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Classic walkabout shoot'em up from RCI. Reviewed by Richard Goodwin and Alasdair Bailey.

Well, you all know the story. Doom is undeniably the most popular, the most enduring computer game of the nineties. Released initially in 1992, with Doom II and The Ultimate Doom (Doom with one additional episode: Thy Flesh Consumed) following in quick succession, the game has captivated and inspired a generation of would-be genocidal lunatics. With the the release of Final Doom, the last two episodes of the saga, and the 3000 level collection, by professional and amateur level designers alike, the trilogy is complete. R-Comp have it for us, at last, as a boxed collector set, which will also run on the PC.

Doom was the final result of the project that Wolfenstein 3D was the halfway stage of; a first-person view of a 3D world in which you can wander anywhere, dispatching enemies with a variety of weaponry which you pick up in your travels. This itself led on to the far more sophisticated Quake and Quake 2, but many still play Doom. Why? Read on...

Rich...

Some people can't see what all the fuss is about; it's a four-year-old game that's been out on every other platform you can think of, but that is like saying that the Mona Lisa is an ages old picture that's been on postcards for years, so why bother seeing the real thing? Doom is a classic - it wouldn't have come out on platforms like the Playstation without the Suits knowing they'd get a good return (and it sold out every week for the first two months of its release), and it's still in the shops for the PC. This is the genuine article, often imitated but never bettered - until it was superseded by the same software company bringing out Quake.

The world moves around you, and this makes for a terrifically exciting and involving game, as you find yourself trying to dodge out of the way of bullets as if this would affect your computer player. You can actually see your gun recoil as it's fired, and the bullets hit your enemy (or cut them in half!); as such it's got a 15 rating, so it's only for the older gamers.

The Acorn version, a long time in development, is an excellent conversion - as long as you have a high-specification Risc PC. It'll play reasonably on a Risc PC, but a Strong ARM makes it so much better. With 2MB of Video RAM you can play it full-screen in 640x400 - better than the PC - or in the desktop up to about 1024x768. You can drop out of a fullscreen game into the desktop to do something else and the game carries on playing; it's not just a great game, but also a good test of what a Risc PC can do. Of course on an ARM 600 or 700 machine you're looking at playing it in the standard resolution outside the desktop, and possibly making the playing area a little smaller to improve the speed.

Niggles include the lack of music - you have to buy some kind of MIDI player, either a proper MIDI interface and keyboard (costly) or a software emulator (quite cheap, but adds to the amount of loading on your processor), but this isn't really necessary and can't detract from one of the greatest games of all time - just buy it. NOW!

Alasdair...

The Acorn Doom front-end is very easy to use. On double-clicking on its icon, a window pops up into which the level file you want to play is dragged. Then there are options to change the keys, mouse and display options and then it's just a matter of clicking Play and the game starts to load. The display control dialogue box is quite simple to use for the advanced user but I would have liked to have seen a pull down menu for the screen resolution setting rather than the pair of writable icons which were used. My other main criticism of the front-end program is the lack of advanced options such as those present in some other versions, for example and option to re-spawn the monsters after they've been killed.

With regard to speed and framerates, Acorn Doom is playable on an ARM600/700 in the default 320*256 resolution and maintains a just about playable framerate in this resolution in 16 million colours on my ARM700 RiscPC. An option to switch off all sound processing, however, would speed things up on the slower machines but this is, unfortunately, not present in the Acorn version. Whilst on the subject of sound, the in-game music will not play unless you have MIDI hardware or emulation installed on your machine. This is a pity, as the music tracks could have quite easily been converted to a native Acorn music format such as 'Digital Symphony' but this, apparently, would have caused problems with standard Doom add-on levels and patches from the PC version of the game.

At the moment, the Acorn Doom player doesn't feature any support for network/internet multiplayer modes. This is a big disappointment since games such as Doom and its counterpart, Quake, really come into their own when played against other human opponents. However, R-Comp have said that Acorn-Acorn serial, network and internet multiplay will be available through a freely downloadable patch on their www site in a few week's time.