Review - DOOM

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UnholyTancred
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Review - DOOM

Post by UnholyTancred » Tue May 29, 2007 3:42 am

I posted this up on Gamefaqs on September 5th, 2006.

Even Doom 32x is better than this

DOOM follows in the steps of Mortal Kombat of being released on almost every single console at the time. However, unlike Mortal Kombat, which had pretty decent and good ports, the majority of the DOOM ports fail. I should rephrase that... fail miserably. The 3DO port of DOOM is no exception. It's simply horrible. The only decent thing about this game is the music.

Graphics - 1/10
Everything looks a lot worse from the original PC version. Everything is so much more pixellated and the colors are bad. To make things worse, the screen is only 3/4's the size. The large amount of empty space that goes from the playing screen, down to your characters information is one ugly green-ish border. Some of the levels have also been simplified. Of course you could resize the screen but making it bigger would only make the game more unplayable. More on that later.

Sound - 8/10

This is actually the best part of the game. The original sounds are all there and all the songs have been redone. Instead of hearing the limited MIDI tunes, you hear actual music. The song of the first level has been re-done fantastically and sounds like a killer heavy metal track filled with pinch harmonics and simple but nice leads played throughout in the background with just the right amount of delay effects.

Story - n/a
Monsters, Mars, hell... bla bla bla. If you don't know the plot of DOOM, then I wonder where you've been in the last decade.

Gameplay - 1/10
Unplayable. Imagine the American and European release of DOOM for the Sega Saturn but imagine it being twice as bad. The framerate makes this game unplayable. The horrible framerate makes the game very slow and unresponsive and there's nothing you could do about it. Making the screen size smaller will improve this but only to a certain extent. And who the hell wants to play DOOM with the screen being the size of a stamp? The only time when the framerate runs smoothly is when you are right in front of a wall and moving left or right alongside the wall. The only thing you're looking at... is the wall. That's the only time this game has a smooth framerate.

I'm surprised I managed to play through 5 levels without blowing my brains out. I was very eager to get a hold of DOOM for the 3DO and then I heard about the horrible framerate. Folks don't get this. If anything, try to get a hold of it's MP3's online or something. That's the only good thing about this game.
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Post by 3DOKid » Sun Jun 03, 2007 12:04 am

I never liked Doom. I remember the PC version. Maybe it's because, I loved the Commodore Amiga and the Atari ST and HATED, really HATED, the PC. It ran under Windows '95, which was Satan's way of operating a computer and I loathed that too, and finally I just didn't see the attraction. It took a long time for me to get over a bigoted hatred of FPSs (Cured finally in '07) but Doom? Even now it fills me with despondency.

People keep talking about the music in this. There must be a reason. I'll dig it out :)

Appreciate your efforts buddy - thanks!

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Post by UnholyTancred » Sun Jun 03, 2007 1:17 am

I loved Doom as a kid. Hell, I don't even remember how I ever found out about Doom but all I know is I wasted a huge amount of my childhood on it.

A couple of months back, I got some online client for Doom and I played with that for a few months. CTF, deatmatches, ah it kicked ass. I got bored after about a month or 2 because I just can't play games on PC anymore.
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Post by Game.com » Tue Jan 22, 2008 2:32 pm

Completed doom at work on a 286 machine with no sound card !! it took a while but i got there in the end.

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Post by WindowsKiller » Fri Oct 31, 2008 11:42 am

Game.com wrote:Completed doom at work on a 286 machine with no sound card !! it took a while but i got there in the end.
Funny that almost a year have passed and no one replied on this. :D

DOOM runs in 32-bit protected mode, so you certainly haven't played it on a 286 machine. It simply doesn't run on anything below a 386, as older CPUs aren't 32-bit and hence aren't even able to execute the game's code. Moreover, even the fastest 286 would have only had the power to make the game run at 2-3 fps...

Anyway, I loved DOOM on the PC, and because of that, I never really tried playing any of the ports. I knew they would be worse anyway. 8)

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Post by ManAndDjinn » Fri Oct 31, 2008 3:12 pm

I had doom on a 386 with windows 3.1; it was one of my first PC games. That and Myst.

