Doom (series)/YMMV

The Video Games

• Acceptable Targets: The bad guys in the first game are demons from hell. Feel free to be an Ax Crazy orgy of death now. The second game is similarly populated by demons...except for the secret levels, which are also populated by Nazis.
• And the Fandom Rejoiced: Doom 3: BFG Edition contains all of the previous games in the franchise (save N64 entry) remade in HD and are 3D compatible, along with seven new levels. In addition, the ever-irritating problem of switching between a flashlight and a gun has been solved by allowing the player to wield both at once.
• Anticlimax Boss:
  • The Cyberdemon from Doom 3. Very big. Very intimidating. Very tough. Very, very easy.
    • Provided you can figure out the trick to damaging him—he's immune to normal weapons fire.
    • But that shouldn't be too hard, as the resident Artifact of Doom gives you a not-so-subtle hint on how to kill it.
  • Heck, the Cyberdemon from the original Doom can get like this, straddling the line between this and "Wake-Up Call" Boss. Once you get past his giant roar and KATHUNK-KATHUNK-KATHUNK footsteps, he's less of a boss and more of a circle-strafing target because, unlike the Bruisers, there's only one of him and he hangs out in a much more open arena. His rockets are definitely faster than the fireballs you've been dodging up to this point, but after a while you will find yourself filing them under Painfully Slow Projectiles all the same.
  • Even the Spider Mastermind is anticlimactic if you collected the BFG in an earlier map, dying in only two or three hits at most. With some skill and a good bit of luck, it's possible to get a One-Hit Kill, as you can have the maximum damage output from the BFG and have all the tracers hit.
• Non Sequitur Scene: The finale for the Game Boy Advance edition of Doom shows the ending picture from Ultimate Doom's fourth episode, with the marine carrying the severed head of his luckless pet bunny, but it doesn't show the cutscene from episode three that gives the picture its context, leaving new players wondering why the hell Doomguy is just holding some rabbit's head.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Dwango5, according to Doomworld.
• Complete Monster: Dr. Malcolm Betruger and the actual monsters.
• Demonic Spiders: Archviles can take a fair amount of punishment, do a Hell of a lot of damage in turn, and can revive or (in the third game) summon enemies. Prioritize death for them first. There's also the Revenants with their homing rockets. While not too bad one-on-one, they'll rip you to shreds in seconds in large packs.^[1]
  • Mancubi have plenty of health and can do incredible damage if you don't take cover when they start firing.
  • In Doom 3, taken more literally with upside-down heads with legs.
• Game Breaker: The Artifact from ROE. You start the game with it and, although it doesn't do anything until after you beat the first boss, once you do it immediately becomes a Game Breaker. Then after you beat the second and third bosses it gets worse. Let's face it, it's hard to be afraid of the hordes of Hell when you can slow time to 1/5th of normal, run through a storm of fireballs without receiving a scratch and splatter enemies across the landscape with your FISTS.
  • The BFG in multiplayer, due to the aforementioned ability to fire off a shot in one room, run over to another player, and then hitscan frag them without them even knowing. They could even kill you first, and still get nailed by the hitscan!
  • The Soul Cube is pretty damned break-y, too. It homes in on the enemy with the most HP and heals you as it slices, dices and makes julienne demon slaw.
• Goddamned Bats: The Lost Souls and Cacodemons, some enemies from the zdoom Realm 667 beastiary.
  • The Forgotten Ones summoned during your boss fight with the Maledict. As soon as your Artifact's invincibility lets up, they're ready to chomp you, often doing more collective damage than the Maledict itself.
  • Former Commandos are often used by sadistic level designers to ambush the player in large numbers and chew him apart.
  • In most cases, Ultra Violence mode consists of huge numbers of Revenants, who are weak but can pulverize you if you encounter them in groups, especially in the open.
• Hell Is That Noise: Archviles. Just...archviles. *shudder*
  • The "player sighted" roar of the Barons of Hell is rather pants-filling.
  • Let's not forget any time you encounter a Cyberdemon. *THUNKTHUNKTHUNKTHUNK* "RAAAAAAAAAHRG!". The stuff of nightmares.
  • Go, Revenant! AAAAAAAAAAHHHH!
  • Its missile launch (HIRO-EH) and active (HAAAOOOOW) noises can also be unsettling.
  • Because most enemies' encounter noises trigger upon firing a weapon in an open area, especially in the Final Doom expansion packs, there is a good chance that the sound of your pistol can bring about a chorus of waking Cyberdemons, Archviles, Revenants, and Spider Masterminds. All. At. Once.
  • In Doom 3, you hear the Cherubs long before you see them, all through the "Recycling 2" level. They're a bit... disconcerting.
• Internet Backdraft: Some of the debates over the quality of the various Game Mods can be...heated. Of specific note, quite a few flame wars erupted when the massively popular Aeons of Death received a surprisingly vitriolic Award Snub in the 2010 Cacowards.
• Memetic Badass: The Doomguy.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The "Powerup Get!" gong sound in the first two games.
  • The sound of a shotgun cocking each time you pick up a weapon (even if it isn't a shotgun).
  • The death rattles of the Baron of Hell, Cyberdemon, and Spider Mastermind.
  • The double-barreled shotgun. Any game.
  • The WHAAAARRGARBL of an expiring Arch-Vile is quite awesome too.
  • "Use us!"
  • That nice pulpy sound of something or someone being gibbed (so long as it isn't yourself).
• Nightmare Fuel: Tons of it. Doom specializes in this trope.
  • The Icon of Sin.
  • In source ports with the aforementioned "Ouch Face", it's pretty funny the first time you see the Doomguy's expression When he takes high damage. As his health drops lower and lower, though, and the "Ouch Face" is triggered, you get to see the Doomguy's facial wounds in all its glory, including huge bullet holes, with blood still dripping from them.
  • Doom 3, particularly the early scene where all hell breaks loose. For best results play with headphones, alone and in the dark. Avoid the flashlight game mod, and don't skip any of the audio logs.
  • A few scenes are pretty up there, such as the opening, and what happens to Goat after he is killed.
• Paranoia Fuel: In one of the closing scenes, by the point when you've gotten used to all the jump-scares that the game throws at you... there's a level where NOTHING comes out.
• Polished Port: While Doom has been ported to many systems with tons of issues mentioned under Porting Disaster, some of the ports, while not measuring up to the PC versions, were still quite good efforts.
  • The Atari Jaguar port was so good (due to the original developers directly working on it) it's source code was the basis for many other ports.
  • The SNES port managed to keep almost everything intact from the PC version save a few levels and needing to have much simpler level geometry and textures, but otherwise managed to keep almost all the original game essential experience intact, the only major issues being lack of circlestrafing.
  • The PlayStation port was also quite good, and while it was missing some content, it featured some innovations that made it superior to many other ports, such as colored lighting and an eerie ambient soundtrack.
• Porting Disaster: Doom has been ported to all sorts of systems, some of which couldn't really handle a game of its size and complexity all that well. This often resulted in extremely pixellated graphics, shortened and sometimes removed levels, missing weapons, fewer types of enemies and removed frames of animation for said same. The last one led to "crab-walking" enemies that faced the player constantly, meaning it was impossible to sneak up on them and very difficult to trick them into damaging one another.
  • The 32X version got terrible music, and losing even more levels and both the Cyberdemon and the Spider Mastermind monsters.
  • The 3DO version comes dangerously close to being worst. In addition to cutting several levels and monsters, it also has serious frame rate issues. You can either shrink the screen down (making it virtually impossible to see anything without bunching up to the TV), or you could make the window bigger (which caused the frame rate to drop into single digits at points). The only thing saving it is the awesomely remixed soundtrack.
  • Keep in mind that most of console ports (except for the SNES version) were based on the Atari Jaguar version; Romero, Carmack, and id Software developed the Jaguar version themselves.
• So Bad It's Good: The comic and the movie.
  • And for some people, the four novels based on the original game. The demons were changed to aliens and the Doomguy was forced to have a female Marine tagging along with him, then her plus a Mormon soldier and a teenager on Earth. That's ignoring how the third and fourth books really went off on a tangent about faith and the soul.
• Special Effect Failure: The Windows port, Doom95 (which incorporates Doom, Doom II, Ultimate Doom and Final Doom) makes full use of Windows' facilities, including using hardware acceleration (where available) to implement the "partial invisibility" effect. Unfortunately, on some graphics cards this doesn't work properly, and Spectres (and players using the Partial Invisibility power-up) are even more conspicuous than other creatures. Lampshaded in the Doom95 manual. "Due to all of this new hardware tech, the previously-nearly-invisible Spectres are now in the realm of sorta-invisible. To make up for the difference, please close your eyes when you encounter them."
• Video Game Movies Suck: The movie. But it may be good for a laugh or two.
• What an Idiot!: Let's just say the plot of Doom I, and ESPECIALLY the plot of Doom 3 revolves around the UAC having a death grip on the Idiot Ball. Well, to be exact, in 3 the UAC was wise enough to realize the situation was getting ugly and tried to stop it, but blatant idiocy prompted things to go wrong in the first place.
  • The UAC of Doom 3 aren't geniuses, but they aren't responsible for the fiasco that unfolds. Betruger specifically went against orders and forged a pact with hell that blindsided them, as proven by the two representatives who actually DO come from corporate HQ, who wind up helping to save the human race by containing the problem to Mars. While they SHOULD have gotten rid of Betruger earlier and shouldn't have been dabbling in all the things they were, they took fairly sane precautions that were deliberately undermined by treason from within rather than their own stupidity.

