Format: Advance
Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: David A Palmer Productions
Publisher: Activision

Would you have thought that the GBA could do a first-person shooter with arbitralily angled walls, textured floors and ceilings, and dynamic lighting? No? Well, guess again! In single-player mode, the framerates are actually very consistent, and, aside from the silly green blood (die Nintendo cencorship!), all of the original Doom graphical content has been unaltered. This includes the level textures and enemy sprites and animation. Sadly, the large Cyberdemon and Mechaspider sprites were omitted due to memory limitations- I would have rather seen scaled down bosses than no bosses at all. Also, in multi-player mode, the framerates drop... a lot! Dynamic lighting is disablable via the options menu, and this helps a bit, but still. All in all, the fact that someone wrote an engine this good for a handheld deserves a ton of credit.

The most important thing in porting a classic is to leave the content alone, because this is why the game was classic to begin with! Apparently, developers still haven't learned this, as the Bobby Prince's excellent Doom tunes have been totally defiled into twisted visages of their normal selves- some of the melodies are changed for no apparent reason and sound just rediculous, parts of entire songs have been removed, and most of the songs play for the wrong levels. I'm sure those music files don't take up that much space, it's like they changed the songs just to change something. Silly, silly developer. On the plus side, all of the sound effects (minus the coolest sound- the dying demon effect, probably too gross for Nintendo's good ole family values) are here and sound just fine. Still though, the music is one of the best parts of Doom, and they wrecked it completely, which really hurts the overall character of the game.

The thing that matters the most is, "How does it play?" Not only is the engine graphically faithful, but the gameplay is spot-on. Most of the maps have been altered presumably to conserve cartridge space, but the developer did a fantastic job of keeping all of the cool parts of each map totally intact, and the flow of the levels hasn't been disrupted at all. My all-time favorite Doom map, Pandemonium, is there, and I'm sure your favorite levels are in place as well. The multi-player modes play fine too, with DM2 mode present, complete with optional monsters and respawning items. It's all good!

Aside from the sound department, Doom GBA is the best port of Doom to a non-x86 platform that I've seen, and that includes the old Mac port. The levels have been altered slightly, but only in unimportant ways, and the game even features 4-player DM and coop! Unfortunately, the framerates partially hinder that experience, but it's still playable for those long car trips. I'm really disappointed with the music, and the green blood is just silly, but this is really a very good port of one of the best FPS's ever. The gameplay might be a bit too primitive for a new Doomer, but to an old-school guy like me who lived, ate, and breathed Doom back in the day, this port a lot of fun.