Gaming off the Beaten Path

It's very rare that a developer gets it right on the first try. Look at my 10's list, or even a typical critic's list of the greatest games of all time and you will find very few inaugural titles. Super Mario World, The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, Resident Evil 4, Super Metroid, it's almost always a second, third, fourth, even fifth title in a series that's featured on those lists. I can only think of a few games where a series just knocked it out of the park on the first try. Deus Ex is one, we will definitely be discussing that at some point, probably next year. Chrono Trigger is another, I poke fun of the cult-like obsession with the game but that doesn't change the fact it's an all-time classic and one of the greatest video games ever made. But today, we are going to talk about the sequel to another all-time great series first: Doom. I think I've made my love for the original Doom pretty clear, it's one of my favorite games ever. It...

Taking on the armies of hell, one demon at a time... When you think about it, its really unbelievable how many first person shooters are out there right now.  Call of Duty, Battlefield, Halo, the list goes on and on and on. And its not just straight up FPS’ anymore.  Open world games are FPS’ now (Far Cry).  Hell, even RPGs are more FPS’ than RPGs now (looking at you Fallout).  It’s getting a little tiresome, even if I do love a good FPS.  But that wasn’t always the case.  There was a time where these games were a novelty, something you only saw a few times in a generation.  So what happened?  Doom.  Doom is what happened. Don’t get me wrong, Doom was far from the first FPS.  There were games like maze war dating back to the 1970s and of course, there was ID software’s precursor to Doom, Wolfenstein 3D.  But none of those quite captured the hearts and minds of Americans like the journey of a single, unname...