One of the truly satisfying things with Doom and Doom 2 is that the levels were all designed with two playstyles in mind. Each level, starting with the pistol, you can either beat par on Hurt Me Plenty, or kill 100% on Ultraviolence. Most of the harder levels require some route-planning or lateral thinking to achieve that. All of which, back in the day, provided me with way more gameplay than you’d expect.
Not only can you pistol start each level (it's pretty commonplace), it's actually possible to complete most levels in "pacifist" mode, where the player can't harm any enemies. Decino did a 3-parter on this:
I was going for a pistol start UV recently, and some levels are really hard, especially if you don't know where secrets are. On some levels it's hard to get that shotgun to get things going and the ammo is often scarce.
Yeah, there’s a fair few levels where you’ve got to plan your route very carefully, use particular weapons for particular fights, be strategic about power-ups.
Suburbs is a pretty nasty level to begin with, but IIRC the only way to deal with the two archviles efficiently is double shotgun at close range, which involves popping the invulnerability or it’s not going to work.
Against Thee Wickedly (E4M6 from Doom 1) was my all-time fav doom level for this reason. Boy, it was difficult with pistol start, but so, so, so much fun. Huge replay value. Incidentally, pistol starts in the duke nukem games (I was on N64 version) were also incredibly fun and challenging.
You can also play Doom 3 in the browser, which blew my mind when I saw it here. What used to slow down my whole system is just a tab, and I could click over to take a work break and pick up right where I had left off.
The most active multiplayer Doom port is Zandronum, using the Doomseeker server browser to join games. Mac support may be a bit flaky, but I think it currently works (join the Discord for help).
I've always much preferred Zandronum over Zdaemon because it's open source and it has much more advanced mod capabilities (with much more Zdoom/Gzdoom mod support than Zdaemon), supporting mods adding game modes like the PVE Invasion mode.
There is the community around ZDeamon [1]. As a Doom port, it has its own server browser, Discord and a built-in IRC browser to get to their channel. Binarys are available for Win, Linux and MacOs. IME, especially popular there are gigantic megaWADs, which are played by fifteensomething players in coop mode simultaneously.
As long as a game allows someone to run their own server, a community never truly dies. There are people who still play Half Life 2: Deathmatch and Counter Strike Source because we can run our own server
Ha. There's still people on CS1.6. I dip in a play a couple games every now and again. I found a server, not too long ago, that was running a full conversion Rocket League mode. Occasionally, you could see a flash showing that you're just a CT/T wielding a knife before the custom graphics load in and you're playing soccer with rocket propelled cars.
Doom was written to make it easy to port to other platforms from the start. You basically only need to write a handful of platform specific functions and then compile the code on the new platform and you're done. It's fundamentally the same whether you port it to OpenBSD, WebAssembly, or a washing machine.
