Doom 64Midway has ported the game perfectly,keeping all the elements that made Doom great. |
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Publisher: Midway Home Entertainment Developer: Midway Home Entertainment Genre: First-Person Shooter
Midway Home Entertainment has ported the game perfectly, keeping all the elements that made Doom great, and purposely leaving out changes (i.e. "improvements") to the gameplay that would have made it something other than Doom. That's not to say that there aren't some surprises -- Doom 64 has a new weapon, a few new creatures, and a couple of tricks up its sleeve. First off, the game looks amazing. There is a wide variety of environments, from castles to space stations, to the well known pits of Hell. The guys at Midway said that they used enough texture maps to create seven complete Doom games, and it shows. In previous incarnations, the closer you got to a wall or monster, the worse it looked. Midway took advantage of the N64's trilinear mip-mapping to anti-alias the texture maps. Now instead of horrible blocky things, you get slightly blurry things and it's a vast improvement. The level design is great, too. Even though Midway designed each level, they are all "Id sanctioned," so you know they're the real deal. Each level is filled with monsters to blast and puzzles to solve. Plus, they are much larger and make you think a little harder than the typical Doom levels, so you definitely won't run through it in a single evening. All of the characters have been redesigned, but none have been radically altered. Midway has added a lot of detail to each creature and, in most cases, the effect is startling. The heat-seeking-missile-launching Revenant is noticibly absent, but in its place is a new breed of Imp, and a new final boss. All of the weapons were redesigned as well. They don't do anything different, but they look better doing it. The chainsaw has two blades now and is particularly gruesome. There is also a new weapon that tops the BFG 9000, but we won't spoil the surprise by telling you what it is. Doom 64 isn't a perfect game though. For one thing, the characters suffer from a severe lack of animation frames. As in every other version, the sprite-based characters jerk about the screen like Rock'em Sock'em Robots. We'll probably never know if this was due to a lack of effort on Williams' part or if it's a limitation of the cartridge format. Sprite clipping was also evident in our reviewable copy. When half of a monster disappears from one frame to the next it's not the end of the world, but it's still annoying. Lastly, it's still Doom. If you didn't like the game before, you aren't going to like it any more now that it has even better graphics and sound. You still go through a world blowing things up in first-person perspective, you still solve puzzles by tripping switches, and you still can blow yourself up with the rocket launcher. Every N64 owner who is a fan of the first-person shooters probably wept the day they heard Doom was being ported to N64. Having the mother of all action games on the most powerful system ever seems too good to believe, but we're here to tell you that it's really here, and it's really great.
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Super Password!
Enter the following password: W93M 7H20 BCY0 PSVB. This code will give
you 100 health, 200 armor, all the weapons, full ammo, the backpack, levels 29-31
finished, and takes you to the last level. Also, it gives you three pentagram
items that make your laser three times as powerful as the BFG9000. You will be
able to kill the last boss in four seconds. The three pentagram items also let
you use the three switches in the last level (closes the gates that spawn the
monsters), and the laser now shoots faster and stronger.