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The PC version of Doom 2 RPG finally arrived. The port, released on the 7th, is the result of the hard work of a team made up of independent programmers who brought the until now exclusive version for cell phones launched thirteen years ago to iPhone. Previously, they had already converted Doom RPG Likewise.
Incredibly, this revamped version of Doom in RPG is quite fun, despite being simple in concept and execution, especially by today's standards. Even limited, it manages to convey the tension of the first-person shooter that revolutionized the gaming industry.
On paper, how Doom can work as an RPG
As bizarre as it may seem, taking a game at first sight incompatible from a genre like shooting, to another like RPGs, makes total sense when we talk about Doom. Structurally, it's an extremely ingenious game design. The maps designed by Romero and his team, when analysed, are much more than mere corridors where the virtual killing rolls freely.
There was a visible concern to make the game's worlds true puzzles for the player, in which not only is it necessary to survive against the many enemies that are placed in front of it, but it is also necessary to discover how to reach the end of them. And, of course, in addition to clearing them, finding their secrets becomes a separate objective; they are often hidden and inaccessible from the start, lying behind specific sequences of actions, like pulling in order a set of switches scattered around the level, for example.
In addition, for each type of monster there is a weapon that is more efficient in killing it, which makes saving ammo another important aspect of the game to pay attention to. In higher difficulty modes, when reaching the most advanced stages of the game, this becomes more evident, as there are more enemies than bullets or rockets, forcing the player not only to be precise with his shots, but also to take into account the weapon he uses. uses and the environment you are shooting in.
Before talking about Doom 2 RPG, it should be noted that his predecessor, Doom RPG, was also converted to PC last year and that, curiously, it was originally developed under the care of none other than John Carmack himself, the same programmer of the main game. Amazingly, this was the last of the classic Doom games he worked on, and it came about out of sheer curiosity on his part.
My entry into this [Doom RPG development] was kind of a random event. A year ago, I hardly ever carried a cell phone with me, and when I did, it was one of those prehistoric black and white bricks.
When my wife got me a phone that wasn't even top of the line but wasn't bad either, that came with a fairly decent color screen, with a bunch of horrible game demos in the memory, I became interested in the platform.
I ended up discovering that it was very easy to program applications in the Java language used on that phone, so I played around with it a bit and started thinking about what elements could be used to make a good game for that format.
So I wrote a concept demo of the basic gameplay and rendering in BREW [the base Java programming language], and gave the result to Fountainhead Entertainment for them to develop a full game. After that, I ended up programming a little more and became the project producer [of Doom RPG].
Remembers Carmack, in an interview conducted in 2006, the year in which Doom RPG was released.
The RPG based on the first Doom, designed to run on devices that supported formats at the time, such as BREW, Java ME e J2ME, was a tremendous success. It has received many awards from specialized publications, as well as surprisingly favorable reviews. Such a reception was enough for a sequel, obviously entitled Doom 2 RPG, was developed, only this time it would be released on the then brand new iOS, for the first version of iPhone.
Doom RPG it was eventually brought to PC last year, thanks to the efforts of an independent Costa Rican team of developers with no involvement with Bethesda, publisher and owner of the intellectual property of the Doom series, which is part of Microsoft.
for the port of Doom 2 RPG, the same team, GEC Entertainment, basically reverse-engineered the entire programming code for iOS, bringing the hitherto inaccessible game – not only because of its outdated programming language, but also because of the nature of the App Store, which renders old applications unusable with each new version of iOS – for current computers.
How to Crack Doom 2 RPG
What do we finally have now to download it is the basic structure that serves as the foundation for the game to run, that is, a kind of emulator. It is still necessary to get the game itself. For this you will have to get the file 'Doom 2 RPG.ipa' on its own, as it would be illegal to share it along with the download. Don't worry, it's nothing that a search in the programs section of Web Archive don't solve.
You still need to configure a few things before everything works as it should. Basically, you will need version 1.1 of the OpenAL Windows installer, which can be found on their website, www.openal.com. After that, just copy the game file 'Doom 2 RPG.ipa' that you found somewhere to the folder created when unzipping the file 'DoomIIIRPG.zip' from the Doomworld website, containing what is needed to run the new PC version of the game.
In this version, Doom 2 RPG has support for generic controls, or those of PlayStation e Xbox. And of course, since it's originally a mobile game, there's also the option to play with the mouse and keyboard, with which you'll be able to interact with the touch graphics of the original version of the game.
What to expect from Doom 2 RPG
The game itself, as I mentioned at the beginning of the article, is quite simple by today's standards, but it still works, bringing the insanity of the FPS to the dungeon exploration format. In it, you face the forces of the devil as one of three playable characters, one of which is himself. doomguy, called the Sarge in that version.
