I 100%ed DOOM 64! [Some cool things I found]

[Chip]

Well, in truth, not really. But by PS4 standards, I did! I did use a bit of passwords at the end, but here are a few cool things I've realized playing its new port!

 

-If you enter the secret level In the Void with the password that gives you all items, only 2/3 keys are activated until you pick up the purple one.

-This one is pretty well known, and not limited to the new port, but there are monitors in the game like in Duke 3d! You can see demons without triggering a fight! 

-Modding for DOOM 64 is uncommon. But, there might be new levels in the future. I only say this because there is a News section that has not been updated since March, so a future update may add more content.

-The level The Absolution, the final level of the game is separated by the fun levels from the previous level No Escape

-There is an achievement for finding Hectic is called RVNH 3CT1 CD3M 0??? (which is supposed to be read as Run Hectic Demo, do you see it?), which is also the password for finding the demo in the game

-The Sister Resurrector is supposed to be an easy foe to down, since the game provides you with 3 demon keys and the Unmaker

-Unmaykr is the name of the gun in Eternal. it is simply Unmaker in DOOM 64

-Rip n' Tear is the achievement earned if you kill a cyberdemon. Making a direct reference to the comic, where Doomguy tries to kill the cyberdemon while repeating the phrase "Rip n' tear"

-Another reference to the comic, if you pick up the BFG, you get the achievement "My Cause is Just, My Will is Strong" 

-The achievement Escape Artist is supposed to reward the player by making their way to the final level on the hardest difficulty. Rather, the achievement can be triggered if you type in the password to warp to the level, even the one that gives all items and 200 health. 

-the achievement for killing the Mother demon is called Mother May I, after the childrens game. I've never played Mother May I, so it might also have something to do with the level layout.

-The Lost Levels tie DOOM 64 to DOOM 2016. The achievement named "Walk the Path" might have something to do with the DOOM Slayer, but I was not really interested in DOOM 2016, so I'm actually not quite sure.

-The Unmaker according to the DOOM Bible is made out of dead demon bodies. Hence the reason it looks like flesh and bones, also why the achievement for grabbing it is called "Unholy Firepower"

-In some AMA here on Doomworld, one of the lead designers mentioned that the laser that everybody loves in the early Beta shots of DOOM 64 are actually early designs for either the rocket launcher or another weapon (maybe the Unmaker wasn't an unmaker at one point)! 

-The Fun levels are the furthest thing from fun

 

It was fun playing through the game, and it is probably my favorite in the series! I am so glad that people that don't own Nintendo consoles can now enjoy it too! I also want to thank Kaiser for the fun and challenging levels! It was so fun playing the whole game! Can't wait until its sequel comes out (LoL)!

[Immorpher]

Nice, glad you finished it and liked it!

Back in the day it was a bit trickier to find the secret levels, and even trickier to get some of the demon keys, since most console-owner homes didn't have the internet. Although print strategy guides existed, they had not gotten big yet either. So I felt those secrets were placed there for players who went through the game multiple times, so it was like a reward for dedicated players so they could feel powerful with the upgraded unmaker.

I've been making a list of custom Doom 64 maps and the ports they are for: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kgPXUDuxEaCN6nxVsWiY2lBy9XM-e9er2Z2D67azgC0/
And here's an archive with all the maps I could find: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/q8nyzhj3hbs1x9x/AABuS-mDkXcqE9QpEbG_FjBFa
(if anyone else looks through this and finds incorrect info or missing maps, let me know!)

When you feel like more Doom 64 and want to try out this maps or need recommendations, let me know, I am more than happy to help out! :D

[sponge]

GameFAQs has a Doom 64 FAQ from 1997, and the unlock everything passwords way back then: https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/n64/197141-doom-64/faqs/3193

 

I believe typically these passwords (and other cheats) were released by the developers themselves to magazines, which then got spread onto the net.

 

I remember printing out a Link's Awakening walkthrough on our school computers in 96, mostly because they had a Laserjet printer, and it was a lot of pages.

[Cacodoomonic]

On 9/2/2020 at 11:41 PM, Chip said:

Well, in truth, not really. But by PS4 standards, I did! I did use a bit of passwords at the end, but here are a few cool things I've realized playing its new port!

 

-If you enter the secret level In the Void with the password that gives you all items, only 2/3 keys are activated until you pick up the purple one.

-This one is pretty well known, and not limited to the new port, but there are monitors in the game like in Duke 3d! You can see demons without triggering a fight! 

