This part of the episode is brought to you in part by NordVPN. What better way to prepare for the upcoming video game streaming war than with a VPN? NordVPN encrypts your data so it can't be seen by ISP's, potential hackers, or game companies. For a limited time, get 70% off a three-year plan at NordVPN.com/stopskeletons. This special offer makes your subscription just 3 dollars and 49 cents a month, so you can browse securely on up to six devices at once! I'm in Ireland! Honest! And for a short time, use code 'STOPSKELETONS' at checkout to get an extra month for free! Link in the description below, try out a 30-day money-back guarantee at NordVPN.com/stopskeletons, and the offer code 'STOPSKELETONS'. Thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring this part of the episode. It is Doom season, folks! It's almost the holidays, and my hype for the big followup to Doom's utterly fantastic 2016 reboot, Doom Eternal, is at a peak level! And then when Bethesda surprise-released ports of Ultimate Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3 on the Switch, PS4, and Xbox One to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, my little Cyberdemon heart almost couldn't take it, and then, a few months later, they announced a re-release of Doom 64, it's the best one!! IT'S ABOUT TIME!! However. In typical Doom port fashion, these ports to modern consoles still weren't without issues. Yeah, you'd think it'd be impossible to screw up Classic Doom in 2019, but Bethesda somehow found a way. Still, all this made me think of a time when the console hardware limitations that kneecapped Doom ports... vanished! I've covered many console ports of Doom over the years, I've seen it all, I've seen terrible framerate, missing campaign levels, awful/amazing music... [grating synthesizer buzz] But for this episode, we move to an era where all of that changed! Or, where it should've. These ports may not be weird, ambitious or unnecessary on their own, but what is weird and unnecessary is how some of them still botched it! That perfect PC Doom is still a struggle on consoles! Welcome back to Punching Weight, and get ready to rip and tear, this is Doom Ports 3! Oh, and it's not Doom 3 ports, it's actually... ... we're gonna be talking about Doom 3 a lot. But we're not gonna be talking about Doom 3 actually in this video, It'll make sense by the end, I swear. Uh... let's go! We start with Doom 3 Limited Collector's Edition for the Xbox! I've owned this game since it came out in April 2005, not because it's an interesting and ambitious port of Doom 3, no, the reason I hunted this game down was because it had Ultimate Doom and Doom II. And I do mean THIS version, Vanilla Xbox Doom 3 did NOT have Classic Doom, for some reason. Now, that alone was all I needed, but what I didn't realize at the time was how important this release was! This would be THE first time these games would appear on consoles in their entirety! Every single console port of Doom until this point had levels missing or slimmed down, a different soundtrack, and only a few had any multiplayer to speak of! For over a decade, Doom had not been fully represented in the console space, but that finally changed in 2005! Made by Vicarious Visions, this port of Doom 3 is interesting in its own right, but again, we're saving that discussion for another time. Truth be told, this is still the only version of Doom 3 I've ever played, so I got some catching up to do. I think what's most impressive is that, well, beyond being the first time all levels from Thy Flesh Consumed and larger Doom II levels like the Industrial Zone and The Chasm appeared unbroken on consoles, it also has two exclusive new levels: Sewers and Betray, both of which are pretty big, and a decent amount to chew on! Sewers, accessed from E1M1 in Doom 1, in particular is almost too long, but I tend to not enjoy the more sprawling Doom levels, and the titular sewer area of this level is quite the maze! Betray, accessed from Level 2 on Doom II, is a puzzle of small rooms linked together with warps. I liked it more than Sewers, plus it had a couple 'o Wolfenstein guards, which was fun. These levels are a really cool addition, but they're too easy to miss! They're accessed my activating random walls. I didn't even know they were there until researching for this video! Tch. And just when I thought I couldn't learn anything more about Doom! But enough about the levels, how does it actually play? Once you get past how weirdly dark it is, - I mean, Doom's already kind of a dark game, but what's goin' on here? - I'd say it plays about as well as the PC version! Solid framerate, good controls... ... okay, actually, the controls are a little odd: The A button doesn't open doors, instead it's "Repeat Info", in case you need to remember you just picked up a shotgun? Why is such an important button used for such a useless thing? And Map is D-pad up? Another weird choice. Why's there no button customization? Turning on God Mode is pushing Activate three times while holding Run, which I constantly did accidentally, it was kind of annoying, and overall, the audio is a little muffled? [slightly low-quality, clipping sounds of carnage] But these are all really small things, and man, I played the hell out of this back in the day, plus, it had co-op and multiplayer, though just local, but it was still pretty cool! But again, this is only the steel case version of Doom 3, however, there was an alternative: The Doom 3 expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil, was released six months later, and all Xbox versions have The Ultimate Doom, Doom II, the two extra levels, plus the Master Levels for Doom II, making this the more complete package, depending on how you were looking at it. I did not realize that at the time, I probably would've been happier with this one, but I don't think I could've waited that long. I needed my Doom! I needed it. I had a problem. I still have that problem. The Master Levels for Doom II is an awesome get for this package, they are some hardcore levels! And I'd like to say that this was their first time ever appearing on consoles, but that's actually not true! There's also Final Doom for the PS1, a game built on a house of lies, with about half of it being made up of Doom II Master Levels. I mean, how you gonna call a game "Final Doom", but you only got six levels from The Plutonia Experiment?! C'mon! Plus, it runs worse than the Custom PlayStation Edition, overall it's kind of a fascinating mess, but anyway, this is at least the first time console players could play Doom II Master Levels at a decent framerate. Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil was developed by Nerve Software, a company founded by former id Software employees, who would handle most Doom console ports from here on out! Everything here runs and controls as well as it did on the Limited Collector's Edition, and more than likely shares a lot of the same code. The two bonus levels and the Master Levels are great additions, but future Doom II re-releases would instead have a different bonus episode, No Rest for the Living! These maps were designed by Nerve, and first appeared on the XBLA version of Doom II, and then later on the Doom 3 BFG Edition, which also features Ultimate Doom for good measure. At this point, we've now moved on to a new console port of Doom, you can think of it as two slightly different versions split across five games. The XBLA/BFG iteration of Classic Doom is basically a slight improvement over the OG Xbox version, with brighter graphics, a smoother look, splitscreen and online multiplayer, and better controls! Still no button customization, but it's no biggie here. I think I'd like No Rest for the Living more than the Master Levels, it's only nine levels, but they're huge and pretty well made! Apparently they're so huge and packed with enemies, they couldn't run on the original 90's engine, so it's Classic Doom, but without limits! I love that kinda stuff! Toss in the fact that these XBLA/BFG games are the only Doom ports with online multiplayer, - that's still true, by the way - and you could make the case that these are the best console ports of Doom and Doom II. The BFG Edition was also the first time any Doom action came to the PlayStation since the PlayStation 1! But bringing it all back to where we started, I'm pretty disappointed that the Nerve-developed 25th Anniversary ports of Doom and Doom II are rife with a LOT of minor issues. Like, a LOT. It's a bit- bit of a trainwreck. In retrospect, there was trouble right away with these ports, even in the launch announcement trailer, they screwed up the orders of Doom I and II! Like, you thought we weren't gonna notice that after the Doom I logo, you show Level 2 from Doom II? And after the Doom II logo, you show E2M1 of Doom I? Slayers Club, my big toe! Don't @ me! Now, to be fair, this was just the trailer at QuakeCon, they fixed it with the other trailers, but still! Doom on Switch? Portable Classic Doom?! Insta-purchase, right? Well, minutes after launch, social media exploded with grim news: An internet connection and registering to BethesdaNet were required to play, on all systems. It was basically DRM on one of the most DRM-free video games in existence. Bethesda claims it wasn't to enforce DRM, and someone's not getting the company memos, because the port of Doom 3, which was ported instead by Panic Button, never had these issues. It was apparently a way to get people to join their proprietary Slayers Club, which... Hey! Don't @ me! Wait, no, please DO @ me, because I put hundreds of hours into the Doom 32X port in the 90's! I'm already part of the OG Slayers Club anyway! DRM or not, it still took Bethesda three weeks to patch out this requirement, and it's still prompted on startup, and if you're playing offline, it hassles you for an internet connection three times. Dude, should I just get my GBA instead? Okay, but what about the actual gameplay itself? Let's talk about the game. I went all-in on the Switch port, because you know I'm all about Doom on the go, so I can't speak for PlayStation or Xbox, but I can say these are some pretty solid ports of Doom! All the levels, all the monsters, it's all here! But still with the few baffling issues! The Switch version apparently has dropped frames when docked, though not enough for me to notice, and I wasn't a huge fan of playing with Joy-Cons, movement felt better on a Pro Controller, which is a bummer because I bought this for portability! And it crashes sometimes when you put it into Sleep Mode, I mean, c'mon guys! We actually got footage of it happening earlier when we were setting it up! Roll it! We're trying to set up right now! And it froze on me! GRACE: It froze?!
