Editor’s Note, a retro review gets a retro score.
We tend to look at events from our youth through rose colored glasses, young love, Friday night high school football, pre-NAFTA trade agreements, so it’s to be expected that video games are no exception. The first time you leapt over a Koopa in Super Mario Brothers, camped out in Team Fortress to snipe your buddy, freezing that thing... that you used to freeze... to jump off of... in Metroid, well, you get the idea.
DOOM came out in 1993, it wasn’t the first FPS, that distinction, arguably, belongs to Castle Wolfenstein. But DOOM defined the genre. I was pushing 15 years when I got my first taste and was hooked, but times, as do technologies, change, nowhere is this more evident than in games, we forget. So it wasn’t until another 15 years had passed that I was looking through the Xbox Live Marketplace and saw that DOOM was available for download for five dollars, or 400 credits in Microsoft’s world of cognitive dissonance. All four episodes are included so it seemed like a bargain at least as far as nostalgia goes.
After a few minutes of downloading I was ready to play. And like Celine Deion sang, it was all coming back to me now...
Me 1993, Damn! These graphics are unreal, this is even better than Wolfenstein: multi-level stairs, obstacles, monsters popping out from all over. Crazy!
Me 2008, What the hell is wrong with my TV? Everything is all pixilated and lame. Why can’t I aim up or down, was left and right all I was really limited to?
Me 1993, This music is spooky, it’s like Trent Reznor did "Pretty Hate Machine" for a video game, awesome. (6 hourst later) Al right it’s getting a bit repetitive but still, awesome.
Me 2008, It’s throbbing, it’s pulsating, it’s annoying the hell out of me. (TV is then turned way down).
Me 1993, The AI is pretty unreal, and the enemies get harder and harder and that green fireball hurling, half goat dude is straight up demonic. I better not let my parents see this.
Me 2008 , I don’t remember it being this easy, or fast. I’m almost flying around the map, Microsoft should have throttled the processor when they ported this game.
Me 1993. I can’t believe it, that game had everything, Martian moons, gates to Hell, 3-D graphics, there’s no way anybody will ever top this!
Me 2008, When the hell is GTA IV coming out?
The controls of the game were really the only change in the game, when DOOM was originally released, being a PC game instead of console, it made use of the familiar keyboard/mouse combo. Nostalgia is one thing but being able to play the game with my 360 controller instead of a keyboard/mouse was much nicer.
The game doesn’t have a lot of replay value, as playing a game from your childhood is inherently gimmicky, but most of my friends that have seen me playing it want a turn too if only for few minutes. All that being said, if playing DOOM was one of the defining moments of your teenage years, for five bucks, this is a pretty worthwhile trip down memory lane. And if you came of age in the post-Quake II era, give it a shot to see where it all started.