-Modding for DOOM 64 is uncommon. But, there might be new levels in the future. I only say this because there is a News section that has not been updated since March, so a future update may add more content.

-The level The Absolution, the final level of the game is separated by the fun levels from the previous level No Escape

-There is an achievement for finding Hectic is called RVNH 3CT1 CD3M 0??? (which is supposed to be read as Run Hectic Demo, do you see it?), which is also the password for finding the demo in the game

-The Sister Resurrector is supposed to be an easy foe to down, since the game provides you with 3 demon keys and the Unmaker

-Unmaykr is the name of the gun in Eternal. it is simply Unmaker in DOOM 64

-Rip n' Tear is the achievement earned if you kill a cyberdemon. Making a direct reference to the comic, where Doomguy tries to kill the cyberdemon while repeating the phrase "Rip n' tear"

-Another reference to the comic, if you pick up the BFG, you get the achievement "My Cause is Just, My Will is Strong" 

-The achievement Escape Artist is supposed to reward the player by making their way to the final level on the hardest difficulty. Rather, the achievement can be triggered if you type in the password to warp to the level, even the one that gives all items and 200 health. 

-the achievement for killing the Mother demon is called Mother May I, after the childrens game. I've never played Mother May I, so it might also have something to do with the level layout.

-The Lost Levels tie DOOM 64 to DOOM 2016. The achievement named "Walk the Path" might have something to do with the DOOM Slayer, but I was not really interested in DOOM 2016, so I'm actually not quite sure.

-The Unmaker according to the DOOM Bible is made out of dead demon bodies. Hence the reason it looks like flesh and bones, also why the achievement for grabbing it is called "Unholy Firepower"

-In some AMA here on Doomworld, one of the lead designers mentioned that the laser that everybody loves in the early Beta shots of DOOM 64 are actually early designs for either the rocket launcher or another weapon (maybe the Unmaker wasn't an unmaker at one point)! 

-The Fun levels are the furthest thing from fun

 

It was fun playing through the game, and it is probably my favorite in the series! I am so glad that people that don't own Nintendo consoles can now enjoy it too! I also want to thank Kaiser for the fun and challenging levels! It was so fun playing the whole game! Can't wait until its sequel comes out (LoL)!

This is why I ordered 6 physical limited run copies in the first 10 seconds of their release, despite owning the original version for years anyway. And I implore everyone else to do that same. Doom 64 has been overlooked for far too long.

[ChopBlock223]

I've played through the main campaign in Doom 64 three times now, since I got it on PS4, and I had a really good time.

Starting out though, I wasn't sure I would, I knew it had all that new music by Hodges, like in the Playstation version, and I didn't care for it there, I knew it lacked the Revenant and Arch-Vile, which I felt was a serious downgrade, and having seen some of the monster redesigns, I really disliked some.

 

Spoilered the rest, because this became a small essay.

 

Spoiler

 

I got going on skill 3, I figured it would be alright, but I found myself disappointed at how barren the game's levels were, I was never in any danger ever. As I complained of it, someone suggested I'd play in skill 4, and it was a dramatic improvement, there were now monsters in the levels to fight, and sometimes it actually went at it pretty hard. I would recommend that anyone with any reasonable experience trying Doom 64 for the first time play on the highest skill setting, anything else is just boring.

 

For the music, I find that on some levels, it's suitable, Doom 64 has a different atmosphere and feel to Playstation Doom, so it works better, but I still think it's all very samey and it gets boring quickly, there's no melodies or tunes, it doesn't have that quality to it where I find myself humming some bars from it when I go to take a piss or take the dog out for a walk, because there's no bars.

It's all just droning noises, thumps, the occasional monster growl, and sometimes a baby crying, this can add to soms maps, but most of the time I find myself just tuning it out. If it wasn't going to have fast high tempo tracks like the original game, it could still have tried to do something like the tense slow tempo suspense tracks, like I'd love heard Hodge's take on The Demons From Adrian's Pen, The Dave D. Taylor Blues, or Waiting For Romero To Play.

 

On sound design, some of the new sounds are great, others aren't so much. I like that the Arachnotron stomping around isn't so loud, I like the sound of the plasma, the Zombies are great, and the Pain Elemental sounds fantastic, suiting his new appearance. However the Mancubus sounds boring, the Caco is just kind of eh, the Baron sounds too similar to the Knight at a distance, and the Cyberdemon sounds just way too similar to one of the lower tier demon sounds, that's straight up just a BAD choice. The Super Shotgun also sounds way too much like the Shotgun.

