That is correct, I believe the monsters on PS1 Doom have a selectable "spectre" flag and that particular Cacodemon had it selected by mistake. It's a cool thing, I noticed it back in the day and thought I was going crazy at first haha
I used to haul my big CRT over to friend's houses for weekend link cable multiplayer, good times. At the time of these ports, having both players on the same screen was viewed as kind of ruining the point of a multiplayer FPS, so I never gave it any thought. Then Goldeneye happened and the rest is history
Club doom played a track from the disc. I used to remove the doom disc before climbing the stairs and put in any other music cd I had, and when you went up the stairs it would play a track off the music cd instead of the club doom track.
It was a different story for me. Some PS1 games allowed their music to be played on regular CD players. I was pretty impressed by that as a kid. And of course, Club Doom was blasting in my apartment the same day I learned about this neat feature
Spectres and Nightmare Spectres were created by special flags rather than being unique monsters, so that "Spectre Cacodemon" was probably just that Cacodemon being erroneously flagged with the Spectre flag. On that note, the Nightmare flag can be technically applied to any monster, which simply makes them translucent with subtractive shading and doubles their HP, and pre-release screenshots even shown Nightmare Imps, but the flag was only ever applied to Pinkies in the final game for some unknown reason. As for some gameplay quirks of PS1 Doom: *Bullets and shotgun pellets deal 4-16 damage in multiples of 4, rather than 5-15 in multiples of 5. This doesn't really change average damage much, but it makes it technically possible for the Shotgun with all pellets hitting fail to one-shot Shotgunners and two-shot Imps and Chaingunners. *Zombiemen bullets however were buffed to deal 3-24 damage in multiples of 3, instead of 3-15. Shotgunners and Chaingunners thankfully still do 3-15 damage with their pellets/bullets. *The Fist and Chainsaw were buffed to deal 3-24 damage in multiples of 3 per hit, rather than 2-20 in multiples of 2. When berserked, the Fist now does 30-240 in multiples of 30 instead of 20-200 in multiples of 20. So more damage _and_ more consistency. *Lost Souls have 60 HP instead of 100. *Barons and Hell Knights can now infight with each other. *If Doom Guy is gibbed or his corpse is crushed, his HUD head sprite will play a unique exploding animation. These changes would be kept in Doom 64 (aside from the exploding head animation as Doom 64 obviously doesn't have the HUD head sprite). You then got some other quirks as a result of it being based on earlier versions of Doom, such as Lost Souls counting towards the kill count and Pinkies attacking with a short-ranged hitscan attack, which can lead to them infighting each other and miss you when you have invisibility. These changes also led to a formerly widespread myth that PS1 Doom halved the gibbing threshold, as people saw Zombiemen being gibbed by the Fist without berserk, Chainsaw, and other Zombiemen, which is normally impossible in PC Doom, but it was debunked once the game's source code got fully reverse engineered and revealed those unusual Zombiemen gibbings were the result of the aforementioned damage buffs.
Based knower. I spent a lot of time on the Doom wiki back in the 00s, and I knew about the spectre flag, so I was kind of surprised to see the author call it "a new enemy" when it's obviously just an error by the developers, and any enemy can become a "spectre".
Yeah, that was kind of confirmed by the GEC Master Edition team (they ported official pc doom maps to ps1, playable either on a ps1 emulator or a ps1 itself) and the builder they use has those flags, spectre or nightmare versions for any monsters due to the memory problems the port itself has which limits monster type variety (which spectres and nightmares are not affected by since is the same monster except with flags), wall textures and floor/ceiling textures aswell maps' sectors being only able to be 256 units tall or the wall textures would stretch. There is a known issue with the map suburbs from doom 2 which is after the blue skull if you dont kill the monsters fast enough the map would crash giving the eeriee black screen with the error texture along the map's track keeping on playing, that happens due many sprites happening at once in the player's visual. PS1 port is a jewel for any curiosities on hardware limits, doom for that console is your big bro for learning that stuff i tell ya.
PSX DooM has always and will always be my favorite version of DooM. The visuals, sound effects, music and all. Been smitten by it's dark mood and ambience since it's release
@@Larry Strange, this is literally the only game I had where I couldn't get it to play link up with one disc. When you say you could only load one map at a time do you mean backing out to the main menu before each level or do you simply mean the usual one console loading at a time? I remember the game lacked a progress bar which made things a little more difficult so perhaps I was just impatient with this one. I just grabbed a second copy in the end haha.
@shroomologist its been a while since I did it but what you do is keep putting the disk in the next PlayStation while the data is loaded I think only the Disk PlayStation gets music But certain both get sound I have two disks now so I don't have to do it anymore
@@shroomologist One console loading at a time, you load the game all the way up to the part where it's finished loading the map and is waiting to hear from the other console. Did you put something in the button to make the machine think the door was still closed?
While playing deathmatch in the courtyard if you picked up the invincibility and got the other player to telefrag you, you didn't die but became invulnerable for the remainder of the match on that map. My mates never cottoned on to this and always thought I just owned them on this map 🤣🤣🤣.
Considering it was a rush job Williams really knocked it out of the park with the PSX Doom trilogy. Despite the changes it was surprisingly well balanced and the exclusive levels weren't bad either. The new lighting is great and Aubrey Hodges' soundtrack elevates the experience to another level entirely.
The amount of sleepless nights of playing ps1 "link up" doom. Good times. For me the atmospheric soundtracks Aubery Hodges did on the ps1 versions of doom are just masterfully done.
Here's one. The "Nightmare" flag works on all enemies, not just the Specter. Using it on other enemies makes then negatively blended and doubles their health. This is not to be confused with the Nightmare Imp from _Doom 64,_ of course.
It's a bootleg remix of DJ Skinhead - Extreme Terror. They used a sample pack from Industrial Strength Records but did not clear the samples for licensing. Naughty!
@@JamesStocks So how does that make it a "remix" of Extreme Terror? I mean, okay, it's a bootleg track that uses an unlicensed sample pack, and it also uses the scream from the Extreme Terror track. It's still not a remix tho
Yes, more especifically it's the lack of frame animations as the Ravenants unlike other monster has a major number of unique frames that the PS1 couldn't handle at the same time. So they cut some of the frames making his animation more choppy and the speed was reduced probably to hide the effect a bit. The Arch-Vile was cut for the same problem, but in that case the monster has so many unique animation frames that the devs just couldn't make it look decent enough if they had to reduce them, so cut him was the better alternative.
Slow moving Revenants scared the Hell out of me when I was little. Just the unsettling slow movement they have was enough to send a chill down your spine.
@@quiver5756 Not sure how true this is, but apparently the Revenant speed wasn't able to be adjusted properly, the only two alternatives they had was an insanely fast Revenant or the one they implemented, and well because of that nerf, they made it so that all of his missiles were seeker ones.
Ohhhhhh, you should really see the details of how those flames were created. The skybox and menu version of those flames are generated in real time, it's not just an animated texture. Google "How DOOM fire was done", it's just an interesting piece of history.
I cant get enough of your PSX Doom coverage. I still play this game all the damn time. It's my favorite port of Doom on any system. I dont do PC gaming so for me this is the perfect Doom. I still remember vividly linking up our PS1s in my bedroom in 1995 for Doom and playing all night long... and getting to Club Doom. What a favorite memory. As far as the spectre Cacodemon, i always thought this was just a texture issue with the overlap texture of the bars atop the caco's textures so they made adjustments... but i like the idea that he's a special one-off baddie you only meet once.
@@luckystardoomnjeraxivyurie5415 I've played ancient level edits that decided to place a cybie in the courtyard. Not hard at all to take down, but it sure takes a while with only the pump-action at your disposal. I was being sarcastic with my original post. Handling lone PEs with minimal equipment is more annoying than threatening.
5:49 Came here to say that this has been brought back! The Doom + Doom II rerelease contains a spec called ID24, which features a music change on linedef function. I'm not sure if it's used in any officially released WADs, but it's still cool to me that a PS1 exclusive feature is available. And that's not the only one either (as far as I'm aware).
One thing about PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom that seems to be just a simple bookmark during your monstrous genocidal spree, is the actually complex password system. While you do get a password for almost every level you finish, they aren't for the most part accurate in the amount of stuff you actually got, if you do enter the password from the pause menu or the main menu. Let's say, that you exited Entryway with 102% health and 97% security armor, you get the password for Underhalls, you play that level, only for you to die from the level's abundant hitscanners, and you hit up that password from the pause menu, and what's this? Now, you start the level with 125% health and 100% security armor?!? And this happens to your ammo as well, so if you didn't use any of the two rockets from your Rocket Launcher you got from Entryway, your rockets increase from 2 to 6 if you use that aforementioned password! I'm Dead Simple serious! The passwords respond to these tier levels of how much health, armor (also checks for what kind of armor you left the level with), what weapons you got, the amount of ammo you have, and if you got a backpack, and those tier levels will increase your stuff if they stay on their level, always to the maximum numbers the tier levels offer. This means, if you got the BFG9000 with the maximum of 600 cells, you can always shoot one salvo of it for free, since 560 still is within its top tier level, so when you exit the level without getting more cells, and get the password for the next, using it will still always start you with 600! But, if you shot two salvos from your BFG9000, didn't replenish it, and exited the level, you get a different password for the next level, and using that will only refuel your cell ammo from 520 to 525, because the first number is in its weaker, second-to-top tier level. And again, this counts for EVERYTHING you do carry that has numbers! So, because of all this, I actually have played both PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom, trying to get the most perfect stats as possible (176% to 200% for both health and combat armor, with the exceptions of finishing Hangar and Attack since neither levels have a soulsphere, and trying to keep my ammo as full as possible, get every weapon as early as ever, and all of this to naturally respect the tier levels, until I reach the higher-up tier levels) before exiting a level, and immediately using every password I received to reap their extra benefits from those tier levels, and I got the maximum of 100 rockets from the password I got after finishing Central Processing! You could NEVER do that without this password system method, nor the Lots Of Goodies! cheat code! The problem with my Max Statistics Run (as I like to call it) is that certain levels (like Deimos Anomaly, Mt. Erebus, The Factory, Monster Condo, Wormhole and Ballistyx) lack either Soulsphere, Megasphere, or combat armor (or heck, all of them, like in Hell Keep and Hell Beneath), making them extra difficult to go through, while trying to still respect the tier levels for all your stuff, meaning you have to take as little damage as possible! Not easy for these kinds of levels, let me tell you! If you think the way I have explained all of this still is too weird for you to understand, please check out classicdoom.com/hosted/lpalin/ps1pwfaq.htm as it explains all of this a tad bit better, and shows all of those tier levels, all nice and tidy. I end this with a neat little nugget: because PSX Doom and PSX Final Doom shares the exact same password system and coding, you can get your password from finishing the latter game's Attack, and use the same password for the former game to start Plant with a Super Shotgun, Rocket Launcher and Plasma Gun, which Attack indeed does offer! Heck, even the perfect password I got for the former's Threshold Of Pain and the latter's Onslaught, is the exact same one! Not too sure if Doom 64 follows this trend as well, as it also has its own password system, but someone else can fill that in for me.
Nice primer on the password system. 👍 As for Doom 64, it does use a similar system, and stat values can be rounded as well. The passwords are a few characters longer than those in the PS1 games, to handle things like whether you found any Demon Artifacts, and which one(s). A nice thing about Doom 64 is that if you also had a separately-sold 'Controller Pak' you could store up to 16 passwords for quick level reloads.
To be fair, if the game gave you 100% accurate ammo and health, the password would be ridiculous long. I think they made a good compromise. Is not like it affects the game too much.
The mere fact that Doom 64, Quake 64, and Quake 2 64 have turned up in official capacity in the modern ports gives me hope that Doom Custom PlayStation Edition will make its way into the Unity Doom ports as one of the officially curated add-ons for the games. All of the aforementioned Doom and Quake games were released and developed by Midway, which means Bethesda and id have access to those master files and source codes...it's just a matter of time
With PSX Doom it wouldn't really work with the current port, it's just running Vanilla Doom, they'd have to add a lot. Would be easier to just make it a separate game.
@@0neDoomedSpaceMarine The only thing I could see being an issue is new lighting effects, but they've been able to take total conversion mods and have them work with Unity Doom so I wouldn't think it is outside the realm of possibility If they sold it as a standalone title, I think it would honestly cause more confusion about what it is versus what has already been released. Just because you and I are informed, does not mean the rest of the playerbase is
My sister was already moved out when I was born. When I was 5, we got a PlayStation 1. My dad was looking for some games to play and my sister lent him Doom. My mom hated me playing it but she would go bowling on Wednesday nights and that's when my dad would let me play. This game was the trigger for my love of Doom.
