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Shoot Club: The Doom 3 review
By Tom Chick
My friend Trevor is sitting at the keyboard. His fingers are poised over the keys.
"So, do I start with the plot or should I just launch into graphics? And should I give my score for each area first? Like this?"
He types 'GRAPHICS 9/10'.
"This isn't Adrenaline Vault. You don't have to do it that way."
"Oh. So I just start with the story, maybe give a little bit of the history behind the game?"
"This isn't Gamespot either. Just write what you want to say. Did you like it?"
He pauses, his fingers over the keys. He takes a deep breath with turns into a sort of sigh. Then he pulls back his hands to rest them in his lap. He stares at the notes sitting off the side.
"That's the problem. It's not that easy."
He leans back in the chair.
Three days ago, Trevor never would have expected it was going to be this hard. We drove to Best Buy at 6pm, ready to stand in line until midnight, which is when they were selling the first copies. We went inside, expecting banners or something, maybe a big guy in a Doom marine outfit with a plastic BFG. Instead, it was just business as usual. Kids hogging the console systems, couples browsing through the DVDs, blue shirted employees trying to look busy so no one would bother them.
"Where's the line?" Trevor asked an employee whose name tag read 'Monica'.
"The registers are right over there," Monica said. She was carrying a stack of DVDs.
"No, no, the line for Doom 3."
"Is that that game? I don't think it comes out until tomorrow."
"Wait, wait, I thought you guys were selling it at midnight."
"We close at nine," Monica said with as much of a shrug as she could manage with a few dozen copies of 13 Going On 30 in her arms.
"No, that's impossible," he protested. "You guys are putting Doom 3 on sale at midnight. You're giving out prizes to the first hundred people in line. You are."
"I don't know about any of that," she said.
"Well, I'm here to get in line."
"Look, I get off work in an hour, so I don't know anything about that. Go ask that guy." She nodded her head down another aisle where two employees were laughing to each other about something.
"Which guy? There are two of them."
"The one with glasses. That's Kevin. He knows about all that stuff."
"Where's the line for Doom 3?" Trevor asked Kevin. Kevin glanced at his watch.
"Already?" he said. "Man, you're early."
"There's no one else here?" Trevor asked.
"Not yet," he said apologetically. "Not that I know of."
"Awesome! So we're the first ones?"
"Yeah, I guess so. If you want to start a line out front, go hang out by the door."
"Totally awesome. Thanks, dude. Oh, hey, what prizes do we get?"
"I think it's just a T-shirt."
"A Doom 3 shirt? That's awesome."
"Are you going to be this excited about Half-Life 2?" I asked him as we headed for the door.
"Fuck Half-Life 2."
We stood by the front door. Just the two of us. We must have looked like we were on a smoke break, minus the cigarettes. Trevor surveyed people coming in from the parking lot. Every now and then, he'd say something like 'I bet that guy's going to get in line' or 'Here comes one'. But no one else got in line.
"Hey, dude, over here," he said, waving his arms to a guy in a Sci Fi Channel T-shirt. The guy looked around to see who Trevor was talking to. "Yeah, you. It's over here. This is the line for Doom 3. We're first, so you're right behind us."
"I'm just here to get a printer cartridge."
"Oh, okay. But if you want, they're selling Doom 3 at 12:01am. You're behind us if you're going to get in line."
Thirty minutes later, Trevor decided we needed to make a Starbucks run. "One of us needs to hold our place in line. Do you want to go, or should I?" The Starbucks was right at the corner. I could see it from where we stood.
"I'll go. What do you want?"
When I came back, there were two more people with Trevor.
"Hey, the line is behind us," Trevor told me with mock indignation. "No cutting!"
"Here's your java chip frappucino."
"Heh, I was just kidding. He's with me," Trevor told the other people, "and I was saving his place."
One of the guys was pretty young. When I asked him how old he was, he said twenty one.
"You're twenty one?" I said. "How do you know about Doom? You must have been, like, eleven years old when Doom was out."
"Dude, what do you think I've been playing since I was eleven?"
"What's your favorite weapon in Doom?" Trevor asked him. The guy thought it about it for a while before saying 'shotgun'. How can a shotgun be someone's favorite weapon? There's one in every game.
"Mine too," Trevor agreed.
"No, wait, I changed my mind. Chainsaw."
"Oh yeah, chainsaw! Totally."
"What's your favorite level in Doom?" the kid asked.
"Hey, there's the chick that helped us," Trevor said as Monica walked out to her car. "Hey, check it out. We're the first ones in line!"
She took a few steps towards us. "What's that?" She had no idea what Trevor just said because he blurted it out so quickly.
"We're first in line for Doom 3 at midnight. Remember us? We're the guys who were asking you about it earlier. This is the line."
She glanced at her watch. "You're going to stay there until midnight?"
"This is nothing. Ask how long I was in line for Phantom Menace?
"What's that? Is that a game?"
"Ha, that's funny. I was in line for two days. Ask how long I was in line for an Xbox?"
"How long?"
"Fifteen hours. This is nothing."
"So you're going to wait here until midnight?"
"Yeah. It's Doom 3. I'm totally psyched. We all are." The four of us stood there, totally psyched.
"Well, I heard they didn't get the shipment today," Monica said. "We won't be selling it until Wednesday afternoon."
We fell into a shocked silence. Then she grinned. "I'm just kidding. I just saw them taking them out of the shipping cartons in the back."
Trevor still mentions Monica from time to time, although he doesn't know that was her name. He pretends he's going to go ask her out. He maintains she was flirting with us.
Trevor and the 21-year-old give each other high fives. "Those are our copies of Doom 3," Trevor said. "The copies we'll all be installing," a glance at his watch, "in about four and a half hours."
Actually, I should mention that I won't be installing anything. I already had a press copy, so I was just there because of the persuasiveness of Trevor's enthusiasm. I had been in line with him for Phantom Menace, for an Xbox, even for the opening night of Godzilla. Yeah, that Godzilla. The one with Matthew Broderick. But I've long since learned that what we're waiting for doesn't matter. We're in it for the thrill of the communal wait, that shared moment where fellow victims of hype come together for the moment of truth.
In fact, I had already finished Doom 3. But Trevor didn't want me to say anything about it. He didn't even want to know if I liked it. "You're too picky," he had told me. "I just want to know if a game is fun or not. And I don't trust you in that department. You're too harsh. You need to lighten up. Plus, I don't want you to give away any spoilers."
But that didn't stop Trevor from buying the latest issue of PC Gamer with the world exclusive first review. He'd thumbed through the six pages repeatedly, holding the screenshots close to his face and peering at them as if looking for clues. "I think there are some new kinds of monsters," he noted.
"'You will never experience a dull moment'," he had read out loud from the review, "'or even a less than mesmerizing one. Doom 3 is a masterpiece of the art form.' How about that? Dude, that's the way to do a review."
By the time Best Buy closed their doors for regular business at 9pm, there were about fifteen people in line. As they arrived, most of them went up to Trevor to ask what time he got there. He told them with pride that he'd been there since "a little after five", which wasn't technically incorrect. Kevin came out periodically to give newcomers yellow wrist bands signifying that their eligibility for T-shirts.
"How many is that?" Trevor kept asking.
By midnight, there were eighty six people in line. Kevin addressed the line from the front, explaining that they would let in a few people at a time. Trevor was champing at the bit. He let out a whoop when we got in. There were about ten employees standing around and they all turned to see what that noise was.
"Doom 3," Trevor yelled, as if by way of explanation.
"So have you played it yet?" he asked the girl at the cash register while she scanned his copy.
"Not really," she said, ready to go home.
Kevin was standing at the door with a box of T-shirts. "Thanks for coming out, fellas. What size do you want?"
"Extra large," said Trevor, beaming. Kevin handed him a rolled-up T-shirt. It was black, of course. Then Kevin looked at me.
"Large, I guess."
"We only have extra large," he said.
"Oh. Then extra large."
"Wait, did you not buy Doom 3?" Kevin saw that I wasn't carrying anything.
"No, just him."
"Then you guys have to share a T-shirt."
As we walked out to the car, I muttered to Trevor, "I thought it was the first hundred people in line." Not that I really wanted an XL Doom 3 T-shirt, but it was the principle of the thing.
"You can wear mine if you wash it afterwards," Trevor said, already opening the box to get the manual. On the way home, he made me drive with the dome light on so he could read it.
