Genre: First-Person Shooter
Developer: Williams Entertainment
Publisher: Williams Entertainment

For this PlayStation version of Doom, the entire ray-casting engine was swapped out to leverage the PSX's 3D hardware: the game draws the level geometry using triangle-based vertical "strips", to minimize affine texture warping. The textures look super sharp, especially certain details such as the door textures. There are some added parlor tricks such as transparent windows added in spots, cool alpha-blended demons, and "Quake 2"-esque colored lighting! The framerate is great compared to other console ports, but does struggle in some of the later high-geometry maps. It's too bad the sprites weren't re-drawn to be higher resolution-- but that would come in the future, in "Doom 64".

For this rendition of the game the beloved Bobby Prince soundtrack is out, atmospheric music is in. The new music runs on the PSX's DSP, and the samples sound really good. Various sound effects, especially for monsters, are swapped around, and an awesome hardware reverb effect makes everything sound echoey and spooky. This reviewer wishes the original music had been converted instead, but at the same time this new "take" on the Doom aural aesthetic is not bad at all.

This port's control scheme is fantastic: L1 and R1 strafe, L2 and R2 cycle weapons, square runs, triangle shoots, and circle opens doors. With this default button mapping playing the game is a cinch-- it's even easy to circle strafe! This release has tons and tons of content, around sixty maps in total. The player can pick "Ultimate Doom" or "Doom II" from the main menu. The former just runs all of the levels together in a giant sequence, versus having separate episodes.

This is a truly phenomenal console port of Doom. It has a good framerate, and leverages the PlayStation hardware in clever ways. Apparently the background is that some people at Williams wanted to make an "Ultra 64" version of Doom for Nintendo's impending hardware, but when that hardware was delayed numerous times Carmack suggested starting with this PSX version to get their feet wet. In a lot of ways this version of Doom reminds this reviewer of the "Macenstein" Wolf3d 3DO port-- both are like ultimate versions of their respective games, with zillions of maps, but with their own unique personality as well.