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Post by rossi46 » Tue Dec 30, 2008 8:29 pm

Even the Gameboy Advance version of Doom is good. I can empathise with the rubbish framerate as I have Saturn Doom and the later levels resemble a slideshow.
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Post by Strider » Thu Jan 08, 2009 5:45 pm

Seeing tha I am a doomaholic (I even have a doom tattoo), I'll still get this once my system arrives. I mean I played doom for hours on end years ago and still do on occasion.

FYI - the 32X version of doom is much maligned. Not nearly as bad as people make it out to be.

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Post by PowerPie5000 » Fri Apr 24, 2009 9:52 pm

Doom on the 3DO is by far the worst version on any console... then the 32X version..... Even my old snes version looks, sounds and plays better!

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Post by 3DO Experience » Mon Apr 27, 2009 11:24 pm

I split our little discussion over to Console/PC/Emu from the DOOM Review in the General Forum. We do get off topic a lot on this site don't we.
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Post by Trev » Wed Apr 29, 2009 9:08 pm

We do get off topic a lot on this site don't we.
Never. :wink:

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Post by phatrat1982 » Fri Jun 17, 2011 2:36 pm

I only ever had it for PC and 32X, to be honest I preferred the 32X version for one reason, I didn't have to fiddle with DOS and it's overly complicated command structure and I could never get doom to run on any version of Windows I ever tried it on always crashed. But We were poor I didn't get my first PC until December of 1999.

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Post by Austin » Sat Jun 18, 2011 12:23 am

Sorry you had to deal with that.. I didn't get DOOM until after my Dad bought a new PC Windows '95, and it worked perfectly in it. Likewise with Windows '98 as well when I got my own PC down the road. Come to think of it, I had very few DOS incompatibilities with Win '95 especially (11th Hour and Cyberrace ring about as the biggest culprits for not working)..

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Post by phatrat1982 » Sat Jun 18, 2011 1:24 am

I guess I just never was any good at getting anything done in DOS.

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Post by r3tr0g4m3r » Tue Aug 02, 2011 10:51 pm

I am a huge Doom/id Software fan. I have all the versions of Doom (1,2,3) for the PC. gzdoom is a nice engine for old WAD files. ;)

I completely agree with the review. Doom for 3DO is the WORST port ever! I could barely finished the first level. Easily passed-over.

BUT....

The music is awesome!

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Post by Calavera » Wed Aug 03, 2011 9:36 am

No matter how much of a Doom fan you are, I still couldn't recommend you playing 3DO Doom. I popped it in thinking, oh it can't be THAT bad. It was.
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Post by 3DO Experience » Thu Aug 04, 2011 2:05 am

Yeah it's one of those games that you really want to enjoy but as you play it you wish you had turned on a different system.
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Re: Review - DOOM

Post by Retrofanatic83 » Wed Nov 04, 2015 11:25 pm

It is a poor conversion. However it is doom and the music is superb so, still worth a punt. Plus it's 3DO so I did force myself to play it through although I did find it difficult. Not n terms of actual gameplay difficulty just when I had heard all the tracks and having it displayed about two levels down from the already restricted window it plays in it did seem a very weird way to release it. Shame! But still, worth having in my opinion as I do love the game and the music is worth experiencing.

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Re: Review - DOOM

Post by NikeX » Wed Oct 12, 2016 4:22 pm

have to get it!

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Re: Review - DOOM

Post by T2KFreeker » Thu May 11, 2017 7:13 pm

After some time and going back and playing this train wreck, I got to see the Burgher Time video about it on youtube, and to tell you the truth, even though it's a train wreck of a game, I have way more respect for the game. I still think it's a pile, but I am impressed with what they were able to pull of since Art Data was just a nightmare as it is. The game is crap, but the story behind it is very interesting and a cautionary tale of what not to do when designing a game, right?
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Re: Review - DOOM

Post by Martin III » Sat Jun 03, 2017 11:30 pm

Yeah, I've been wanting to play it myself. I'm intrigued by the thought of playing Doom on the 3DO, and since it only has 24 levels I could whip through it in just a few days. And one thing I've learned from playing the Saturn and SNES versions of Doom is that the merits or shortcomings of Doom conversions are grossly exaggerated according to the capabilities of the console they're being played on.

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