Doom 3 preview

Playing Doom 3 in Activision’s hermetically sealed theatre is a scary prospect. Cut off from the hurly burly of the rest of the show and donning the proffered headphones, the game doesn’t pull any punches from the off, as you enter the first room in the game’s small demo level and find what appears to be a dead body sitting in a nearby chair. Unlike most dead bodies though this one’s making a noise and when you get close enough it lunges out at yet, in the game’s first but certainly not last, stand-out scary moment.

Thankfully this is Doom though and a few gunshots later and the zombie is back to being a normal corpse. Picking up a nearby shotgun – ever the weapon of choice in previous Doom games – we’re also able to dispatch one of those big fat zombies that were featured in some of the first PC shots of the game. This makes the inevitable comparisons with the PC version all the more necessary but, bearing in mind that the PC version wasn’t actually around at the show to see how it was getting on since last year, the Xbox version more than holds it own. The resolution and detail levels are predictably lower, but most of the clever new lighting techniques seem to be intact and more importantly the atmosphere and style of the game seems a dead on copy of the PC game. The frame rate is far from perfect, but at this stage in the game’s development there’s no telling whether this will last through to the final game.

Resident evil

For those of us that regularly take to wearing women’s oversized blouses though, the fact that the game features such horribly realistic graphics is actually a bit of a problem, in a brown trouser kind of a way. Behind every door lurks some kind of grotesque monster and often killing them turns out to be just as unpleasant as trying to avoid their attacks, as they slowly dissolve into the ground or hurl the contents of their stomach over the surrounding area.

But despite how good the graphics are the sound is actually probably even better. In one particularly nasty moment a strange grating noise starts out of nowhere and starts to get louder and louder. It transpires that this is the sound of more demon nasties trying to break into the real world (the concept is a direct steal from the bit towards the end of Evil Dead II) and as the noise reaches a crescendo monsters start appearing as if out of nowhere. By which point you’ve become thoroughly terrified of what’s going on, before they even start on you.

What’s that noise?

A combination of the graphics, sound and the fact that most of the game is played in almost pitch dark (you have a light you can turn on with the white button, but you often fear to use it – scared of what you might see) conspire to make Doom 3 quite the scariest video game ever made. In fact if there’s any one criticism of the game it’s that despite its quality it’s not actually anything like the old Doom games at all. In this one you creep slowly around the Mars base meeting only a few number of monsters at a time, at a pace that is much slower than the likes of Halo or even Half-Life.

Considering that the original Doom games were all about flinging as many monsters at you as possible, as often as possible, it’s actually a bit of a puzzle as to why iD have bothered to call this Doom at all – except for the obvious fact that it follows the same basic plot as the first game. Still, that’s nothing to do with the quality of the game itself, which seems to be of the highest calibre even if it is more like a first person Resident Evil than anything else.