Video-game review: "Doom 3" executes killer graphics

By Mark Rahner
Seattle Times staff reporter

In the long-awaited video game "Doom 3," the player is a Marine making his way through a labyrinthine Martian research facility, shooting assorted zombies and monsters.

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At a Starbucks the other day, I became aware that I had moved between the sale racks for cover. The baristas hadn't had any significant change in temperament. That was from a couple of days test-driving "Doom 3" (id Software, $54.99).

Four years of waiting, breathless previews, tantalizing glimpses. Not to mention delays from id, in which its typical message was: It'll be done when it's done.

It's hard to overstate the anticipation for "Doom 3" or the impact of the series, especially in light of attempts in recent years to establish a causal link between violence in video games and reality.

The Columbine shooters were fans of "Doom," and the U.S. military used it for combat training. The ultra-violence of the new game is even more noteable coming the month after a federal judge struck down Washington's first-of-its-kind video game legislation, sponsored by state Rep. Mary Lou Dickerson, D-Seattle. The judge ruled unconstitutional the law, which made it a crime to sell minors games depicting violence on law enforcement officers. A lawsuit blaming id and other game companies for Columbine had been tossed out of court, previously, as well.

The addictive 1993 original popularized the first-person shooter genre, became one of the all-time best-selling computer games and helped propel the Mesquite, Texas-based company, which also makes the "Wolfenstein" and "Quake" games, to net revenues of $948 million in the past fiscal year.

Was "Doom 3" worth the wait? The short answer: Leave me alone!

It won't be the cultural watershed that the original became. But if that one defined the genre, this one refines it with a new graphics engine. Star programmer John Carmack and his team have a bases-loaded home run, in which the bat is also used for bludgeoning. I could barely tear myself away to type these words.

It's rated M for mature, and is not for children, the faint of heart or Buddhist monks. But you're not killing cops or other humans. You're a Marine making your way through a labyrinthine Martian research facility, shooting assorted zombies and monsters (or chainsawing them) before they can hack, bite or blast you.

The gameplay is nothing revolutionary. It's the, ah execution — the look and feel and vibe — that'll make you mouth-breathe and jump in the dark. The graphics are like looking through a window into hell. It's just about on a par with movies such as "Finding Nemo" — but the gore is more of a "Finding Hemo."

Little touches keep you riveted when the action isn't breakneck: red eyes glowing in the darkness, a limb falling from a ceiling panel with a faint, wet thud. Light and shadow are active in real time. They change as the action affects them — as you move, with the swaying of a lamp, the flickering or shorted-out bulbs, even as the light from a fireball plays along a corridor wall when it's hurled at you.
 
It takes a monstrous PC to run those graphics, and will drive some fans to use the Jaws of Life on their wallets for upgrades. You need a high-end graphics card and a Pentium IV 1.5 GHZ or its equivalent. An Xbox version is due later this year.

How to play it

You arrive on Mars just as an experiment does what they always do: It goes awry. The gates of hell open, transforming the staff into homicidal zombies and creating beasts that range from the fireball-lobbing "imps" to biting skulls with spider legs, and other mutants that defy taste and description.

There's a bit of a storyline, and you uncover clues in e-mails and voice recordings from dead staff members' PDAs that you find. You're given different objectives, which mainly involve making it past all the horrors to a location and pressing a button.

Finding the hidden codes for weapon lockers and doors gets tedious, and it's sometimes easy to lose your way in the complex.

You're playing in the dark or near-dark — a frustration that ratchets up the tension. You can cycle through an arsenal of weapons with limited ammo (that include, yes, a chainsaw), but you can't hold your flashlight and your weapon at the same time! On normal difficulty, the game's surprisingly easy, judging by my Hollering/Swearing Index. (Formula: The more often the neighbors wonder if they should call the cops, the more challenging a game is.) But it gets increasingly hard, and by midgame you'll take advantage of the quick-save feature that lets you save the game anywhere without first reaching a checkpoint.

"Doom 3" has raised the bar for this year's other hugely anticipated blockbusters — "Half-Life 2" and "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" — and sharpened it.

Mark Rahner: 206-464-8259 or mrahner@seattletimes.com