Saturday, April 09, 2005

Doomed! We're all Doomed!

It was a pleasant surprise to see that the Xbox version of Doom 3 also comes with fully complete versions of the original Doom and Doom 2. Not spruced up or updated in any way, just the original versions circa 1964 or whenever it was they first came out. So far I've spent just over five minutes on Doom 3 and around four hours playing the first two games. Is this wrong?

It's not like I don't have other versions of them knocking around. The GameBoy version of Doom has wasted many, many hours of my life, and I also have a PS1 version somewhere (always a bit odd that one - the levels were kind of flattened a bit. Not always obviously, but it was really apparent on levels like "The Crusher"). And I also remember playing the original PC versions at uni. My home PC was too weedy to play them at the time, being only a 12Mhz 286, but at university my friends had 386s! And 486s! Woohoo!

"Eat My Shotgun" I'd shout. "No" my friends would reply, "Let's load up Doom instead".

I'm not sure what it is about Doom that I find so compulsive, even now. The fantastic level design? The hordes? The shotgun? The complete lack of stealth? The fact that I'm stuck in the past? The only other game I've owned and played on as many different systems is Bubble Bobble. That has much better music than Doom... I wonder if it's possible to get the BB music playing whilst I massacre the denizens of hell? That would be cool.

I feel that I should at least make an effort to play D3. Or at least play it to the point where I get to shoot something. All I have seen so far are some (alive) marines, some soft drink vending machines and some pen pushing military guys. Don't even have a gun yet.

Maybe I'll be able to enjoy it. Maybe.

No comments: