Back in the days when you didn’t have to worry about aiming up, things were more visceral, gory, daft and generally a damn sight more fun. Like some lurching blood encrusted dinosaur, Doom comes lurking out the past and although it may be a bit of a lumbering beast it’s a dinosaur that you love. A velociraptor or triceratops, rather than one of those little chicken things that no one knows the name of. Doom has still got a mighty roar after all these years and chopping someone up with a chainsaw will never ever grow old.
Our first experience of playing Doom was actually on one of the school’s 486 computers 13 years ago. Someone had managed to install it on one computer in the IT suite. We would sneak in at lunch or join the “computer club” so we could go in to play. It felt like nothing else we’d ever played before (although Wolfenstein was released first) and we’d revel in its action-packed blasting gameplay. The game has now been released on every format possible, including Game Boy Advance, but when we picked up the pad and started playing Doom over Live we still got that buzz we’d had way back in our squeaky-voiced days of puberty.
From the moment you start playing the pixellated graphics are like a love letter to ancient PC gaming. Nothing has been changed here. The blocky characters are still there, the same enemies charge onto the screen and it’s even got tragic midi music that somehow makes you smile. To a new 360 gamer who never experienced Doom back in its heyday, it may make them want to be sick… but that would be stupid. Although the game does look ANCIENT the gameplay is still as quick paced and tight as it was all those years ago.
Unlike many FPS games it revels in giving you more than just the standard shoot, shoot, shoot gameplay we’ve now become accustomed to. There are actual SECRETS to be discovered here. Doom mixes a sense of exploration with frenetic gunplay and although it is possible to just blaze through each level you’d be missing out on a lot. There were even secrets that we discovered that we couldn’t remember from the original so remarkably it managed to still feel fresh.
But how does it feel on Live? Well we heard complaints that it was terribly laggy but after a sustained session we discovered that as long as you play people with a fairly decent connection it’s not that bad. You can have four player deathmatches with relative ease, although you’ll often find yourself searching through the large levels for opponents. As well as deathmatches you can also have four-player co-op through the single player levels. As soon as we saw this option, we rounded up a few mates who’d played the game with us back in the 90s and we were soon sharing memories and having a laugh playing. Co-op and deathmatches can also be played by four players in splitscreen mode on one Xbox. Nice!
Lately we’ve been bemoaning the lack of real classics on Arcade but Doom is a genuine old-skool joy. Perhaps it’s only because we played the original so much that we’ve immediately fallen in love with it all over again. Modern gamers who like to aim up and enter stealth mode will probably turn their nose up at it. Whereas all you gamers in your 20s are probably playing as we type. Now we just want Doom II.
