I wish I was born earlier in time

Dropping the Grungo act for a bit, I am sad I was born in the early 2000s rather than the 90s, it appears I missed out on a lot from skulltag and zdoom wads, to terrywads and niche YTers, looking back at random wads I found on idgames gives me a sense of nostalgia for something I was not around to witness or at least experience.

anyone feels this way?

listen im sorry, im sorry but i just have to, in the least offensive way i have to say it..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcmylxQ0ma4

PS; i thought this was a little to harsh to do but yes, i can somewhat relate, many people can

As someone who is probably the same age as you, I wouldn't sweat it.

From what I've heard from some of my veteran friends, the community at the time fostered a much less welcoming environment (not just in a politically correct way, but that is part of it). A lot of the time, the past seems better because we glamourize the good parts and largely push the bad parts to documentaries and books. 

For the record, the 2000s are my favorite era of mapping, but I also acknowledge that there's a lot of poorly aged material that's best left as a time capsule of a time when the general community sentiment was less tolerant than the modern Doom community. I'm glad that we have all the great and classic wads from this time period, but I think that the stuff that didn't survive is largely best forgotten.

yeah. i think everyone feels like that in some way, but i guess we cant experience EVERYTHING cool that happened before, right? at least we got pretty much all the content from that era archived and everything we need to experience it, with better computers than what the dudes from back then could have ever dreamed of.

Personally i think the best time for Doom wads is probably right now or in a near future. On the other hand i totally get what you are saying and can sometimes feel like that too about many different things. But i think it is better to ''live in the now'' , since years are literally just years, as someone born 2001 i obviously can't know for sure, but i don't think the 90's where as much of a different time as some of us might think (note that i know that the 90's where a different time, but maybe not so different that we should wish to be born earlier) especially since i remember a lot of late 90s stuff still being popular in the early 2000s when i where a young kid, i have seen people say stuff still ''felt 90's'' til like 2004. But this is just theories mixed with my opinions . Best regards

the rest i mean, you can go play those wads and stuff, and view those vids, skulltag otoh i get, when I got into zandronum the servers were sorta dying as i got in around 2016, I missed out on some cool stuff.

In relation old wads, I think over time as you play more and more old games, it becomes pretty easy to "put yourself in the mindset" of the time they were released. Playing PSX games still gives me the same feeling and vibe that I remember from back then, and it's not just nostalgia because I get the same feeling from playing games I never played back then. So I can only assume that when I play games from before I was born, such as Dragon Quest, Megaman, etc. that the "charm" those games hold for me today is pretty similar to how they would have made me feel back then. On the other hand, some games are only impressive if you played them back then.

For example, when I moved from my PS2 (my PC couldn't do anything) to my PS3 and played stuff like Heavy Rain and Bioshock, I was blown away by the technology and that really enhanced my enjoyment of them, enough so that I could forgive shitty or uninteresting gameplay. One of those games I mentioned no longer impresses me at all, and it's not hard to guess which one. You can draw the same comparison with wads - some wads that were really impressive back then ("oh my god, are those slopes?") are just kind of lame today ("oh my god, why is everything sloped?"). You just have to accept that you missed out on these novelties and their associated gimmicks, because they are no longer novel, they are just gimmicks. Other wads hold up well enough that they can put you in the 1994 mindset even if you were born in 2004, because there's no irritating bullshit preventing the time travel. Some people enjoy the (being blunt) shittiness of old wads, but I think those people are more on the hardcore/nerd side, and I don't mean that as an insult. That stuff is more interesting if you're able to understand why they were so shitty.

I won't lie, missing out on multiplayer stuff can suck. But it's probably better than enjoying it and then having to watch it die.

I don't know why I'm giving you this advice though, you're a Neanderthal. A fucking troglodyte, a relic of the past. You were born in 2000BC and wish you were born in the 1990's? You were made for TV commercials, not deep thinking.

Banishing Grungo to the shadow realm for dropping the posting gimmick.

(The 90s were overrated in all regards. Enjoy what you've got.)

