Hey there, I wrote a detailed review of Doom Classic Complete for PS3, might interest all those of you who spent as much time with Doom as I did back then in the 90s. Enjoy! Doomed To survive 1993 was the year the biggest game of all time was released, whose episodes "Knee Deep In The Dead", "The Shores Of Hell" and "Inferno" were called after bible quotes from the Book of the Apocalypse, which especially becomes evident from the expansion "Thy Flesh Consumed". More than 8.5 million copies of the game were sold worldwide and critics label the game up to this day as the most influential video game of all times. The overwhelming success of the game went that far, that it was installed on more computers than the new operating system Windows 95 two years later. In due time classified by a reviewer as a "drug for the cerebellum", one must admit that the impulses are really short circuited: the world is your enemy, the only focus is on survival, everybody has to be eliminated immediately; shots, fireballs, bites, plasma rays and moveable walls cause death in no time. The successor "Hell On Earth", which was released one year later, defines the game very well: you can make yourself comfortable there in huge, infernal levels - Earth is redesigned as a hellish place to be. Gateway To Hell The game is strongly influenced by the movie "Aliens"; you get banned to Mars as a space marine, where the Union Aerospace Corporation is performing secret experiments that evolve that badly, that an overdimensional gate to hell is created, which naturally attracts evil. All UAC employees are killed immediately or turn into undead, who the player has to eliminate together with supernatural monsters in order to prevent an invasion of Earth. At the end of Knee Deep In The Dead the marine enters a teleporter to the vanished planet Deimos, only to be see himself overpowered by monsters. At the beginning of The Shores Of Hell he succesfully teleports to the moon of Mars, where the gateway to evil has deformed the UAC installation and overgrown it with alien structures. The finale consists of defeating the great cyberdemon, after whose death the marine figures out what happened to Deimos: it slides and floats above hell. This is exactly where the adrenaline-pushed, with insanity confronted player is going to during the episode Inferno, where he has to succeed in eliminating the Spider Mastermind with a hopefully completed arsenal of plasma weapons. After its demise you find a hidden portal to Earth, which has to be saved from the alien invasion in the last episode "Thy Flesh Consumed". The Perfect Beam I must admit, that I enjoyed Doom Classic Complete up to the last bit on PS3 because of its sensationally converted 1080p graphics, that stay faithful to the original up to the last color sprite and pixel. The same applies to the new sound in Dolby Digital and DTS, which has dynamic, powerful yet neutral timbres without any elemental changes of the original tones. That not being sufficient, Doom Classic Complete also includes aside from Doom 1 and 2 No Rest For The Living, the Doom 2 Masterlevels and the Final Doom episodes TNT Evilution and The Plutonia Experiment. These 151 levels really accomplished by usage of the luxurious PS3 analog stick to literally teleport me into another world for two weeks. Additionally, there is an online multiplayer with coop and deathmatch for up to 4 players, where you can team up with your friends in order to fight against the evil alien empire, and the same fantastic option is available at home with splitscreen with up to 4 players as well - assumed that you own that much gamepads. My ID is... At this point I have to contribute a very personal bottom line to a game, that succeeded in inspiring me many years on screen. What started as unmeaning shareware soon turned into a social cult, with the admittedly really cheap effect of simply consuming the state of the art graphics - approximately the same effect as if a N64 gamer those days had been suddenly confronted with The Last Of Us on PS3. Many people bought a new computer specifically for this game, at a time when a 386 PC costed over 750 $. This computer often was taken to friends together with a clumsy monitor in order to survive against the invasion of evil together or to fight against each other. Apart from that I recorded those days many screenshots and gameplays and created playable 3D worlds via editor, which nowadays is nearly impossible without knowledge of programming. I once read in an online magazine, that the game leaves the player no other choice than to kill everyone and everything in a hellish world, and I strangely enough must admit, that exactly this dull after taste remained, at a time when Windows based games and 3DFX graphic cards offered entirely new possibilities. But even in the year 1996 ID Software´s successor Quake left you no other choice than to fully link into it, since its graphics and adrenaline gamesplay was worlds apart from any other game. Conclusion: Like it is with all great works of art, it leaves you no choice than to either love or hate it. Rightly rated mature, Doom still breathes the atmosphere of what is forbidden, dark and evil and magically captivates you with its uncompromising and breathless nonstop action gameplay - rooms all of a sudden turn dark, something undefineable gurgles in the background and all of a sudden deadly monsters teleport out of nowhere directly in front of your shotgun. The right switches have to be pressed, lifts must to be used and keycards have to be found. Without ammunition or medipacks only armed with fists and a chainsaw you still see yourself in nowadays confronted with a faint - and a fatal death. The HD Remake can be only described by the word sensational considering the volume, the fidelity to the original and the playing possibilities - up to 4 players online or offline, unlimited savegames, perfect controller support with vibration function - that´s more than outstanding. It´s by the way only necessary to move the analog stick left or right in order to strafe. The only negative aspects remain the missing features, that made the game absolutely innovative by that time, such as recording personal gameplays or creating own levels. On that account the cheat codes were also luckily dropped, that would deprive the trip completely from its genuineness and archaic and plunge it into boredom. Score: Graphics: 10/10 Sound: 10/10 Music: 7/10 Gameplay: 8/10 Fun: 10/10 Volume: 11/10 Overall: 10/10
Now if only we could get an updated Morrowind (or just an Elder Scrolls collection of the first three games) port on PS3 or PS4
