Skulltag – What a lot of fun

Skulltag, it's Doom... but with real networking

During my time at school, before overclocking Celerons and wasting my life on the Internet became the “in” thing, I used to spend quite a lot of time playing Doom. It was, in fact the reason I spent 30 quid on a 10Base2 network card, length of coax cable and learnt all about this stuff called “IPX Networking“.

Me and a friend used to take it in turns to drag our entire PC setup – featuring ‘massive’ 15″ monitors and Cirrus Logic VLB graphics cards – around to the other’s house. Since neither of us could drive, this required a willing parent. And then we’d spend all night playing Doom, followed by Doom 2 when it came out. There was even one night where we clocked the frag counter, just to see what’d happen (it loops back round to zero).

All of that was back in 1994, and over the following years Doom has come out on pretty much everything from your toaster to digital camera. Well, maybe not the toaster, but I bet someone somewhere has tried, probably using an Arduino and Twitter account. I must have bought this damn game more times over the years than anything.

None of these newer versions have been able to quite accurately capture the simple, frightening fun of playing Real Doom on a Real PC in DOS. No chirping chat clients, no fancy graphical updates, no OpenGL, no mouse… just you, the screen and the world’s simplest FPS controls imaginable. And maybe a slightly smaller screen if your PC wasn’t a monster Pentium 166MMX. Modern FPS games are so complicated to play, requiring hand co-ordination that’d make a hardened Robotron player look weak. Doom had 8 buttons you could press, and cleverly they were all clustered around the same part of the keyboard – four arrows, ctrl, alt, shift and space. Old keyboards conveniently had a gap between ctrl and alt for a finger to rest. I once wore this section of keyboard off and made my spacebar lean to the right from excessive Doom playing.

So, anyway, enough of the past… This is the future, and Doom has been made a little bit better. It’s not been totally mashed beyond belief and rendered in ultra-realistic 3D, it’s still the same old blocky Doom, playable with the same old simple key bindings. However, if you get Skulltag and copy your Doom WAD files across, you’re presented with a few extras.

The main extra is the proper networking. Doom network games were always a pain to set up, requiring one person to become the “server” and run their game first, then all the other “client” machines had to try and connect. Should someone’s connection go away, the game stopped. This happened once due to me accidentally pulling my friend’s network card out of his PC while it was switched on. In my defence it was his fault for not screwing the card in with the little retaining screw. Should a game be running already, newcomers weren’t allowed in. It was all done using IPX networking, so when the Internet started to arrive you couldn’t play it online. Fortunately all that’s gone now, and games can be freely joined and exited without changing anything. Also, because it’s Doom, there’s zero lag and it all runs super smooth.

If you’re less than 20 years old, you may not have a clue what the Original Doom was like because you would have been five years old when it came out. It came on five floppy disks, took up a good portion of our meagre 150-210MB hard disks and didn’t run at all in Windows. It was also the most frightening experience you could have in front of a PC. Yeah, the graphics are crap by today’s standards, but really… sitting alone in a dark room creeping around levels, it didn’t take realistically rendered things ripping their way through pipework to make the player try to hide behind their chair. Watch the reaction of a hardened Doom addict when they meet an unexpected rocket coming towards their face

Tags: doom, Game, Internet, skulltag