Doom 3

Doom 3 is a survival horror reinterpretation of the legendary id Software series, returning to a space base on Mars, but this time placing far more emphasis on atmosphere, darkness, and tension than on the pure action of previous entries. The player pushes through semi-automated corridors among the corpses of colleagues and awakening demons, with a defining trait of the game being the need to choose between shining a flashlight and holding a weapon, which creates a constant sense of vulnerability and even led to unofficial fan-made mods that combined the flashlight and gunfire. The new id Tech 4 engine brought dynamic shadowing and lighting that had no equal on PC at the time, and together with the sound design, where an unexpected attack lurks around every corner, this remains what players remember most about the game to this day.

This 2004 PC version is the original, not a port — the Xbox version was released by Vicarious Visions a year later, in 2005, and with noticeable technical compromises. The console did not have the power to run the engine at the same quality, so resolution and frame rate went down and some textures and environment geometry were simplified so the game could run smoothly on the hardware of the time at all. In return, the Xbox version offered an exclusive two-player split-screen cooperative mode, which the PC release did not have at all, so players could experience the horror of Mars in pairs, albeit at the cost of an even greater drop in graphical quality.

The PC version also shipped with full mod support and a large community of custom modifications and maps, and in 2005 received the expansion Resurrection of Evil, which the console version never got at all. So whoever wanted Doom 3 in its sharpest graphical form, with the highest frame rate and the widest range of content including mods and the expansion, clearly reached for the PC version even back then, while the Xbox mainly offered the comfort of a gamepad and shared co-op.

Why play it: Whoever wanted Doom 3 in its sharpest graphical form, with full mod support and the exclusive Resurrection of Evil expansion, clearly reached for the PC version even back then.