1 hour ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

don't know why I'm giving you this advice though, you're a Neanderthal.

neanderthals were actually intelligent and thoughtful creatures and I will always fight the outdated perception that neanderthals were stupid brutes everywhere i see it because i hate to see our sister species slandered >.<

1 hour ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

won't lie, missing out on multiplayer stuff can suck. But it's probably better than enjoying it and then having to watch it die.

ive seen things you could never imagine, big team battle with vehicular combat in UT 2004, button combos in Halo 2, a Rainbow Six Siege Roster with less than 50 operators.. All those memories.. will be lost, like tears in rain..

Be Careful What You Wish For...

Wads can always be played any time.

Passing on the communities is probably a good thing. Skulltag community was awful (I in no way contributed to that no sir).

But you're here and now - you can experience many things from older times, most of it is preserved for you to use. There's no better time than now to live and get both the worlds. 

I was born in 1996.

In terms of growing up, I was there for the latter day Playstation, I was there for the PS2, the Xbox, I got to experience the wonders of Jungle music... We had the Backstreet Boys (and some other great music, mainly Backstreet Boys fucking fight me), we had some of the best shows on TV, some of the greatest films and had the Advent of Sky and Freeview (UK) from old analogue tech. All of this and we still got to play outside, we still went and lived our childhoods on parks (that are now long since gone), I was there for YouTube's early days. I was there for so much cool ass shit.

I was born so in the right fucking time man.

Yeah, the dinosaurs were cool af. I understand.

1 hour ago, esselfortium said:

 

(The 90s were overrated in all regards. Enjoy what you've got.)

Trying to come up with a counterexample but I think you're right.

Mall food courts were better then, maybe?

I'm from Bosnia and I think being a 2000s kid is a blessing, God forbid if I had to live through the 90s here lol.

1 hour ago, Rudolph said:

Be Careful What You Wish For...

 

is that norm mcdonald?

13 minutes ago, 97th Century Fox said:

I'm from Bosnia and I think being a 2000s kid is a blessing, God forbid if I had to live through the 90s here lol.

From Croatia - probably wouldn't be a fun time, especially if I was of war-fighting age at the time.

Yeah I grew up in the 90s it was pretty sweet

2 minutes ago, Pechudin said:

 

From Croatia - probably wouldn't be a fun time, especially if I was of war-fighting age at the time.

Same, but from Kyrgyzstan, my life would have been full of unfun adventures with active criminal groups, corrupted police officials and terrorists. The only thing left from that era are corrupted officials

I was born in the 1970s and was a teenager when Doom released in 1993. N.B. that makes me Gen X, not a Boomer.

We can always go back and play old wads. If you really want the awful 1990s experience, play on a basic source port and crank the resolution down to 320x240. That is how I played back then: on a 286 with so few pixels I could count them on one hand. (nothing wrong with basic source ports: my point is they are more true to the OG experience than, say, GZDoom).

Upgrading to a 486 meant I could quadruple the resolution to 640x480. Then the demons and imps were no longer pink and brown splotches: I could see teeth and other details. I still play Doom because the game is, and always has been awesome: however, I don't have any nostalgia for how it existed decades ago. Doom in 2024 is far better than it was in 1994 or 2004. I'll take Doom in 2560x1440 on an IPS panel over a 640x480 CRT any day.

Editing back then was rough. DEU, DCK, DETH were all great tools for their era, but ultimately they are products of their time. DOS was a garbage OS, and hardware of the time was severely limited in CPU horsepower and RAM. We didn't have in-editor previews. Aligning textures and getting every little detail just right required a lot of edit-quit-Doom-quit-edit cycles, which took a lot of time. We are spoiled in the modern era with tools such as Slade3 and UDB3. Turnaround time is far faster, and modern tools make modders and mappers far, far more productive and efficient. I am grateful for the efforts of the early tool authors that personify the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants" because without their early trailblazing, modern tools would not be as good. However, I have zero nostalgia for editing levels in the early days of Doom.

Communities really weren't very different back then, either. I am sure you can dig around in Usenet to read old posts, or even these forums, and see for yourself. Maybe they are slightly better now, though, because the bulk of the Doom community are die-hard Doom lovers. Back when Doom was new, lots of people played it and were involved. If you pull a random handful of people from the general population you will inevitably get a few trolls and smooth-brains. Now, those people are mostly relegated to Fortnite.

