More fun than Quake (Doom (PC))

Member Name: Murf!

Product:	Doom (PC)
Date:	06/09/01 (154 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazing conversion considering the hardware, fun, very hard...

Disadvantages: black borders, 'flat' floors and ceilings, slow framerate

There was a time not so long ago when the concept of saying what Doom is would've sounded stupid, but now you could have mainly played recent PC games and 32/64/128 bit console games and may not know of the game. Basically, it's Quake, minus the ability to look up or down. The game uses sprites, so there can be huge numbers of monsters after your throat at the same time, unlike the original Quake, where the PC's limitations at the time limited the number of enemies on screen to two or three at a time. In Doom there can be dozens.
There is an immense sense of satisfaction gained when you run into a zombie or ten wielding a chainsaw. I can't explain exactly why, but a huge sadistic grin WILL rapidly spread across your face. The shotgun is also entertaining, and the rest are pretty decent. There's no stun gun, don't worry. There's also a decent variety of monsters to test the weapons on, of course.

The graphics are pretty good considering what SNES is having to pull off. The floors and ceilings are made of flat colour, but all the walls have textures. Again due to SNES' limitations, the game runs at 8-12 fps on a PAL machine, and 12-15fps on a NTSC SNES. Those of you used to top of the range PCs may shudder at the thought of a game running at less than 75 fps, but it doesn't affect the game. Other changes for SNES game include simpler AI - the monsters just run at you shooting whenever you come close, unlike the PC version where they have a line of sight which you must run into to make them attack, less detailed graphics(obviously), a few less levels (it's only a 16 meg cart), those HUGE Super FX chip black borders, and no cheats (they totally ran out of space on the cart). That isn't bad considering that Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake coder John Carmack originally said the conversion could not be done.

The game is certainly tough enough, with 25-odd levels, and around 7 difficulty levels. Unfortunate
ly there's no save game option, though you can overcome that with an emulator. You could question the amount of variety within said levels, though, as there is very little. At most, puzzles consist of hitting a switch and finding a newly open door. There are some new problems in this conversion due to a few shortcuts taken in the coding of the game: you can get surgically 'stuck' to a wall, for instance. There is one big reservation I have with this, though: if you play the PC version, it will be better in every respect, so you may as well get that instead.

[This review was from my site, http://members.madasafish.com/~kefka/]

Summary: