DOOM Port Corner, Entry 3: Sega Saturn

You know, it's a funny thing: I was pretty positive that the general consensus was the 32X port was about as bad as it got. I mean it is in a tiny little window and the soundtrack is a war crime and not having any shoulder buttons with which to strafe is an enormous bummer, so it's an abomination, right?

Kind of! It also runs so smoothly that I legitimately thought RetroArch was doing some acceleration magic in the background that I just didn't know how to turn off, but when I did a little digging it became clear that no, actually, it really does run that well!

I don't want to bury the lede here, so here goes: The Sega Saturn port is awful. A real fucking bummer from top to bottom!

DOOMed to Failure

Let's take a moment to talk briefly about the Sega Saturn as a console: It sucked.

Well, okay look. It didn't suck, but it had poor support for higher-level programming languages, had a weird parallel processing architecture, and had... let's say "some trouble" rendering 3D environments. It was not an easy console to develop for, and a lot of 3rd party games ports suffered as a result. If there's a game on the Saturn, and that game is also available anywhere else, you are better off playing it anywhere else (unless your only other option is the 32X, in which case... man maybe just don't play the game). The original titles for the system are a different story, but we're not talking about those here. We're talking about a port of DOOM.

Much like the port for the 32X, this seemed like a slam dunk of an idea. Get the game that everyone loves and put it on your new console! A layup! Everyone likes DOOM! Now was everyone still clamoring for DOOM ports in 1997? Probably not, unless they were PC players who were busy fucking around with DOOM modding and mapmaking. It was more likely anyone who would have been interested in a DOOM port in 1997 was too busy playing Quake to care.

Anyway, the decision was made to put DOOM on the Sega Saturn, and on the Sega Saturn it would go. The PS1 version had been out for two years, so the idea was to just take the PS1 version and port that over rather than starting with the PC version. The developer, Rage Software, tasked a programmer named Jim Bagley to get the engine up and running on the Saturn, which he did! He wrote a hardware renderer and went back to id for approval.

He did not get it. John Carmack, who will show up a lot in these things, didn't like the way the hardware renderer handled texture scaling (specifically, he thought it looked ugly), and demanded they do a software renderer which would render things in the way the PC version of the engine did. Bagley went back to the drawing board and delivered what Carmack had requested, but by doing so it killed the port's ability to run smoothly. Unfortunately, the speed of DOOM is one of the most important features of it (part of the titular mission statement of "scary, dark, fast"). The port was, in other words, doomed from the moment the engine was written.

More Compromises

The Saturn was not built with the same capabilities as the PS1. It was built with the idea of "let's run 2d sprites real nice" rather than "let's render polygons real nice" and that, alas, is part of why it ate shit so bad. Which is to say, the hardware just didn't have the juice to do a 1:1 conversion of the PS1 version, something which is pretty immediately obvious if you look at what is becoming our regular E1M1 Comparison Shot:

Here's your PC version

Here's your PS1 version

And here, friends, is the Saturn version

You can see a few things here: First, the status bar is an amalgamation of the PS1 and PC versions: the Doom Guy's face sprite is back to the one from the PC version rather than the new sprite the PS1 version used (it's taller and thinner), the shade of grey is closer to the PC version, the weapon selection layout and lack of ammo count are the same as the PS1, etc. The second thing you doubtless noticed is there's no green lighting effect through the window into the base like there is in the PS1 version. In fact, there are none of the fancy lighting effects are present. It's overall darker and muddier, although it does have slightly nicer-looking skyboxes? The animated fire sky that shows up in later levels (and was heavily used in DOOM 64) is missing, though. Not only that, but Specters don't have the cool transparency effect anymore, and in fact just kinda look... dithered? They aren't even greyed out like in the PC version.

You can't really tell from here but I assure you that is a Specter

As for the bitchin' solarized effect they put in for the Nightmare Specters, fuckin' forget it. They're just identical to regular Specters now - the only way to tell you're fighting one is that it takes longer to kill and moves faster, which is not immediately obvious. It's an instant visual downgrade, which makes the fact that it runs like dogshit stand out even more.

