Did you hear that? It sounded a bit like a child…a muffled giggle and a faint pitter-patter somewhere behind me. I’m praying that it wasn’t a child because they scare me. At least now they do. The last toddler that I ran into had wings, bloody sharp teeth, and the ability to launch itself with supernatural might across the room at my face. Jumpy reflexes pulled my grimace out of the way just in time, and the infant hit the wall behind me with a 7 lb. thud. Before it could scramble away into the shadows I sent it back to hell via the churning blades of an industrial power, Mahogany-grade chainsaw. Yes, since then I’ve been a little more wary of the little ones than usual. You never know until it’s too late which one just spawned from hell.

DOOM 3 may have prevented me from ever having children. It may even force me to join the forestry industry so that I can stay far away from those dangerous little creatures, and closer to my gas-powered savior and simple foes like the Grizzly Bear. DOOM 3 is a very scary game. It combines intense 3D audio with very little visual information to produce an extraordinarily spooky environment. The game takes place mostly in the shadows, and your flashlight has a very narrow focus. Even more diabolical and ingenious, the game designers rigged it so that pulling out your flashlight requires you to stow your chainsaw, shotgun, or other defensive item. In order to see, you must be vulnerable. What a wonderfully twisted concept! It reminds me of that scene from Peewee’s Big Adventure when Peewee lights a match to discover the source of many threatening sounds. In DOOM 3 you’ll feel like Peewee quite a bit. Visual information is so scant that you must have the audio cranked way up to survive for any interesting amount of time. Often the only thing that predicts impending death is the sound of something dripping just behind and above you.

I want to emphasize that this game is a complete audio-visual experience. When you open the game’s manual it tells you just this: jack up the sound and put out the lights. While they don’t say it in so many words, keep a bottle of powerful sedatives close at hand for emergency administration in the event of a fit, stroke, or sudden bout of paranoid hallucination. They should probably have also told us to take a long piss and a crap before hand, otherwise diaper-up.

It is a dimly lit game, but I don’t want to downplay the graphics at all. They are among the most gorgeous graphics I have ever seen in a game. There is profound detail and novelty at every step. The environment and lighting are rendered with exquisite beauty. I’m telling you, these graphics are AWESOME! The first time through is like a 72-hour cocaine binge, and as far as I can tell the game has unlimited scalability. When someone buys me a 5Ghz machine and a graphics card from the year 2010, I will max this game out and get scared shitless one more time.

The entities that inhabit DOOM 3 are terrifying. I’m sure you’ve seen some of them in ads, etc. But to see them move, growl, chew flesh, is something entirely different. You’ll be struggling to pry your finger off the left mouse button after your 350 lb. foe is full of holes and twitching, just inches away. Since you really only get fleeting glimpses of beasties before you kill them or vice versa, the developers could have shorted us on some detail and gotten away with it. But they didn’t. These creatures are absolutely awesome, and I’ve got the screenshots to prove it. In DOOM 3 there are more polygons on one imp than there are in the entire first DOOM game.

The weapons from the Doom trilogy are all present, in their best incarnation yet. The developers added one other little piece of trouble – a cube that feeds off of death and carnage and is wickedly destructive when fully charged. It’s probably no coincidence that it reminds me of the little box-o-heck from Hellraiser. This time you don’t even have to figure out how to open it to have hellions from another dimension tear your skin off from all directions. High Quality Disembowelment comes at a very low cost in DOOM 3.

Great graphics, perfect sound. In fact, if it weren’t for the mouse and keyboard I’d be convinced that I rented a DVD. The game is, not surprisingly, essentially linear. As far as I can tell, you have to step in every goddamn trap in the game. There are secret rooms and stores of weapons all over the place. Finding the sneaky glittering button on the obscure place in the wall is kind of fun the first time. Searching through bloodstained Personal Data Assistants for the lost security code to a weapons locker is never fun, especially the first time when you thought that there might be something worth reading in there. I mean who wants to waste time poking through a pile of lab coats and shredded meat? But the audio logs are nifty because you can start them playing, then walk away into the inky blackness and get creeped right out by the recording.

Anyway, apart from little easter eggs here and there, she’s totally fucking linear. As in every Doom game you end up feeling like a SWAT team member, clearing out room after room methodically with high-adrenaline. There are pseudo-choice points where you have to select one of two options on a computer screen, but I’m pretty sure the result is always the same plus or minus 10 or 20 frantic kills.

The plot is vacuous, but still fairly satisfying. In a headline: Teleportation Researchers Accidentally Unleash Hell Just In Time For You To Start Sweeping It Up With A Minigun. I am glad that they didn’t wait too much longer than that, but a little tiny bit of buildup wouldn’t have hurt that much. With all the entrail-slinging that goes on thereafter, it would be nice to have a few more low-caliber freakouts to start things off. On the other hand, they do manage to create a sinister mood in the first few minutes of gameplay. The people you run into before hell is unleashed don’t look very healthy, and they are seriously paranoid. I mean, everybody looks pasty and pale, kind of like a zombie. When hell finally breaks loose the scientists don’t have to transform all that much in order to zombie-out completely. The biggest difference is that they start shouting in Doom-speak: some mumbled and incomprehensible but clearly satanic slang.

After the place is compromised, something WILL jump out at you every 10 or 20 steps that you take. Now you can’t predict where the next rotten ghoul will come from, because the damned thing always lurches out of an opening that was a wall just one second ago, and it’s behind you or beside you, and in pitch blackness you can’t see a fucking thing so it WILL get one slash at you before you exorcise it’s bitch-ass. With a little experience, though, you will be quite able to predict when the bastard will stagger out. In fact I’m sure you could measure this sort of thing at the gamer’s scalp. But that’s another matter entirely – scalps don’t really stay on very well in DOOM 3.

So, for a hacker-slasher, DOOM 3 is top notch. I believe, fundamentally, that there is some real merit in any game, book, movie or story in which a large number of people turn into highly aggressive living-dead. Anybody who agrees with this even partially should buy DOOM 3 (upgrade your machine if you have to), launch the game after dark, and after taking a kamikaze bong hit. But honestly I need a bit more flexibility in a game. In my mind the whole point of gaming is to exercise skull-cracking freedom that has no business in real life. DOOM 3 is essentially a really beautiful, really scary, really long tunnel filled with terrible creatures that you must kill. And while I appreciate a diverse selection of flesh rending weaponry more than almost anyone else, I also appreciate a little more freedom to choose when and how I deploy my high-powered tools.

Maybe I’m asking for too much. I mean really, Art – you’ve got other games! If you wanna jack-off to cargo and money then play Railroad Tycoon. If you wanna spiral into endless resource management and expansion then play Civilization 3. If you wanna work through the best hacker-slasher movie/game ever, then get back into DOOM 3 and stop being such a pussy. Yeah, maybe I should take some of my own advice. But then again I’ll probably wait until I get that graphics card of the future before I play DOOM 3 again. Because when it comes to replay value, the next bang in DOOM 3 really is the next detail setting. In the meantime I’m going to go get a lumber-jacket, a Chainsaw, and a vasectomy...