[omgpcgames.com] - DOOM 32X (1994)

You hear a growl echoing through the facility. You panic. The best weapon you’ve got – a pistol, oh crap, it looks like you’re out of ammo. You’ll have to settle with your fists, you quickly put your pistol away, and move further away from the long hallway; you’re stuck here, you can’t get out, the door locked as you entered, and you can’t get back through. The growl gets louder, and the demon is quickly approaching you; you cower in the corner fearing for your life, as the demon gets nearer and nearer. Christ, what’s that over in the corner!? A berserker pack! Yes, yes! You quickly run towards it and you pick it up, your muscle mass increases tenfold, and you feel capable of anything. The demon comes round the corner of the metallic hallway, but that’s okay, you’re ready for it.

Doom was produced for DOS in 1993 by the masterminds behind ‘Wolfenstein’, Id Software. It was one of the earliest popular First Person Shooter (FPS for short) games.
It boasted the fact that it had a trait recognized as “2.5 D” which mimics the effects of real 3D.
Doom was also was one of a few games who offered simple means to create custom maps, unlike previous Id Games such as Wolfenstein.
In 1995 “Doom 95” a windows port of Doom was created; which is still available in certain gaming shops today.

You play as an unidentified marine (nicknamed “Doomguy” by fans), one of the toughest marines on Earth; who was deported to Mars for refusing a command to engage civilians. He is forced to work for the UAC, a military-industrial conglomerate who have research facilities on Mars, Phobos, and Deimos.
During a routine teleportation procedure between Phobos and Deimos, something goes terribly wrong; “monsters” burst through on either side, and proceed to overrun the facilities. Shrieks can be heard on the radio, as well as the crunching of broken bones, and the sounds of tearing flesh.
A few hours later, Deimos disappears fully from the sky.
You, a marine from Mars, is sent as a part of a team to Phobos to investigate what has happened. The player was instructed to wait outside while the rest of your squad enter the facility and investigate.
Not long after your squad enters the building, you can hear screams and the sounds flesh being torn, and bones being crunched. All goes silent. Your comrades are dead; and you’re the only one left. Your mission is to fight your way through 32 levels of complete chaos, and find your way safely home.

For such an old game, it’s still a lot of fun to play; the combination of atmospheric solitary walks, through hellish environments (complete with still-wiggling bodies staked to the ground, of course), and fast-paced shoot-em-up action, keeps you interested in the game at all times.

It’s always great fun to be shooting at a horde of quickly approaching “imps”, with your trusty boomstick. The noise of the blast and the sound of the dying creatures really help getting the adrenaline pumping.

Doom uses a (now) popular method of introducing fight scenes, called “monster-closets”, EG: you activate a button, or pick up a key; then the wall opens behind you, and a horde of demon pour out and attack, this was repeated in the remake of Doom, Doom 3. It is now a classic FPS technique.

The sound effects are somewhat good quality, nothing sounds better than the blast of the Boomstick as you shoot down the many Zombie Soldiers. The major drawback is that a few of the sounds (doors opening, closing, et cetera) are taken from a free library, meaning that they are freely available to anyone who wishes to use them; so they’re quite common sounds, and are used a lot in TV programmes. I’m sure this wasn’t the case in 1993, however. Some of the monster sounds will go down as classics, such as the noise the imps make, or the groan of the zombie soldiers. After playing the game for a while, you’ll notice these sounds in other places, such as cheap B-Movies, or low-budget television programmes. It’s almost like a nod towards the Classic Dooms, each time you hear it.

The music is the finest element when it comes to the sound effects in Doom. Each track is influenced by 80’s metal bands, such as Metallica or Slayer. Tom Hall, the sound engineer, was previously a lawyer so he knew just how much had to be changed in order for it to be ‘influenced’ by metal bands, instead of a complete rip-off. The songs that are the most famous from Doom, are E1M1 – influenced by Metallica’s “No Remorse” - and E1M8.

The graphics in Doom were first-class for their time, but have a somewhat dated feeling now; despite mimicking a 3d environment, the creatures are designed with 4-sided sprites, and are somewhat pixelated. This is easily forgiven, though, as you’re normally blasting through too many of them at once to really sit back and appreciate/criticize the graphics. The graphics were based on clay models that were scanned onto the computer as a base image, and the creature design is unique, each monster is easily recognizable as from the video game, and whenever you seen them in artwork, you immediately recognise them.

