DOOM CAPTCHA

[charlesabarnes]

I tried to do it the intended way, but found it too difficult. I was able to cheese it by staying in the starting area and killing the enemies that spawned to the right.

[dspillett]

That isn't cheesing it, given those start conditions. That is a standard tactic when you only have the pistol (or are too low in ammo for other weapons).

The pistol is crazy accurate in these games so you can pick enemies of from afar with a few shots each, and in this case they are firing shotguns which are very ineffective at long range (the game stimulates them as having unrealistically wide pellet spread, so even if a far-off enemy gets a pin-point shot you will only take minimal damage).

I remember playing over the collage NetWare LAN and winning people who had better but less accurate weapons (usually the shotgun, or the double in later versions, as we found that the most cathartic) simply by keeping my distance. Works until someone gets close from behind, at which point if you respawn somewhere convenient you can find the bugger PDQ, and pick him off with the pistol for revenge. Even works against the rocket launcher, just make sure you don't get hit directly (d'oh) or hang around where it is easy for splash damage from misses to ruin your plans.

It is a valid method for many DOOM-style games (as they were called in my day) and their offspring. Works well in HL2 where you can spam the trigger button as fast as you like and the basic pistol will fire at that rate without a limit (other weapons have a minimum shot latency).

[BiteCode_dev]

Well, this is not the first level, but this is the level entry weapon.

Plus, left and right arrows rotate the characters since it's keyboard only, but in modern FPS you are used to having them laterally move you and you rotate with the mouse, so your reflexes are off.

[gruez]

You don't even need to cheese it when everything is client side, so there's no way for the server to verify you actually killed the required amount of enemies.

[cuu508]

Hah, same here.

1. press the back arrow to move back

2. press spacebar every second

and that's it, 30 or so seconds later the captcha is solved :-)

[TehCorwiz]

Yeah, pistol starting this particular level is...unkind. At least start with a shotgun.

[oytis]

IDDQD works. Just saying.

[Sparkyte]

If you run immediately to right entry and get behind everything providing one of the shotgun guys dies you can get the shotgun and take them out.

[big-chungus4]

you run straight and to the right, and there is a group of 3 enemies that you can kill in less then 10 seconds and win

[johnisgood]

Yes, same. Are those invisible turrets?!

[anandsuresh]

+100 for technical chops, -100 for usability. +10 for the trip down memory lane, and the self-realization that I now suck at playing video games.

[smitelli]

This is the secret level (E1M9) that you'd normally encounter after E1M3. By this point in the regular progression you'd have found a shotgun, chaingun, rocket launcher, and probably some armor. Starting this level with just a pistol (and it looks like maybe U-V or Nightmare difficulty) is just begging for a buttwhipping.

[sznio]

>and the self-realization that I now suck at playing video games.

Nah... No mouselook really makes this much harder. Took me over 10 attempts to pass, and I'm Diamond at Overwatch.

[Reason077]

Not sure how secure against bots it actually is either. Surely you can make an AI that can play DOOM at least as well a human now days.

[teach]

Yeah, amusingly, I use a keyboard that doesn't have arrow keys. I've bound them to a different layer, but that doesn't work well with this setup.

If this implementation supported the now-standard WASD (which was absolutely used by some high-level Doom players back in the day) AND if it allowed me to fire using the left mouse button (again, like the original game), then it would have been relatively easy to prove that I'm a human. :)

[casenmgreen]

1. That's a tough level, one of the hidden levels IIRC.

2. It feels like "-fast" has been used.

3. The task is much, much more difficult because you can't strafe.

Very cute though :-)

[epcoa]

Correct, it's E1M9, the shareware secret level, on Nightmare difficulty.

You can strafe with the old-school chording of Alt.

The sound was fucked up for me, high pitched, no idea why (fits the ridiculousness of this experience though, so NBD).

[mistaken]

Strafing works for me on linux with firefox. Maybe it's an OS or browser setting that prevents it?

[mock-possum]

Is it actually that tough??

I was ready to good-naturedly complain that it didn’t work on mobile, but the onscreen controls worked just fine, and I didn’t have any trouble killing 3 guys right away.

I guess I have been playing a fair amount of classic doom lately though so

[RiverCrochet]

Hold ALT, you definitely can strafe. At least I could.

[inglor_cz]

Yeah, E1M9 is notoriously hard with a pistol start. I immediately recognized it ... which speaks to the amount of time I spent on Doom in my youth.

[galleywest200]

There are so many monsters, took me 3-4 tries...just like a real captcha!

[liontwist]

I interpreted this as a parody for this reason.

[gamegod]

What kind of monster doesn't give us WASD or at least ctrl to shoot?

Awesome captcha though :)

[InMice]

ijkl;

[msoad]

When I try to log into AWS console and have to solve their captcha I always think that the target audience that this is designed to avoid can easily automate it (Some open source models can solve this without all that "AI safety" gatekeeping) while the majority of audience are simply suffering from this "feature".

Apple has proposed a solution to captcha[1] which I can't wait to be standardized and widely used.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/102591

[arresin]

> Automatic Verification helps protects your privacy when you sign in to an app or website. Instead of being asked to complete a CAPTCHA:

> An Apple server validates your device and Apple Account.

