Retro Gaming Australia

Doom II: Hell on Earth is the follow up to the one of the most influential games of all time, and while it seems like it is treading familiar ground, the devil is in the detail. Doom II‘s levels are much larger and more intense, and the combination of these larger areas with the more dangerous enemies makes for a more challenging game.

Doom II: Hell on Earth was one of the most anticipated releases of 1994. While not drastically different from the original game, it added the double barrel shotgun and a seriously refined set of 30 levels (plus two secret ones paying homage to id Software classics).

A couple of years back, id Software released the source code to Doom, and a bunch of source ports popped up to enhance the game. One of the most popular of these was ZDoom. ZDoom added all kinds of enhancements to Doom, including those brought to the table by other Doom engine games like Hexen and Strife.

It’s been quiet on the ZDoom front for the last two years, but last weekend, the long awaited version 2.6.0 was released.

The new version adds a long list of new features, which you can read here.

Bethesda’s Doom 3: BFG Edition, the prettied up version of id Software’s 2004 hit, will be released on October 16 for North America and October 19 for Europe.

The package includes The Ultimate Doom, Doom II: Hell on Earth, remastered versions of Doom 3 and Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil and the new 7 level pack “The Lost Mission” and will set you back $US29.99 on the PC and $US39.99 on the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.

We look forward to getting our monster closet action on then.

As one of the most influential games of all time, Doom continues to be ported to just about every platform released – either officially or unofficially. This has been going on for many years; even though Doom was a couple of years old by the time the PlayStation was released, the game was still popular enough for Midway and GT Interactive to team up to bring it to Sony’s console and sell more than a million units.

Bethesda has announced that they will be releasing an enhanced version of id Software’s 2004 hit Doom 3, entitled Doom 3: BFG Edition.

Doom 3: BFG Edition will give the game a partial makeover, giving the game’s visuals a slight spit and polish, along with adding 7 all new levels created for this version of the game. The Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil expansion pack will also be included. Of course, no Doom re-release is complete without ports of Doom and Doom II: Hell on Earth.

It will be interesting to see how this game runs on the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, given that the history of idTech 4 games on those systems hasn’t exactly been rosy. We’ll find out when Doom 3: BFG edition releases later this year.

Avenge your rabbit friend (seriously) in this fourth episode of Doom

The Ultimate Doom was the 1995 re-release of Doom (post-Doom II) which added an extra episode called Thy Flesh Consumed on top of all of the other improvements introduced post-release. However, due to id Software’s focus on other projects, the quality of the levels in the expansion is inconsistent.

Can you believe that it has been almost 7 years since Doom 3 was released? Shocking how quickly time passes. Saying that, I have no doubt that many of you immediately question the game’s credentials as a “retro” game, but it fits into our current coverage timeline (games on hardware released up until November 20, 2004 – the day before the release of the Nintendo DS), so as far as we’re concerned, it’s ripe for the picking.

Doom 3 was met with awe when it was first revealed at E3 2001, but the response to the final result in August 2004 was a little more tepid – though it was still most certainly a good game. Steven L. Kent, former video game journalist and author of the excellent The Ultimate History of Video Games takes us behind the scenes of the development of this landmark game in The Making of Doom 3 (ISBN: 9780072230529).

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