DWBS: GBA Doom Thoughts

After looking at the just-released GBA Doom screenshots, here's some thoughts collected from my own observations as well as talk in the forums/chatrooms:

• The game seems to have no blood! This pic shows a messed-up Doomguy, but there's no blood on his face, he just looks hung over. This shot has green slime coming out of the Baron, which makes sense actually, since the corpse has green entrails. Most tellingly, this picture has what looks to be a slime pool in the background, while the original scene has a blood pool in the same spot.
  
• No lightmaps? None of the shots seem to have any noticable light levels. This might be a limitation of the engine, or maybe the GBA's notoriously dark screen means the game will be dark no matter what. For instance, E1M8 looks fullbright and certainly much brighter than the original level.
  
• Texture changes. The previously linked E1M8 shots, as well as E2M9 vs. the original E2M9, show pretty heavy retexturing. Some people have mentioned on the forums that they have noticed Doom 2 textures in the shots as well(?!).
  
• The levels show signs of having their architecture simplified pretty noticably, but this is to be expected and has happened in most of the other console ports.

So what does this all mean? Good/bad? What's your thoughts on the apparent blood removal?

Of course. I think they re-did all the other console levels like that as well. It looks like they ported the 32X version over, from what I see. I haven't played any other versions (besides PC obviously), but Elbryan told me that the PSX version had the same retexturing and re-editing job as the 32X one did, and I assume that goes for the rest as well. The re-make of E1M8 with the brown brick walls and other Doom2 textures is the exact same retexturing and relighting job that was in 32X.

Those bastards removed the blood!Maybe it will be in the complete version?In Mortal Kombat 3 for gameboy color when you punch someone a gallon of blood spews forth.Also you kill the poor bastard/bitch at the end.But then again nintendo are known to be pussys anyway.

It's a game not a simulation. The blood removal is insignificant.
IMO, the question that would have been asked is..
How do we recreate the FEEL of Doom for GBA without being completely unfaithful to the original given all the obvious limitations?

I'd be fairly certain that Activision want gamers to link up for this one and not spend all their effort on the single player game.
With that in mind, the aim is to score points not look at elaborate scenery or bloodpools.

I may be wrong but big father Nintendo will probably also have insisted on a universally acceptable title hence the green slime instead of blood. (Germany??)

Notice how shot 8 of 9 shows an unharmed Trooper? Also, none of the other humanoid characters (ie. players) are visibly injured.
It's ok to shoot the aliens/demons as they're just aliens and demons. Anything human-like can't possibly die. They'll probably just fall over blinking knowing Nintendo.
And there's not a great deal wrong with that.
There's as much player reward in that as there is in seeing showers of blood.

Finally, if it's going to work properly, the circle-strafe technique MUST be available.
D-pad and Shoulder buttons probably!

maybe there the green blood is for the baron's only...I mean, they have green blood after all.
Blue blood for cacos maybe?


and that little green pool might be some toxic nukage stuff....

..maybe I'm wrong. Who knows?

Noticed this over on Shacknews in the comments:

"It does, in its current state, have two lighting modes - full bright (probably because of the dark GBA) and normal lighting. I could only "make" one cartridge, so I couldn't try out the MP stuff yet."

Nintendo have a track record of removing blood from id conversions - check Wolf3D on the SNES, for instance. Anyone remember if N64 Doom had blood?

Oh great, no blood. Why don´t we just remove the guns for crying out loud. I mean seriously, Blood isn´t the only thing in Doom but it´s preatty tame by todays standards. And it is supposed to be a horror FPS.

i wonder if theyll keep the satanic symbolism and stuff. and the impaled guy. and the other dangling and squirming guys. and half the other artwork.

Hm well. it appears as if the bloodsplats are green. (look at shot3. there's a little green splat behind the pistol sprite) but the zombie is just as blood soaked as always.

if you like blood then there is this doom program you need to track down. i used to have it, called napalm something. it replaces all the deaths of enemies so when you kill a zombie with shotgun he repains standing but his whole head gets blown away and all thats left is a bloody spinal chord. it was pretty sick.

who cares?
i know for a facj that there is deathmatch and coop, look at the pics, the doom guy is in them twice.

I'm surprised they would go to all that trouble of removing the blood in the game when there's blood pretty much everywhere in the world... in TV shows, movies, games... you would think the world is desensitized to this level of violence after all this time for exposure.