> This verification is sent to a third-party token issuance server, which has been verified by Apple. The token issuance server generates a private access token that verifies you to the app or website.

This is definitely not better for privacy and gives apple even more control. I would rather 3 extra seconds for captchas.

[TowerTall]

> you don't have to complete a CAPTCHA. All you have to do is sign in to the app or site

No thank you. Do not want.

PS: I stopped reading the apple support article after reading that sentence.

[wheresmycraisin]

Random trivia: the creators of Doom made sure that they could complete each level starting only with a pistol and 50 rounds by doing it themselves.

[vunderba]

Thank you for doing the right thing and crediting the original Doom Captcha creator on the github repo. My expectations of the software industry in general have been at an all-time low lately, so this was nice to see.

The original from a few years back:

https://vivirenremoto.github.io/doomcaptcha

https://github.com/vivirenremoto/doomcaptcha

[bilekas]

Well this is hard, guess I'm not a human!

It's been so long since I've played doom but without strafing.. it's almost impossible!

[KerryJones]

Stated elsewhere: hold alt + (left/right) to strafe

[cpill]

just go forward to trigger the monsters and then immediately back to where you started for cover and then pick them off at a distance. easy!

[airstrike]

This was created with Vercel's AI assistant "v0"

Here's a link to the chat: https://v0.dev/chat/4X85A52Dzde?b=b_tOXbbZzZPgT&f=0

[gruez]

>This was created with Vercel's AI assistant "v0"

"with" is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here. I skimmed the log and so far as I can tell, the only thing that the AI assistant did was design the UI. It didn't implement the actual game. This might sound impressive, but aside from adding minor bits of interaction (eg. a button that shows "loading" for a few seconds), there's little difference functionality-wise from a drag-and-drop UI designer like winforms (and its predecessor, visual basic, which existed in the 90s).

[pierrec]

The JS part is nowhere to be seen, I guess they used the assistant to create the layout, but not the actual DOOM integration part (?) Even then, that chat gets pretty painful to read after a while... Paraphrasing, but that's the gist of it: "center the text in the button", "you didn't center it, center the text", "please please center the text"...

[skrebbel]

I read through the chat but it's all nitpicking about layout and there doesn't seem to be any point where DOOM is actually inserted. I don't understand, did the author get the AI to do the easy part and then code the hard part by themselves?

[runlevel1]

As others have pointed out, that was only setting up the UI.

Here's the repo with the rest of the source: https://github.com/rauchg/doom-captcha

They also had to modify Doom to skip the menus, add the necessary callbacks, and a few other tweaks.

[sira04]

One day we'll have the Dark Souls captcha https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqnXp6Saa8Y

[Bengalilol]

Open console, type: for (i=0; i<3; i++) {Module.onEnemyKilled();} Done.

[threekindwords]

Ok, so this is the kind of content I show up for.

On one hand, it’s a clever and fun way to show off what we can do with the web these days. The way it is presented hits just right... the demo is dead center of the page, with debug tools and more info within reach. I particularly enjoyed reading the "how it's made" page to understand how it was put together. I like how all of this extra stuff was not front and center when the page loads. Even the design language of the CAPTCHA box itself felt just right.

On the other hand, it's a satire of what we have done to the web. The bad guys (like the monsters in the game) have won. I'm a flesh and blood human, but here I am having to click on fuzzy pictures of random objects before I can do the task I actually wanted to accomplish. Behind the scenes, my human insight gets licensed and used for whatever purpose (nefarious or not). Just like the DOOM demo here, it's hard and cumbersome, but for whatever reason we all accept it as the way it has to be. We all shake our heads and say "what a shame, what a shame."

[itvision]

Solved it on a second attempt on my smartphone.

It's horrible. 99% of people will give up.

[theendisney]

If they give up they are human 99%.

[acidburnNSA]

Thank God the cheat codes I have memorized still work.

[irusensei]

Really cool. I’m all for cool and interesting captchas if there has to be captchas at all. Aparently this one is made to be really hard uh? Gave me some wicked idea about a captcha where you have to survive a few seconds in a 2hu fight.

You can argue that’s bad for accessibility and you are correct but let me use this opportunity to talk about that hostile “put things into orbit” thing big I noticed Microsoft and X using. Recently I’ve installed windows 11 on a laptop and had to create an MS account for testing purposes. During the captcha phase the OS was installing drivers in the background so the resolution changed to 4k during the challenge but the UI didn’t scaled. With no way to reconfigure the display I had to strain my eyes to finish it and I suffer from miopia and astigmatism.

[jordigh]

Aw, monster in-fighting kills don't count? That's my favourite kind of kill. In-fighting is a basic Doom skill, kind of forgotten in modern FPSes.

[mrcwinn]

No WASD?! CAPTCHA fail — I can tell no human created this.

[throwanem]

Pistol-starting E1M9 "Army Base", the first episode's massive difficulty spike of a secret level, on a touchscreen? Not that I don't appreciate the massive vote of confidence, but...

[econ]

Just shooting without moving shouldn't solve it. The ammo is excessive.

Mobile needs a better interface and landscape mode.