Doom (Sega Saturn)
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Rip and tear this inferior port apart!
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Doom is a first-person shooter game developed and published by id Software. Originally released for MS-DOS back in December 1993. This game, along with Wolfenstein 3D, is known to revolutionize the first-person shooter genre, and since its release, it's been ported to loads of consoles from the 32X to the eighth generation consoles.
This page will cover the Sega Saturn version developed by Liverpool-based studio Rage Software and published by GT Interactive.
Development
Programmer Jim Bagley, upon receiving the resources from id Software, was able to create a hardware-accelerated renderer for the platform in a relatively short amount of time. However, upon review by John Carmack, this rendering engine was found unacceptable due to the hardware's quad-based affine texture scaling. Carmack demanded that the hardware graphics capabilities be avoided, forcing Bagley to undertake writing a software renderer that utilized both SH2 processor units in the system, under the coordination of the central 68000 chip, to draw the screen like the PC game engine.
Why It's a Doom-ed Port
- The most infamous thing about this port, is the dreadful framerate, with the game staying around 12 FPS for most of the game, but it gets worse during the later levels, where the framerate dips to 10 FPS with slideshow quality levels of smooth.
- Due to the awful framerate, Doomguy is very poor to control in this version, where he has less reaction time than the other versions and he moves like a drunk lad.
- Loads of false advertising plague the back of the boxes for both the North American and European boxes.
- The biggest example is that the North American box states it has 60 levels, while the European box states it has 55 levels, neither of which is true as it has 59 levels in it.
- The screenshots for both boxes are taken from the PC version of Final Doom and not from in-game.
- The North American box states it supports multiplayer via linkup, which is not present in the version, and only present in the European version of the port.
- Enemies are noticeably weaker than the other ports, as they attack slower, either due to the terrible framerate.
- A lot of features are completely removed from the PS1 version, with the most notable being colored lighting, leading to areas more washed-out than the PS1 version, and the multiplayer in the North American version, as mentioned above.
- Sound effects are a lot slower and lower pitched in this version, due to the game using a lower sample rate, which isn't good for the majority of the game.
- For some odd reason, for levels 10-20 in Doom 2, it uses a cityscape sky texture, even for levels in Hell, which can come off as ridiculous and stupid.
- Limited soundtrack compared to the PS1 version (which this port is based on), as certain tracks are repeated more often in some levels, though, there are unused tracks on the disc in the Redbook audio.
Redeeming Qualities
- The soundtrack (even if it's limited) is still awesome because it uses the PlayStation version of the soundtrack.
- Just like the PlayStation version, it allows you to play either Final Doom or Doom II, which adds more content that is worth playing.
- North American/European cover art is pretty decent.
- The graphics are decent, despite the framerate issue.
Trivia
- According to Sega Retro, earlier builds were compatible with the 3D Control Pad, but the feature was removed from the final game.
- John Carmack would later regret the decision to disallow the 3D hardware on 8 October 2014, stating that "I hated affine texture swim and integral quad verts, but in hindsight, I probably should have let experiment."
- A rumor circulated that the Japanese version was a little bit more optimized than the North American and European versions. However, this claim was debunked by DigitalFoundry commentator John Linnerman, who found no difference in the framerate.
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