Sunday, May 8, 2016

InstaDoom (INSTADM.ZIP)

INSTADOOM
by Andrew "Linguica" Stine


If you bore witness to any aspect of the InstaDoom craze back in 2015, it was probably its included add-on, Selfie Doom. Given the mod's title, it's clear that the selfie stick wasn't the original focus, but for awhile it was One Hot Topic. I was right there, too, taking a number of Doomguy selfies for the Doom WADs Tumblr until some people became especially tired of them. Like Vuvuzela Doom, the star burned bright, searing its place in the big book of Doom history as one of the more humorous footnotes, to be resurrected for a laugh when the need presents itself.


The intended attraction, I believe, was... InstaDoom, derived from Instagram. It is a collection of 40 Instagram filters, later expanded to 57 via "Instadoom DLC Pack 1", which purportedly mimicks the free filters available for the VSCO Cam application. You pick whichever filter you want, load it up with Doom, and then play and screenshot to your heart's content. The effect is achieved through the use of individual palettes and colormaps per "filter", which is why it's compatible with pretty much any Doom source port, including vanilla. That also makes it way more cumbersome than, say, taking a picture and THEN applying the filter of your choosing, but where's the fun in that?


Of course, no one is really interested in screenshotting Doom with arbitrary color "filters", much less playing it, and I suspect that that's part of the joke. I dunno if the satire will influence any Instagram users, especially given that Selfie Doom completely overshadowed the Insta portion of the package, but there's something there, I think. What is the interest in applying color filters to real pictures a la Instagram? Are the colors of reality not interesting enough on their own merits? I'd hate to take a gorgeous vista from, say, Swim With the Whales, and then ram it through a color filter as though it would be any more preferable.


Throwing all that aside, the breakout star of InstaDoom was the selfie stick mod, the aptly-named Selfie Doom. It's also amazingly vanilla compatible, using some DeHackEd trickery and - most importantly - amazing weapon sprites to simulate the act of Doomguy flippantly taking a selfie, complete with camera flash. The original incarnation replaced the BFG, and still does in non-ZDoom ports, also swapping chainsaw and BFG pickups so that you can grab it and go to town in MAP01. The execution in ZDoom replaces nothing, instead adding the selfie stick as an alternate slot 7 weapon already in your arsenal, which is a nice change to accommodate ZDoom mods. I remember running into some difficulties while trying to use the stick during Doom Vacation, and while I may never use the Selfie mod again, I appreciate the pains taken to make sure that it would be much simpler in the event that I did.


This version of Selfie Doom is dubbed the "Buddy Adding Edition" (BAE), for use in multiplayer. I can't be bothered to actually try the functionality out myself, but if you load up SELFIE.WAD and SELFIE.DEH in, say, Eternity, you can see it in action in the third demo. When Doomguy strikes his pose, the three other players showboat in their own amusing way. Another thing I discovered through the demos is that holding down the trigger keeps Doomguy in the shifty-eyes state until released, in case you need a little more time to set up the perfect shot. I guess it never occurred to me that I could, y'know, keep "firing".


Has the sun set on InstaDoom? I, uh, don't think that ship ever really left the harbor. The joy of Selfie Doom, however, has been burned from many hearts, and I know that I did a decent enough job helping it along on my Tumblr account, now preserved here. Whatever you may think of Selfie Doom, it pushed this evergreen wonder back into the public eye in a big way. Sure, a lot of those eyes were rolling, but it's good to remind the world that the Doom community is alive and well and as capable as ever of creating stuff that quickly escapes its oft-insular confines.






This post is part of a series on
Doomworld's 2015 Cacowards

The Top TenBest MultiplayerRunners Up
SunlustDon't Be a Bitch RemasteredDoomed Space Wars
ErkattäññeChaosCore CTFCrumpets
SkulldashBest Gameplay ModPrime Directive
Swift DeathDoomRL ArsenalPinnacle of Darkness
BreachMordeth AwardOl' No Name
ValiantChaosCore CTF32in24-14
50 Shades of GraytallMockaward
Sheer PoisonInstaDoom
dead.wireMapper of the Year
Return to Hadrondannebubinga

10 comments:

  1. We have a wealth of mappers that regularly release completely free epic masterworks like Sunlust, Valiant, Skulldash, BTSX, Going Down, etc which are awarded within the community but are otherwise unknown...and yet stuff like InstaDoom gets write-ups in PC World and Wired.com. Sad.

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    Replies
    1. while disappointing that says very little about InstaDoom itself

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    2. I agree. This shitty wad got more attention than those popular wads listed above. In fact, I never really liked gameplay mods at all, mostly because they change the Doom style too much, the only exception being AEOD because it's a fun randomizer mod, though I enjoyed the earlier versions more because they were closer to the original Doom style.

      -FistMarine

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    3. I mean, those publications write about stuff that they think their audience finds interesting. It's not really their job to comb the Doom community for great new megawads.

      I actually think that if you would shoot, say, RPS or any other website that isn't afraid to cover cool little niche stuff, a good pitch with an angle for why your wad is great/interesting, they would totally be willing to check it out and write about it. You know, basic PR. A release thread on Doomworld isn't really gonna cut it if you want mainstream coverage. Especially if your wad doesn't exactly "pop" at first sight.

      Instadoom on the other hand makes for a great little tidbit that most people that read gaming/tech/geek news will find funny. You see the screenshot, you're instantly in on the joke.

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  2. that second picture of the bedroom... is that the wad i think it is c;

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    Replies
    1. it probably is! i took 40 shots of Army of Darkness Doom's MAP03 (by Linguica and Stefan Maes) composed of four scenes at ten filters each and divided the xpac between doit.wad and linguica's area from exquisite corpse. i couldn't justify cramming all of them into this blog post but they will be showing up in the Tumblrized version tomorrow.

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    2. I think it's from DO-IT.WAD

      -FistMarine

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    3. omg it IS do-it. That's so wonderfully horrible. Hat-tip to you, sir.

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  3. Cute little jokewad. Good for like 10 minutes of chuckles.

    ReplyDelete