Favorite console port of Doom

[Koko Ricky]

Doom 64's insistence on providing a new adventure is really attractive and hard to ignore. The PSX versions are a bit more mature in comparison, as Doom 64's art direction is less professional than the source material, in addition to the soundtrack being lower fidelity and thus slightly less effective. At the same time, there's something incredibly disturbing about Doom 64, much of which is related to the stronger emphasis on hell maps, as well as the extensive use of occult imagery. Along with the highly memorable level design, it's hard to beat as a Doom experience.

[Pencil of Doom]

PSX and SNES, PSX because top notch sound effects and music that fits well plus the coloured lighting gives the levels a refreshing and cool look.
Snes cuz' first console port played, via emulator though, despite being sluggish, it's playable and has some nice music.

[TheNerdTurtle2]

SNES.



Said no one ever.

I own the SNES Doom and have sat down to play my favorite levels (E1) and I honestly couldn't make it through, so I bought GBA Doom :P

J.B.R said:

PSX and SNES, PSX because top notch sound effects and music that fits well plus the coloured lighting gives the levels a refreshing and cool look.
Snes cuz' first console port played, via emulator though, despite being sluggish, it's playable and has some nice music.

Have you played the SNES on actual hardware, I'm not kidding when I say it's slower. I have played on an emulator and it doesn't seem near as sluggish. Maybe it's just me?

[VGamingJunkie]

Honestly, it's a miracle the game even runs at all, given what they had to work with. I'd say the SNES was the most ambitious of the ports, given they based it on the PC version unlike the others which got Jaguar hand-me-downs and, consequently, was the only console port before the Ps1 version that got the Cyberdemon and Spider Mastermind. Sad thing is, it still doesn't seem as sluggish as the 3DO or Saturn versions which have far more capable hardware.

[Maes]

MetroidJunkie said:

Sad thing is, it still doesn't seem as sluggish as the 3DO or Saturn versions which have far more capable hardware.

Well let's not forget that unlike the 3DO or Saturn, it ran on a completely different and cut-down engine, which however had the advantage of being almost fully hardware accelerated (heh) by the FX chip, so the sluggishness is mostly due to memory bandwidth constraints. The fact that it had the weakest CPU out of all its competitors was, paradoxically, rendered quite irrelevant. If you could stuff the same FX chip hardware on a NES cart (the 8-bit one), it would probably run almost just as well (crappy visuals and sound aside).

Ironically, the "better" console ports of the era could not benefit from any hardware acceleration whatsoever (with the exception of the PS1), and so had to rely on brute CPU strength. Not a very good proposition, when the CPUs used in most of those systems were at best comparable with a low-end 486, in terms of raw number crunching performance. Trying to beat PCs at their own game was not the smartest move for any console port of any game of any time, period.