The game uses the PS1 version's soundtrack as well, although some tracks are missing. I couldn't tell you which ones, though, because frankly while I do think the more atmospheric soundtrack is neat in terms of leaning into the "scary" part of "scary, dark, fast" it also all kinda runs together and the only reason I know that some tracks are missing is the Doom Wiki told me so. I admit this freely! It also uses the new sound effects the PS1 version does, but because the Saturn sound hardware isn't as good as the PS1's, some of the quality is lost. Not super-noticable, but if you boot them up one after the other you'll definitely be able to tell (of course I did this, I'm a scientist god damn it).

The Berserk Effect is eye-searing, as it should be. This is as close as the game gets to "fancy lighting effects"

The Controls are Fine Though

Here's what I can freely give the game: It lets you customize your controls, and it gives you strafe left/strafe right buttons. Now, on a Saturn Controller this might not have actually mapped that cleanly, but on my trusty 8bitdo SN30 it was basically just like the PS1 version. Sorry, I can't give you a totally accurate report here, I have to work with the controllers I have and I do not have a Saturn controller hanging around. It works just fine! Just as fine as PS1 DOOM does, which is to say "I'm still not in love with using a d-pad and strafe buttons but it's good enough." It'll get the job done, for the most part. Gold star.

Punching the shit out of a pinky demon is still extremely satisfying

What won't get the job done is, as I've mentioned already, the frame rate.

So How's it Play?

Bad! The game chugs along at a generous 15 fps at the best of times, and god help you if there's more than three demons on screen or you are in anything bigger than a corridor. The game damn near comes to a complete stop! Not what you want in your scary dark fast demon shooter. It makes it easier to dodge imp fireballs and all when they're coming at you at a rate of 1 frame a second, though!

The Pain Elemental is back, and he's inflating our kill rate

Just like the PS1 version, you get DOOM II monsters if you choose to play the game on Ultraviolence (which is how I play these things), meaning it's chaingunners and pain elementals from hell to breakfast. I already admitted to kind of liking that as a fun little fuck you to experienced players, and I hold to that! It's a fun time! Even the fact this game runs like shit can't quite crush the DOOMness of it all, like, I played through to the Phobos Anomaly and had an... okay, "good" is too strong, but "okay" time!

The automap is still the automap! It's undefeated!

A Worthy Port, or Doomed to Ignominy?

You read everything up above, right? You read how this game runs like ass?

Come on, it was always going to be Doomed. I kinda knew this going in, since it was specifically suggested to me as a bad port! I tried not to let that color my opinion, but I was braced for it to not be that good. It surpassed my expectations! I was actually expecting something a little more interesting, but instead all I got was the PS1 port (again, a good version of the game! I really like that one and have, in fact, played more of it since writing about it) but at 15 FPS and without any cool sound effects. It uh... it sucks shit!

Oh, and here's one more thing about the port: The NTSC box promises support for two players via linkup*, but it only exists in the European and Japanese release (the NTSC and European box also use screenshots from the PC version of the game on the back rather than images from the port). They didn't even manage to get the box right! Really tripped on their dicks with that one, if you ask me.

Okay but the cover art of a flaming skull is pretty fucking cool

NEXT UP: It's time to go back to the port that started it all, baby! It's time to check out... The Atari Jaguar port. I already did some of the legwork for this one - I'm not 100% sure how good the emulation I've got of it is though, so I might want to do a little digging and make sure that it's running something close to accurately. I'm pretty sure it is, but I'll look at some footage and compare as necessary.

I'm still not 100% sure how many of these ports I'll be able to actually get running, but there's so damn many that I feel like we'll have a pretty comprehensive view of the porting scene and what it was like. I'm really excited to get to the 3DO version eventually, if only because the soundtrack is supposed to be really good.

*What's linkup, you ask? It's a cable that you use to make a local connection between two Sega Saturn consoles to play competitive or cooperative games, which is one of those insane features that you used to get on old consoles before it was all "just use the internet." We once linked a couple Xboxes together to play Halo multiplayer, running cables through the hallways of my college dorm until we got yelled at for creating a tripping hazard.