is so scary I'd pee my pants if I were playing it on a harder setting than normal (Marine) and if I had not already been scared out of my pants. They flew away in terror while I was playing the game and will wander the earth then probably wind up in some Dr.Suess book.

Now, if you check out the screens shots at the Doom3 website, you're not put off by lots of blood, and you notice the monsters are kinda shiny, you could wind up thinking to yourself, as I did: whoop dee doo! And when you're tired of hearing hype for literally years on other games that kinda lived up to expectations or fell flat on their faces, plus given the not so ground-breaking release of Quake 3... well... you're somewhat 100% skeptical on the matter plaging all Doom and Doom2 players: Will I ever get the pants scared off of me again, or, if that hasn't happened, if I will be scared by a game again enough to pee my pants in fright loud enough to wake up the family.

I have an answer. I have the answer.

Yes!

So! This game delivers. Given the 4 difficulty settings, Recruit/Marine/Veteran/Nightmare, I chose the default of Marine. The game isn't shiny like the screen shots pretend it is. Yes, when you shine your flashlight on something organic it will have a sheen. The rest of the game is dark as my basement (our lights down there burnt out -- can you guess who's been afraid to go to the basement recently?). You have the option of wielding a weapon to defend yourself with, or, a flashlight to see by. One or the other, one at a time. Don't try to fire when you're out of ammunition because then you'll have to go through the nail biting agony of reloading. I'm jumping around a little bit, sorry. I get a little jumpy when my heart is still racing and I'm all jittery from being so tense.

Asthetics

GORGEOUS. The amount of textures they use, the detail, the beautiful lighting, the AMAZING shadow rendering and object interaction, effects, just mind blowing. And gory. And dark when your flashlight is off.

Geek Factor

Half-Life 2, eat your heart out, or Doom3 will for you. I have a P4 2.5Ghz with GeForce FX 5200 (128 Mb) graphics card. It ain't the best but it ain't bad either, and my CPU is coming up on a year old so it's pretty much top-grade still. The game has decided my computer is one level above barely adequate to play this monster of a game. It's a whopping resolution of 640x480 and a detail level of 1 above the lowest, coming in at Medium, ranking 2 out of 4 for detail levels. Holy shit: the reqs are a 1.5 Ghz with 64 Mb card running fast, to play on the lowest detail settings. How does this affect the game's look. Usually a game is pathetically choppy, granning, pixelized, chunky, and obviously only barely functional. In other words: you're missing out big time. Doom3? Not so. I am only missing out when I either scroll text and it doesn't come out to a perfect pixel-synch or I'm looking at someone's glasses and I can see the frame is pixelated. Other than that, it blows away any and everything else I have ever seen on a computer. In the years to come you can return to this game on an exponentially faster computer system and crank the detail up to Stupid-High, then play, and I think you'll still be amazed to some extent. Nothing will be new anymore, but, you'll know you're playing with something that's technologically a dinosaur but still pretty cool.

Fear Factor

The level designers are clever bastards. You'll be walking down a narrow hallway and -- aha! you spy an enemy in the distance. You could continue to use your very-short range shotgun or switch to the more practical machine gun and take some pot shots. Taking aim with your machine gun -- you're mauled from behind by something demonic. In short, the wizards at id have outguessed the player. So, as a smart monkey, the player adapts. Just when id knows they will. And your second guessing works against you. Soon after you're huddled in a corner planning every conceivable outcome as you plan you next step forward. I wander into a stone cavern with cobwebs on the wall. Me thinks: spiders. A little nudging ahead proves me correct. So I'm pegging them with my pistol when, yes, you guessed it, I get mauled from behind -- no, wait, no I don't! But I'm ready for it. I've whipped around, sure that more spiders will be feasting on my arse, to find none. So I turn back around and continue forward... to be munched on from behind. Oh if my ass had a mouth and eyes it would be giving me quite the lecture on what it saw creep up from behind. On top of the not-knowing-what-is-going-to-happen-next syndrome that I seem to be plagued with (as are other players), there is the I-know-all-too-well-what-nastiness-is-about-to-happen syndrome. Such as when you listen to the voices. There are CREEPY voices throughout the game that screak or whisper to you. Sometimes they are there to help you. I heard a woman's voice say, "this way". So I moved in that direction around the corner, listening to my footsteps echo -- or were those hers? And I reach a wall ahead of me. "follow me" she calls errily, and bloody footsteps apear on the floor, and I do hear her walking. And she walks right up to the wall and keeps going. All right... I walk up to the wall and it rises. I stealth along the red lit maintanance shaft to see, lit from above in white light like a god-send: the plasma rifle. I'd been finding plasma canisters for it all over and here was this deadly baby. Able to give me hope in a room full of demons. YOU KNOW bad things are going to "pown" me when I grab it. Your pets know it for crying out loud. But we wants its! Precious! ... one massive ambush later and far too much blood than I would have thought I could stomach, splattered EVERYWHERE, I move in a red haze in search of a medpack. When I find one on a shelf in a room I am about to grab it when the room goes demonic. I can barely move with the presence, the lights have gone out, there is a glow that has no source in odd places casting disfiguring shadows. Glowing sigils appear on the ceiling, walls, floor, me, and some powerful force blows into the room to manifest. I spin around and dodge a flying floor grate with my eye on the door, plasma gun at the read. When I hear the crackling of my doom manifesting directly behind me. Exactly where the wizards at id predicted I'd jump to in fear, out of grasp of the medpak and I am messily eaten by some I cannot describe. Lastly, I've cranked the volume. It was erie to start off with, on normal levels of sound. But when I cranked it, with my nerves already shot, I found that the first burst of gun fire froze my muscles as they screamed to get me out of harms way -- which ever way that was. Only it was me who had been firing. That was a rush. The jostling around of my line of sight and concept of the direction I'm facing when I'm being mauled is horrifying. You're panicing to get a good shot off, in fact a shot that will even graze your devourer would be a nice conincident. I've noticed that the fear factor is drastically reduced when there is little to no sound. So crank it when you play, and play it late at night. Make sure you've gone pee first! Oh, one more thing I forgot to add, which is truly frightening. The flashlight. You can use it, or, a weapon. But not both. So as you're moving about checking out the dark places and suddenly find yourself staring at a very ugly, fast demon, and you switch to your weapon, you're also engulfed in darkness for the most part. And when you fire, and you don't hit anything but the wall, you get scared. Because then you start getting eaten and the red, scaring slashes that cover your visor as you are raked to pieces and generally molested so roughly that you wind up aiming at the ceiling or get turned about and you just want to cry. Yah, very scary. Enjoy kiddies!