Review: Doom
Score:
75%
Version Reviewed: 1.x
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As most of you know this game is available in Free and Commercial versions, I shall be reviewing the free version here as I personally don't feel that any advantages offered by the commercial version are worth the money, when I can play it without spending any extra on my laptop.
First off: Installation.
Unlike most other ER6 apps, you don't just get one .sis file to install, and the installation differs as to whether or not you want to run the shareware version or the full version. If you don't own DOOM at all then you need to install the DOOM engine .sis file and the .sis that Wildlpalm have made available as a download, this is a choice of the shareware version with or without sound for space saving considerations.
If you own the full version of DOOM or DOOM 2, you need to install the DOOM engine .sis file as normal, but you need to copy your doom1.wad and/or doom2.wad files to the doomapp folder in order to play them. If you want to install both to your communicator you will either have to change the file extensions, or have two different copies of the engine installed for each of the wad files. This is because you do not have a choice of which wad file the app loads at startup, and can prove annoying to set up. If you want to select the wad file you play, the commercial version has that option (I think).
The Game Itself.
Unless you have been under a rock for almost a decade, you'll know what DOOM is all about. In case you don't I'll do a quick hash over the plot.
Satan decides it'd be fun to send a legion of his army to the moon, and subsequently Earth loses contact with a base on the Moon. DOOM 1 sees you battle your way across the moon eradicating the hell spawn that have captured it. A lovely simple, "If it move's it's the enemy, so shoot it." plotline follows this. After the first episode of DOOM1 you will fight through the depths of hell whooping everythings ass that moves until you destroy something meant to be Satan himself or some other strange thing (I never figured that out). DOOM 2 sees you battling the creatures fleeing hell as you went in, they have decided to set up home on Earth, and again it's up to you to kill 'em all.
How does it play?
Well back in the day (yes I am that old ;)) I was running a 386SX with 8MB RAM, a little beast tuned to an extent that I could outrun someone else playing DOOM on a similarly specced 486DX50, so in the early days I was blessed with an amicable playing experience. This was the experience I was thinking about (rather than my last playing on a p3 800) before starting the game to give the 9210 a fairer chance.
I fired up DOOM with default settings, normal size and no sound and expected nothing special.
I was surprised to find it play as slick as I always used to play it and in some parts it seemed smoother on the 9210. I also tried it with sound, this seemed to make it a little slower when lots of noises were made, but even if it didn't I decided to enable it again as I was getting odd looks on the bus, and mono sound is really quite pointless in that sort of game. Next the fullscreen mode, this was a dissapointment, I was expecting the slick graphics to be kept and my field of vision to be widened, unfortunately the normal screen was stretched to twice it's width which I found reduced the overall quality of the graphics. Needless to say this was turned off.
The controls haven't changed, apart from the key relpacing as strafe. The direction pad on the 9210 is nasty to play with as it has a tendancy to rock over to the left or right and will sometimes find you walking in circles. This is obviously not WildPalm's fault, and after a while you should become quite adept at using the direction pad in both DOOM and in other apps where this can cause a problem. Anyone who has played an older shoot-em-up (before 1998) the controls will be second nature and with the aid of the high quality nokia screen, DOOM quite frankly has never looked or played as well as this before.
Reviewed by Dazler Dazler at