John Romero's SIGIL and the significance of DOOM

[ForeverWar]

John Romero's SIGIL and the significance of DOOM
A Rant in Several Parts

Introduction

DOOM is my favorite game. This does not make me unique, but it did compel me to make this topic. With the recent release of John Romero's SIGIL .wad (the unofficial "fifth episode" of the original DOOM), and the somewhat mixed responses it has received, hopefully some of you are interested in chatting about DOOM (and maybe DOOM-like games) in general.

Here is a link to John Romero's SIGIL (the .wad is free): https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il

First, some context (i.e., a euphemism for "muh blogging"):

I was born in 1991. My dad traveled a lot for his job and I spent more time with my mom and sister as a kid. My dad and I have had an odd relationship as I've grown up, since both of us have minor mental issues that make socializing difficult in general for us. My dad had a job that necessitated powerful computers, so we always had access to relatively up-to-date hardware. I used to disassemble old computers when I was very little just to see what was inside. I would pick resistors off of late-1980s motherboards like a child might pick insects off the ground to examine them. I suppose it's no surprise that I've built several computers for friends and family over the years, but anyone who has done so knows that it's not much different from playing with LEGO in terms of difficulty.

When I a little kid, my mom had bought in to the 1990s PC "no violence" culture. I never had a single toy gun as a child and was not allowed to play any "violent" video games, but the shareware version of DOOM was the exception. My dad insisted on it. I remember him arguing with my mom, who thought I wasn't able to distinguish between red pixels of demon gore and human beings. I insisted that I knew the difference. All I wanted was time with my dad.

DOOM became a way for my dad and I to bond. He didn't fish or hunt or do any of the easy "male bonding" activities. When I was about five years old, I obviously wasn't capable of playing DOOM effectively, so my dad and I would play together, me sitting on his lap in the unfinished basement of our house in front of a CRT monitor that looked huge to me. He would say to me: "I'll move, and you shoot when I tell you to, okay?" I sometimes fucked up, but he was so patient...I'm almost ashamed of how vivid these memories are for me, since my later memories of my dad aren't nearly as significant.

I would later play Duke Nukem and Doom 3, but I wouldn't play the original DOOM or DOOM 2 again until my late teens when I realized that I'd only ever played the shareware version with my dad. I burned through DOOM 1 and DOOM 2, and then I discovered the player-made .wads that had been made (Most recently, a .wad called "eviternity" has come out, which is in-fucking-credible; easily better than SIGIL).

DOOM continues to be a meaningful part of my life, despite how fucked up that may be. I associate it with one of the only meaningful moments I have in my memory where I bonded with my father. Playing it makes me feel like I'm fighting, not against pixels in the shape of demons, but against the forces of fate that made bonding with my dad so difficult. This obviously makes me biased towards DOOM, so if that invalidates my opinion for you, then so be it.

Second, the release of SIGIL

I heard about SIGIL after the pre-orders for all of the "editions" of the .wad had sold out. In retrospect, I'm, glad I didn't pay John Romero somewhere around $150 bucks for a bunch of cringey "WHOA SATAN DUUUDE" merch. I did buy the .wad for the buckethead soundtrack, which is pretty good, but the free soundtrack included with the free .wad is comparable and more faithful to the original MIDI sound from the original games.

The SIGIL .wad itself has received mixed reviews from the more prominent "oldschoool FPS" YouTube reviewers. There are two such personalities that, among others, communities like 4chan's /vr/ (retro games) board pay attention to: "GmanLives" and "Civvie11". Their disagreement comes down to a difference in expectations. Where Civvie11 understands that SIGIL was designed to be a successor to the final episode of DOOM, "Thy Flesh Consumed", GmanLives seems to have expected SIGIL to incorporate not only mobs and weapons from DOOM 2, but also to throw out what made "Thy Flesh Consumed" so difficult to begin with. Whether you like the fourth (and final "official") episode of the original DOOM, SIGIL is faithful to it, and in that sense, its difficult moments are both an homage to, and an extension of, the fourth episode of one of the most iconic FPS game ever made.

Third, GmanLives's Review of SIGIL

Here is GmanLives's Review of SIGIL:

The term "artificial difficulty" has ironically been used by game critics to legitimize their personal, subjective opinions about games by dismissively labeling what aspects they dislike using a term that, in theory, will magically insulate them from any criticism of their criticism. The same tactics are used in criticism of other art forms, using other supposedly "magically-insulating" terms, terms designed to immunize the critic from backlash. Only those that know the true function of such terms are able to effectively rebut the claims of those that use them, effectively leading to a closed system of criticism that favors the critic, always.

GmanLives calls both the lack of lighting, and the frequency of mobs that require many shotgun shots to kill (barons of hell), means of producing "artificial difficulty". I could rant about the absurdity of this term for hours, but suffice to say: ANY difficult action in ANY game is inherently based on the memorization or understanding of the mechanics of said game. Objectively speaking, NO difficulty can be demonstrably dismissed as "artificial" (remaking the term as a pejorative!) unless the critic can argue that the fundamental rules of the game, contrary to how the game has presented them, are underhandedly biased against the player to such a degree that successful LEARNING of said rules is near-impossible.

SIGIL is not unfair to the player. There are dark areas that become dark at a certain point to challenge the player to use the SOUND of demons to either avoid or kill them, or to rely on memorization of spawn points/muscle memory. There are parts of SIGIL that challenge the player to use the original single-barrel shotgun against high-health barons of hell, but these challenges are similar to those players faced in DOOM's fourth episode "Thy Flesh Consumed". GmanLives also criticizes the lack of DOOM 2 assets in a DOOM 1 game, a move that acts as its own rebuttal.

Fourth, Civvie11's Review of SIGIL:

Here is Civvie11's Review of SIGIL:

Civvie11's review of SIGIL is somewhat critical of ammo management, which was also a hell of a challenge in"Thy Flesh Consumed". Civvie also acknowledges SIGIL's tendency to punish the player for trying to avoid fights, something that "Thy Flesh Consumed" also did. There are parts of both episodes that cannot be avoided, as Civvie acknowledges, but rather than recommencing player avoid SIGIL, Civvie simply recommends training on a lower difficulty setting before moving up to "ultra-violence".

Civvie11's review basically acknowledges the difficultly of SIGIL but doesn't attempt to denigrate the design of the .wad or brush off its propensity to annoy players used to much more forgiving DOOM 2 player-made .wads. Civvie 11 gives the creator of SIGIL credit for DESIGNING the .wad to be difficult in the same way that the later episode of DOOM were difficult.

Essentially, to be blunt, It is my opinion that GmanLives was bitter about having a rough time with SIGIL due to not playing enough of the original DOOM and being spoiled by player-made DOOM 2 content, and attempted to deflect his frustration by criticizing SIGIL.

Romero's levels make use of an arguably more primitive and limited set of enemies and weapons in order to create an experience that hearkens back to the hardest levels of the original DOOM. Since most player-made .wads utilize DOOM 2 as a base because of MUH SUPER SHOTGUN, 2 NEW ENEMIES, AND A FEW EDITED TEXTURES, Romero's .wad feels like a bit of an alternate-reality piece of content, like if you took a time machine back to an alternate dimension where the original DOOM had five episodes and this was the final one.

[Kobold]

Thanks for reminding me this came out. I didn't realize he was dusing DOOM1 as the basis, that's pretty cool.

[ForeverWar]

Thanks for reminding me this came out. I didn't realize he was dusing DOOM1 as the basis, that's pretty cool.

Yeah, it's a tough constraint to follow using the DOOM1 engine. It makes several innovative mobs (and the double-barrel shotgun) from DOOM2 unusable. I think a lot of people who complained about "having to shoot barons of hell 12 times with a single-barrel shotgun" either wanted a DOOM2-based .wad or haven't actually played the original DOOM's episodes in a long time. As I said, "Thy Flesh Consumed" forces you to kill barons of hell "the slow way", i.e., without a double-barrel shotgun, if you decide not to just rocket them.