Modern Gaming: Doom II (GBA) Review · 7:12pm May 13th, 2022
A new edition of Modern Gaming Reviews is available, and we check out one of the few Doom II ports on Game Boy Advance. I don’t have to tell you how the first game has been ported to death to every system that could run it. There was even plans to bring Doom to the GBC despite the possibility it would have ran terribly with crusty visuals. Duke Nukem 3D on Tiger’s Game.com with those crusty monochrome graphics and clunky gameplay is a terrible reminder. It’s a good thing Id didn’t go that far and waited until Nintendo had a stronger portable ready to do such porting. Then again, Capcom was able to put the first Resident Evil from PS1 on GBC with great effort before canceling it for odd reasons. Of course, the best example of quality porting to GBC was Alone in the Dark 2001 that somehow worked on such limited tech. The release of the first Doom was celebrated in 2001 because one, it went portable and two, laptops was quite expensive in the early 2000’s.
Now, Doom II was a whole another beast for the GBA to handle and this time Torus Games was put to the task. Torus Games is mostly known for producing license games from Marvel which are not the best quality titles. The only decent game they ever produced was the Invincible Iron Man on GBA based on the early 2000’s comics. Not a quality resume to ensure this will be a decent port of an extensive PC game. However, the previous studio of David Parmer Productions responsible for the first Doom's GBA version was in a similar situation. They too developed mostly shoddy games with the first entry being one of the only quality titles to come from them. The fact these developers took on the task of porting this beast to a limited system should be considered impossible. It’s one thing to take the Original Doom and bring this over to the Super NES or GBA but the sequel to a weaker system was an Olympian feat. Can Torus strike just as hard as David Parmer Production and produce a worthy port?
