Back in the day, most people could play computer games on their parent’s PCs, or on the work computer when the boss wasn’t looking. But nowadays, it seems most of the games out there everyone wants are just unplayable.
Not because they’re bad. In fact, they’re very, very good. It’s also not because they’re expensive – as a matter of interest, many of them are free to play as it turns out. No. It’s because the hardware needed to even start the game is the sort of thing you’d have had to take a car loan out to pay for for back in the day. Many current games expect CPU speeds in excess of 3 gigahertz – and fancy graphics cards bearing names like “Radeon” and “Nvidia” – and they’re so expensive they’re out of reach for… well, me, at any rate.
Needless to say, it’s been many, many years since I considered myself a gamer. Sure, I played games as a kid. In the early 1980s, some cousins of mine were better off financially and had an Atari TV game console, so I spent a lot of time playing games whenever I visited them. Some years later, I got my first computer – a Sinclair QL. It was bought second-hand off a newspaper swap-column, and was good for a few simple games like Scrabble (FFS!) – but it was the business side of Sinclair, unlike the ZX Spectrum, so other than giving me a good foundation in Basic programming in my teens, it was really a waste of time.
Fast forward to the late 1990s, when my first PC was an old 8mhz IBM compatible 8086XT, I was able to play a few basic DOS games, like Commander Keen, and upgrading what I had with what I could get my hands on… Just when I was getting into PCs, I played a lot of cool games that are all classics now: Doom, Heretic, Hexen, Quake, Quake II and III, Unreal Tournament – and last but definitely not least, Half Life.
My wife Wendy (a.k.a. Kay Valkyr) on the other hand, never stopped gaming. Today her platform of choice is Android, and her current obsession is Once Human – which is still not available for mobile, and won’t be until the end of this month. Meanwhile, she’s marking time – and excelling – in several other games, and in particular, Ark and Fortnite. She’s planning to get back into game streaming via Twitch again soon, once she gets hold of the mobile version of Once Human. Given the hype surrounding this game, we watched a few Rate The Base videos just to appreciate the sort of graphics and features available to players in that world, and I have to say it’s amazing! I have to say, I really enjoyed Minecraft – but the sort of building opportunities in Once Human puts it all to shame!
Bearing in mind that many of those new games are also free to play – IF your PC (or phone) can handle them.
Of course, I’ve long been tempted to get back into gaming, and this past weekend I succumbed to the urge and decided to try and install the PC version of Once Human on my laptop – which I use for all my writing, web and graphic design, work and play. After the initial installation of Epic Games’ launcher, it cost another 56 gigabytes to download the game, followed by another rather large update file, which was then followed by the installation process. After nearly the entire day spent waiting for the download and installation – finally giving up around midnight, I slunk off to bed. The next morning, I got up early and eagerly opened my laptop to see how things went. It installed!
Then came the proof – starting the game. And that’s about as far as it went. I sat watching a blank black screen for about half an hour, during which there was little I could do but wait. Eventually, I had to hard restart the device. Obviously, Once Human was just too much to ask of my laptop! Of course, I realized with something of a shock, I got it in 2018 – 6 years ago now! It’s positively ancient! It’s a good workstation, but a gaming PC, it’s not!
When you consider the sort of hardware requirements games like Once Human and Fortnite demand of a PC, it’s no wonder gaming pcs are so outrageously expensive these days!
Phones on the other hand, don’t seem to have much trouble. Funny that.
Then I cleared the debris off the deck and started to look around for less demanding alternatives. After examining all the current games out there, and figuring out none of them would run on my ancient laptop, I started looking at my old favorite again – Doom.
Of course I still had a bunch of old versions of the game lying around – with my copy of “Ultimate Doom for Windows 95”, still in it’s pristine original packaging, taking pride of place! The only trouble was – *ahem* – getting it to work on Windows 10. Then again, getting any of the old versions to run on Win 10 is a bit of a nightmare. I tried DOSBox and Virtual Box, but ended up just wasting hours struggling through obstacles and data downloading extra dll files and fixes and the like. And then, after faffing about with that almost the whole of Sunday, I decided to quit for the night and just watch a few videos on the Tube.
I spotted a video about ray-traced Doom classic. Basically what this does is to enhance how Doom looks using modern ray tracing techniques used in modern games, which generally requires a very, very high-end graphics card to run it, along with shovels-full of VRAM.
