Introduction
Another journey to Hell and back leaves Nick Haywood wondering if Satan should just install revolving doors and have done with it.If we go way, way back into the mists of PC gaming history, a few games have been hailed as genre busters or genre creators. Doom was one of the games (along with Wolfenstein 3D) that could rightly then, and rightly now, claim to have set the standard. Doom was the game that made me get a PC. There was no other platform that had any sort of first person shooter on it and back then Doom wasn’t just ground-breaking it was earth-shattering. To describe to someone what it was like to play the blocky, sprite driven games, with a faux 3D environment was impossible. And although the methods and tricks used to immerse you and scare you seem crude and ungainly now, when Doom came out many chemists shops had a sudden rush for incontinence pants.
Of course, after the massive success of Doom, there was a rash of clones and games varying on the theme and of course, follow up to Doom itself, finishing with an Ultimate Doom Pack that was the first game, the sequel and all the expansion packs, mods and add-ons that had been made up until then. After this, all went quiet on the Doom front until a couple of years ago when a few screenshots and a small press release told the world that our favourite shooter, the father of scary shooty games with a demon theme was being updated and revamped to scare us all over again.
So, now you’ve had a potted history of the game and you’ve no doubt been slavering over the plethora of screenshots and previews that id have been drip feeding to us over the last 12months or so... the game is here, but is it worth the wait? And was it worth pawning your granny to get the latest bleeding edge graphics card to run it on?