The Leaked DOOM III alpha

A Quasi-Review

by MattBoySlim

Ok. When I heard yesterday that there was a leaked alpha version of DOOM III, I said "Wow! That would be awesome, but it would melt my PC!!!" I also read that John Carmack and friends are super-pissed about the leak of this alpha. I can understand, kinda. I wouldn't want people seeing the raw footage of my movie almost a year before it's premiere. But then this is more akin to seeing a rough cut of a Spielberg film. Using that same analogy, seeing my raw footage would be like grabbing an alpha version of E.T. for the Atari 2600.

Anyway, after about a day of Kazaalite, I had it on my hard drive. Sadly, it left me with about 5 megs of space remaining. After some deleting and much rebooting, I had enough room to extract it and try it out. It took me a while and the help of this website to get it running. For reference, I have a P3 600 with a GeForce 2 and 256 MB of RAM.

What I saw really blew be away. The lighting has to be seen to be believed. You start in a narrow, rusty corridor rife with pipes. A lone flourescent light swings from the ceiling at the end of the hall. Every single thing on the screen casts a real-timemoving shadow as the light swings. I almost wet my pants, it was so pretty. (Almost...who am I kidding?) Soon enough, some enemies caught sight of me, and it became a very detailed slideshow. The framerate was almost nonexistant. However, you gotta keep in mind that this is very early, and is meant for machines at least twice as powerful as mine.

I tried a couple of the levels so far, and I'm not dissapointed. One time, I shot a zombie-type guy, and another came along and slipped on the first one's blood and fell. I almost had a fit. everything that mattered was really professional and higher-quality than anything else I've ever seen. I gotta sleep sometime, though, so I'll continue to study it tomorrow. I'll update with anything I find relevant.

Oh, and just so you know, I heard that some sites were being shut down for putting up screenshots of the alpha, so instead, you can look at our kitten, Raven.