Back on the shores of hell
In 2020, Nightdive Studios released a source port of the oft-forgotten Doom 64 that brought it to modern platforms and reintroduced it to a new, more receptive audience. Beyond simply porting it, however, they added a new episode that better links it to the rest of the Doom series narrative. Now fans have implemented the new episode back into the N64 version as Doom 64: Complete Edition.
This means that if you, for whatever reason (not judging), preferred the N64 version of Doom 64, you can play it again without sacrificing the extra features of Nightdive Studios’ source port. This all sounds really difficult, since the 2020 version runs on Nightdive’s proprietary Kex Engine. I’m assuming the maps still exist in an extractable format because I imagine it would be too much work to try to manually recreate them for a release such as this.
Beyond simply adding the extra maps, Doom 64: Complete Edition adds a number of quality-of-life upgrades. You can find them at this link. One of the most important revisions for me, however, is the ability to disable three-point texture filtering. This was what was mostly to blame for everything on the N64 looking blurry. They also improved the framerate in some areas and enabled support for the Expansion Pak upgrade. That’s some good stuff!
If you haven’t played Doom 64, it’s definitely worth checking out. It always had its fans, but Nightdive’s port helped force a wider re-assessment of Midway’s contribution to the series. Personally, I don’t think it’s better than Doom, but I might put it above Doom 2. However, it has its own style and approach to the series’ formula.
The Doom 64: Complete Edition fan patch can be found here.
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