Game:

Doom (1993)

Duration: 16:36

2,491 views

17

This video was captured using the actual game on an actual Super Nintendo.

If you've browsed through some of my videos, you know that I am definitely a hardcore Doom fan. I love me some Doom. However Doom on the Super Nintendo is not the best port of Doom ever made. Visually it is certainly the worst, but given the fact that the SNES should have never been able to do this game and be more than playable makes it a worthy version. Compare this version to the Sega 32X version which should have been able to do a much better job than what it did (especially the horrible music) and you'll find Technically speaking the 32X version is the worst port of Doom. Not to mention that the price of admission was much cheaper on the SNES. If you wanted to play the 32X version..........well......you had to have a 32X which was a $200 add on to the Sega Genesis, assuming you already had one of those too. The SNES cart cost $80 which was $20 more expensive than a normal cart most likely due to the expensive ROM chips and FX 2 chip.

I am going to come clean here. I rewrote this entire description because I felt like I was way too hard on this game. I had not taken consideration that PC gaming was even less popular back then than it is now and that many people who played Doom for the first time played the SNES version. I played the original PC version first in 1993, so when I saw this in 1995 I laughed. However if I had never played the PC version first and saw Doom for the first time on the SNES I would have been completely knocked off my rocker.

The game is perfectly playable and runs surprisingly fast despite it's low frame rate. The enemies no longer turn around and shoot each other like in the PC version and they always face you. The controls are a tiny bit frustrating as you cannot turn and strafe at the same time, but it is a manageable flaw. The sound quality is pretty muffled as the sampling quality was kept low for space reasons. Unfortunately the SNES didn't have enough sound channels to fully accommodate all the music and sound effects, so the end result is that most of the time you cannot hear when you're being shot at. If you turn the music off then that frees up enough channels to remedy this problem but who likes playing Doom with no music? People who like the Atari Jaguar. Wait....who likes the Atari Jaguar?

The bottom line is that this was an incredible effort to port a next generation game onto a current generation console and the end result was surprisingly decent. Is it worth owning today? If you're a hardcore Doom fan like me absolutely. If this is the first Doom you've ever played and it has nostalgic value, again absolutely. If you are a collector, definitely. If you want to just sit down and play some Doom, no. This version was overshadowed 2 years before it was released and is certainly not worth playing if you want to seriously play Doom. The PS1 ports and GZDoom ports on the PC are there for that.

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