Doom

The Good
I'm writing this short review mostly because of a stunningly different perspective on the technological achievements for the SNES port of the original DOS title, Doom. I don't know what version HE played, but it certainly wasn't the same one I did.

What's good about this SNES port? Well, for one, it's Doom. It's Doom in almost every way you remember it on your PC. So many monsters that at first glance you'd think it's impossible to overcome. Fight through the tunnels of Hell itself and conquer evil for the good of mankind. It is Doom. If you want to read more about Doom, a PC review would be much more informative.

As it goes on the SNES, though, it really is Doom. So people who didn't own a PC, or didn't have the hardware required to run it, had a cheap alternative to get in on the run-and-gun action. Also, if you're more used to using gamepads, you have that instead of a keyboard.

The Bad
But the SNES was not built to play a game of this calibur. Running through the halls in this game, even when there's nothing on screen but the walls themselves is like watching a slideshow. Quite frankly, this ruins the game. I remember getting this game for SNES in an attempt to fool my mother into letting me play this horribly violent game that was forbidden to play on the PC. After all, SNES has Mario, Zelda, Disney games...Doom? Surely it's a different game than the PC version.

Well, it certainly was that. Oh, all the blood and gore might have been there, but it was just impossible to enjoy it if you couldn't get more than a few frames a second out of it.

The Bottom Line
I think this game would have been killer on the SNES if some effort had been made to make it smoother. Get rid of some textures, lower the sound quality...something. Something more than they did. I don't know what exactly made it run so poor, only that it ran so bad it was virtually unplayable.

It was an okay port, really. I mean, it was Doom. But for those of us who had seen it run on a decent computer, it just wasn't the same.