Doom

STORY / GAMEPLAY
The game was initially released for the PC DOS featuring network multiplayer gaming, and support for customized additions and modifications (called "WADs"). The game was also released for the Atari Falcon and the Amiga AGA chipset (A1200 etc) home computers. Doom was played by an estimated 10 million people within two years from its release! The player takes the role of a nameless space marine who has been punitively posted to Mars after assaulting a commanding officer disobeying the order to fire against civilians. The Martian marine base acts as security for the Union Aerospace Corporation (UAC), a multi-planetary conglomerate, which is performing secret experiments including teleportation by creating gateways between the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos. Your mission is to fight through an entire onslaught of demonic enemies -all by yourself- in order to prevent them from attacking Earth. The objective in each level is to simply locate the exit room that leads to the next area, marked with an exit sign and/or a special kind of door, while surviving all hazards on the way. The levels are sometimes labyrinthine and feature plenty of items to pick up, like additional ammo, health aid etc. There are 10 types of monsters to fight, including possessed humans as well as specifically hellish monsters, all of which varying in many ways. The action is particularly tense and Doom never leaves you stand still and take a breath since every corner of the game's environments hides dangerous species, with some of them being able to kill you instantly.

GRAPHICS / SOUND
Ok, the SNES graphics are meant to be good and pretty close to the original (PC) version, but due to the console's hardware limitations, some details had to be compromised. The game does not use the original Doom engine, but is based on a custom one, known as the Reality Engine, programmed by Randy Linden. The game's cartridge features a Super FX 2 chip (a co-processor for the SNES primarily aiming to provide advanced 2D and 3D techniques) in order to help the hardware to perform some good technical standards from the original. Due to memory limitations, the enemies are only animated from the front, which means that they always appear to face the player. Also, the game here runs at the system's usual 256 x 224 analysis and thus, it runs on a window, with a black frame around. One thing you'll notice easily is that the enemies, the environment and the items are heavily "pixelated" the farther away they are (this justifies the difficulty to see the monsters from afar). Additionally, due to limitations, no particle effects such as blood impacts, smoke or bullet sparks are present in the game. The frame-rate reminded me of playing Doom on a 486DX / 66Mhz PC, offering reasonable results. Overall and aside from any comparison to the PC, Doom looks rather good and impressive (taking into consideration the limits) . The game's sound is also good, using digi