As I’ve said before, I’m not a gamer, but this came to my attention because I regularly watch James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd videos.
Rolfe recently produced a review of Chex Quest, a re-skin of Doom that was put in boxes of Chex as a prize, and which was good enough to get its own cult following.
Here’s the video. For courtesy’s sake, I should probably give a language warning:
Toward the end of the video, he mentions that the game is compatible with a mod called Brutal Doom. When this mod is plugged in, it removes the nonviolent component of the Chex Quest game and instead allows you to slaughter your enemies with wild abandon.
I am old enough to remember when Doom first made its appearance. It was mind-blowing at the time, and it was also unusually hackable, producing a huge community of modders creating their own levels, weapons, enemies, and other features. Non-gamer though I am, even I screwed around with some of the mods lurking on the young internet and built a few custom levels. I may or may not have seen the original Brutal Doom—I don’t rightly remember—though I saw other mods that upped the gore or improved the arsenal. In any case, Brutal Doom is one of the most popular Doom mods of all time.
Because of Rolfe’s videos, I discovered something called Project Brutality, an ongoing effort to build on what Brutal Doom got started. Currently, Project Brutality 3.0 is in its beta phase, and videos showing it off have appeared on YouTube.
Some of these videos vary considerably in how they look. I’m not sure if the players have multiple mods going at once or if these represent different stages of this one project. Some seem to be playing through a version that combines all the levels into one continuous map, and others (such as the one below) are not.
In any case, the modified game is stunning.
Watching this player, I have to wonder just how complicated are the controls for this game, seeing all the different things he can do from throwing axes and grenades to kicking enemies in the face to pulling himself up platforms to switching to third-person.
I’m astonished at this player’s skill, but even more than that, I’m astonished at how completely the modders have modded the game. I mean, holy heck. It’s recognizably Doom, but the vast array of added features is incredible. Some of the added features are listed on the Doom Wiki.
And of course there’s the gore and the bird-flipping, but those juvenile bits are hardly noticeable amidst the attention to detail in the animations, weapons, and gameplay.
Watching this recaptures the feel Doom gave when it first came out, when we said, “I can’t believe this game!”
