We Were (and Remain) DOOMed for the Kids

Well, another Community Endurance Run is in the books, and I participated in it for the first time. I was extremely nervous for a number of reasons, most of them having to do with worrying that I would fuck something up in OBS and the stream would have no audio or video or something and I wouldn’t notice. Or worse still, that I would get hung up on some level and get angry and miserable and never actually finish the damn run as planned. The biggest thing I was really worried about was that nobody would come by, and nobody would donate. I’m just Some Guy, you know? I’d just spend the weekend playing through DOOM to an audience of nobody, and at the end I would feel bad about having failed to contribute in any real way to the proceedings.

Well, that last worry ended up being extremely fucking silly of me. Forgive me, Giant Bomb Community, I wasn’t really familiar with your game (although I should’ve been). Not only did we meet my goal of $150 in donations, you doubled it, and we had a final total of $300! I said this on the stream and I will say it again: I am blown away by your generosity, and by your willingness to watch a dude who had never done this before fiddle around and play some DOOM. You even managed to send me to both the DOOM³ Zone and, thanks to one generous donor, banish me to the Daikatana Zone, which was exactly as good(?) as I hoped it would be. Thank you, a thousand thousand times, thank you. The whole thing was a success, and I couldn’t be more pleased. You can even watch the archives of both days if for some reason you want to see me pistol start Perfect Hatred and play the Fist of the North Star DOOM mod and also I guess really kinda walk through episode one at a speed I wasn’t prepared for if we’re being honest.

I’m already looking forward to doing this again next time, and I’ve got some ideas in mind to really dig into… wait, do you hear that? Is… is that?

Bah Gawd That’s John Romero’s Music!

Yep, turns out that final $100 means I added SIGIL and SIGIL II to the run, but because we hit that goal pretty late in the game, I only got through half of SIGIL before both my old man body and the arrival of the pizza I ordered mandated an end to the stream. Unfortunately for me, I am a man of my word, and I said I’d play through both campaigns Live and On the Internet – so we’re not done yet! There’s still some work to do!

So once again, this very weekend, I will saddle back up, load my save of SIGIL, and start going. Specifically, we’ll do it on Saturday, starting at 15:00 CEST (which is 9:00 EDT for you Americans out there on the East Coast). I’m not sure how long it will take to get through – I actually feel pretty confident the final four maps of SIGIL won’t take terribly long, but if we’re being honest I’ve only fully cleared SIGIL II once so I have no idea how long that will take. We’ll play until I am either done or too tired to keep going (which would mean we’ll come back and finish up on Sunday).

You can, of course still donate money to Pencils of Promise while I’m streaming, and the incentives are still in effect – except when we hit SIGIL II I am gonna have to call off the pistol starting incentive because I need to get through that game sometime in the next century. I haven’t figured out what I’ll replace it with, but I liked getting banished to other games, so maybe that’ll be the DOOM 64 Zone. You’ll find out!

Oh Right, Prizes

A thing I impulsively said at the end of the stream, heart full of gratitude, was that I would do a raffle to give one lucky donor a copy of SIGIL with the Buckethead soundtrack. That’s going to be expanded to include a copy of SIGIL II with the THORR soundtrack too, because why the hell wouldn’t I? You were generous!

That said, these are .wads and you need to have the original DOOM .wad and also a copy of GZDoom to make it work right. If you have a copy of DOOM I + II you can just go into the game files and pull the wad from there and, you know what, if you win and aren’t sure how to get it all working I’ll point you in the right direction. Romero’s own documentation explains it pretty clearly too – SIGIL II is way easier because he just did a completely separate release, whereas the SIGIL version you have to select a couple things and drag them onto the gzdoom executable and if you don’t get it right it won’t work, but don’t be intimidated, it’s fine, and once you have it running you can finally check out H-DOOM! I know you want to, you perverts.

Anyway, I thought that I could pull email addresses from the anonymous donations, but it turns out I can’t! So if you want a shot at getting two of the best goddamn games to release in the last five years (six years now I guess?), here’s what you need to do:

DM me here (or I guess on the wretched bluesky if you don’t have a GB account) with your email address and a screenshot of your donation receipt. If you win, guess what? You’ll get your prizes. How about that, eh?

Anyway, I’ll do the raffle after my great labors are at an end (i.e., after I’ve finished SIGIL II) so that you can keep donating (either to my campaign or just to the general GB Community Endurance Run team, I’ll keep an eye on everything more or less, and as long as you show me a receipt I’ll show you an entry into the raffle).

And after all that’s done, I’ll have time to think about how playing through Ultimate DOOM and also SIGIL and SIGIL II made me somehow love the games even more, like it turns out that the real treasure was the DOOM we played along the way and also the $300 we raised for the Kids. I was worried about being really stuck and getting frustrated and angry doing Thy Flesh Consumed but I didn’t, I actually had a good time with the vast majority of Thy Flesh Consumed! That’s not something I thought I would ever say! It also gave me moments like somehow turning around a pistol start in Perfect Hatred and a series of deaths at 1% health into a victory, or taking the Spider Mastermind down with like 33% health or something, or just punching the crap out of some Pinky Demons to save ammo, or…

Okay Daikatana was somehow worse than I remembered but that’s fine.

See you Saturday.