Doom III

OK. That last post was a little thin. Let’s summarise this obsession with this game and its genre while I’m sat on the train, on my way home, a pre-Doom III person. And it’s not because I’m an anatomy teacher with an unhealthy interest in zombies, OK?
I had already been playing computer games for many, many years thanks to my dad, because he bought me and my brother a ZX Spectrum back in the day. Yeah, it was educational (look at me now), but what I really remember is Jet Set Willy, Jetpac, Psst, & the like.
Jump forward many years & we’re in the age of side scrolling platformer & arcade games. Then Doom is released. It is absolutely revolutionary. Never before have we played a shoot-em-up within a virtual reality; 3D hell (yes, I do remember Wolfenstine). The gameplay was spot on, and the style and technology became the new standard. Pick the original game up again even now & it’s still a load of fun to play.
Jump forward to Quake. Back in Doom you were obviously limited by the PC hardware available of the time, but Id’s next 1st person 3d shooter was promised to revolutionise gaming. It did. The increase in detail was enormous. The virtual world was massively enriched & it was difficult to imagine that this was possible before Id did it. You could look up and down, & maps were truly three dimensional, with bridges and pathways criss-crossing one another, death now likely to come at you from any angle. It was an amazing experience.
I remember the hype leading up to Quake 2. People were promising that the difference between Quakes 1 & 2 was going to be as large as it was between Doom & Quake. I wasn’t sure it was possible, but Id proved me wrong. It was possible & they amazed me again. I still remember the flies buzzing over the bloated corpses of enemies I had destroyed, and again the gameplay was as fantastic as the game’s engine. It was a leap in technology and it was loved.
In between then & now other companies took over, and gaming became online multiplayer oriented. This was a good thing, but not something I’m going to go into detail about now (I’ll bore you with the history of HalfLife when HL2 comes out next month!) Life was good. Games had massive replay possibilities, and gaming graphics and physics continued to move forward.
But then we heard that John Carmack and his team at Id were going to do it again. They were going to create something new. A new engine. And they were going to remake Doom – the game from our youth. The game that started it all. We were going back to Mars.
If you weren’t part of this, you just couldn’t understand. We were going to take another technological jump forward. This was, this is, going to change everything.
Yes, there is an obsession here. This is gaming at the cutting edge; it’s state of the art. This is important. What’s makes the tension worse is that we have been waiting so long for this day, and we have seen hints at what the game may be able to do. The hype is incredible – the risk of disappointment is high. I’ve spent the equivalent cost of three Sony Playstation 2’s just to upgrade elements of my PC to a half-decent level. Reviews are good, but personal experiences are varied. Reviewers say this is as close as you’ll get to taking the lead in a major movie, but they’re wrong. It’s more than that. You’ll be there.
Last night I dreamed of zombies, but it wasn’t a bad dream. Tonight may be different.