/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8580824
>>8580832
The port of Doom 1 was based on the port for the Atari Jaguar. This was pretty common for the old console ports. If done properly, it would run well, like on the Sega 32X (though that port has other flaws), and if not done well, you get Doom on the 3DO, which, in fairness, had a turd volcano for a development cycle, and it was more one man's desperate race to technically fulfill a bullshit contractual obligation he'd been tricked into by a pedophile, rather than a serious attempt at a port.

The port of Doom 1 runs, but not that well, it has the option to turn off shadows, which makes the game run better, but also renders everything at full brightness, which kills a lot of the charm of the game. Being based on the old console levelset of Doom 1, it also lacks a lot of levels, and doesn't have the big boss monsters, which even SNES Doom had, and that ran like shit. Good music though.

The port of Doom 2 uses a custom engine designed for the GBA, and actually runs decently, so it's not a big deal that you can't turn the game fullbright. It also has all the monsters and all the levels from the original Doom 2. There's some concessions here and there, some areas got cut in size a little, and the two largest levels get split up into two halves each, respectively, along with some reduction in texture variety (and some reduction in colors). Beyond that, it's basically Doom 2, just a little bit slower, and with a GBA SP, that meant having a pretty playable version of Doom 2 that fit easily in your pocket, which is actually a pretty fucking cool thing for its time period.

There's one notable flaw with the Doom 2 port though, and that is that the monster AI has a rather short range, if you're far enough a way, it doesn't matter that you're in plain sight or even shooting at them, they won't react, and if you run far enough a way, a monster will stop chasing you and go idle. This ends up being pretty easily exploitable in a fair number of places.

>>4469562
The port of Doom 2 would do that, because unlike the port of Doom, where lots of levels were cut or truncated to fit and function, since it actually was a port of the engine, Doom 2 was actually a customized version of an engine made specifically for doing FPS games on the GBA.

Through work and trickery, all of the levels of Doom 2 are actually present, and for the most of it, quite intact. Some larger areas are shrunken down for performance (usually more empty ones), and the two largest maps, Industrial Zone, and The Chasm, were in fact split into two maps each, Industrial Zone A & B, and The Chasm A & B.
Because of the fact that the levels were more vast, and since the engine wasn't working the same way, the port of Doom 2 would have the enemies simply not detect or react to you if you were like, maybe 30ft to 50ft or so, and in fact forget you existed if you moved far enough away from them, this would be necessary to make sure it wouldn't overload the engine, you couldn't have too many enemies active at once, IIRC a few places had visual blockers added in one or two places as safeguards against having too many enemies active at once.
The port of Doom 1 did not have this feature of dropping off AI, but it did have some visual blockers added here and there to avoid overload, the game had smaller amounts of enemies though.

Overall, this would let you have pretty much the complete Doom 2 on the GBA, even the Icon Of Sin and the Wolfenstein levels (even if IOS is kind of nerfed by the short AI range, and the Wolfenstein levels are mildly censored), the gameplay is mostly intact, though the short range of the AI can be pretty easily exploited.
Downside to 2 is that you can't turn off light levels, so slowdowns are more common, in the port of 1, you can turn off varied lights to improve performance in most levels. Both feature the green blood, because of the fucking Germans, but there's patches which can be applied to the .rom to make it properly red.

The GBA ports were pretty good for playing Doom on the go.

The first one was based on the Jag port, so it is missing a few levels and secrets, and the music is a little out of order.

The Doom II port, however, was awesome and didn't cut anything. It's one-to-one with the PC
Revenants can get fucked though.