#doom 1

no not 2016/eternal/dark ages

i mean like classic doom 1 and 2 from 1993 and doom 64

What a way to start the Cacowards 2011 roster, huh?

Br1: Brutal Doom

Main author(s): Marcos Abenante (Sergeant Mark IV)

Release date: August 19th, 2010 (original version)

Version(s) played: v21 Gold Release

Required port compatibility: GZDoom/Zandronum

If you know about the Doom franchise even a bit, you have heard about Brutal Doom. How could you not hear about Brutal Doom? You probably heard about it so much that you were sick of it, along with its fanatics, non-stop asking if other WADs are compatible with this mod, to the point that it felt like they were whining about it.

But some of you may be asking – What is this mod even about?

To put it simply, Brutal Doom is like a classic Doom, but on steroids. It adds a shit ton of new mechanics, enemy behavior, new enemies, new weapons, etc. I would say it might have too much new stuff, but let’s not get ahead.

My point is that this mod has too much stuff to talk about in one post. So I’ll split the review/analysis/retrospective (even though I have no nostalgia towards this mod when it comes to the latter) into at least five parts, talking about my first impressions about this mod and its story and its author, going through the mod’s mechanics, enemies, weapons (don’t expect that I will talk about all of them), culminating with talking about my final, proper playthrough of Doom I and Doom II with this mod (although, at this point, I’m still not sure which way I’ll play it).

Now, with all that said, let’s dive into Boot All Dume and see what’s the deal with this mod.

PART 1 – FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND THE HISTORY

For my first playthrough with Doomed Brutality, I decided to play the first episode of Doom I and the first eleven maps of Doom II to see what it has to offer. Both games were played, of course, on Hurt Me Plenty, in a Standard Mode (pistol start), and without touching any other options.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t have relatively positive expectations towards this mod; not after what I heard about its author (even though most of the stuff he did either he apologized for, was exaggerated by people who don’t like him or the mod, or made sense in the context of the game development) and its vocal minority of fans.

Anyway, playing Knee-Deep again, the mod starts out relatively small; I can see some differences, but nothing much that would relatively flip the concept of the Classic Doom upside down. Then, as I progress through the maps, the mod shows more and more of its teeth; weapons, enemy behavior, and mechanics I wasn’t even aware of, like how your regular shotgun shoots much faster when using iron sight, or the demonic sphere that turns you into a baron. Not to mention the Bruise Brothers having four times more health to make them actual bosses, and the army of pinkies and imps that reveal after killing one of the barons in E1M8.

Moving to Doom II, it was a rather similar experience to Doom I – the mod starts off relatively small, and shows more and more with each map. Even here, there were things I didn’t realize were possible, like stealing revenants’ and mancubi’s weapons and using them.

So first impressions – better than I expected, although I sometimes felt overwhelmed with new mechanics.

Now, about how the mod came into fruition, I don’t really have much information on it. All I managed to find on Doomwiki and Wikipedia is that the mod started as a testing ground for new effects for another Sergeant Mark IV’s mod called ArmageDoom that was released the same year as Brutal. From what I’ve gathered, people liked these new effects, and so they were made for a separate mod we know today.

But we can’t talk about Bootoot Doot without its creator – Sergeant Mark IV himself.

Marcos Abenante is a man of many talents (at least from what I’ve read). He’s a bodybuilder, he teaches English, and is also a web designer. But most of all, he is a game designer. Incredible, but still controversial, I might add. Arrogant is the nicest thing you might hear about his personality (especially on ZDoom and Zandronum forums). Here are some of the dumber things he did (mostly from the early 2010s):

Taking other Doom modders’ work and not crediting them.

Showing some guy with depression symptoms on a forum a guide on how to jump off the bridge good (this is what perma-banned him from the aforementioned forums).

Putting racist text in one of the BD v17 lumps.

This is what was confirmed he did up to 2013, and yeah, it’s horrible, but you have to remember that it happened over a decade ago, and Marcos apologized for this crap. IN 2013. BEFORE HE WAS BANNED. I’m not saying that where he lived completely excuses his actions (you need to remember that he’s from Brazil; the humor there is different than in North America), but you must realize that people were slightly more edgy in 2013 than today, not to mention how people who aren’t from the USA are not completely PC and sensitive towards these things.

Today, in the decade where it feels like we have another celebrity exposed for being too interested in children every month, this feels like looking at the braindead edgelord saying one thing too many and letting the fame go over his head… Which, in the case of Marcos, couldn’t be further from the truth.

I didn’t even mention how he threw a hissy fit over Doom 2016’s glory kills because he thought id Software ripped him off… even though these were already planned since Doom 4. You know, the Call of Doom one.

While the things Sarge did described above will definitely make you cringe and facepalm, there are other controversial things that were overblown to say the least:

Calling him sociopath because he was experimenting with the digitized real-life gore… even though he didn’t ultimately implement it in his mod, not to mention how many, more gory games like Half-Life 2 (even though this game isn’t that gory) and Dead Space used real life gore as a reference (he didn’t even force anyone to look at these pictures).

One of the main devs behind Project Brutality (a mod that started as a fork of BD) saying that Sarge put a hack in the newest (at the time) public version of the Extermination day (another Marcos’ WAD) that will crash GZDoom and even the entire computer if used with the aforementioned Project… when Sarge did it for a public BETA version of his mod, it lasted only a few days before the hack was removed in the following version, only bricked GZDoom and not the entire computer, and was done only to troll the Project Brutality community, rather than out of purely malicious intends.

Accusing Sarge of being a neo-yahtzee… basing it on his stupid 4chan profile tag that says United Communist [[Yahtzee]] Republic Dictatorship of Banana Land (Brazil)… Did these people ever consider that he was making fun of himself? Not to mention that 4chan is a walking shitpost of the site and shouldn’t be treated 100% seriously?

Comparing Sarge to one of the Columbiners… because both made a Doom mod that’s more gory than the original game… This is just being desperate and refusing to stop living in the past.

So, yeah, that’s what I have to say about Marcos Abenante. He is a talented game designer, he said, and did dumb and terrible things in the past, but I think his accusers should stop acting like 2013 was yesterday and move on with their lives. I didn’t even mention how Graf Zahl made BD v20b incompatible with GZDoom 2.3.0 onward ON PURPOSE. I won’t be surprised if Graf still holds the grudge.

But anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. I recommend you watch this video made by Midnight. It helped me a lot with looking at the author’s controversies.

In the next part, I will be talking about the mod’s new mechanics.

When I looked, it was already somehow in my Steam library.

I was so confused, how is a game I didn't buy yet already in my library?

I looked into it, and it turns out if you already have the original 2 games, they just give you the remaster for free automatically.

Holy... shit...

Analytical Fanboys Discuss DOOM (1993)