 

On the monsters overall, the Nightmare Imp is a good addition, the faster projectiles make him stand out, the Zombies are WAY too hard to tell apart, they're thankfully squishy, but they should have done more here, at least color differentiating them better. The Cyberdemon is nerfed like hell, he's really slow, and he's not used in a very menacing way in the main campaign (Hardcore uses him in a mean as fuck way though), and then there's the Barons and Knights, which 64 likes to use often, now, I don't have a problem with that, you get plenty of ordance to handle them, but they look WAY too similar too each other, the big way to tell them apart is color of the glow around their hands, and their projectiles, which is a little too subtle, they really could have done a lot more with palette changes here, but didn't. They also just look like a 3D model imitation of their original design, like the Cyberdemon, but unlike him, I think they look pretty damn bad, their anatomy and animation just looks goofy and awkward. While I'm at it, I very much dislike the new design of the Caco and Mancubus, though they fill their original roles just as well as always, Pinkie looks excellent, he's just as good as his original, in his own way. Speaking of excellence, I saved the best for last here, the Pain Elemental, in the absence of the Arch-Vile and Revenant, they gave him some Vitamin Go Fuck Yourself, and now he's a SERIOUS menace, the Lost Soul is faster and more aggressive, and also explodes violently on death, effectively making him a seeking missile for the Pain Elemental, who spits TWO of them at a time now, and if you try to block his spawns like in classic, you eat the resulting explosions, forcing you to have to approach him real differently. Every time a Pain Elemental shows up, it makes me go "Oh no!" in a way only the Arch-Vile can, and he has a suitable new look and sound for that effect. Originally, the ol' meatball (which I still love) was seldom more than an inconvenience to me, but Midway did a fantastic job making him THE fiercest monster in Doom 64. The new Lost Soul doesn't look that great, but the new behavior combined with the new Pain Elemental still makes them great.

That leaves the Motherdemon, which looks cool, sounds cool, and CAN be a tough fight, but if you get all the Demon Keys, she's not that hard, more, the second one in the Lost Levels set becomes a joke because there's a bunch of Invulnerability Spheres in her level, they should have made you fight two at once.

The weapons are largely the same, the Chaingun is a little faster, which makes it a lot more fun to use, I found, the Super Shotgun is a lot faster (or feels like it), which makes the frequent use of meatier monsters a lot more bearable. The Plasma Rifle is slower, which might originally have been for performance reasons, but most likely to make the Unmaker more relevant, even when not upgraded.

 

On the level design, it's overall pretty good. The first 9 levels of techbase I think are just kind of so-so, but once you reach hell, it really picks up, starting with a great Dead Simple clone which hits hard. In a general sense I like the use of colored sector lighting and stuff, and a lot of the demonic statues and etchings, as well as scripts for complex actions (if only it had the sound reverb like in the PSX version). The aesthetics feel a bit like a halfway between Doom and Quake, with a lot old stone and brick work, and some gothic aesthetics here and there. I really enjoyed looking for and playing the secret levels, Outpost Omega and The Void in particular are great, atmospheric as hell, they have intense and fun fights, they're really fun to explore, and the Demon Keys are wonderful, tangible prizes to drive you. The Lost Levels are great too, a suitable bump in challenge, and exactly what I was looking for after I was left wanting more (if only there was even more).

 

 

So I enjoyed it a lot.

[P41R47]

6 hours ago, ChopBlock223 said:

I've played through the main campaign in Doom 64 three times now, since I got it on PS4, and I had a really good time.

Starting out though, I wasn't sure I would, I knew it had all that new music by Hodges, like in the Playstation version, and I didn't care for it there, I knew it lacked the Revenant and Arch-Vile, which I felt was a serious downgrade, and having seen some of the monster redesigns, I really disliked some.

 

Spoilered the rest, because this became a small essay.

 

  Reveal hidden contents

 

I got going on skill 3, I figured it would be alright, but I found myself disappointed at how barren the game's levels were, I was never in any danger ever. As I complained of it, someone suggested I'd play in skill 4, and it was a dramatic improvement, there were now monsters in the levels to fight, and sometimes it actually went at it pretty hard. I would recommend that anyone with any reasonable experience trying Doom 64 for the first time play on the highest skill setting, anything else is just boring.

 

For the music, I find that on some levels, it's suitable, Doom 64 has a different atmosphere and feel to Playstation Doom, so it works better, but I still think it's all very samey and it gets boring quickly, there's no melodies or tunes, it doesn't have that quality to it where I find myself humming some bars from it when I go to take a piss or take the dog out for a walk, because there's no bars.