31 minutes ago, Grungo said:

is that norm mcdonald?

No, that is Andrew Divoff.

1 hour ago, Caffeine said:

I was born in the 1970s and was a teenager when Doom released in 1993. N.B. that makes me Gen X, not a Boomer.

 

We can always go back and play old wads. If you really want the awful 1990s experience, play on a basic source port and crank the resolution down to 320x240. That is how I played back then: on a 286 with so few pixels I could count them on one hand. (nothing wrong with basic source ports: my point is they are more true to the OG experience than, say, GZDoom).

 

Upgrading to a 486 meant I could quadruple the resolution to 640x480. Then the demons and imps were no longer pink and brown splotches: I could see teeth and other details. I still play Doom because the game is, and always has been awesome: however, I don't have any nostalgia for how it existed decades ago. Doom in 2024 is far better than it was in 1994 or 2004. I'll take Doom in 2560x1440 on an IPS panel over a 640x480 CRT any day.

 

Editing back then was rough. DEU, DCK, DETH were all great tools for their era, but ultimately they are products of their time. DOS was a garbage OS, and hardware of the time was severely limited in CPU horsepower and RAM. We didn't have in-editor previews. Aligning textures and getting every little detail just right required a lot of edit-quit-Doom-quit-edit cycles, which took a lot of time. We are spoiled in the modern era with tools such as Slade3 and UDB3. Turnaround time is far faster, and modern tools make modders and mappers far, far more productive and efficient. I am grateful for the efforts of the early tool authors that personify the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants" because without their early trailblazing, modern tools would not be as good. However, I have zero nostalgia for editing levels in the early days of Doom.

 

Communities really weren't very different back then, either. I am sure you can dig around in Usenet to read old posts, or even these forums, and see for yourself. Maybe they are slightly better now, though, because the bulk of the Doom community are die-hard Doom lovers. Back when Doom was new, lots of people played it and were involved. If you pull a random handful of people from the general population you will inevitably get a few trolls and smooth-brains. Now, those people are mostly relegated to Fortnite.

Dude I usually play Doom in DOSBox and most custom wads, if they're vanilla-styled, in 320x200 resolution, using space for "use" and mouse for forward/back and right click to strafe.   GZDoom can go as basic as you want to with software renderer support. Only thing it can't do is menu demos, which is only important for speedrunners.

I agree immensely though when it comes to modding and modding tools available from the community, it is so much easier and so much more possible to build bigger, cooler maps with scripting, et. al. with the newer engines (e.g. Slade, Ultimate Doom Builder,) and formats (e.g. UDMF). As someone who started out by mapping in Doom 2 mode, then went to Hexen mode, then to UDMF--each jump allows for cooler stuff and more possibilities to take place.

4 hours ago, TheMagicMushroomMan said:

it becomes pretty easy to "put yourself in the mindset" of the time they were released.

This has always been my attitude to anything. Hell, when I was reading Shakespeare's Hamlet in high school, I tried as best I could to see the play from the point of view of the seventeenth century, or whenever it was from.

This one of the reasons why I despise most remasters and I love films, books, music, games, etc. of a particular point of time to stay feeling like they are of that particular point in time. They become like a time machine, and it's as easy to mentally slip back into that year as putting on a new shirt. Through that media, whatever year it's from becomes the present once more.

Yeah back then graphical improvements seemed cool, graphics now are too detailed for you to even be able to notice improvements.

I will say, things seemed really cool when ZDoom's scripting limits were constantly being pushed and there were all these ambitious total conversions under development....but at the same time, the way that the community has drifted more towards relatively limited efforts that are just as likely to push 'vanilla' gameplay to its limits as to provide some slight enhancements to gameplay is probably indicative of how shallow most of that really is. Like just take a look at the stories of some of the ZDoom mods like Claustrophobia: The Walls Close In. The dialogue was so cringy and forced they might as well have not bothered, but more importantly, cutscenes break up gameplay so they're mostly avoided these days.