The level design in the original Doom is fairly good, despite having a rather linear path to get to your next location. Another drawback is that each map is more of the same: “Find Key, Open Door, Kill Enemies, Find Next Key, Open Door, Kill Enemies”, however, you do get the occasional “diamond level”, which has a rather rare unique feeling to it, such as some of the few ‘Hell’ levels, such as E1M8, the boss battle to the end of Episode 1, and the finale to the Shareware Doom.

All in all, I think Doom is a rather good game, but somewhat dated to today’s standards. It’s still a must play for any real FPS fan, to get the feel of what FPS games were like when they first started.

I’m going to rate it according to its time, as it’s a fairly old game, and it’d be unfair for me to give it a poor rating because it’s not up to today’s standards.

Sound – 7/10 – Great audio tracks, despite being in Midi format, and good sound effects, however, it gets somewhat repetitive after a while.

Graphics -7/10 – Amazing for their time, but somewhat dated now; it is however, still playable, and doesn’t give you motion sickness like other games of the 90’s.

Level Design -6/10- Some levels are more or less the same, but as things move onto Deimos and Hell, the levels become more and more unique. There are a few areas with ‘slime pits’ that you cannot escape for, causing you to be too careful. This is somewhat frustrating.

Overall - 9/10 – Doom is a game that will go down in history for being one of the first – it’s still fun to play nowadays, and has a rather large online community to help you with any questions you may have. Modding is still a huge factor in Doom, and it always has been. The levels are fun to play, the sound effects are satisfactory, and the graphics were good for their time.

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Reviews for the Sega Genesis

DOOM 32X (1994)

Written by Clari87

Monday, 14 April 2008

DOOM 32X (1994)
Platform: Sega Genesis 32X
Region: USA
Genre: First-Person Shooter

Doom. One word and one objective: blast the demons back to Hell. The game revolutionized PC's and the entire genre worldwide, with competitive multiplayer, dazzling and scary graphics, eerie sounds and a heart-pumping music score -- DOOM was it. Sega being Sega knew they needed to get the ball rolling on it. Perfect for their 32X Genesis add-on. The 32X was designed to add 32-bit capability to the Sega Genesis -- in other words, the add-on takes care of the Graphics and the Genesis takes care of the rest. They knew DOOM on the Genesis wasn't enough. Perhaps on the 32X it'd be better.

Take Nintendo's side. They're busy thinking that Sega was wasting their time with their add-ons, why build a 32-bit unit when the SNES could play it as-is? Just pack their SuperFX2 chip in there and BOOM! Unfortunately, Nintendo also forgot to note that the 32X was a 32-bit add-on. They would pay for this mistake, as the SNES stand-alone could not take the heat. Read up!

You all know the story. You're a marine, sent in to kill demons. That's it, pretty much. All of the Doom games follow this basic outline. You have to go through tons of fast and furious heart-pounding action to survive, using an arsenal of 7 weapons. Can you do it?

First of all, everyone knows the Genesis alone couldn't handle this. While many believed that the SNES could -- they couldn't as their SuperFX2 chip was built into the cartridge (it's not Stock anymore kids!). Anyways, you had to have both the Genesis AND the 32X, which pissed off some gamers, but how else could this be done? It was perfect. Have both consoles run in tandem to deliver the best experience possible. They contracted id Software themselves to port the title. However, even know they did the best they could nobody expected a slightly lower-quality port.

32X was good at graphics. Everyone knew this. So it was natural of them to put the 32X in charge of all video rendering, and it shows. The 32X port contains a high framerate, mid-level resolution and all of the tricks of the PC port (lighting, texture-mapped floors and ceilings, etc). The game doesn't run in a full resolution though -- it takes up about 70 percent of the screen without the status bar included. Now, take this in comparison to Nintendo's port, which ran at a shitty resolution, poor ranged lighting, no texture mapping at all, and framerate problems. Compared to the 32X version this was sad. And, Sega being the bad-asses of the early 90's, decided to keep all blood in the game. The Nintendo port contains blood but only on their death animations, while you can blast away at them and enjoy the glory of ripping them to shreds, blood and all. While the other console ports lack certain features, the 32X version was definitely the smoothest. The only thing, due to limitations, is that all enemies face only 1 direction (not capable of all 8 sides). This isn't too bad, but it makes monster infighting impossible, but that's a small price to pay for greatness. However, the rest of the port doesn't hold up as well.

