scrobble.life
Hive Gaming

Doom Coming to Sega Genesis with MAJOR Caveat

Carl Williams@triverse (75)1d

Before we get into this, if you are not a fan of AI assistance in game development then save yourself some time and skip this article. MegaLDoom, Ultimate Doom, whatever it is called and it changes depending on where you read it (title screen says one thing, game pages say another), this is going to likely be a polarizing work in progress. Most gamers know what Doom is so I will skip the lengthy description – if you do not know this title just know it is a First-Person Shooter (FPS) and you shoot anything that moves. Done. Now you are up to date on Doom. About that Sega Genesis port…

AI Assisted Is More Like AI Created

According to the itch.io page for MegaLDoom, AI was used in almost every aspect of game creation here. Code. Graphics. Sound. Text. It may be easier for the “developer” to list what they actually did besides AI prompts to create this version of Doom for Sega’s 16-Bit console.

Seriously, I personally don’t care if AI is used or not. If the result is good, I don’t care. I do care if what gets turned out sucks and for me, MegaLDoom leans to the crap side of the scale.

It is slow. There are glitches to deal with (shown at the end of the video below). I did a quick run through for the video but other than that, I have no interest in playing MegaLDoom/Ultimate Doom on the Sega Genesis. At least not this version.

To me, Doom is about fast paced action. MegaLDoom is a lot like the 3DO Need for Speed – it forgot the speed part of the original.

A Work In Progress

MegaLDoom being a work in progress means it could improve before final release. I do not see that happening, but miracles could happen.

As you can see from the video above, MegaLDoom does not keep true to the map layout of the original id Software version. The room to the left is drastically different and the first room with enemies has been reworked.

I am not sure how many of those changes were chosen by the developer or the AI, so I am not sure who to point at here.

All in all, if you are a fan of Doom, here is potentially another version for you to check out.

Comments · 2

  • @jacobtothe(77)· 19h

    Sounds like a slop jockey floundering along instead of the previous ports where programmers were trying to truly understand the hardware to make a crazy idea work where it shouldn't. Still, A.I. may blunder into something truly interesting so a real programmer gets inspired to make the real thing work.

  • @darth-azrael(74)· 1d

    Yeah, I don't really think of AI use in this case to be a 'caveat'. It's all about how good the game is. After all, if nobody told you, you probably wouldn't know AI was used. Even when that is not true today, it will be true tomorrow. While this may not be a great version, AI has only been a consumer technology for a few years. I wonder how good it will be in a few more?