Remember the Columbine school shootings where people were disgusted at Doom? News teams provided clips of people playing Map01, yeah, shooting the troopers in the beginning! There is a drastic difference between real life violence and fantasy violence - the media companies who ran those sorts of clips knew it, and tons of gullible people follow the media, so then logically people should know the difference by now! Am I missing something?

Doom needs to be played in a big computer screen and with huge speakers. The GA version is fucked up just for having to be played in a tiny little handheld stupid console with no backlit. The Doom concept is a PC concept and it should be played in a PC always. What Nintendo should bring is a Chrono Trigger for GA. And "id" should stop selling out for christs sake!!!! They are going to end up bringing Super Noah´s Ark for PS2 dammit!!!!!! I love the PC and I love Doom.... its like chocolate and cigarrettes.

who's going to be first to complain at everyone and point out all the blood on the dead imp in Shot 9? :)

Although it does kind of look like the far side of his upper lip is bloodied in that hungover shot ...

Blah, it just looks like every crappy console port of doom ever, with Nintendo's usual half-assed attempts at censoring violent content. I can't really imagine playing doom using a d-pad, can you get a trackerball addon?

doom 64 has lots of blood... so does perfect dark and many other games for nintendo consoles

let's keep in mind, gents, that this is still in development. They are far from being finished, and are probably a helluva lot more concerned with getting player/enemy sprites in place and textures finished than getting the blood all in place and the lighting down... im sure they will eventually. even the snes version of doom had all that. ^_^

I say we bide our time, and wait...

Anyone else notice that the screenshots are all mismatched?

Umm, no...

there IS blood on the doom guy's face - if you look closely, you can see blood leaking out of his nose

Ummm, play Conker's Bad Fur Day for N64 sometime and tell me Nintendo only makes kiddie games.

Ok, Rare made it, but Nintendo owns about a quarter of that company so it still counts!

I interviewed at Rare for a GBA job a few months ago and asked them how the hell they got Conkers' BFD past Nintendo??
The simple answer was they didn't get it!
Viz style humour is lost on them and besides, N64 is dead long live Gamecube.
Great game though.

You guys are pretty negative.. Personally, I don't even care if they take out the blood (even though I seriously doubt they will, atleast fully, I mean this is 2001 not '92) I'm more concerned on how they plan on keeping the gameplay intact.. DM or Co-op anywhere doesnt sound like a bad thing to me though. I mean, I can't be at the computer all the time to play doom, it's just too bad there'll be no way to have user-made wad's on it. hah, deepsea GBA anyone?

Oh yeah, and Doom64 kicked ass, the only problem was getting used to using the n64 controller, if you can do that.. I got pretty immersed in that game when it came out, the whole mood of the game just melds perfectly.. Anyone remember playing level 12? I can still hear the eerie sound of those crying babies circulating in my imp-infested nightmares, along with the flaming backgrounds of the later levels. Everything about that game pretty much screamed, "You're in hell, motherfucker! Eat shit and die."

No Super Shotgun though? That's not cool... Unless ofcourse you hate the SSG, which alot of people do. heh. But that's another topic.

There's a big problem. GBA only has six buttons which is very little to work with. SNES had 8 which were used for: fire, run, change weapon, open, strafe left, strafe right, map, menu. The GBA version better let you redefine the controls and do more things from the menu. I think this set up would work:

B = fire, A = open, L = left strafe, R = right strafe, select = change weapon, start = menu which you could access the map from. Then autorun would be on.

But we'll probably get a shitty set up with a run button and strafe on instead of separate left and right strafes and no way to change it.

Here's an idea, it was done on the original PC version of doom when using a joystick or mouse. A button- Fire B Button- open doors, and run. Then the rest is the same as
Gokuma said. Sounds like a good idea to allow us to configure controls anyway though. Another thought, one of the only things about the SNES version that was better than pc is that the invisible guys were actually see through, if you've played it you'd know what I mean. They're not black dots, you can actually see the colours and stuff. Hope they do this on the GBA.

No reason to expect the controls to be totally unconfigurable ... the old GB had plenty of games which allowed you to configure your controls (MGS springs to mind), and same goes for the GBA (Castlevania COTM) ... I would say the chances are better for a configurable system than not.

anyone played duke nukem 64? they removed the table dancers and that kinda shit. NOW
they're removing the blood from doom?! What the hell are they doing?!

This isn't the complete version yet, remember everyone. I mean, even THPS 2 on Gameboy Advance has blood! It'll be there, don't worry. And if they can't have blood in games overseas or whatever, I'm sure there'll be different versions of the game sold depending on the laws.