Would someone with an XBox 360...

[Linguica]

...like to review the Live Arcade Doom port for Doomworld? I'd like to get a review that covers it from a Doom lover's perspective and not a "hahaha this is great I haven't played Doom in 12 years I totally got the chainsaw in E1M2 again" perspective.

[Coopersville]

I'll be buying it at my earliest convienence, and I suppose I'll type up a review if no one here does it first.

[Khojan]

You can see all the official reviews on the metacritic site: http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/doom

Here's a quote from a post I made about it in another thread:

I've been playing through it. It's good and bad. The good is that it's very true to the old-school doom. That's also the bad. It's too close to it. You don't get widescreen support and none of the textures have any filtering done (super blocky up close). I thought those were two things that would have been done to make it look a little nicer today. Oh well. Still a hell of a lot of fun.

Online play is nice and quick to set up but it seems I often have to try a few times before it can find some people to play against. The leaderboards keep track of your friends' records (kills, deaths, and time played), your own record, and the top players. The few online games I've played so far seemed nice and smooth, not too much lag. VoIP is standard of course too.

The four episodes of Doom 1 are included. Maybe they'll bring out Doom 2 later too.

I've gone through all of it on hurt me plenty and I'm about a third of the way though now on ultravoilence. I'm a Doom fan so I think it's fantastic. The dual analog is no replacement for a mouse but it's pretty good when you get used to it (I normally don't play FPSs on consoles).

If they bring out Doom2 later for XBLA I'll be getting that one too. I'm sure they will since this was very likely ported from the latest code which is compatibile with Doom and Doom2. I'd say the only reason why they didn't include both at once is so that they can release Doom2 later for more money. That's pure speculation though.

[Scuba Steve]

Linguica said:

...like to review the Live Arcade Doom port for Doomworld?

Aww... you DO care about this place ;)

[kristus]

RUN SCUBA, IT'S A TRICK!

[DeumReaper]

[Khojan]

Nice little review.

Two things:

The deathmatch achievements are for 50 and 100 kills, not 10 and 100.

Also I could be wrong but it looked to me like the deathmatch leaderboard and ranks were based on kills only and it didn't seem to account for deaths.

[Jehar]

Hmm, I'm a information junky when it comes to my deathmatch. The more information you can give me about my performance and how it relates to others is a big plus in my book.

The question I'm asking right now is if MS is going to do the smart thing and start releasing more content for their port, such as levels and mods. This could *really* give a boost to things. I'm also sure that they could find a way to turn this into a cash cow without doing anything evil.

[Khojan]

Yeah. I just checked out the leaderboards. They're grouped together by kills. After that I don't know what determines the order. It doesn't look like it's either deaths or time played. Maybe good old randomness.

[Ledmeister]

BTW, if you've got the earlier Xbox "Ultimate Doom" port bundled in with the Xbox Doom 3 games, you'll probably like this port better. Excerpt from a minireview at my site:

"Those previous Xbox Ultimate Doom versions had some problems that have been corrected here: The background skies for each level now correctly match those in the equivalent PC maps, the music and sound FX settings can be adjusted independently, the Kills/Secrets flaw introduced into map E4M1 is not present here, Skill levels can now be set for Co-Op games, Deathmatch items respawn, and common gameplay actions no longer toggle cheat codes."

(As has been said, this version also has better resolution and sound, and online multiplayer, etc...)

It's not flawless, but IMHO it's the best commercial console port of the original PC game so far.

[Dittohead]

Ledmeister said:

It's not flawless, but IMHO it's the best commercial console port of the original PC game so far.

Very true. Too bad we couldn't get a version like this to run smoothly on the original playstation. At the time, this port would have been absolutely killer. The sounds are pretty good and the coop and dm features are great too. Anyway, I think it's a great port and worth the 10 bucks.

I should be ashamed to say this, but I couldn't find a few secrets on some of the episode 1 maps. And I'm sure I don't know all of them in e2 or e3, either. Oh well, it'll be fun finding them all over again.

[Sporku]

Ledmeister said:

common gameplay actions no longer toggle cheat codes.

That was really the most annoying thing about the XBox port that came with Doom 3. Whoever came up with the cheat-triggering scheme in that really needs to be slapped. I remember playing it and randomly getting invulnerability out of nowhere.

Anyways, it's kind of hard to get a good idea about the quality of this port when all I had time to try was the demo, which has.. one level.

[Ledmeister]

Dittohead said:

Very true. Too bad we couldn't get a version like this to run smoothly on the original playstation. At the time, this port would have been absolutely killer. The sounds are pretty good and the coop and dm features are great too. Anyway, I think it's a great port and worth the 10 bucks.

Yeah, but the PlayStation games have a charm all their own. :)

I should be ashamed to say this, but I couldn't find a few secrets on some of the episode 1 maps. And I'm sure I don't know all of them in e2 or e3, either. Oh well, it'll be fun finding them all over again. [/B]

The maps are straight outta the PC game, so if you ever want to know where the secrets are at a glance, you know where to look. ;)