Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil for Windows

In 1993, id released probably the most influential game in the history of video games. Everyone has heard about and people still love it to this day. That game was Doom. With graphics and gameplay that was said to have given some people motion sickness (according to some sites), the game was a huge leap in video games. id managed to release many more technology topping games, like Quake, Quake 2, Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Quake 3 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein are still popular today, even though they are a quite old now.

id released a sequel to Doom, aptly named Doom 2. The major differences between Doom and Doom 2 were more guns and monsters in Doom 2 and the fact Doom 2 had 32 levels!

But Doom 2 was released early-mid 90s and years went by without a proper sequel to one of the industries biggest games. But then came the year 2000. id announced that the sequel to the Doom games was coming; Doom 3 was actually being made.

4 years later, people getting sick and tired of hearing about games such as Doom 3, Fable and Half-Life 2, each announced 4 years ago, Doom 3 was announced to being heading towards completion and a lot of people got excited. Eventually the words "Doom 3 has gone gold" flew across the internet and everyone knew that this wasn't a drill. One of the most high anticipated games ever was on its way.

But was it worth 4 years wait?

It's hard to answer the question with a yes, no or kind of. The only way to try and unbiasly give an answer is by explaining what the game has and then what my impressions are. Reviews all the around the internet give different opinions. Unfortunately, some reviews of the game are way too picky and make the game sound worse than it is. Doom 3 is really a game you have to try before you can really say "this game is good" or "this game is bad". So here's what you need to know about the game:

-Graphics:
Doom 3 brings graphics in the video game industry to another level. Bump-mapping gives textures a great look, people and monsters look good and the lighting and shadows is fantastic. It's hard to explain the graphics in a way that really does it justice, but, as far as I know, all the pictures on the internet of Doom 3 are made with in-game graphics, so if you see a picture of Doom 3, it may give you an idea. In short, the graphics are incredible.

-Sound:
Another place that Doom 3 excels. It has 5.1 surround sound, which is great. When the game hits the point where evil stuff starts happening, you can hear distance screams, eery voices saying things like "help me" and the sounds of movement, which sometimes are and sometimes are not monsters. The sound is well done and scary.

-Gameplay:
Doom 3's most criticized area. Doom 3 is not a fast paced game, compared to something like Half-Life. You walk around, reasonably slowly, sometimes run, and are constantly looking out for monsters. The game is basically you going around, shooting monsters and soaking up the story. A lot of the game will involve you switching from your weapon to a flashlight, too, so you can see where you are going in dark places, although you can't use your flashlight and a gun at the same time.
You cannot poke your head around corners and cannot hit monsters with your weapons, which are 2 of the missing features, which people wish were in the game.
The game's story mainly progresses through the use of PDAs. You have a PDA and if you find someone else's (by finding it laying around or by killing someone and stealing their's). You can find video discs which show you video or you can see people's emails and listen to people's voice recordings, when you upload from other people's PDAs. Some PDAs will have junk email, some will have story elements in the form of emails or voice logs and sometimes an email or voice log will have helpful information. Although this is the way id chose to do the story, a big chunk of story is actually in a voice log on a PDA given to you by a person.

-Lighting and shadows:
Definitely the biggest place where Doom 3 struts its stuff. Doom 3 has per-pixel lighting and shadows. What does this mean? It means that the program actually works out which pixels on the screen are illuminated by a light source and it also works out the exact pixels that are covered by shadow. This has never been done before, as far as I know, and it basically means more realistic lighting and shadows than even Splinter Cell!
This realistic lighting and shadows really helps make the game really scary. You cannot see anything which is in complete darkness.
Thankfully, you have a flashlight for almost the whole game. This helps see through dark places, with it's realistic lighting.
The last thing about this is that the per-pixel lighting and shadows is done in real-time. The game actually does something incredible with this. Most games, if not all games, from about Quake or Quake 2, stored the lighting and shadows in a file. Every object's shadow and every light source's affect was stored in the file, which had to be made when the map was made. This meant that shadows were always the same, light sources could not move and moving objects could not have shadows. Games eventually got dynamic shadows and lighting, but still used the "stored in file" method for objects and lights that can't move. Doom 3 is different. From my understanding, light source details are stored in either the "lighting information" file or are stored in the file for the object which the light source is coming from. Shadows are not stored in files. The exact affect a light source has on the its environment is not stored in a file. It does not figure out what surfaces are lit up and which ones are not when the map is made. Instead, when you are in a room, it works out what the light does right there and then. Unlike other games, if there are no light sources in the game, there is no light in the game. It's complicated. Basically, all light is done on the stop by the computer, instead of predefined.