It's a good thing Trevor didn't let me talk about Doom 3 before he played it. Because I have to say I'm not a fan and I probably would have sapped some of his enthusiasm. He was practically beside himself as he installed it, downloaded the no-CD crack, and then turned out the lights as it started up. That ardor was still going strong when I left a few hours later to go home and go to bed. He called me the next afternoon to say he'd come home for his lunch break to play a little more.
"I kind of figured you were going to call in sick," I said.
"I was going to, but I'd been talking about the game so much that my boss knew it was coming out today. He told me I better not try to call in sick."
"Busted."
"I should have kept my mouth shut. So, dude, what did you choose when it came time to send the message to earth and that guy from the board of directors told you not to do it? Did you transmit or did you cancel?"
"There was some guy from a board of directors? How do you know that? Is it in the manual?"
"It says it in the game. So what did you choose?"
"I think I picked 'cancel'."
"No way! I picked 'transmit'. But first I saved the game so I can go back and replay it from that point."
"I don't think it matters."
"What are you talking about? I bet the game plays completely different based on what you choose. Anyway, shut up. You're going to start giving away spoilers. I gotta go. I'm in the reactor support hallway for Delta Labs 1?"
"Where?"
"Delta 1. The reactor support hallway."
"How do you know that's what it's called?"
"Duh. It fucking says it in the lower left hand corner of the screen. I don't see how you could have missed it. I gotta go."
Trevor had called again after sneaking out of work early. He was stuck on the rail lift puzzle. He had spent two hours trying to figure out how to unlock the exit. He didn't notice that you could raise the lifter to reach higher areas.
"There's an up and down arrow on the control panel. I don't see how you could have missed it."
"Aw, that's cheap," he said before hanging up. "But Doom 3 still rocks. Woo! Okay, I gotta go."
I could tell by the tone of his voice he'd lost some of his enthusiasm. It might have just been because he was stuck. But he was trying to buck up. He'd just spent sixty bucks, a few weeks of being really excited, and six hours of standing in line at Best Buy. It's only natural to try to deny that it might not have been worth it until you're absolutely sure. And if it wasn't worth it, better to put off that realization as long as possible. Sometimes you can fool yourself into having fun if you don't think too hard.
Of course, I could be completely full of shit. Maybe he really does love it.
He called again a little before 3am.
"What are you playing?" he asked.
"Mario Golf Advance."
"That game is for little kids."
"Don't make me bring up Animal Crossing."
"Fair enough."
"What's up?"
"Okay, don't give anything away, but I want to ask you just one thing." He sounds deflated. This might be a last ditch effort to buck himself up.
"Okay."
"Do you ever get to drive that car that Swann and Campbell are using?"
"Who?"
"Swann and Campbell."
"Who the hell are Swann and Campbell?"
He sighs like I'm a total moron. "They're the guys the UAC board of directors sends to Mars City to investigate Betruger. There's a car they used to get to the communications center. I can't believe I have to explain all this. Did you even play Doom 3?"
"I didn't know those were their names. Who pays attention to that stuff?"
"Did you even read the PDAs?"
"Not really. I scanned them for three-digit locker combos."
"You missed out. There's some funny stuff in there. There's something about a guy who flips out and attacks a Coke machine, you know, like Derek Smart. I even wrote down his name."
I hear Trevor rustling around some paper. "You're taking notes?"
"Here it is. Steve Hammer. Ha, that's funny. I didn't even realize that. Hammer. Oh, and check out this quote: 'I can't think of a more useless piece of equipment then a chainsaw on Mars'. That's in one of the emails. They explain that they accidentally mis-shipped the chainsaws to Mars. Isn't that funny? There's also all these fake spam emails. It's funny."
"You think fake spam is funny? Any game with email in it has joke spams. That hasn't been funny since, I dunno, being able to pee in Duke Nukem. At least that healed you up. What do the fake spams do?"
"It's called atmosphere."
"No. That stuff only qualifies as atmosphere in a game where back story is important. A game like, you know, System Shock. Otherwise, it's filler. In Doom 3, it's just another example of these guys at id aping what they've seen in other better games because they're lousy game designers."
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. Lousy game designers?"
"Yep. Lousy. Great technology, hats off to Carmack and all that stuff, but it's clear they don't know the first thing about making a good game."
"This is exactly what I meant before. You're way too harsh if you think Doom 3 isn't a good game."
"Okay, maybe it's a good game. But just barely. I could think of ten other PC games this year that are way better than Doom 3. It's overlong, repetitive, derivative, uninspired. It's full of fucking monster closets, for Christ's sake. Monster closets! There's a monster just sitting in a closet that won't open until you walk past it. What's up with that?"
"Okay, this is more your jaded gamer crap. You didn't even like Far Cry."
"At least it's better than Doom 3."
"Far Cry is better than Doom 3?"
"Hell, I'd say Max Payne 2 is better than Doom 3. At least it's got some personality, some variety. It's got a spark of life that's completely missing in Doom 3."
"You're clearly insane. Let's wait and see what the reviews say. Let's see how many Best of 2004 lists have Doom 3."
"Who cares? We're not talking about everyone else. We're talking about us."
"Okay, then you're still insane because half of us is totally digging it. And that's all that matters."
He's right. He likes it and I have no business trying to dispute that. He's having fun and I'm being analytical. We might as well be speaking different languages. Besides, none of this matter because Doom 3 is going to make more money than God.
"So do you?" he asks.
"What?"
"Do you get to drive that car?"
"Do you really want me to tell you? It might give something away."
He is quiet.
"How far are you?" I ask.
"I just activated teleportation pad 2. I'm at the hydrogen storage transfer in delta 3."
"Jesus, I have no idea what that is. How do you know all that stuff?"
"I told you, it's right there on the screen. It's called paying attention. Besides, I've been fucking stuck here forever. I can't figure out this dumbass teleportation pad shit. I just want to shoot some more zombies."
"No, you don't get to drive the car. There's a freight loading train thing later on. It drives you about fifty yards and that's it. There are no vehicles like in Far Cry, no mechs like in the end of Riddick, nothing like that. It's just running and gunning, mostly just in that base. You don't get into a giant organic entity like The Many, there's no Xen, there are no twists. It's just that little bit of Hell and then another long slog through the base."
He's quiet for a moment. I feel like I've done a terrible thing by disappointing him. But it's not my fault. It's the game's fault. It's the hype's fault. It's his own damn fault for believing it, for being dumb enough to trust that gushing review but smart enough to know better when he actually plays the game.
"Are there any more parts with those sentries?" he eventually asks.
"Sentries? What are those, the zombie soldier guys?"
"No, those are zombies. Sentries are those little spider bots. Jeeze, are you sure you even played the game?"
"I didn't know they were called sentries. You should have just said spider bots. And no, you don't have any more parts like that. You've pretty much seen everything Doom 3 has to offer. There's a big boss fight at the end."
"Gaaah. Spoiler! Don't tell me anything else." He hangs up quickly.
He calls back in the morning, while I'm making coffee. "Hey, are you up? I left you a message. I have a question. How do you pronounce where you keep, like, weapons?"
"What?"
"What do you call it, where you keep weapons?"
"An arsenal?"
"No, no, like a place you'd store them?"
"What, a gun cabinet?"
"No, no."
"Is this about a Doom 3? Do you mean those lockers?"
"Yeah, but there's a word I want to know how you pronounce. You corrected me once in front of all the guys at Shoot Club."
"I have no idea what you're talking about."
"Do you say 'cash' or 'cash-ay'?"
"Oh, you mean cache. It's pronounced 'cash'. Cachet is like reputation or credibility."
"Ha, I knew it. On the audio logs, some dude -- I wrote down his name," I hear him flipping around some pages, "it's Robert Price. He says it wrong. He says something about a 'cash-ay' of weapons. I think they meant it as a joke, like he's this really smart scientist, but he can't pronounce the word."
Trevor's picking at minor things now. At some point during the night, he must have shifted from fun to analytical. It takes a certain amount of detachment to notice something like that. Taking notes probably had something to do with it.
He calls a few hours later. "Hey, did you notice how every time you kill a zombie, a brain pops out of him? They're like fucking Pez dispensers, but with brains instead of Pez. I thought that was pretty cool the first ten or twenty times. Now it's just stupid."
