More Room for Doom

Sometimes I just don't get ROM hackers. Case in point... someone (actually four someones) went to the trouble of improving the Game Boy Advance version of Doom, nearly twenty years after its release and over twenty-five years after the game made its PC debut. Is this hack, called the PC Doom Total Conversion, better than the original? Certainly. I'm not a fan of this series and some of the changes are obvious enough to smack even me in the face. Let me dig up a couple of photos...

The original by Activision and David A. Palmer Productions

The hack by KippyKip, Doomhack, et al

There's no question the hacked game looks more like the PC version... the red blood has been restored, numbers in the heads up display are more detailed, textures have more definition, the colors are no longer washed out for the sake of the old, unlit Game Boy Advance, etc. It goes a little deeper than just visuals, though. Notice the pit in the center of the screen in the Doom hack. Now notice that the pit isn't there at all in the original game, likely removed to lessen the burden on the design team. I haven't been through the entire game, but this stage alone has several areas which weren't in Activision's port, and I suspect the Toxin Refinery is only the tip of the iceberg.

So I've got to give KippyKip and his crew credit for their work, but at the same time, I have to wonder if all this was necessary. The original Game Boy Advance version of Doom got high marks from the press, with a Metacritic average of 81%. It wasn't perfectly faithful to the PC game, but the fact that someone got Doom running on a handheld in 2001 made it easy to overlook the omissions.

Beyond that, the Game Boy Advance isn't the ideal place for a port of Doom. Yes, this hack is better than the original, but with the limitations of the GBA as an anchor, there's no way it can stack up to conversions for later handhelds. Out of curiosity, I fired up Doom Legacy for the PSP, and it's so much better than its Game Boy Advance cousin that it's hard to imagine why anyone would take that step back into the past. 

Sprucing up a Game Boy Advance conversion of Doom (which was more of a novelty than a viable way to play the game even in 2001) is rather like welding a jet engine to the roof of a Volkswagen Bug. Sure it might actually work, but uh... why? 

But hey, what the hell do I know. Doom has popped up on worse.