| paleface [sys=GBA; cat=Shooter_3D; reg=NA] |
| | | I won't bother reviewing Doom II itself, the original game I mean. Suffice it to say that it is a very simple and violent first-person shooter with lots of demons and shooting.
The GBA port does a good job of capturing the look and feel of the original PC version. Sound effects in particular are very sharp, although the music is a little weak--maybe just not quite loud enough next to all the blasting and snarling. The weapons, I think, are all here, and the one's I've got so far all work like I remember them working in the PC version. Same goes for the levels, monsters, etc. I've read that a few of the bosses got cut for the GBA version, oh well.
Although you can't free-map the controls the available presets offer up the logical choices, and work quite well for your shooting needs, circle-strafing and so forth. Using the shoulder buttons on the GBASP to strafe, my hands get a bit cramped, but that's not port developer Torus Games' fault.
Another possibly GBASP issue is that the graphics appear a little washed-out, even after cranking the in-game gamma slider down. You can still see where you're going... mostly... but in some areas the walls and floors blend right together and everything seems blurry. More contrast would have helped, but this was ported in the days before the official frontlight. Of course, the game as a whole is so low-res that you can't really see too well more than fifty feet in front of you, as the sprites just dissolve in to a few moving pixels.
But that's to be expected given the format, really. No, the only particular disappointment here is the rather low framerate, low to the point that it can be hard to turn and aim carefully. It's still playable, certainly, but not nearly as smooth as one might have liked, and the control suffers because of it. I've heard that the earlier port of the first Doom runs a good deal faster.
Still, something about this game has me clutching the thing and compulsively playing through the same levels that I played however the heck many years ago it was on the PC. You'd be a little silly to play this on the GB Player, I suppose, seeing as how far superior versions are freely available for any PC, but for on-the-go FPS action, it's remarkably satisfying. |
|
|
| | | Download added: map.jpg (11813 bytes)
"The map doesn't rotate but still works nicely, and you can run around in map mode."
Forgot to mention that you can only save between levels. I like this, actually--back in the day I used to drain so much of the spontaneous fun out of FPSs by saving every time I killed a badguy. When you can only save at the end of a level, it's just balls-out action time to get through, no more worrying if your armor got slightly more chipped than you'd have liked. |
|
|
| | |