Doom 3 is losing him.
He called again a few hours ago.
"Man, I never thought I'd say this about Doom 3, but I'm bored."
"It's not fun?"
"I didn't say that. I said I'm bored. If I have to shoot another fucking cacodemon, I'm going to scream."
I have no idea what a cacodemon is, but I get the point. "It does get to be the same thing over and over, doesn't it?"
"I'm in Caverns 1. How close am I to the end?"
"Caverns 1. What is that?"
"You really don't pay attention do you? It's the excavation under Site 3."
"The part that looks like Egyptian ruins?"
"Right."
"I think there's like two more levels in that area, then the final boss."
"Are they really long?"
"I don't think so."
He sighs. "Okay, I'm going to come over when I'm done. I need you to help me. I'm going to write my own review."
"It's going to be an honest review," he says when he arrives with his notes under his arm, "not some ass-kissing thumbs-up nonsense."
"You know, even ass-kissing thumbs-up nonsense isn't necessarily dishonest."
"You know what I mean."
So now he's sitting here with his legal pad and loose pages. "I took notes when the levels were loading," he explains. The margins are full of three-digit numbers: locker codes. In several places, he's scrawled comments like 'Where the fuck am I supposed to go?', 'I don't know what to do now', and 'Stop Sarge? WTF? How?'
"Everything looks the same and it never makes any sense," he says. "I keep thinking there's no way this is real base. There's, like, three bathrooms in that whole huge place, which is full of these twisty corridors and catwalks and ducts and locked doors and these hallways that double back."
He has written, 'Kick-ass computer screens, but otherwise not very convincing'.
"And you have to do all this backtracking, but you're never sure when you're supposed to go back or if you just missed a door. Half the time I couldn't figure out what was going on. My objective was like 'Find the main portal' and I'm all like, 'Umm, okay, could I get a little more info than that?'"
He wrote 'Bad level design' and underlined it three times.
"That's one of the cool things about Painkiller. You always knew exactly what you were doing and the levels were all different. The monsters were different. You know, it's funny. By the time I got to the cyberdemon--"
"Cyberdemon?"
"The main boss guy. At the end. Of Doom 3."
"That was called a cyberdemon?"
"Yeah. A cyberdemon. And by the time he came out, I was like 'Yeah, whatever, shorty, there were a bunch of dudes way bigger than you in Painkiller'.
"True."
"Painkiller didn't have anything like those stupid crane puzzles. There were three puzzles with cranes in Doom 3. Painkiller didn't have anything like where you had to figure out those teleportation pads. And that fucking tram thing you had to help me with. Floating platforms with things that try to knock you off. And I got so sick of looking for stuff. A door panel, a data linker, a plasma inducer, positronic astriction, a doo-hickey, a thingamabob. Remember when they used to just have keys?"
"They have those in there, too. Keycards."
"Yeah, I guess that's what it all comes down to. And don't get me started on the weapons," he says, flipping to that part of his notes. He's written the word 'weak' in capital letters and circled it.
"Okay, I won't."
"Boring! Not a single fucking original idea in there. Even the Soul Cube is pretty lame. It's like, I dunno, Hellraiser meets Blood Omen. Actually, the whole fucking game was like that. I was always, like, 'Yeah that's from Half-Life, that's from Undying, that's from Blood.'"
"It was pretty derivative."
"Or how it's so dark and you can't have your flashlight with your gun. And Marines with no night vision goggles?"
"Yeah, I think a lot of people noticed that one."
"You know what? Fuck it. I think I'm just going to go post on a forum. You can have my notes. If you use any of them, you're going to credit me, right?"
"Okay."
"So what did your review say?"
"I'll read you the last line. 'Although it's built from an impressive engine, Doom 3 is ultimately a soulless derivative rehash of tired, tried, and true motifs. It is a bauble that reminds us of id's triumph when it comes to technology and their abject failure when it comes to imagination.'"
"Harsh. But really, it all comes down to what you'd give it out of ten."
"I'm not going there. Want to play a round of Mario Golf? I'll give you six mulligans since I've been practicing."
"Yeah, let's do it. I call Princess Peach. Well, I think I've learned my lesson. I just wish Half-Life 2 would hurry up and come out."
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