Honestly.

Believe it or not (I’m walking on air…gah, no I promise that this is a review of a video game, not “Greatest American Hero”) I really wasn’t a gamer, or at least, video gamer all of my life.

No, I didn’t really care. I played a few games here or there. A friend worked at Babbage’s, so we’d borrow games from there. I’d played the original Castle Wolfenstein, back on an Apple II, where you could throw a grenade against an outside wall and run out that way. At one point he showed me Wolfenstein 3-D, and it was fun to shoot Nazis (and it still is today (in video games)!). But I really didn’t think anything of it, except to look for it occasionally when I’d see the racks of shareware games at the local Food Lion or something.

Ah, the old days. My old Packard Bell 486SX25 with a staggering 4 MB of RAM. The hours and hours of X-Wing and Dune 2. But my friend showed me a game he’d picked up and I’d never heard of before. Doom. He told me about the demons and such in it, and I remember thinking “oh, this game will suck”.

It did suck – SUCK ME IN! (I am so, so sorry for that line, but I feel obligated to leave it in.)

Hours and hours of Doom were played. I eventually beat it – though I’m pretty certain I had to use cheat codes to do so. The “IDDQD”, “IDSPISPOPD”, etc. Then I went to college.

In college I ended up rooming with a complete unknown person (to me) who ended up becoming one of my best friends. He had a 486DX33 with 8 MB of RAM. Another friend had one of the late beta versions of Doom 2, and our room turned into the Doom Deathmatch room, where days wandered by in epic one on one battles of Doom. I retired from playing my suitemates when I dropped below a 5 to 1 kill ratio.

Years go by. Many bad, bad, horrible first person shooter games come out (anyone remember “Blake Stone”?). Some good ones do, too. I found the “Doom” novels at the beach one year (all 4: Knee Deep in the Dead, Hell on Earth, Infernal Sky, Endgame). They were bad books – I found out later at DragonCon that they were intended to be bad when the writers found out that it wasn’t apparent that the editors were even reading them before sending them out for publication, and they’d even hit the NY Times Bestseller list. But I digress.

I avoided Doom 3 when it came out because survival horror ain’t my bag, baby. I had planned on catching the movie version of Doom on DVD, but I’m inherently a lazy, lazy man and haven’t done so yet.

So I bought a new cell phone, a process wrought with peril that you may not believe, particularly when you’re as lazy as I am (as I’ve stated before). I was stuck on the highway with my brother, looking at the game demos, when I saw one game for $7.99 (via the Sprint PCS network) that I couldn’t resist.

The Doom RPG.

I bought it.

Here’s the lowdown: you’re a marine. (Surprise!) You’re on Mars. (Surprise!) The base is apparently under attack by demons. (Surprise! But at least it’s not aliens like in the books.)

The graphics are very similar to the original game. It’s almost kind of funny – 12 years ago they were awesome, and now I use them on my cell phone. The sounds are fairly simplistic but they work.

Unlike the original, you have some help. There are scientists around that help you, innocents that are taken over and turned into demons, and computer terminals to talk with. Intrigue flows through the UAC corporation. You work from sector to sector, tracking down what’s going on, finding the combination for certain doors, killing monsters. If you follow the story line, you’ll keep leveling up to keep up with the monsters for the most part, but you can always go back and redo the old sectors for the XP and loot.

All the classic weapons are there (except the chainsaw, replaced with an axe) plus a new one, the dog collar, which lets you capture a dog and use it as a weapon. There are the ubiquitous crates to smash open, barrels to explode, and messes to make.

The game itself is turn-based, so it’s not twitchy. It does seem to suffer from slowdown if you’re in an area with poor reception or your phone is overloaded somehow – often turning your phone off and back on helps with that. When it’s in slow down, you turn and move slowly, and it can make you a bit nauseous to watch.

But, in the end, it’s a first person shooter. You don’t have to aim, but hey – blast away! It has a sense of humor, too – make sure you talk to everybody repeatedly to get some of the jokes. (I love the scientist who comments on why they all look alike, or the other one that just says “Hold me!”)

Let’s be honest – your cell phone isn’t the best gaming environment. On the other hand, the Doom RPG is a great value, and has provided me at least with hours after hours of playing enjoyment while doing other things that I find incredibly boring.

(But not driving – I’m not that dumb!)