Playing the wrong note here might land you in hell. Game over hell.
My first experience with Doom left me terrified of the dark and sick from my stomach due to the famed shooter’s first-person perspective (I’ve got a sensitive tummy.) I wonder though what my eleven year-old self would have felt afterwards if I had to play it through the keys of a piano.
Seeing as how my aptitude for playing one is less than my aptitude for being a brain surgeon (hint: none), I doubt it would help. It might make it worse, honestly. But I got to give credit, where credit is due, this is one of the more creative ways to play a videogame.
The Doom Piano – and I fully endorse its bad-ass name – makes use of a beat-up old piano to host a normal port of Doom displayed on a PC monitor. Normal, except for having all of its controls mapped to piano keys: Forward, back, strafing, and shooting. You name it.
As part of a gaming jam challenge to create a unique arcade machine at this week’s Virgin Media Game Space, an indie games festival held in London, modder David Hayward devised this crazy gaming machine with little time and money, as in compliance with the challenge rules.
Judging by pictures and a few Vine posts, the Doom Piano seems like an impressive mod considering all the limitations David was put under to build it. Sadly, those constraints do a heavy number on controlling the game without getting you butt handed by creepy, mutated beasts.
It looks sort of a mess to play, especially when different moves are far away from each other on the keyboard. Although, to be quite fair to David, computer keyboard or gamepad controls weren’t the first priority when it came to making his machine.
I would imagine this would be the kind of contraption the Mythbusters would design on a rainy afternoon. And then pack it with explosives and blow it up in the middle of a desert. That won’t be happening with the Doom Piano though, as it will be playable to all who come to the show.
Be sure to to hang around Walyou for more awesome gaming mods, Pacific Rim monsters made from LEGO, and leaked images of supposedly the iPad 5.
