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Post by Deleted on Dec 17, 2018 18:51:06 GMT -5
Aw well, in addition to the PS1 port, I'm also adding the 3DO version to my to-play list. Can't say I'm a big fan of the music in the other versions, the Atari Jaguar and Sega 32x sound particularly jarring to me. The GBA is fine given the hardware limitations and all that - most shooters on the GBA didn't even have in-game music.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 18, 2018 12:05:57 GMT -5
The 3DO version of Doom was disappointing and a little painful to play due to the framerate but the music is pretty fantastic.
The port's producer had a garage band and their interpretation of the soundtrack is really good and full of some clever instrument choices and ad libbing. But the programmer had something crazy like two months to port the game and had zero resources as he provided her with a CD copy of the game and nothing else (id sent her the source code after she contacted them personally). The guy didn't really understand that porting video games was more complicated than just a copy-paste job.
On the bright side I think modern emulators can run the game at a proper framerate.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 18, 2018 18:31:22 GMT -5
Yeah I've always heard the story of that programmer and her hectic time constraint. You're not kidding though, looks worse than the SNES version (EDIT: well after watching them side by side maybe not that bad, but they're both bad)
The Sega 32X version actually looks pretty solid to play... but yeah the music is downright torture.
May as well throw in the SNES version for comparison:
It's commendable and historical how Doom got ported to anything and everything, but even as a hardcore fan I can't really entertain the idea of even touching most of these versions haha.
In final, here's an awesome episode of DF Retro that does a deep dive on most of them:
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Post by Deleted on Dec 18, 2018 22:51:05 GMT -5
It was a different time. Everyone wanted to play Doom and they were willing to put up with a lot to do so. There are a few I like as a curiosity like the SNES port which is was a herculean effort despite the not-so-great results. Then there are the disappointments like the 3DO and 32X which could have actually been good if they hadn't been rushed to the shelf. Someone actually ported nearly the entirety of Ultimate Doom between two ROMS on the 32X. www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/96528-ultimate-doom-32x-port-episode-12/And someone else redid the music though it hasn't been changed in the Ultimate Doom ROMs.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 18, 2018 22:54:26 GMT -5
That's damn good. FM Doom should have been a dream match up haha, no excuse for that 32X OST... guess they had no idea what they were doing with that sound chip.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 18, 2018 23:01:22 GMT -5
From what I understand the music was a placeholder, just a direct translation of the midi file through GEMS.
They basically gave John Carmack a few weeks to port the game practically by himself, so it's ultimately an unfinished product.
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Post by Deleted on Mar 5, 2019 16:18:03 GMT -5
Gunstargreen touched on the misadventures surrounding the 3DO port already, but you can get more information from this insightful interview to Rebecca Heinemann, who did that port as well as many others and also worked on gaming milestones like The Bard's Tale and Out of this World. Pretty sad story, but also hilarious: And he (aka Randy aka Art Data Interactive's CEO) went to id and said, "Here's a check for $250,000. Give me the rights to Doom." And id's like, "Okay? Here's the source code to Doom and thank you for the check, have a nice day." Well, I guess John Carmack's Ferrari didn't buy itself. [...] the 3DO company was actually hearing all the positive press that Doom was coming out for the 3DO and people were getting excited about it. And then they come to find that after they went over and actually inspected Art Data Interactive and realized that this guy has no clue about what he's doing, they're like, "Oh my God. We are screwed."Heineman had recently ported Wolfenstein 3D to the Mac and the 3DO, so they went and started literally begging her to somehow save the day, or rather, their console. But then I had my friend at 3DO begging me, "Please. We really need this game out by Christmas. People are expecting it." So I then told 3DO, "Sure. I will do it for you as a favor to you at 3DO. To help you with your platform." Because they've helped me and helped build my company at the time. So, I did it more as a favor to them.Unfortunately, Randy wasn't much help as he was reluctant to share the stuff he got from id with Heineman and he was firmly convinced that you could just Photoshop weapons into the game. I didn't have time to optimize it. And he was saying, "Why isn't this game running at 60 frames a second? Where is my new weapons? Where is my new stuff?" And I'm like, "Do you have any idea how game development is done?" Because he truly believed all you had to do to put a weapon in a game is to draw it. He did believe that if you drew a weapon -- you just gave me the art file -- I would put it in the game and it would magically fire bullets. It would do all the effects animations and switch and -- he thought that was just me putting the art in there, hit "compile," and I'm done.Eventually Heineman bypassed Randy and got the game code from id, including the Jaguar port. Almost all Doom console ports are actually based on the Jaguar version, since John Carmack was directly involved in its development. So that gives me October -- let's see. I started around August and I released the final disc on November 1st. That was 10 weeks. I just said, "This is just going to be a straight Jaguar port."But that wasn't the final nail in the coffin either. And then Randy at Art Data did the stupidest thing -- even more stupider than everything up to this point. He pressed 250,000 copies, as I understand it, of Doom for the 3DO. To put it in perspective, there were only 250,000 3DOs in existence. It was a blunder of the same proportions of ET, where Atari printed out as much cartridges as there were consoles. Which is -- mathematically, you're never gonna sell them all.