So I quickly found a source and downloaded it – and while the launcher installed and ran, it wouldn’t run the game because it couldn’t detect one of the aforementioned high-end graphics cards! That seemed to be the end of that, I thought. My 6 year old HP laptop might be an 11th gen i5 with 8gb of RAM, and it may excel at everything I’ve used it for so far, crunching videos and graphic design etc – but it just wasn’t up to that sort of insane level! Then again, when I bought it 6 years ago, it cost me R11k – while an actual gaming laptop today STARTS at around R13k and can also go anything beyond R45k. Insanity, right? I don’t know how people afford to game – or stream games these days. Perhaps in a few years, I may upgrade again, but it would have to be on an installment system. Some people might, but I have a family to support – I just don’t have that sort of cash lying around.
Disheartened, I scrolled through more YouTube videos about Doom…
And then…
I tripped headlong over something called Brutal Doom Black Edition! And everything suddenly changed! What can I say – the name says it all! Brutal Doom Black Edition, right? Or, if it doesn’t do it for you, the video (linked later in this article) should!
What is Brutal Doom Black Edition?
It’s no secret that for many years now, Doom – originally released in 1993 (that’s 31 years ago in case you needed reminding) has been modded, upgraded and enhanced by players and enthusiasts alike. In fact, I’m pretty sure Doom was the first game that really catered to this dynamic – and I daresay that’s probably one of the reasons why its player community is still alive and well. I can’t think of any other FPS – a genre of game which was defined by Doom by the way, of this vintage that still has such a vibrant, enthusiastic following today.
Originally, Doom was released based on MS-Dos, with Ultimate Doom being officially released by ID for Windows 95 – but as Windows became the dominant OS platform on PCs, it gradually became more difficult to run the game on newer versions of Windows. Since then, the Doom community of enthusiasts came up with their own fixes and workarounds such as emulators and launchers in order to keep playing their favorite FPS on ever changing versions of Windows, Linux, Mac and etc.
While there are still those who prefer to play the original game in unaltered form, a lot of effort has also been invested in updating, improving and modernizing the venerable Doom – whereas in the original, the player wasn’t able to look up or down and could only aim left or right for example, improved versions offer the ability to look in any direction as well as relative freedom of movement within the game itself. Also, where most of the earlier upgraded versions I’ve seen made all these under the skin changes, one of the things that never seemed to change was the very blocky, low-res detailing of the original game. Well, it was 1993, and rendering anything higher at the time would’ve literally rendered the game unplayable to most average PC graphics cards of the day! Newer upgraded versions have somehow improved the original detailing to the point where minor details in the game – like readouts on display screens – and even the digits on keypads become legible!
One of the ways you can play Doom on your Windows 10 or 11 PC is to install a launcher like GZDoom, which is part of a family of enhanced ports of the Doom engine for running on modern operating systems. According to ZDoom.org, “It runs on Windows, Linux, and OS X, and adds new features not found in the games as originally published by id Software.“
GZDoom is an open-source port of the original Doom engine made to run on modern computers and is itself a descendant of ZDoom (a considerably earlier example discontinued in 2016), which gives the venerable Doom the OpenGL treatment. Because some people don’t like OpenGL (apparently) they still prefer to play Doom on ZDoom instead. Or, if you want to remind yourself what it was like to play original Doom or Doom 2, pop along to websites like https://playclassic.games/games/ or https://www.classicgames.me/ where you can play them online in your browser for free. If you don’t want to face the drama of trying to get your old games working in modern 64 bit Windows, this is a fair solution.
“GZDoom is a 3D-accelerated Doom source port based on ZDoom coded and maintained by Christoph Oelckers. The most recent stable version is 4.12.2.” “GZDoom features an OpenGL renderer and lots of new features, among them: Sloped 3D floors. Light effects, including dynamic lights, brightmaps, and glowing flats.” – ZDoom.org.
ZDoom also supports other games built on the same engine as Doom, such as Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Chex Quest, and fan-created games like Harmony and Hacx. I’m not sure if GZDoom does as well, but since I have fond memories of Heretic and Hexen as well, I’ll probably find out eventually – and let y’all know how that turns out!
But, back to the topic at hand: Brutal Doom. What is it?
“Everything in Brutal Doom is extremely intense. Everything sounds louder, looks bigger, moves faster, and hits harder. You can even feel the impact of explosions. Enemies are harder and smarter, and weapons and explosions are much louder. Your weapons have been upgraded to a deadly arsenal, completely throwing the vanilla Doom’s ‘progressive weapon system’ out the window. Every weapon is powerful and have its pros and cons, a weapon will never be outclassed when you find a new weapon, but only find a different use for different situations, making Brutal Doom more balanced and more strategic than vanilla gameplay. You have new abilities too. With any weapon selected, you can press Q (default bind) to kick enemies at close range and send them away. Every new feature and weapon is cautiously balanced, and added in a way that makes sense in the universe of Doom. Many of the features can also be disabled/enabled to provide the best personal experience possible.” – ModDB.