-Computer jargon in Doom 3:
* Per-Pixel lighting and shadows: Explained above.
* Per-pixel hit detection: Think Doom 3 already sounds realistic? Well Doom 3 ups the notch of realism in video games once more with per-pixel hit detection. This is a hard thing to explain without writing a few dozen lines of explanation, so basically, it means that each bullet or rocket you fire can be fired under enemies arms or between their legs, or rockets can fly by your head, just missing it, unlike other games, where you shoot in the general direction of the enemy and you might hit them, even if u weren't dead on accurate in aiming.
* Bump-mapping: This is a piece of jargon that basically mean textures look more realistic and as though they are a little more 3D. It gives a texture the appearance of having bumps. It also means that textures can look shiny and are affected by light sources more than just how light or dark the texture looks.
* Heat haze: If you have a DirectX 9-compatible video card, you can get heat haze. This effect is also hard to explain. Basically, if you look around something extremely hot, such as steam or fire, around the fire, the image will shimmer, almost like the look of water. It's hard to explain but it looks cool, especially when you see a fire ball flying towards you or see a grenade exploding.
* Ragdoll physics: Up until about Halo, in 2001, games, with dying people or monsters, saw the being go through a death animation and sit as a static object on the ground. Halo made it so if an explosion happened near a death body, the body would fly away, with some realism. With ragdoll physics, when you kill someone or something and shoot a dead body, the body flies or moves with realistic physics. This is also referred to as Rigid-Body Physics, I think.

A.I.: The A.I. is very simplistic, but fits right in. Zombie slowly walk towards you with no regards for their own health; undead soldiers sometimes hide, then poke their heads out and shoot at you, or they'll just run at you and shoot, and sometimes they'll dive sideways; most monsters just walk or run at you, and if they have a projectile attack, they throw/shoot at you too.

But what do I think of the game?

This game is great. Unlike most critics around, I think this game is well worth the purchase, the price and the wait.

Playing the game is pretty fun and I have never been bored, apart from when I got lost at one point. If you play without much distraction from the outside world, you can really get into the game and its slow pace, occassional fire fights with monsters and little bits of story that come now and again are glued together well by the suspense, which means the game always feels great.

The graphics are great. They look so cool, especially with the great lighting. Colored lights and moving colored lights in dark areas look amazing, and bump-mapping adds more amazement. My only problems with the graphics are the imp and the textures of people's heads. The imp, while it does look good, hardly has any curves and seems to be mostly straight lines. The textures on people's head, mostly noticable in cut scenes, has a line on the middle of their heads where you can see what look like a texture on the left joining up with a texture on the right, instead of it looking like one texture. Nevertheless, these problems are small and don't affect gameplay or the game.

The lighting and shadows are brilliant. In one part of the game, I was busy showing my brother the coolness of the lighting. I shot a light and showed how it swung around and cast realistic lighting. Then I made the stupid mistake of showing him the coolness of being able to shoot out the lights. I shot out the light, making that area pitch black, and then what happens? Althought I though all the monsters were dead, one of the little spider guys came along. And what did it do? It hid in the darkness. Cool, but scary, as I franticly tried to somehow kill it. Switching to a flashlight means you can see in the dark, but you can't use your gun. This is the bone that all critics jump on, actually. You can't use the flashlight at the same time as a gun? Minus 5 points! But it doesn't matter too much. There were barely any points in the game where I had to fight a monster who was completely submerged in darkness. My only problem with the lighting and shadows in Doom 3 is the fact you can't shoot out all lights in the game. In fact, there are barely any lights in the game that you can shoot out. While in the single player game, this is nothing more than to go "cool!" at, in multiplayer, this would have been great.

