Does anyone remember the ubiquitous classic Doom? Of course you do! That’s why it’s a ubiquitous classic! For those impossible few who have never played Doom, it tells the story of a runaway romance between a man, his chaingun and several horny pinky demons. The man’s mission? Descend down to hell via a quick stop-over on mars and deliver the biggest inter-dimensional beatdown the devil has ever seen. The pinky demon’s mission? To deliver the type of inter-dimensional sodomy that would make even George Micheal hesitant.

Along with it’s predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, Doom invented and popularized the FPS. There was a time during the mid-to-late nineties when every home console was awash with Doom-clones. The likes of Alien Trilogy, Blam! Machine Head, Exhumed, Quake, Star Wars Dark Forces and many, many others tried to make Doom’s charm their own. It took the combined force of Half Life and Goldeneye007 to finally push the industry onwards.

That said, Doom was and is an awesome game that should never be forgotten. It stole an unbelievable amount of my childhood and gave me some serious, serious fun. I played Doom a bunch of times on different platforms. Does anyone remember how everyone fawned over the Atari Jaguar port? Or how about the stuttering, critically savaged Sega Saturn version? Or even the weird SNES one that had no music? I played ’em all. Having recently bought Doom 3: BFG edition (which comes packaged with Doom & Doom II), I’m now playing it once again. And you know what? It’s still an immeasurable joy to play. Much more so than that new-fangled (circa 2005) Doom 3 crap. To be honest, I like this game far more than most FPS titles of this generation! There’s something about the game’s simplicity that really appeals to me. The graphics are charming and timeless, the level design is perfect and it even manages to rustle up the odd fright now and then. Making enemies do the chaingun cha-cha just NEVER gets old. Neither does chainsawing people. Or seeing the witless enemies fight among themselves. Or punching someone into mush with a berserk power-up… It’s just brilliant!