Also due to cartridge limitations, not all levels are present (only half of them are in the game). This kinda sucked and was disappointing upon release. Another factor was that the levels were edited a bit to not depress the Genesis hardware. Not a huge loss, but noticable if one were playing side-by-side. Also, forget about saving, as that's impossible in both the SNES and Genesis versions. However, unlike the SNES, you can level select on the Genesis version, making things a bit easier.

The controls seem to survive better in this version. They are somewhat customizable with a 6-button gamepad. You can cycle through them front and back, which makes it easy. Movement feels tight and you can also strafe (contrary to what people might say about this version). Now, if you have the standard 3-button controller (are you insane?) this is a problem. You can only cycle forward and strafing is a bit harder. It just feels more at home with 6 buttons -- if you can snag one, go for it. By the way, the game is also a lot of fun to play with the Arcade Pad that Sega made.

In the original DOOM, multiplayer was an amazing aspect. For the 32X they had to obviously remove it. This isn't a big deal but for many people then it was. Now, people will argue that the SNES port had it...but if you look at it with a sane head...no sound effects, items don't respawn, the player corpse doesn't remain, no cooperative, a subscription to "XBAND"...if you think about it, the 32X version is better off both ways because it doesn't have to worry about multiplayer...that automatically makes any argument that the SNES had multiplayer futile. Why would you want to play Deathmatch with all of that stuff taken out?

The Sounds. They make up the heart and soul of DOOM. The 32X is so powerful that you should think it can take care of the rest, right? No...this is far from the truth. The Genesis takes care of the sound duties, and you can tell. First off, the sound effects are wonderful, right from the PC version. Sometimes they truncate and if more than like, 3 sounds play at the same time it's hard to hear them all (if even that). Compared to the other ports it sounds good. The music however, is downright crap. Absolutely, no-matter-how-big-fan-of-DOOM-you-are shit. Someone at id forgot to delegate the music to the sound designer, as the Genesis YM2612 FM chip is put to the most disgraceful use ever. It's like they replaced the MIDI patches with existing FM patches and left it at that...it's really hard to explain unless you hear them. I can't help but feel that id could've squeezed more out of this port in other, more important areas, if they left the music out. At any rate, you just turn them off and pop in a CD. It's annoying. SNES Doom sure won in that department.

Okay, brushing away from the Music department (shudder), the game has a couple of other odd quirks. I mentioned above that this port contains all 7 weapons: this is true, with cheats. The BFG is not included in the actual game (i.e. you cannot pick it up). The status bar can only display the ammo level of the weapon currently selected. That's not such a big issue for me (who even looks at that crap when there's a big red number of the currently selected on the PC version). The Genesis port only has 7 monster types, whereas the SNES port has all of them - this makes it feel like you are limited to playing the "Shareware version" throughout the entire game. The standard Teleportation sound has been proven to actually be a very low key "shotgun reloading" sound...it's bizarre. Other small things are out of place but it's not too deterrent to gameplay. But best of all...it has Automap support! Unlike other ports this one actually keeps itself up-to-date with what is happening, and like the PC version, is the only port you can scale with (equivalent to the + and - keys in the PC version, and you get a grid too). If you happen to get in a mood where you want to play the game from beginning to finish, you mustn't use cheats or you can't see the story, and for some odd reason, if you do use cheats you get a game-stopping bug at the very end...which is a DOS prompt. Literally, don't take my word for it, just feel dirty and cheat!

Being a gamer in the 90's was truly amazing. Nowadays things seem to suffer from consolitis less than they have then. But that was the whole fun of it. Doom for the 32X is a decent port that holds up well (much like the original game), however I can't think of many reasons people would choose to play it over any other recent port. If you can forgive the technical shortcomings, DOOM32X is what Doom is to the PC - a fun and engaging game. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must find the yellow key before Pinky rips my ass to shreds!