Thoughts on Doom 3 for 360...

I'm fairly happy with this bundle. When I said I beat Doom 3 yesterday, I should be more specific: I beat the Doom 3 campaign of the Doom 3: BFG Edition. The BFG Edition includes:

• Doom 3
• Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil (an expansion pack released in 2005)
• Doom 3: The Lost Mission (a new expansion)
• Doom (specifically, the four-episode Ultimate Doom)
• Doom II

That's a healthy amount of content for a budget price. I paid Amazon $20 for BFG Edition (though oddly, it's gone up to $23).

As to the game itself, I had a pretty good time. It had a lot of scares in it. The game became a little formulaic towards the end. Virtually every appearance of a monster is an ambush of some sort. Monsters appear in one of the following ways:

1. They're already in the level, showing up when it loads, and you encounter them naturally (e.g., the way most shooters work).
2. They pop out of the walls.
3. They teleport near you, accompanied by appropriate audio and visual effects.

Those are in reverse order of frequency. Towards the end, most monsters teleport in, and it's pretty standard that one will appear in front of you and one behind. You come to expect it. There are a few cheap deaths, like a floor tile collapsing into lava, with no prior indication it would do that. There are a handful of platforming bits, which are annoying, but thankfully rare. The final battle, against the Cyberdemon, is a cake walk.

Doom 3 has save-anywhere, which is rare these days. The back of the box laughably boasts a "new check point save system." That's BS. The game has an auto-save system, which saves quite rarely, and at odd locations sometimes. You'll want to be saving manually at regular intervals, which is fine.

Artistically, this game is great. The technology was amazing in 2004, and is obviously nothing special now, but the art direction holds up. The Mars base is legitimately creepy. There are a few sections where you walk on the Martian surface, which looks great. Hell is scary and disturbing. If you glanced at the game during the Hell levels, you'd think it was a fantasy RPG (except for the plasma rifle in the middle of the screen). Hell in Doom 3 is far scarier and "Hellish" than any of the Oblivion levels in, you know, Oblivion. Graphically, this game is inspired.

Conclusion: Check out Doom 3: BFG Edition if you like shooters, particularly classic shooters.