Doom II

Doom II: Hell on Earth
The cover artwork for Doom II: Hell on Earth, painted by fantasy artist Gerald Brom, depicts the Doom space marine firing a double-barreled shotgun at a Cyberdemon.
Developer(s)	id Software
Publisher(s)	GT Interactive (DOS/Windows), Activision (Game Boy Advance, Steam), Tapwave, Inc. (Zodiac), Bethesda Softworks (Xbox Live Arcade)
Designer(s)	Sandy Petersen, Shawn Green, American McGee
Programmer(s)	John Carmack, John Romero, Dave Taylor
Artist(s)	Adrian Carmack, Kevin Cloud
Composer(s)	Bobby Prince
Series	Doom
Engine	id Tech 1
Platform(s)	MS-DOS, Linux, Microsoft Windows, Amiga 1200, GBA, Macintosh, Sega Saturn, Tapwave Zodiac, Xbox, Xbox Live Arcade
Release	Windows Macintosh Game Boy Advance Zodiac Xbox Xbox Live Arcade
Genre(s)	First-person shooter
Mode(s)	Single player Multiplayer

Doom II: Hell on Earth is a first-person shooter video game, which won the Origins Award for Best Fantasy or Science Fiction Computer Game of 1994. Unlike Doom which was initially only available through shareware and mail order, Doom II was a commercial release sold in stores. Master Levels for Doom II, an expansion pack that includes 21 new levels, was released on December 26, 1995 by id Software.

Due to its popularity and success, Doom II has been released for numerous platforms, including the Amiga, Apple Macintosh, Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo Game Boy Advance. The release of the original Doom source code has facilitated ports to many other platforms, including the Apple iPod, and several types of cellphones. On August 13 during the QuakeCon 2009 media conference, it was announced that Doom II would be ported to Xbox Live Arcade, and was released in May the following year.

Plot

Immediately following the events in Doom, the player once again takes the role of the anonymous space marine who has proven too tough for Hell to contain. After being teleported from Phobos, and subsequently fighting on Deimos which is suspended above Hell, the Marine finds himself back home on Earth, only to find that it too has fallen victim to the hellish invasion, leaving billions of people dead.

The player progresses through 32 levels (two of which are "secret" levels based on Wolfenstein 3D).

In the first chapter, the marine learns along the way that the remaining survivors of Earth's population are trapped on Earth. The only means of escape is the space port which contains massive ships that can carry the remnants of Earth's population into space. The demons, predicting this avenue of escape, have placed a force field over the space port so those ships cannot depart. The marine must battle his way through the infested space port and deactivate the force field. Once humanity is finally evacuated from the ravaged, infested planet, the marine is the only human left on Earth. He sits and waits for death, content in the knowledge that he has saved his species, giving them a chance to continue elsewhere.

Only minutes pass before the marine receives an off-planet transmission — humans in orbit have managed to find out where the armies of Hell are coming from. In the second part of the game, designed with a cityscape motif, the marine cuts a swath through the demons in his path before finally arriving at the gateway. He sees no way to close the portal on this side, and so dives through to find a solution on the other side.

After brutal battles with legions of Hell in the third chapter, the marine finally reaches the home of the "largest demon (he has) ever seen", called the Icon of Sin. The game concludes with a battle in which the player must fire rockets into the exposed brain of the demon, dodging constant attacks from lesser demons which spawn indefinitely. Whether or not the Icon of Sin is the devil or just some larger demon is not explained. Once defeated the Icon's death throes devastate vast portions of Hell and the marine sets off back to Earth, looking forward to rebuilding it. In the ending, the player proceeds to view his or her statistics for the entire game. Following the stats page, the player learns all of the demons' names until finally viewing the space marine listed as "Our Hero".

Gameplay

Doom II was not dramatically different from its predecessor. There were no major technological developments, graphical improvements, or substantial gameplay changes. The game still consisted of the player negotiating non-linear levels, picking up keys to unlock new areas, and of course shooting down hundreds of monsters. However, due to the larger and more complicated maps with larger groups of monsters, the game had somewhat higher system requirements than the original.

The main additions to the game were new monsters to fight. Doom II doubled the number of non-boss monster types and started using bosses from the original Doom as normal level enemies. In addition, the multiplayer functionality was greatly improved in Doom II, including "out of the box" support for a vastly increased number of dial-up modems. The two player dial-up connection allowed one player to dial in to the other player's computer in order to play either cooperatively or in deathmatch style combat. There was also LAN functionality added, which was improved upon as patches and updates were released. This functionality was later incorporated into the original Doom.

The double-barreled shotgun in use

The only new weapon addition was the double-barreled shotgun. In-game it is known as the "Super Shotgun", which uses two shotgun shells per fire, but could fire out 20 pellets instead of the regular shotgun's seven pellets. This made it very useful in dispatching medium-sized monsters. However it takes slightly longer to reload and it has a much wider spread which was less effective in medium to long range situations, this allowed for the standard shotgun to still serve a purpose in the game.

Other than the Super Shotgun, there was also a new powerup named "Megasphere", which gave the player, no matter how low his/her health/armor may be, 200% health and 200% armor. It resembles the "Soulsphere" but more brown, and the facial sprites have been altered.

A small change in gameplay was instituted. Instead of the player playing through three related episodes, gameplay takes place over one giant episode, albeit with interludes for when the story develops. Instead of watching the player's progress on a map (as in the original episodes of Doom), the screens between each level simply show a background (as in the bonus fourth episode of Doom available on The Ultimate Doom expansion pack). It also meant that the player was not forced to start over with a pistol every eight or nine levels, as was the case in Doom.

Online multiplayer

As with the original Doom, multiplayer games can be played across the internet using third party source ports such as Skulltag, RUN! , and Odamex, and are still popular today.

Expansions

Master Levels for Doom II

Master Levels for Doom II is an expansion pack for Doom II which was released officially on 26 December 1995 by id Software. The CD contains twenty WAD files created by various authors under contract. The file teeth.wad contains a secret level, so there are a total of 21 levels. As a bonus, 1,830 amateur WAD files downloaded from the Internet are also included, collectively called "Maximum Doom". They were also included in the Xbox port of Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil.

Final Doom

Main article: Final Doom

Final Doom consists of two 32-level megawads (level files), The Plutonia Experiment by the Casali brothers, and TNT: Evilution by TeamTNT. Final Doom was released on May 31, 1996 and distributed as an official id Software product.

D!Zone

WizardWorks Software released the D!Zone expansion pack featuring hundreds of levels for Doom and Doom II. D!Zone was reviewed in 1995 in Dragon #217 by Jay & Dee in the "Eye of the Monitor" column. Jay gave the pack 1 out of 5 stars, while Dee gave the pack 1½ stars.

No Rest for the Living

No Rest for the Living is the title of a Doom II expansion set developed by Nerve Software for the release of Doom II on Xbox Live Arcade. It consists of eight regular and one secret level.

Reception

The reception of Doom II has been very positive. [1] The game was reviewed in 1995 in Dragon #216 by David "Zeb" Cook in the "Eye of the Monitor" column. According to Cook, "if mindless but intense carnage is what you want, you'll get your money's worth. It's not just a must-have game; it's a keep-on-the-hard-drive-forever game. If you need to have more Doom, get this."

External links

• Doom II at id Software's official website
• Doom at Activision's official website
• Doom II at IMDb
• Template:GameFAQs
• Playing the Game: DOOM II, a list of academic texts about the game
• Classic Doom Online - online multiplayer set up instructions