The physics are another place where Doom 3 took a hit. Though, I think my complaints on the physics are more than normal, especially as almost every critic on the net who mentioned physics just mentioned hoe it was implemented enough. The game barely shows off its physics capabilities. There are a few boxes every once in a while, and bodies do have ragdoll physics, but you can never use physics to your advantage. My problem with the physics in the game is the fact that things fall too fast. I know it's basically nit-picking, but I love playing around with physics in games with physics. The gravity in the game is too much, which is a little annoying, but as physics are not used in the game for anything except bodies moving around, it doesn't affect gameplay.

There are 12 weapons in the game. Fists, chainsaw, pistol, shotgun, machinegun, chain gun, grenades, plasma rifle, rocket launcher, BFG 9000 and Soul Cube. The flashlight can also be used to hit things, but it's not too advised. People have complained about the sound level of weapons, saying that some weapons sound wimpy, compared to their real-life counterparts. I can say that I haven't noticed it, and I think it's done well in the game. My only problem with the weapons is the grenades, which are extremely bouncy, and if not thrown right, they will bounce back at you.

Doom 3 has a special system for interacting with control panels and people. When you walk up to one and face it, your crosshair will change. For a person, when it changes, you can press the fire button to talk to them. For control panels, your crosshair changes to a mouse cursor, which you use on the screen as though it were a real computer. I have no problems with this.

The animation is another highly rated aspect of Doom 3 and I agree. Although my computer isn't the best computer in the world and it slows down a lot, I have noticed that a lot of the animation is good. Voice sync is also pretty good.

The A.I. is very poor in terms of current technology, with games like FarCry having very realistic A.I. capabilities. But the A.I. in Doom 3 suits it. Mindless zombies just walk or run at you, while other monsters will shoot at you if they can, then run at you, and shoot again, and so forth, until they're dead or they get close enough for a melee attack. I have no problems with the A.I. I think it'd be odd seeing slow walking zombies shouting at each other "flank left!" In the fashion of what television has taught us, zombies are mindless creatures that walk slow, so Doom 3 is spot on there. Because this game mainly takes place in small corridoors, exceptional A.I. is a little hard to do, because monsters diving for cover and shooting at you is about as good as I could think up. So, A.I. is spot on for the type of opponents you will face in this.

Multiplayer is something I haven't experienced much of yet. I tried to play online, but never seemed to get into a game with other people. There was also a bug that meant that when I moved from my starting position, I was "dragged" back there, so I was basically stuck in the one place. id is working on a patch to fix multiplayer bugs, so I hope this will be one of them. The levels are reasonably small, but with a maximum of 4 players without a MOD, it might fit just well. Unfortunately, the prospect of shooting out lights or flicking the off switch at a wall is not in any maps, that I could find. The game comes with about 5 multiplayer maps. But, as I mentioned before, Doom 3 has per-pixel hit detection, which would definately make multiplayer interesting. Imagine someone firing a rocket at you and it goes under your arm. So, overall, multiplayer is not hugely great compare to something like FarCry or the upcoming Half-Life 2 (most likely), but id did stress that Doom 3 was designed to be a single player game. Also, there are 3 game types I can think of. Death match, team death match and elimination. Elimination is when 2 people fight and when 1 dies, the next person comes in to replace the defeated person and it keeps going like that.

The level design is criticized by some. I find it pretty good. It does a good job of being a Mars Research facility. I have no problems with this area of the game.

For one of the first times ever, this video game would probably not benefit from having prerendered CG videos in it for cut scenes. The graphics, combined with the lighting and shadows, make the game look so good, that a CG video would just be unnesessary.

I thoroughly enjoy the sound. Screams in the distance, eery noises and 6 channel, 5.1 surround makes the game complete. It was so eery, scary and cool when I ended a door and heard this eery voice say "help me" softly, and then footsteps of blood appearing on the ground, 1 by 1, as though some invisible person was walking there. Scary.

Overall, this game is great. From a technological view, this game is the best on the market. From the gameplay side, it may be a bit less than what some people want, but I love it. From the story side of it, it is incredible. This game is scary and not just monsters jumping out at you. The eery noises and voices are scary. If you can get into games and find them scary, like Silent Hill for example, then this game will frighten you a lot. It's just like an interactive horror movie!

I highly recommend this game. id's aim was to make a game that mixed top-of-the-line technology with a scary story, based on Doom, and that's what they did. I can't really honest say they failed in any aspect of that. Some people have problems with the game, but I barely have any. This is a great game.