Interestingly, the same name given to the character played by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in the ill-fated adaptation of Doom to the big screen, which opened the year before Doom 2 RPG originally come out in 2005. In the feature, The Rock did not seem like the silent butcher of the games, and the role of hero ended up being for a young Karl Urban, shortly after his participation in the films of the series Lord of the Rings.
The visuals of the weapons and monsters are based on those of the then new game in the franchise, Doom 3, which had just come out, despite the fact that the soldier's costumes are practically identical to those of the two classic games. In Doom 3, the protagonist spends most of the game without a helmet, with the purpose of showing off the (then) new technology for character expressiveness and reflections in mirrors; while in Doom 2 RPG, it is much more similar to what you see from its pixelated version, which, for me at least, is an advantage and much more nostalgic.
Now that the ports of both of the RPGs based on Doom finally became a reality, it remains to be seen how long it will take for other similar games to be converted to run on today's computers. Yes, believe it or not, until Wolfenstein received an RPG version, bringing the adventures of the inveterate soldier of the Resistance, BJ Blazkowicz, against the Axis and the supernatural forces under the command of Adolf Hitler and his followers. If it's up to me, they can send fire!
A little about the importance of the Doom games
It is undeniable that Doom e Doom 2 are milestones in the world of video games. Developed by the id Software team, a game developer that until that moment, in the early 1990s, was known for its series of platform games Commander Keen and by Wolfenstein 3-D, the controversial and pioneering FPS, the trigger of the real tree which came to be cemented by what was to come. Doom. Literally, by English meaning, destruction.
The team was led by the duo of John Romero and John Carmack, two developers who couldn't be more different, whose combined talent was unbeatable. Despite being thin and laconic, with thick-rimmed glasses and a squeaky voice, Carmack used his brilliant programming skills to build, from scratch, the computational structure necessary for the game to run, referred to as engine.
Romero, in turn, was the complete opposite: a rocker with the face – just the face, by the way – of someone who didn't do well in school, with a huge head of hair; he was rowdy, loudmouthed, and sometimes arrogant. But his care and creativity spoke louder. He was the head behind every part of the gaming experience. Doom. This not only boiled down to the worlds in which the journey of an unfortunate space marine tasked with saving humanity from the devil's forces took place, which in the case of the first game is Mars, and in the second, Earth and Hell.
This tells the whole concept and feel, the visual direction of the monsters we tear apart – designed by Adrian Carmack – to the choice of weapons with which we do it, some based on toys adapted by the team, such as the delicious chainsaw or the deer, not to mention in the soldier's hands, which are a fundamental part of the player's immersion by incorporating the role of doomguy, as the protagonist is affectionately called.
The reception of these games was revolutionary. No other release so far has so shaken the industry to the point of becoming a phenomenon outside of it. The file distribution system on which the first game in the series was made available used a university's networked computer center, which was bombarded with access requests from ardent fans waiting to download the version. shareware – old term used for game demos that contained some stages of the full game and unlocked the full version after payment.
Doom it was the subject of countless magazines, not only those specialized in computer games. He appeared in TV series like Plantão Médico, where the doctors on duty found themselves addicted to “slaying Barons of Hell”. It was a worldwide fever. But, unfortunately, not everything was rosy in relation to the creation of id. Disturbed by the never-before-seen graphic violence, many parents expressed concern about letting their children play at home, even if they played independently anyway, going to friends' houses with less attentive parents, for example.
And in 1999, the Id Software ended up becoming even more infamous, but in the way they never intended to be, after the attacks on Columbine High School, in Colorado, when two disturbed students used the tool to create levels of Doom to simulate the school's study environments. Then, after much planning, they stormed the campus, firing large-caliber weapons, wounding and killing dozens of their classmates, committing suicide in the process.
For a long time, shooting games were blamed for influencing children to commit such atrocities, although there are already many studies that point to the contrary, and, of course, the gun culture that permeates the world (especially in the USA), and the lack of stricter legislation regarding ownership and control of them.
Wolfenstein 3-D, but more precisely Doom e Doom 2 and eventually Quake, were responsible for popularizing the game genre we know today as first-person shooters, (from first person shooter from English, abbreviated to FPS). Before receiving this nomenclature, shooting games were simply called "clones of Doom”. Such was the influence of the creations of the two Johns.
For much more detail on creating the Id Software, game development Doom and what came after them, plus the lives of the people behind it all, I recommend tightly the reading of the book masters of doom, by David Kushner. Unfortunately, there isn't an officially translated version, but it's nothing a little Google can't fix.
Did you like to know about this relic of games? Be sure to check out even more about the world of gaming and technology at Showmetech!
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Sources: Doom world, Eurogamer, PC Gamer
Text proofread by: Pedro Bomfim (15 / 05 / 23)
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