DOOM

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Doom
Developer - Williams Entertainment
Publisher –  id Software
Release date - November 16, 1995


The Sony PlayStation version of Doom was a conversion of The Ultimate Doom and Doom II by Williams Entertainment. It ran with a modified version of the Doom engine used in the Atari Jaguar port.



Story

Doom, a science fiction/horror themed video game, has a background which is given in the game's instruction manual; the rest of the story is advanced with short messages displayed between each section of the game (called episodes), the action as the player character progresses through the levels, and some visual cues.

The player takes the role of an unnamed space marine ("Doomguy") who has been punitively posted to Mars after assaulting his commanding officer, who ordered his unit to fire on civilians. The Martian space marine base acts as security for the Union Aerospace Corporation, a multi-planetary conglomerate, which is performing secret experiments with teleportation by creating gateways between the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Mars is considered by space marines to be the dullest assignment imaginable. This all changes when the UAC experiments go horribly wrong. Computer systems on Phobos malfunction, Deimos disappears entirely, and "something fragging evil" starts pouring out of the gateway, killing or possessing all UAC personnel.

Gameplay

The game has enhancements, updates to the graphics engine, including higher color depth, alpha blending, and colorized sectors.

Like the Jaguar version from which it was based, it contains extensive changes to the map geometry for many levels, mainly for performance reasons. Most notable is that a room is kept with a small usage of textures. Maps with large vertical distances also suffer modification. However, most of the geometry changes are only present in maps from Episode 1 - 3 of the original Doom, since these were taken directly from the already-simplified maps used in the Jaguar port; maps taken directly from "Thy Flesh Consumed" of The Ultimate Doom and Doom II tend to feature very few geometry changes compared to the original versions. There is noticeable slowdown in some Ultimate Doom and Final Doom levels, particularly when using the highest difficulty settings.

The game uses a significantly less amount of enemies, especially the Cyberdemon and the Spiderdemon, which appear less frequently in order to achieve a much more imposing presence (a counter-part to the PC versions where they are used in map tricks). There is no Arch-vile (because he had twice as many animation frames as the other monsters, and the developers "just couldn't do him justice" on the PSX) and the Icon of Sin is not in the game (instead, the final level "Redemption Denied" contains multiple Barons of Hell and one or two Spider Masterminds depending on the skill level).

The game includes all of the enemies, weapons, and items of Doom II in early Ultimate Doom levels, including the first episode. A new type of Spectre, the Nightmare Spectre, was added. The regular Spectre looks like a partially invisible Demon, whereas the Nightmare Spectre is dark cyan and tougher.

Multiplayer was unusual in that splitscreen was unavailable; two consoles had to be linked together instead. This made the multiplayer truer to the original, but it was done at the sacrifice of accessibility. Presumably two players (or more) running on one console would reduce the speed of the game dramatically.