Further, according to ModDB, the “Black Edition” of Brutal Doom:
“…is a dark, serious, realistic and meaningful vision of the original Brutal Doom…” and “combines large battles and speed of classic Doom with a meaningful realism, the dark and atmospheric aesthetic of Doom 3 and the dynamics of modern stuffs found in Doom 2016. The mod also focuses on diversity of game, but take care of preserving the original style and atmosphere of the original Doom I/II.” “If you are either bothered by regular Brutal Doom, or want both modern and meaningful realism, a diverse and dark atmospheric vision of the game with new unique stuffs, experience it with Brutal Doom: Black Edition.“
Without going into too much background detail about the background of Brutal Doom Black Edition versions, this port of my favorite FPS is – to quote one commenter I saw: “INSANE!” Watch the following video to see just what I mean. Or, rather first watch any old other video of original Doom first – THEN watch this video next:
![Brutal Doom Black Edition 3.35 [Rain, Parallax, Visor, Relighting] - Enhanced E1M9 | 4K/60](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9m65I6cUEUo/hqdefault.jpg)
When I first watched that, I was completely blown away! The poster (RaZZoR) who appears to have been responsible for compiling and releasing this version of Black Edition (3.35), was kind enough to place a link below his video to download the mod – all I had to do afterwards was to drop the original Doom .wad file into the folder, and hope that my aging laptop would be able to play it. Believe it or not, it launched and played perfectly! (For more detailed instructions on how to install GZDoom and Brutal Doom Black Edition 3,35, watch this video.)
My Experience of Brutal Doom Black Edition
I started playing Brutal Doom Black Edition a few night’s ago, and what can I say? It’s fucking amazing! When last was I able to say that about a game as old as Doom??!! Or in fact, about any game? Probably back in the late 1990s, I think!
Brutal Doom Black Edition is dark and sinister and moody, and appropriately so – unlike the original, which I always thought was way too brightly lit to be all that tense or frightening – which is probably why my initial foray into Doom 3 was such a traumatizing experience! Brutal Doom Black Edition reminds me a lot of Doom3 – and although it’s not as modern as that game was, it certainly gets very close to the feel of it. At least, I think so. There are also a lot of little things that remind me of Quake and Quake 3, for example the armor shards and the sound made by picking them up. Sadly, there was no Quake nail-gun (which I really enjoyed) in the line-up – dropping a hint here! 
Being darkly lit, the facility is much harder to navigate – and giving the gamer a flashlight helps improve things, and if anything, it also adds to the tense feel of the game. Opponents seem much more difficult to kill than in the original game, and even though I first started playing the game in the lowest difficulty setting, it was actually a challenge to get through the first few levels without dying at least four times! The modder seems to have gone to town on making the levels as challenging and difficult as possible! But then, that’s why they call it Brutal Doom, right?
The port runs smoothly without a hitch – even with all the enhancements, and given how it looks in relation to the system I’m running it on, that says a lot! The main thought running through my mind as I play it, is something of the order of “Wow! There’s so much detail!” – especially when it comes to the zombies and demons exploding or breaking apart when you’ve shot them. Yes, there’s gore – so what? This is Doom, for crying out loud! Repeat after me: “Gore is good!” So just turn the gore levels up to maximum ridiculousness and shut up and play! 
I’m sure with a better graphics card, it would look every bit as amazing on my laptop as it does in the video above, but given the fact that it plays at all WHILE looking almost as good on my system, I’m not complaining! In fact, it’s made my gaming Doom experience every bit as spellbinding and absorbing as the original did back in the 90s – an effect the original lost many years back. Face it, we’ve got used to much better graphics, shaders and world-building since then, haven’t we?
The sound and visual effects are decent and believable and more realistic than the original, the visuals are astonishingly good! You’re able to free look, mouse-shoot, and with all the textures and the resolution being so good you can even read the computer displays in the maps, and the weapons actually resemble their real-world counterparts. The submachine gun actually ejects spent casings while firing, and there’s not doubt that great attention was given to detail. The player’s FPS helmet visor aspect and the dashboard controls are a major improvement to the staid old version I’m familiar with. This is all so much better than before!
Conclusion
Although I didn’t set out to make this article a review of Brutal Doom Black Edition, I guess it’s turned out that way after all. To the makers of it – whomever they may be, kudos! You’ve rekindled my love for my favorite FPS of all time! Brutal Doom Black Edition scores a 5 out of 5 stars on the ol’ Tinamometer!
As I’ve mentioned several times now over the past few months, I’ve been posting new videos on my YouTube channel, and while I haven’t posted any gaming ones yet, there’s always been the possibility. I mean, I am a girl, and I am a gamer (coming out of retirement I guess 