The Comic Book

• Crazy Awesome: Here comes the Night Train!
• Fountain of Memes: Doomguy.
• Memetic Mutation: Pretty much everything "Doomguy" says is a catchphrase in the Doom community, most notably "RIP AND TEAR YOUR GUTS!"
  • Ascended Meme: Half of the achievement names for the Xbox Live Arcade release of Doom II are comic quotes:
    • "An Important Looking Door"- Find a secret area in a level in single player.
    • "Rip And Tear"- Complete any level in single player on "Nightmare!" difficulty.
      • On another note, the infamous Brutal Doom mod for the games actually allows one, with the Berserk to, you guessed, rip and tear enemy's apart.
    • "The Great Communicator"- Get 20 kills in any level with the chainsaw in single player.
    • "A Man And A Half"- Get 20 kills in any level with the Berzerker power-up in single player.
    • "You Have Huge Guts"- Kill a Cyberdemon in single player using your fists.
    • "A Really Big Gun"- Find the BFG 9000 in single player.
• Narm Charm: The hero falls in toxic waste while fighting some zombies. When he climbs out, he delivers a hilariously deadpan PSA about pollution.

"Now I'm radioactive! That can't be good!"

• So Bad It's Good
• So Cool It's Awesome

1. ↑ For you ZDoom-users out there, the Realm667 Bestiary page has plenty of this type of enemy out there, such as the Diabloist and the Azazel enemy.