122 - Doom 3

[RightClickSaveAs]

Oh man, it's been a while since I read them, so the details are fuzzy, but there's a basic summary here: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_novels

Essentially, they're an ancient race of aliens who long ago left gates from their worlds to ours on Mars, and had this long term plan to invade Earth using armies of soldiers, a lot of them from enslaved races, who have been genetically modified to look like demons and such from religious ideology. The zombies were apparently made by using chemicals on corpses of dead humans.

But yeah, the story in the original games was never much of a priority. Your name in the first couple is basically "Doom guy", haha. The story of that whole aspect of the game's creation is a pretty interesting one, originally they had a guy who wrote out this huge backstory and the game was supposed to take place mostly in military bunkers and stuff, but John Romero essentially said "this is boring, let's do it this way" and hammered out some abstractly-designed levels that didn't look like real locations but were a lot more interesting and ended up being the core focus of the level design. This book goes into the whole story of Id Software and is a really fascinating read: Masters of Doom

[matt]

I seem to remember hearing that the Catholic church still has official sanctioned exorcists around. But then again, I may have heard this in a movie, so that's probably not the most concrete of sources!

I believe they do, but they are very, very rare. The movie the Exorcism of Emily Rose was loosely based on the real life exorcism of Anneliese Michel. I think the church distanced itself from that exorcism since the priest was found guilty. The movie paints it in a more positive light than it most likely was in reality.

Event Horizon is a great comparison. Whatever it is going on in that movie, it's horrifying and barely comprehensible to the human mind.

I really liked Event Horizon. Apparently there are terribly evil things in black holes.

I don't know how CANON that is , but that's a fun if slightly less frightening take on the whole story.

I imagine it's not. I read the Mega Man 2 novelization as a child, and apparently he got turned into a human at the start of the book. hahah I was very confused because it seemed totally inaccurate.

[gagaplex]

Oh man, it's been a while since I read them, so the details are fuzzy, but there's a basic summary here: http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Doom_novels

Hehe, bizarre to say the least.

While I very much like the "ancient aliens"-angle (I'm quite a fan of Lovecraft's works about unimaginably powerful alien beings with their minor servants and spawn), this at least in part goes a bit too... standard... for my taste, if you can believe that? The synopsis mentions people "turning traitor", aliens leaving humans alive to "brew the chemicals" needed to make more zombies for them, "stealing shuttles"... after what starts out as this inhuman, vast, demonic alien force, this sounds more like a standard - if genocidal - military occupation (by the "Freds"?!) than some unimaginably foreign, alien force. At that point, the alien invaders are not... abstract and weird enough for my taste, if that makes sense.

But those bits about souls being entertained in theatres, copied, moved around, the "Newbies", evolving out of existence (doesn't make sense) etc., that stuff is just plain weird. To be fair, the article isn't written with particularly good style, but assuming the content is correct, I doubt I'd find it any less weird if better written.

[RightClickSaveAs]

I imagine it's not. I read the Mega Man 2 novelization as a child, and apparently he got turned into a human at the start of the book. hahah I was very confused because it seemed totally inaccurate.

Hah! Yeah video game books/movies/whatever generally seem like the writers have no idea what to do with the characters sometimes so they just come up with weird stuff.

While I very much like the "ancient aliens"-angle (I'm quite a fan of Lovecraft's works about unimaginably powerful alien beings with their minor servants and spawn), this at least in part goes a bit too... standard... for my taste, if you can believe that? The synopsis mentions people "turning traitor", aliens leaving humans alive to "brew the chemicals" needed to make more zombies for them, "stealing shuttles"... after what starts out as this inhuman, vast, demonic alien force, this sounds more like a standard - if genocidal - military occupation (by the "Freds"?!) than some unimaginably foreign, alien force. At that point, the alien invaders are not... abstract and weird enough for my taste, if that makes sense.

But those bits about souls being entertained in theatres, copied, moved around, the "Newbies", evolving out of existence (doesn't make sense) etc., that stuff is just plain weird. To be fair, the article isn't written with particularly good style, but assuming the content is correct, I doubt I'd find it any less weird if better written.

That totally makes sense, the invasion story as put out by the Doom books seems like it's been done a million times. Also I just realized this, these books were written around 1995! I didn't read them until several years later, but I still wasn't aware of that.

The whole newbies and soul sucking thing I don't remember much. I don't know if I actually finished the last two books now that I think of it, they did start to get weird. I just mostly remember the first two, and reading about things that were vaguely like the game "hey I remember that room I think! Hey I found one of those blue healing spheres too!" Not exactly fine literature, but they were surprisingly entertaining, especially the amount of personality they managed to give to faceless video game characters. The Doom Guy (Flynn Taggart in the books) is a smart-ass tough guy but also a pretty religious guy, and Arlene his fellow Marine is a smart and pragmatic atheist, so there are actually some interesting theological discussions. In a Doom book. Yeah.

[matt]

Hah! Yeah video game books/movies/whatever generally seem like the writers have no idea what to do with the characters sometimes so they just come up with weird stuff.

I think video games you so little in the way of story, you either have to make something up completely different and piss off all of the fans, or try to come up with crazy explanations for the things that don't really work well from a storytelling perspective like in Street Fighter the movie. Remember the levitation boots, so he can do his psycho crusher? Poor Raul Julia.... (If you have any interest in the film, Polygon had a fascinating retrospective of the movie.)

so there are actually some interesting theological discussions. In a Doom book. Yeah.

That is a sentence I never thought I would read!