It's all just droning noises, thumps, the occasional monster growl, and sometimes a baby crying, this can add to soms maps, but most of the time I find myself just tuning it out. If it wasn't going to have fast high tempo tracks like the original game, it could still have tried to do something like the tense slow tempo suspense tracks, like I'd love heard Hodge's take on The Demons From Adrian's Pen, The Dave D. Taylor Blues, or Waiting For Romero To Play.

 

On sound design, some of the new sounds are great, others aren't so much. I like that the Arachnotron stomping around isn't so loud, I like the sound of the plasma, the Zombies are great, and the Pain Elemental sounds fantastic, suiting his new appearance. However the Mancubus sounds boring, the Caco is just kind of eh, the Baron sounds too similar to the Knight at a distance, and the Cyberdemon sounds just way too similar to one of the lower tier demon sounds, that's straight up just a BAD choice. The Super Shotgun also sounds way too much like the Shotgun.

 

On the monsters overall, the Nightmare Imp is a good addition, the faster projectiles make him stand out, the Zombies are WAY too hard to tell apart, they're thankfully squishy, but they should have done more here, at least color differentiating them better. The Cyberdemon is nerfed like hell, he's really slow, and he's not used in a very menacing way in the main campaign (Hardcore uses him in a mean as fuck way though), and then there's the Barons and Knights, which 64 likes to use often, now, I don't have a problem with that, you get plenty of ordance to handle them, but they look WAY too similar too each other, the big way to tell them apart is color of the glow around their hands, and their projectiles, which is a little too subtle, they really could have done a lot more with palette changes here, but didn't. They also just look like a 3D model imitation of their original design, like the Cyberdemon, but unlike him, I think they look pretty damn bad, their anatomy and animation just looks goofy and awkward. While I'm at it, I very much dislike the new design of the Caco and Mancubus, though they fill their original roles just as well as always, Pinkie looks excellent, he's just as good as his original, in his own way. Speaking of excellence, I saved the best for last here, the Pain Elemental, in the absence of the Arch-Vile and Revenant, they gave him some Vitamin Go Fuck Yourself, and now he's a SERIOUS menace, the Lost Soul is faster and more aggressive, and also explodes violently on death, effectively making him a seeking missile for the Pain Elemental, who spits TWO of them at a time now, and if you try to block his spawns like in classic, you eat the resulting explosions, forcing you to have to approach him real differently. Every time a Pain Elemental shows up, it makes me go "Oh no!" in a way only the Arch-Vile can, and he has a suitable new look and sound for that effect. Originally, the ol' meatball (which I still love) was seldom more than an inconvenience to me, but Midway did a fantastic job making him THE fiercest monster in Doom 64. The new Lost Soul doesn't look that great, but the new behavior combined with the new Pain Elemental still makes them great.

That leaves the Motherdemon, which looks cool, sounds cool, and CAN be a tough fight, but if you get all the Demon Keys, she's not that hard, more, the second one in the Lost Levels set becomes a joke because there's a bunch of Invulnerability Spheres in her level, they should have made you fight two at once.

The weapons are largely the same, the Chaingun is a little faster, which makes it a lot more fun to use, I found, the Super Shotgun is a lot faster (or feels like it), which makes the frequent use of meatier monsters a lot more bearable. The Plasma Rifle is slower, which might originally have been for performance reasons, but most likely to make the Unmaker more relevant, even when not upgraded.

 

On the level design, it's overall pretty good. The first 9 levels of techbase I think are just kind of so-so, but once you reach hell, it really picks up, starting with a great Dead Simple clone which hits hard. In a general sense I like the use of colored sector lighting and stuff, and a lot of the demonic statues and etchings, as well as scripts for complex actions (if only it had the sound reverb like in the PSX version). The aesthetics feel a bit like a halfway between Doom and Quake, with a lot old stone and brick work, and some gothic aesthetics here and there. I really enjoyed looking for and playing the secret levels, Outpost Omega and The Void in particular are great, atmospheric as hell, they have intense and fun fights, they're really fun to explore, and the Demon Keys are wonderful, tangible prizes to drive you. The Lost Levels are great too, a suitable bump in challenge, and exactly what I was looking for after I was left wanting more (if only there was even more).

 

 

So I enjoyed it a lot.

If you want some custom content, Doom 64 EX let you load some mapset
@Immorpher made a comprensive list of most of the projects out there with respective links for downloads:
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2191697