| Product: |
Doom (PC) |
| Date: |
10/07/01 (475 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: It's the original Doom, Pushed the SNES to its limits, A difficulty curve that makes you come back for more
Disadvantages: A tiny bit slow, Black border, No save function
Doom first appeared on the PC in December 1993 (what a year that was). Since then a version of Doom has graced just about every single other gaming format. Sega's 32X and Saturn, Atari's Jaguar, Sony's Playstation, Doom has even appeared on the state of the art Apple Macs. A SNES version (considered almost impossible to be converted onto a 16-bit machine) was released in 1995. I brought it! I had never played anything remotely similar before and it was the first time I had ever played Doom. I even remember the advertising campaign for the SNES game very well also, especially since there was a report about it in a newspaper. Adjacent to a church was a billboard advertising Doom with the slogan "Go To Hell," written on it.
I'm sure we've all heard of Doom by now. One of the most popular and now classic shoot-em-ups ever made, with weapons, monsters and a lot of blood! The story is a tiny bit confusing but here’s the basis of play. Your character is a marine deployed to Mars as a punishment after assaulting a superior officer. The punishment involves you (as well as other soldiers) taking part in experiments to do with inter-dimensional space travel. These solders are instantly warped to the neighbouring moon Phobos. But soon all hell breaks lose (literally) as monsters occupy Phobos. The soldiers are either returning with body parts missing or not at all. Soon with everyone one either missing or dead and the communication with Phobos lost, you decide to pack yourself a pistol and go yourself with the chance of finding some of your friends (unlikely!) and making it out alive!
The game is a simple kill or be killed procedure. You're placed straight in the action with only a pistol as your weapon. You do find better weapons along the way though and to make your way out you'll have to locate keys and switch switches to make it to the end. As you proceed through the game the monsters increase in numbers an
d the levels get much bigger and you could end up lost! Kinda like another day at the shopping mall. There is a map handy though and there are items such as health and armour to help you on your way.
What makes Doom standout is its tense atmosphere and action. It is a little scary at times. You'd be making your way down a dark corridor, not quite sure if it's empty or not... is it?
Yes it's empty!
No, wait a sec... something's moving...
...something is there...
...Oh my God, it's...
WHAT THE HELL IS THAT!? IT'S VOMITING FIREBALLS AT ME!
And it's this kind of experience that gives Doom a certain edge. Especially when playing it for the first time. In fact it's one of very few games that's actually scared me and made me jump! The music is also quite moody and also quiet at times and this helps achieve the scary effect. The sound effects of screams and growls can also alarm you as to whether you're taking safe route or if you're going to have to pump that shotgun and start shooting some heads off of bodies.
To help you on your way there are 7 weapons in total:
Pistol - Standard pistol that's okay for dealing with the weak enemies though it does little damage.
Shotgun - Now this is more like it. Get up close, load a few rounds and blow someone's head off!
Chain Gun - A gattling gun that disposes of enemies quite quickly yet eats up on your ammo quickly too.
Rocket Launcher - The instruction booklet says that this can turn someone inside out. Nice!
Plasma Rifle - My favourite as like the Chain Gun it's a rapid fire weapon that can get rid of enemies quickly and is much more powerful!
BFG 9000 - A room cleaner of a weapon that's very hard to find. Though once you do, you can quite literally cook someone with this.
Chainsaw - An up close weapon for if you'd like to make more of a mess then you really shou
ld as well as causing some serious damage and being able to see what your victim had for breakfast.
Now to convert a game like this onto the SNES, it seems obvious that not everything is going to be intact. Where as the original PC version had 27 levels, this has only 22, which is still not bad. All the weapons, items and enemies are in here though. Even the spider boss from Doom 2 is in here. Also Nintendo weren't messing around with this game having soften on their censorship policy meaning that all the blood, gore and decomposing bodies are intact. But a lot of animation is missing in this version, and this is noticeable with the enemies. Basically when you come across a demon you'll see the front of them and only the front. I guess there wasn't enough memory to animate the sides or behinds. So trying to shoot them in the back is impossible. This also makes the game rather hard since the enemies are always facing you. In fact the SNES version is probably one of the hardest versions of Doom around. Besides the enemies constantly looking at you, there is no way to save the game. After completing a level you don't get a password or the option to save, so you'll have to play the whole thing through one sitting. To top it all off there are no cheats either. None of that "IDKFA" stuff here!
The game uses the Super FX chip. This helped push the SNES to unheard of limits and allows it to create the 3D environment in the game. So for a 16-bit console the graphics are great! But there is a rather unfriendly black border giving you a small playing screen. If the game was to run at full screen it would be too slow (far too much for a SNES to handle) and although not exactly as fast as the PC version, the border helps maintain an optimum speed of the game.
When PC games are converted to consoles you have to keep in mind that you've got so many functions on a keyboard and have to convert them all to a joypad
where there's only a couple of buttons. The SNES joypad has 6 buttons. When playing I actually found the SNES pad rather comfortable and easy to use for Doom. The L & R shoulder buttons on top of the pad were extremely useful in strafing left and right and dodging oncoming fireballs from a demons mouth! One problem for those used to the PC version is that where as that had numerous function keys to bring up the weapon you wanted, the SNES version only has one button where you can cycle through them, therefore it takes a little while to get to your weapon of choice. But this is only a minor problem.
It didn't take very long for me to get to grips with it and I played it a lot, constantly trying to get to the end. Due to how difficult it was this meant many hours of games playing. I certainly enjoyed it yet I never did complete it. Got close a few times though. There are much better 3D shoot-em-ups these days now such as Half-Life and Unreal on the PC while there’s Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64, so I wouldn’t recommend it as there isn't much point playing this now unless you're really fond of classics. But at the time, those without PC's who wanted a taste of what Doom was like could play it on their SNES. It was quite an experience for me. A costly one too when you consider that it was originally released with a HUGE £60 price tag!
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