Along with it being a genre-defining landmark of the first-person shooter genre, the birthplace of speedrunning, and a haven for a mod community that is thriving to this day, John Romero's Doom is also known for the slew of game consoles, calculators, thermostats, and pregnancy tests that it has been ported to both officially and unofficially, and while I did like how this gave me a ton of options to choose from when I decided to finally give the game a shot, it also made actually settling on one somewhat difficult due to how different some of these versions are. Initially, I played up to the 14th mission using the Doom 32X Resurrection hack of the Sega 32X port, but since that version wouldn't let me make any kinds of saves for some reason, I decide to cut out the middle man and play the original MS-DOS version after wrapping my head around how DOSBox worked (although not before accidentally downloading and playing through the shareware version). This was a very good decision on my part, as it meant that I got to play this awesome game the way that it was originally intended to be played, and I had an absolute blast while doing so.

Even with all of the innovations that have come to first-person shooters over the years, Doom is still as fun of a game as it's ever been in part due to its simplicity. Whether you're blasting the armies of Hell away with a shotgun, ripping them apart with a chainsaw, or decimating them with the iconic BFG 9000, the combat in Doom is consistently hectic, thrilling, and satisfying, and that applies to both the power fantasy moments of turning waves of demons into assortments of gory pastes and the more tense encounters where you're low on health and ammo and need to make every shot count. There were several times in my playthrough where I was so invested in the game's action that I was literally ducking and dodging my head in real life whenever an Imp's hell-fire or a Cacodemon's ball-lighting came my way, and I feel like that sums up just how fun this game is to play. Doomguy's blisteringly fast running speed not only made maneuvering around enemy attacks and even tricking them into fighting each other by luring them out feel responsive, but it also helped with the game's moments of exploration, as each level is filled to the brim with secrets that lead you to ammo dumps, powerups, and even hidden levels. Doom also features some immensely charming presentation, as the 2.5D blend of nightmarish 2D sprites and 3D environments ranging from futuristic military bases on the moons of Mars to the fleshy, rugged terrain of Hell were a great match for both Bobby Prince's blend of blood-pumping metal and ominous ambient music and the humorous text crawls that show up at the end of each chapter.

Before I got into Doom, one of my biggest worries about the game was that I would spend most of it just trying to look for where I was supposed to go next due to how often I've heard people make that exact criticism, but thankfully, that rarely ever happened. Because all of the halls and rooms in each level end up either looping back to a central hub or overlapping with each other, I pretty much never got lost (especially with how the corpses I'd leave in my wake ended up serving as markers for where I had already been), and I rarely even checked the in-game map because of how distinct every area felt. I will say that I wasn't that big of a fan of the more open levels that showed up later on, though, because while they were still good, the amount of empty space that they featured made them a lot less interesting to navigate than the rest of the game's levels. Despite this, Doom was still a fantastic first-person shooter that aged incredibly well, and not only am I excited to check out Doom II and Doom 64, but I also want to try out a few more of the earlier boomer shooters such as Wolfenstein 3D, Duke Nukem 3D, Quake, and Blood as well.