Doom 3 leaps to the Xbox and tears it apart with an awesome conversion: Hell never looked this good on a home system!
Sometime later I came accross the Collector's Edition for the Xbox and I decided to take another chance with it, since it got some very good reviews and I was lacking worthy Xbox games. Boy, this time the game really hooked me. Why? First the fact that consoles lack the kind of FPS that PCs have been getting for years: the scary ones. I don't consider Duke Nukem or the other Dooms scary, they were in fact released for consoles. I mean the really horror ones like Painkiller.
First of all, the game looks awesome. It didn't lose a lot from the PC's graphical ah-ness. Some tetures here and there look a little scrappy, but since you'll play mostly in the dark, you won't notice them so much. The monsters look just like the PC ones and are much more chocking to see in a TV screen that a monitor. All the detail this game has really shows us that the Xbox is not dead and is not even close to its max in terms of evolution. Too bad developers from now on will tend to forget about the poor black box.
Sound-wise, the game didn't lose anything. All the really well acted dialogue is back, and the effects sound really good overall. The music isn't really my style, but it upps the tension at the right places.
The game was really well ported when we look at the control scheme. You can quickly change from flashlight to weapon and the weapons themselves can be binded to the directional pad, so you can be tactical and leave only the weapons you prefer there. The right trigger act like the fire button and clicking the analog pad lets you crouch.
Some areas of the game were scrapped because of the RAM power of processing on the Xbox, but nothing vital. Only some outdoor places that didn't have enemies and some indoor corridors were shortened. This time you won't be walking at Mar's surface while running out of air!
Doom 3 for the Xbox really proves how a good PC game can be great on a console. Genres that are stronger on one platform can very succeed and become even better games with good porting and sound development. We can really see the effort id Software went through to bring us this.
And it is worth mentioning that the expansion pack is also available and is worth playing after you come back from Hell in this game.
Thanks for reading!