DOOM 3

Ah yes, DOOM 3. I guess I'll just write a review of this here because why not. You can't buy it anyway! But whatever! DOOM 3 is a game that many, including me, wrote off as basically just a tech demo, an excuse to stress your PC when it came out. And damn, was this a sweet looking game - dynamic lighting, harsh shadows, and what seemed at the time very accurate lighting too. This game even had physics objects and stuff like that too. While these days, I think many people kind of look back on Half-Life 2 in a different light, and think "man what was so great about this game anyway" - when you look at what it was competing with, games such as DOOM 3, well, you kind of understand why HL2 was venerated as the greatest shooter, perhaps even greatest game of All Time. DOOM 3 is largely restricted to narrow, EXTREMELY confined corridors and occasionally, timed exploration of the Mars surface, because your marine guy (not Doomguy, I think he's known as 'The Marine') apparently either is really good at holding his breath for a few minutes at a time, or I guess he hastily shoves a helmet onto his thick skull to survive - but make sure to pick up those oxygen cannisters! Okay, but I'm getting ahead of myself. I should talk principally, about the most renowned, infamous part of DOOM 3: this is not really a Doom game. Doom games, by definition, tend to have masterful level design, keycards to run around and pick up, fast-paced action, tons of guns, ammo and item pickups scattered across levels, a rockin' metal-influenced score, and I'm talking about Doom 1 and 2 here, not even the 2016 remake. DOOM 3 on the other hand, is a game where many people will tell you, mostly you're stuck creeping through impenetrably dark corridors, holding a flashlight, and once in a while a spookum pops out and you blast him. That's pretty much it. And given the dedication to reading notes and emails off PDAs, this game shares more in common with the 'survival horror' genre than the shooter genre. However, this is also why in some ways I feel this game is kind of a success. If you want to run around and blast demons like any normal Doom game, you're gonna probably have a bad time, but if you're willing to kinda... just go with the flow, this is a pretty OK game. So the game looks pretty sweet for the time, it has I think mostly hand-animated cutscenes? Even though there were games being mocapped even back at this time, I think this game was all done the old fashioned way. DOOM 3 also has some extremely iconic weapons. While certain ones like the BFG 9000 is kind of just a gigantic cube of metal, 'The Soul Cube' is pretty sweet in terms of concept and how it actually works. It just goes to show this game was really operating on a different level because you're going along and then, sorta like a Heretic game almost, you get a hushed, whispered, legion of voices saying "USE US" encouraging you to whip out this cube thing your character cannot possibly understand, and indeed use it to vaporize a screen-full of demons - which is also an esoteric concept today. The Plasma Gun also deserves its own paragraph, and indeed shall have one. It looks fantastic, they managed to do the perfect job figuring out how to make like a sci-fi plasma blaster that sounds great, has a simple and straightforward, intuitive design that also seems like it could genuinely exist, despite it being a weird rectangle that oozes mysterious blue particles. That can't be healthy. Still, this design owns so hard they even reused it in the 2016 remake, so you know it's good. But really, aside from all that the main issue is that while you're playing DOOM 3, you can't see the plasma gun, or anything else for that matter. Because the game is pretty much pitch black most of the time. This is not helped by the game's shadows which are absurdly harsh. The screenshots on this store page do not do the game justice and just how dark everything is. In fact, I'm pretty sure these publicity screenshots may have even been taken like way back in the day during the first marketing blitz of DOOM 3, because I'm pretty sure I saw several of these on my boxed copy of the game, as well as in PC gaming magazines at the time. When you play this game, one of the biggest takeaways is just that the UAC's base on Mars is ABSURDLY dark. Despite the fact the facility has enough power to power all the mysterious bridges, doors and other devices necessary for living in space like oxygen scrubbers or whatever they have, basically none of the lights ever work again once the brief opening of this game is concluded. Once 'all hell breaks loose' (literally) the lights go out, and your marine man is stuck lighting the way with his pathetic little flashlight. This is perhaps the first game I ever even heard of having a 'must have' mod that people were talking about at the time between one another, as something you could download from 'The Internet'. A mod where, you install it, and all your guns have a 'flashlight' magically strapped to them so that instead of needing to pull out the damn flashlight every five seconds to the point where you kind of need it almost on a quick-swap button, you can just carry your gun and shoot enemies to death without worrying about having to see or not. I've beaten this game with and without said mod, and while the convenience is quite pleasant, there is something to be said for playing this game as intended by the developers. There's moments in DOOM 3 where you get caught surprised, and you have to choose between seeing, or shooting. It kind of works, but it's all too often frustrating. In some ways, this game was ahead of its time and also behind the times. Player convenience and accessibility, in the mid to late 2000s, was increasingly important. This is a game however, that is willing to stress the player in a way that is both forward and backwards-thinking. Consider that there's many games today, that are in fact billing themselves as expressly inconveniencing the player, as a feature and not a flaw. DOOM 3 (and other idTech 4 engine games) also have perhaps the best 'computer interaction' I have ever seen in a game. The way it works, is you walk up to the screen or whatever, and it is amazingly, a touch panel. Your mouse controls your finger on the touch panel, and you just aim and 'click' on whatever you want. It's genuinely incredibly intuitive, it doesn't lock you into using the device which means you can walk away or shoot an imp if surprised by one, AND, the interfaces they made are big, chunky, easy to read, and look great. They even function like wireless devices, sometimes transmitting useful stuff to your PDA! Which also bears mentioning. You will spend, I want to say like half your playtime in DOOM 3, just reading emails or listening to audio tapes. They both tell you codes that let you into specific lockers which is usually the DOOM 3 equivalent of a 'secret' from one of the oldschool games. You see, you don't go around really just pressing the use key anymore, you mostly just find stuff in lockers that have a specific code, and if you just know the code, you can open it, from a PDA or otherwise. I like this system, but it's very strange coming from Doom 1 or 2. Anyway. So is it good or not? Do I recommend it? Well, if you own this specific version of DOOM 3, there's really no reason not to play it I suppose, but it's a game you need to be in the right mood for. You need to want to play it, because while I found this experience rewarding, I would not be able to pick this game up and play it any old day of the week on an impulse.