DEREK: [stammering] It fr- it's fr- We haven't even set up- the mic isn't even on yet, I'm still setting up the set- It's still frozen! It's like... why you messin' up my portable Doom?! I just wanna play portable Doom! C'mon, guys! For some reason there's a level select for Master Levels, but not for Doom I or Doom II. This is a small complaint, but I would've really loved the option to just jump right to the Tower of Babel and start trading rockets with the Cyberdemon! There's been a lot of hubbub about the music, and it's true, at the time of producing this video, the music in these 25th Anniversary ports is a bit slower than the PC original. Now, my favorite version of Doom is the PlayStation 1 port, which doesn't have any of this music, so I didn't even notice at first! But it turns out I should have noticed a long time ago, because this is how the music plays in every port Nerve has ever done! Switch: [E1M1 theme playing at a slower tempo] XBLA: [E1M1 theme playing slightly slow, and with low quality instruments] Original Xbox: [E1M1 theme playing at a slower tempo] I compared them all, the music is slower in every single one! What I did notice was the inaccurate lighting: My favorite jumpscare in E1M3 is ruined, et cetera, This strange lighting also appeared in the BFG versions. Now apparently, these two issues are going to be patched out eventually, but seriously, what the Cacodemon?! Update: On September 26th, two months after launch, they did release a patch, but it was a patch for fixes that shouldn't have needed fixes in the first place! These are, again, very small issues, but re-releasing Doom ports should have been a slam dunk! Previously Doom ports were just extras, bonus content, but these are to celebrate the series' 25th anniversary, and to build hype for a new game! This was the time to finally get it right! I don't think they have any plans to fix other issues, like the stretched-out aspect ratio, but to be honest, that one doesn't bother me. Thicc Cacodemons are valid too, y'all! Mm, that demon's thicc! Dummy thicc demons, now I'm talkin'. In terms of other content, there's no online multiplayer, just splitscreen, which is kinda disappointing. These two ports have all episodes of Doom, and even the Master Levels of Doom II, however, I guess this shouldn't be considered the be-all end-all of Doom. It's missing all the console-exclusive levels, plus there's been nary a whisper about Final Doom - no big surprise there, but what's odd to me is the omission of No Rest For The Living, which was even made by the same people! I feel like I... yeah, I'm being extra-negative on these ports, but I just can't understand how Bethesda is making these kinds of mistakes, and I'll tell you this: It makes me worried for the Doom 64 port. So with no place else left to go, it was time to check out the iPhone ports! Yep, it had to happen, it's time for Punching Weight to go mobile! You thought I was kidding when I said I love portable Doom, I need that ultimate portable experience! And actually, Doom on iOS is not a new thing, originally it came out in 2009, ported by John Carmack himself, coincidentally right before id Software was purchased by Bethesda. I slept on that version though, and then 2017's iOS 11 update made it unplayable. Same for Doom RPG I and II. Sleepin' on mobile ports... gotta fix that. But before you get too depressed about that, Doom is back, baby! Released alongside all these new console ports, plus this is the first time Doom II came to iOS! And of course, because this is iOS, we have to contend with touch controls. Now, touch controls are why I avoid most mobile ports, it just never works, but the touch controls in the 25th Anniversary Doom and Doom II on iOS are... borderline unplayable. Strafing is mapped to the left screen, while turning and firing is mapped to the right, it tries to emulate a controller setup. Movement is hard enough thanks to a bit of a delay, but mapping your look and shoot to the same side was a huge mistake, making precise aiming an incredible struggle! Double-tapping is supposed to auto-fire so you can shoot while turning, but I had a hell of a time getting it to work! And of course, there's no controller customization. It's worth noting that these controls are different from Carmack's original version, which also had multiplayer network via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth! Where the heck did that go?! To be fair, the problem of how to translate a game like Doom to touch controls is fascinating, but Bethesda changing up the controls is basically a tacit admission that they still hadn't nailed it. According to Reddit, both iOS Dooms have support for mobile controllers like Nimbus, so there's that. All I know is playing with touch screen is a nightmare. Oh, and at startup you're still asked to join BethesdaNet. Thanks, I hate it. So yep! Another horribly compromised port of Doom, the Circle of Life continues! Is this about as good as it could get on a smartphone? ... I guess I'm not the best person to ask, but how about this: I have played the Saturn and 3DO ports for multiple hours, I've played a LOT of bad Doom, BUT I've never rage-quit Doom before iOS. Is that its own recommendation? [scoff] I dunno. Pull out your smartphones, friends, and play the worst version of Doom I've ever experienced! [Grace chuckles off-screen] Can I stop?
[Grace chuckles off-screen] GRACE: Yeah, you can stop. [laughing]
DEREK: Okay. That's enough Doom... for now. 2019 has become a banner year for Doom, we'll definitely be back when they release the re-release of Doom 64, and oh snap, will it run as shockingly good as Doom 2016 did? You're gonna want to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell, because we got a lot of great stuff planned for the next few months, Also, we got new T-shirts and other merch, and of course, the specialest possible thanks to our Patreon supporters who make sure we'll still be able to make videos even if YouTube finds some ridiculous, random reason to shut down or hide the channel. Join their ranks, see your name here, or hey... Just keep watching, and thanks so much for watching, I'm Derek Alexander, this is Stop Skeletons From Fighting, and we'll see you again real soon.
