DOOM Port Corner, Entry 7: Game Boy Advance

You know what's great, and has always been great? Playing games on the go. Being able to just take your good video games with you and play them in the car or whatever was always the big motivating factor in, you know, buying incredible amounts of AA or AAA batteries, at least before you figured out it was cheaper to buy rechargeable ones.

In terms of handheld rankings, something which I am not going to really wade into, I think it is pretty fair to say the Game Boy Advance is at or close to the top of Best Handhelds of All Time. These waters get muddied nowadays with your Ayn Thors and your Retroids, but I still think that holds pretty true. The GBA gave you more or less SNES-level power (it might actually be more powerful? I can't remember exactly) and has one hell of a library of JRPGs, platformers, and other rad shit. Its games are so good they built backwards compatibility into the DS just to be sure.

So of course it got a DOOM port too!

A David A. Palmer Production

Back in the late 90s, David A. Palmer Production approached id and asked if they could do a port of DOOM for the Game Boy Color. This would have been an awful idea, if you ask me, both because the GBC only had two buttons and it probably did not have the hardware to actually handle any kind of port of the DOOM engine. When id heard the pitch, they (or more accurately, John Carmack and Activision) suggested that the company port Commander Keen instead, a game which was, you know, way more likely to run on the Game Boy Color.

When that port was released (to reasonable success), id gave David A. Palmer Productions the green light to do a port of DOOM - but for the Game Boy Advance, since it was the new handheld on the block and, you know, significantly more powerful. That power would come in handy!

Imagine this on a GBC screen. You can't!

Or, you know, it might've.

Maybe.

In Which John Carmack is a Fool

Brian Nilsson and Brad Hopwood were the programmers assigned to execute the port. In spite of having id's blessing to make the port, they were missing a critical component: any code for the game. Not to be deterred, they did the obvious thing and, over the course of nine months, built an engine from the ground up to run DOOM. They were, according to David Palmer, about 95% of the way there, with some optimization left to make sure the game could hit 30 frames per second, when...

John Carmack found the Jaguar source code. I dunno, maybe it was in a filing cabinet somewhere and he tripped over it one day, who knows? Once found, however, both Carmack and Activision (who was handling the publishing) insisted the GBA port use that code instead of what they'd been working on.

Now look, I'm sure that there was some reason for this in Carmack's mind beyond "the code I wrote is better than yours." The Jaguar version was in fact the lead development platform and the design upon which every console port (excepting the SNES) had been built. So it's not crazy to have the idea that "we did the work on this, we know it will deliver a certain level of performance, use that."

This is still a dick move - nine months of hard work got tossed out the window because Carmack tripped over a pile of diskettes and found the source code? If Palmer is to be believed, the engine was basically finished! They'd done the port work!

Unless, you know, this is all just excuses. DOOM for the GBA, not to spoil the surprise, was not a best-seller on the GBA, nor was it particularly good. It performed poorly enough that the job of porting DOOM II went to a different company, in fact. The titular David A Palmer of David A Palmer Productions points to this decision as a primary reason for its performance, as it was a major developmental setback. They had to start over - using the Jaguar code as base, which probably helped things, but start over nonetheless - which doubtless did take away from time they could've spent doing engine optimization to get better performance out of the GBA hardware. Was the engine they'd made that much better? We'll never know! All we've got is what we've got, and what we've got is, well...

Everything is Tiny

Okay, let's just get it out of the way. Remember how the SNES port was so pixelated as to feel nearly unreadable? Well in that case you were at least on a bigass television. On the GBA, you were on a tiny screen and it looks... maybe a little worse. It's not exactly readable at times, although I could probably take screenshots of these little like two-pixel imps forever.

That's an imp!

Once again there are three shotgunners in this image. Can you find them all?

You may notice the HUD is a little different than the normal Jaguar-inspired HUD here - specifically that there are ammo counts over on the right. This is (I think) down to to the different aspect ratio on the GBA screen - it's closer to 16:9 than 4:3, so they had a little extra room.

Your last E1M1 comparison shot. I miss doing this already.

Remember how nice the textures in the SNES port were? Yeah, me too.

I have to admit here that I am actually kind of impressed the game is readable at all. I love the GBA, it is maybe my favorite handheld ever (well, specifically the GBA SP is), but that screen is tiny! That they got the damn thing to display the wide-open spaces on the tiny screen and it is still readable is in itself a triumph. They even got light sectors in there!

No really having actual dark sectors is impressive by the standards of these ports. The 32X didn't have these!

So while it is obviously a compromised look because it is on a tiny screen and thus had an extremely small amount of pixels to work with, it's still impressive in its own right. It may not be much of a looker, but it gets the job done.

The skyboxes still look decent too, even if they are crunched halfway to hell

I also need to point out something that was extremely weird, which is that while the GBA version does have music in it, all the music is... weirdly one level off? So the music in e1m1 is the music from e1m2 and so on and so forth, up through e3m3 where it suddenly corrects itself. I have no idea why the fuck this is the case. The rest of the sounds are basically fine - a little crunchier than you might want, and the Doomguy makes a pain noise instead of an oof noise when he shouldn't sometimes, but it's not that big of a deal.

