Doom


Title		Doom
Company		ID
Game Type	3D Action
Players		1 (plus network/TCP option)
Compatibility	020+, AGA or Graphics Board
Submission	Angus Manwaring Profiled Reviewer

Review
What's Doom then? Well, for the one person in the world that might not
know, Doom was something of a revolutionary game. But not directly for the
Amiga. Y'see we didn't get it. Yes, I know we did, but I'm coming to that,
okay? Doom came out on the PC some years ago, and they (the PC gamers) went
crazy about it, and deservedly so, it has to be said. Doom puts you in a
series of buildings with corridors, rooms, halls and courtyards where you
must progress through each level, as a Space Marine, killing hordes of
baddies, throwing switches, finding secret areas until you find the exit.
It's viewed from a first person perspective, in what was at the time,
absolutely stunning 3D. There's a wide variety of weapons to remove your
enemies vital signs with, including pistols, shotguns chainguns, chainsaws
etc. and if you have none of these you can resort to the good old knuckle
duster.
 For us Amigans, this what pretty depressing. PC people were in raptures
about how great the game was, how amazing it was to play it on a network
and we didn't have anything like it. The Amiga newsgroups were pretty much
dominated at some points by furious discussions about what the Amiga was
capable of, whether it would have non-orthagonal walls, and what the
future held in general. In some ways it was the Amiga communities finest
hour, because in the same way that the Russians putting Yuri Gagarin into
orbit produced the determination and resolve from the Americans to put man
on the moon, Doom caused lots of talented Amiga people to find ways round
the Amiga's hardware limitations and wipe the floor with the accursed
Doom.
 The Amiga's problem, and you'll excuse my non-technical description,
was that it produced pixels on the screen by using a system involving
several planes, or layers. In the past, this system had allowed us to have
features like 4096 colours while PCs were struggling with 16.
Unfortunately though, as the PC advanced with it's byte-per-pixel system,
we were still  tied to our bitplane system which meant several levels of
calculation were needed to produce one dot on the screen, whereas with the
PC only one was needed. This obviously adds up, and by the time you're
looking at something with texturing like Doom, then the 68020 based 1200
is not looking like a very strong contender. I won't go into chunky2planar
(C2P) routines which help reduce this problem, because this is supposed to
be a review and anyway, it's over my head. Suffice to say that the Amiga
community rallied, and several demos appeared, including Poom, Gloom,
Alien Breed 3D and Fears, the latter three actually making the transition
to fully-fledged games. Later, Breathless, Nemac IV and Genetic Species
appeared, reviewed within this database so well by John Haas.
 Anyway, as the years passed, if Amiga people still thought about Doom
at all, it was probably without much regret, after all it wasn't that
special and who needed it anyway? We did.....

Christmas 1997: ID releases the source for Doom. Within a week there are
three Amiga versions, and they're already extremely impressive. Now we
know what all the fuss was about. Peter McGavin's ADoom, arguably the best
overall version takes an early lead in the "usenet cred" stakes, but is
shortly challenged, atleast for 030 users in terms of sheer speed, by
Georg Steger's DoomAttack. The developments continue apace, and sound,
joypad, network and TCP support are all forthcoming.

Okay, that's the end of my attempt at a history lesson about Doom's
signifigance to the Amiga community and gameplayers in general. It's a
great deal of fun to play, extremely playable on an 030 system. If you buy
the registered version you have acccess to the hundreds of levels created
by players everywhere, known as WAD files. At the end of the day it's just
simple shoot-em-up 3D fun with a very few puzzles, some keys and some
exploring thrown in. The actual 3D engine, while better looking, is not as
sophisticated as Andy Clitheroe's Alien Breed 3D, but this is a game where
the emphasis is firmly based on blasting, blasting and more blasting. It's
great. Various versions can be found on Aminet, and you'll need to
download the Shareware WAD file. Enjoy.




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