Doom 3

No that isn’t a black square you are looking at above. It’s a  screenshot. A screenshot from Doom 3. Forget story and inventive game play, Doom 3 is all about mood lighting. And by “mood lighting” I mean darkness. Lots and lots of darkness… and shooting things.

The original Doom is a classic. I look at it as the pinnacle of the arcade-style shooter. When games were all about insane difficulty and scoring points. In some respects Doom 3 maintains much of the same feel of the original: lots of jump scares and monsters tucked away in places that make little sense in terms of real-world design. They exist only to jump out at you at the very moment you walk by or pick up that weapon upgrade across the room that is so tantalizingly lit. Your only goal is to shoot everything and then collect keys so you can get to the next area and shoot more things.

The graphics are pretty amazing and they seem to have aged quite well. It helps that everything is hidden in shadows. However, the maps all tend to look and play the same. The game does move quickly and offered me enough of a challenge to keep me plowing through to the end despite the lackluster story line. I do like the concept behind Doom quite a bit. The idea of a doorway to Hell occurs quite a few times in Lucio Fulci movies like The Beyond and The Gates of Hell. For that reason alone I was able to ignore the shortcomings of the story and just soak in the sinister atmosphere, and, in the end, that’s really what Doom 3 is all about.