"; if(is_file("header.php")) include "header.php"; else include "../header.php"; ?>

Come with me, down in the dark Doom 3 is smart. It knows your computer, and it scales its graphical detail and quality to the available horsepower under the hood, leaving only a handful of graphics options available for you to tweak and fiddle with. And Doom 3 looks like no game before it-the level of graphic realism is unparalleled to date-even on my current computer where I'm probably only getting half of what the game is truly capable of producing: I have all the visual bells and whistles turned on, AA turned off, and resolution set at 800x600. Amazingly, Doom 3 at 800x600 looks better than other games do at twice that resolution. What it must look like maximized, I really cannot imagine; I know I've never seen anything like it to form a comparison. The environmental texture detail, the character detail, the facial animations-all the best I've ever seen. You begin the game as a marine arriving at UAC headquarters on Mars, a mining and research facility on the cusp of monumental discovery. The facility is massive, sprawling in myriad directions, including downward. And it feels cold and impersonal, a workplace, a dimly-lit construct of steel and glass where shadows huddle in the corners and little hope grows. After an introductory sequence that serves as a tour quite reminiscent of the opening scenes from the original Half-Life game, and after some story-setting NPC conversations, something goes wrong at UAC. As you knew it would. The facility is heavily damaged in places. Electric is sporadic. Most computers and systems have gone offline. Lighting is out or flickering in most areas. And the people are gone...or are they? Eventually you find that most of your fellow marines have been transformed into coordinated, hellish killing teams. UAC workers have been slaughtered and reanimated as zombie-like creatures. The first stages of the rest of the game have begun; the war of attrition, of survival, is on. Turns out the UAC's efforts in mining on Mars had yielded the discovery of a portal deep beneath the planet's surface. A portal to where? Other worlds, maybe. Or one place: Hell. Fragmentary stone tablets are discovered, runes are decrypted, the leader of the UAC becomes a demented madman bent on bringing the malevolent forces teeming on the far side of the portal through to this world, to Mars, and then to Earth. The player, a nameless, voiceless marine grunt, might be all that can stand in the way of this. While other marines also do survive, and they stay in static contact as you wind your way through the levels, you never get to meet up with them. With the portal to Hell breached, the descriptions of the foes you face begins to get more bizarre and horrific-and difficult-as the game unfolds. Doom 3 plays more like a Resident Evil title than an action shooter. The name of the game is pacing: slow and steady, careful and creeping. If you rush into room after room hoping to just shoot your way frantically out, you'll quickly find that tactic negated here; the opponents are just too powerful to tackle en masse. Along the way, the player rarely-if ever-feels at a loss for where to go next: it's basically linear and simplistic level progression. And it's dark in here. It won't take long for you to realize that the flashlight is your best friend, something that you'll need in hand almost all the time just to navigate-although that presents a sometimes frustrating gameplay dichotomy in that you cannot hold a weapon while you're holding the flashlight, thusly necessitating many sweaty quick-changes to a weapon while a demon is busy swiping his claws across your face or hurling fireballs in your general direction. The graphical implementation of the flashlight beam is excellent, the best I've seen to date-even better than the impressive flashlight graphics in Halo. The weapons are standard Doom fare, everything from a shotgun (a great close-quarters sledgehammer, that) to a chaingun to a plasma rife (eat blue lightning, ye bloody Imp!) to a rocket launcher and the granddaddy of them all: the infamous BFG. Generally, I tried to save the rocket launcher and BFG for Hell Knights and Boss battles, utilizing smaller arms for the more common, run-of-the-mill monstrosities. Late in the game you're granted the Soul Cube weapon, and incorporating the use of this living thing along with your other weapons is key to survival in the latter levels. As a rule of thumb, you want to shoot anything that moves during this game. After the opening scenes, I only encountered about three or four NPCs who were friendly. Borrowing a page from the legendary System Shock 2, Doom 3 incorporates a very effective PDA voice, visual and email system to impart story elements to the player. By downloading PDA information from other units, this item also serves as a means to gain access to locked doors throughout the game. The email you will find on the UAC personnel's various PDAs ranges from essential gameplay information (codes and location hints) to the humorous (the Martian Buddy stuff). The voice logs are even more effective; they really flesh out the idea of the UAC as a living, breathing research facility where something has gone terribly wrong. Sometimes, you can acutely hear the weariness or desperation wrapped in the voices on the logs, and it really draws you in. There are also occasional video logs-kind of like UAC infomercials, really-which are interesting and sometimes useful, but they're entirely of an information variety-not personal. During gameplay, the player can access still-functioning computers and systems simply by walking up to them. The firearm crosshair turns into a cursor and you're free to punch up codes or pick options from screens. It's a simple detail, but an ingenious one. Doom 3 is a scary game, no question about it. Full of abrupt shocks, laced with Satanic overtones, packed tight with the trappings of any effective horror movie. Seemingly around every bend in every hallway, or when you enter any room, something dark and sinister will leap out at you. It works. For a while. Eventually, the sense of suspense lessons considerably, and the shocks don't shock quite as much as they did early on. There's little suspense when you know that there's going to be something ahead-every time-and you usually have a pretty good idea what it's going to be. So you just go in until you trigger the invisible spot that will spawn the bad guys (teleporting in front and behind you usually, or rushing out from suddenly-opened panels in the walls), backpedal and take left/right evasive action as you fire away. The cycle of Doom 3 repeats too often, with too little variance in the gameplay or the environments. Sometimes it feels like the best 15 minute game ever made, because you seem to replaying the same 15 minutes over and over again. What are almost criminal are the outdoor vistas you are given a brief glimpse of. The outdoor Mars graphics in Doom 3 are entirely photo-realistic, eyepopping-I feel that I can reach out and touch those red rocks right through my monitor. They're that real. But then, you barely get to play any of the game out there-just extremely brief snatches when you're sprinting from one airlock to another, gasping for air, hurling streams of glowing blue plasma at some hovering pinky demons, trying to get to the next airlock before your lungs empty and fill with the swirling red Martian sand. It is perhaps one of the most disappointing aspects of Doom 3, that it undoubtedly possesses the best graphics in any game to date, yet insists on using them almost exclusively in tight, dark corridors. Doom 3 was a fun game for me when I played it in only short sessions. It got old quickly, but my interest to go back to it repeatedly also regenerated quickly as well. It took me over three months of on-again-off-again playing to wade through the entirety of it. Doom 3 is a survival shooter, a throwback in a way, and for what it does it succeeds in that-but it could have been so much more.