Doom

"This atrocious port makes Doom unnappealing to any player."

The Sega Saturn really does shows its unpleasant backside Doom. A little backstory, in Doom, you are a lone soldier stuck in the entrance of a moon base where all Hell has come forth. They have slaughtered everyone, and now sense of your arrival. It's up to you to escape and save the base as well as Earth! This game is a port of a port, as Saturn Doom was derived from the Playstation version of the game. You get all the features from the Psx version, Doom 1 and 2, password protected saved games, and the standard necessities, volume control, an array of 1 of 4 difficulties, and restart option. Doom really had potential here from one of its offspring from a great port...except for the Saturn limitations kick in.

You'll find some very annoying characteristics in here. One example, is that any kind of drop, say a step, makes the grunt that you just fell this goes for ALL ledges. Any downward step subjects you to a series of grunts that would seem rather silly. Another example, is that if more one enemy is shown on the screen, the game literally begins to chop through the game, making the difficult somewhat easy. As you watch them move almost in one second time-lapses, you can fire 3 quick pistol shot or 2 shotgun blasts in that second! Yes in this port, you can fire a gun at an extraordinarily rapid pace that could almost be considered cheating. So just imagine the wonderful Psx version with a clear 30 frames per second, but take some lighting effects and half of the framerate.

Graphics-6/10
It's an evil looking base that been corrupted by Hell, and it looks good, but thats after you minus some of it's lighting effects and create the enemies with somewhat large pixels.

Sound-3/10
As stated before, you "fall" off a ledge, whether it be a 6 foot drop, to a stair, or even half an inch that separates a room, makes you feel as if your legs were sticks. Apparently, you're captain peg-leg in this port, and moving down stairs hasn't been more difficult.

Story-8/10
In an eerie setting of an abandoned moon base beyond mars, up comes zombies and demons from the bowels of Hell. These monsters came out one day and killed every known human on the base, your friends, colleagues, even civilians. You come to realize when you enter, after all the screaming and bloodshed, you're the only one left, and you have to get out of there. ALIVE. Maybe you can run it through and escape in fear, or you can take your shotgun and waste the freaks that tore your commanding officer a new hole.

Gameplay-2/10
It feels like I'm running in tub of glue! By far, the worst movement I've ever come across, as there is no true 3D movement, more like dodecagonal-paths that you can move around on. Enemies are stuck in movement as well, and the only consolation is that your the fastest draw in the game. You can clean out a room full of Barons easily and with little to no harm, thanks to its slow state.

Buy/Rent
Only buy if you are a very serious collector! A novelty to have, but not to play.

I have never seen a worse port in my days, I even though that port that I grew up with, the 32x, would fall before this, but wow, I sure was wrong. As it's been deemed, this is the 2nd worst port of Doom of all console video games in it's history. Prepare yourself for this, it's a real laugh with nothing to joke about except its existence and it's attempt to give the player a taste of Doom, bitter as it was.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 06/03/08, Updated 07/12/08

Game Release: Doom (US, 03/31/97)