Good point. In fact, it sold only about 10k copies.
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Post by anayo on Mar 9, 2019 9:17:50 GMT -5
It's interesting to read how enthralled with DOOM you guys still are. Don't get me wrong, I respect this game immensely, and it deserves its status as a hallowed classic. That said, I haven't played through DOOM or DOOM II since the mid '90s. I've never felt an impetus to return to those games. I think it's because the FPS genre just kept evolving and my tastes along with it. Why would I play DOOM again when I could play Quake? Why would I play Quake again when I could play Quake II? Why would I play Quake II again when I could play Half-Life? That sort of thing. I know you posted this 3 months ago. But I’ve been thinking about it on and off since then. One reason I’m so blasé about modern gaming is that I feel it promotes shiny visuals over deep interactivity. Each time I upgraded my gaming setup over the past 20 years, the graphics got nicer, but so did the interactivity. Mario 64 would have been fundamentally impossible on my Sega Genesis. Fallout 3 couldn’t have been shrunk down enough to work on my Gamecube. I get that 4K and pretty shaders are important in 2019, but I haven’t observed an accompanying leap in interactivity this generation. Anyway, by the time Daikatana came out, people were tired of the FPS formula of three colored keys and locks, the “pistol - shotgun - machine gun - plasma rifle” weapon ladder, and “zombie - imp - demon - cacodemon - etc” bestiary. But as the years passed, shooters grew more scripted and linear. By the time Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare and Gears of War had become the new template, original Doom was starting to seem more interactive and deep despite its simpler technology. It has nonlinear level design and enemies with more complex patterns and behavior (such as accidental friendly fire and retaliating against each other). It also takes after that school of thought I noticed during my year of the Sega Genesis where the designers aren’t afraid to grill the player a little before allowing them to win. So beating a stage in Doom feels more meaningful to me than some of the action set pieces in FPSs from 15+ years later. To me it's a good example of old tech doing stuff that new tech doesn't.
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Post by Sarge on Mar 9, 2019 15:55:05 GMT -5
I'm probably repeating myself, but in my case, nostalgia doesn't even factor in. I loved DOOM, thought DOOM 2 was good, and thought Quake was solid. I'm trending in the wrong direction! But I've also established that, for whatever reason, I like the older-style FPSs. And of course, I'm not a genre aficionado, so grain of salt and all that.
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Post by Ex on Mar 9, 2019 22:32:13 GMT -5
It has nonlinear level design and enemies with more complex patterns and behavior (such as accidental friendly fire and retaliating against each other). I wish you would play through the first System Shock. System Shock came out only a year after DOOM, but System Shock makes DOOM seem like child's play. As to your original point, I agree with you completely. There came a tipping point in the FPS genre where spectacle and narrative took center stage, while complexity and challenge were pushed to the back burner. (This can easily be said of other video game genres as well.) I can absolutely understand seeking older FPS entries (like DOOM or Duke Nukem 3D) based on their particular style of game design. Which takes us back to our other discussion, where I said newer isn't automatically better. Thus going back in time to play games may not necessarily be out of nostalgia, so much as it is a desire to experience an explicit game style that has long been out of vogue. Versus simply the comforting familiar specific low resolutions or tonal brashness of a given elder console. I think my thing with DOOM is that I played SOOOOO much of it as a teenager, that I just burnt myself out on it. I enjoyed the game so much I made my own campaign levels for it, as well as unique weapons (with redesigned graphics). I wish I could give you dudes those old WADs, but they have long been lost to the digital ether.
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