Shoot the Demons

Okay, so much for the visuals. How compromised is it from a gameplay standpoint? The GBA had a grand total of four buttons (six if you count start and select), but two of those buttons were shoulder buttons. Wisely, they put strafe on the shoulder buttons, which works very well. A shoots, B pulls double duty as the sprint and use button, select brings up the automap which kind of looks like ass:

I don't know what exactly it is that makes me dislike it, but I think this looks awful.

Switching weapons is accomplished by holding in the shoulder buttons and pressing up or down on the D-pad. This is, I think, a decent-enough solution for the problem, but also I spent a lot of time strafing left or right when I wanted to be switching weapons. Not exactly what you want in the middle of a pitched battle, but like... I don't know, that's as good of a solution as any. I got used to it fairly quickly, as I did with a lot of these port controls, honestly. We wouldn't get a really good way to swap weapons until dual analog controllers allowed you to use shoulder buttons or the d-pad to cycle through weapons.

As a nice little treat, unlike the 32X or SNES ports, sprites can turn around, and infighting is a mechanic again. Again, my standards for what is praiseworthy in these ports continue to lower, but hey, look at that Pinky bite that Cacodemon!

Extremely funny that the Cacodemon fireball blowing up looks like a gout of blood, considering this is the least bloody port out there

You may notice that green smear on the Pinky's leg there - that's because Nintendo was shooting for T ratings on all its GBA games. That meant the blood became green - in fact, you might have noticed the Doomguy's face never actually seems to be bloody in all the screenshots here, even when his health is low enough to really warrant a little blood. They wanted to avoid the appearance of blood so bad that when you take damage, the screen turns purple.

EXTREMELY PRINCE VOICE: Purple pain, puuuuurple pain

Like the SNES version, you can choose which episode you want to play up top, but unlike the SNES version you can also save your game when you beat a level. This counts for every level except for when you exit to a secret level - if you do that, it skips the save screen, so you have to beat the secret level in order to get to a save. I don't think that was intentional.

Also like all the Jaguar-based versions, there's no Cyberdemon or Spider Mastermind, so once more the SNES port remains the only one with those guys in there (not counting all the DOOM II levels in the PS1 and Saturn ports, of course), and the levels are swapped around/left out in the same order as well. Pretty standard, really.

A lot of green on the ground over there. Also look at the way the hand is chopped off, it's amazing

Also, bodies disappear. This makes the game slightly more of a pain in the ass, as a good way to keep track of where you've been in DOOM is to look for the bodies of the demons you've killed on your way through. Not great, but probably a hardware limitation. There's also whatever the hell happened with this texture here in E2M1:

Looks mostly normal....

What the hell

This is what it is supposed to look like just fyi

A Worthy Port, or Doomed to Ignominy?

There's a charm to playing the game on a wee little handheld - I mostly played this particular port on my Analogue Pocket, and had a reasonably okay time - but the compromises they had to make kind of brings the score down for me. The framerate also can bog down here and there, although it runs at something approaching 30fps (or maybe I am just poisoned by knowledge of worse ports, like the Sega Saturn) and that's not nothing! Being able to save your progress is a big bonus, as is being able to choose your episode.

What it ultimately comes down to for me, I guess, is that if you wanted to play DOOM on the go this was easily the best way to do it, so I think I have to give this Worthy Port status. It works! It's not going to be your preferred way to play, but you can go back to it now and again and think about how far technology has come. It's not bad!

In Which Other Ports Exist

Now obviously there were (and are) other ports of DOOM that exist. There was a Pocket PC version, for example, but I couldn't figure out a way to emulate that cleanly. There are also other more mundane ports like a Mac port and UNIX port and whatever else (I play the game in a Linux version of UZDoom, which is itself a port!). I stuck with the consoles of yore, mostly because once you get past the Xbox port (which while feature-complete has a few weird bugs as a result of being kind of a rushed port of the Linux version of the game which means that like, the music plays at a slower tempo for some reason) the controls all more or less standardize and you stop getting weird variations in level layout and whatnot. I have copies of DOOM on multiple consoles right now, which is stupid because I generally just play the damn thing on PC, so what do I have it on my Switch for? Hell, I don't know, some kind of sickness, probably.

Still, if I had to point you to one of these old ports? I reckon I would point to the PS1 port as the most interesting (doubly so if you just play Psydoom on your PC). That or the SNES port for its sheer audacity. The rest of them are just varying degrees of compromised - the Jaguar port, as good as it runs, is also the reason so many ports make you play fucking Fortress of Mystery as the final level, and that's just fucked up!

The newest version - the DOOM + DOOM II version which is available on modern consoles, I mean - is the best way to play on a console, and hell, it ain't a bad way to play on PC either! But there's plenty of other options out there, options which give you access to some of the coolest (and weirdest, and occasionally just downright pornographic(?)) user maps and campaigns out there. Perhaps one day we will speak of such things.