I dont know why, but all of the Doom engine games on PS1 uses more blocks than your regular game. Hexen uses the entire memory card and Duke Nukem 3d i think it uses 3 or 4 slots. Maybe thats the reason or also because in 1995 most people didnt had a memory card yet. Although i would had like if the game had a level selector for singleplayer, similar to coop mode. At least we had normal saves in the PS1 PC port psydoom.
This game singlehandedly made me love gabber and hardcore dance music. 11 yo me was really impressed by that secret level "Club Doom" with the revenants and the insane fast track playing in the background. I kept it in my memory for years and later, when I finally had internet, I was able to find it online and now it's forever in my playlist. And many other tracks of different aggressive hardcore styles too :^) Thanks, PS1 Doom!
Superb video. Some of those I genuinley didn't know about and I've played Doom to death across pretty much every format since it was released. Great job!
I used the hell out of the system link cable. Spent many hours on co-op and deathwatch on both of the Doom games and destruction derby and wipeout. Dedication
The PlayStation version actually was very good. I still have a copy. Not sure if this is a unique thing for the PlayStation version, but I remember that if you take huge damage on low health (a rocket for example), the mugshot of Doomguy explodes. Also, If you put it into a standard CD player, it plays the amazing ambient music by Aubrey Hodges.
> As the player is unable to save their game within a map, the difficulty and tension of each map are significantly increased, since the player must complete the map in one sitting. Yup. And it forced me to really play Doom a bit differently. On difficult levels, I have to memorize my run and optimize it. It made me discover the fact that a berserk powerups indeed increase fist damage for the entire remaining of the level, which can really make a difference. Also, I dig the music and the atmosphere so much.. The lighting visual touch is great as well. I really despise the fact there is no memory card support. It would be a great quality of life improvement to have an automatic save between levels and a "Continue" menu item on the opening screen.
Some other random things: - MAP13 (Command Center) uses the Hell fire sky although the level takes place on Deimos still - Lost Soul's have less health. Round about half of what it is on PC - Tower of Babel takes place in Hell. Also I believe it is the first level you come across a Doom 2 monster if you play on HMP - Pain Elementals show on more Doom 1 levels on UV than Doom 2 levels. (Only appearing in Nirvana & exclusive map the mansion) - Arachntron is the least common Doom 2 enemy to show in Doom 1. Only one appears in refinery. - Revenants move and shoot a lot slower but all missiles are homing - Armor Bonus & Health Bonus both give 2 points instead of 1 - Megasphere also shows up in Doom 1 (on Level 29 - Twilight Descends & Level 30 - Threshold of Pain) - I believe rocket launcher splash damage radius is much larger as well - Although the Spidermastermind had the worst treatment in Final Doom , The Mancubus & Baron didn't get much love either. Both only appearing in 1 level.
I knew most of these as I played once through all PS1 maps in UV, but never noticed or don't remember the transparent cacodemon. There used to be an Archvile there in the PC version. There were some more interesting technical curiosities and restrictions that weren't mentioned. One is very obvious. If you compare a lot of levels especially in Doom 2/Final Doom/Master Levels, there are some height tall areas that are shrinked down in the PS1. Like The Pit from Doom 2 or some later levels in Final Doom or Master Levels, which I remember why I admired some high tall areas in the original, to see how bland they look shrinked in height. It's not obvious initially what the technical reason would be, as a reduction of wall heights is just changing a sector value, so no gain in memory or maybe performance. But if you study how this engine was, like in an emulator you enable the wireframe mode, you realize that even in PS1 it's not a different engine than the original, it still mimics the individual wall columns with many many thin triangles. But there is something more. For some reason, a very tall wall that could have long wall columns with 2 triangles, those are split to more triangles if the texture is tiling up. It's not about perspective because vertically the Z doesn't change. It's that if you had a very long tiled texture (which a wall column is a 1D bitmap stretched), it has to be split every time a texture croses it's boundary and repeats. Someone told me the PS1 doesn't do tile textures. It might have other things other platform are missing like texture coordinates (which is missing from 3DO for example), but then it misses other features like tiled repeated texture, so you have to subdivide the column into smaller columns and each column is like 2 triangles. It's hard to explain, but if one looks at wireframe option of games in some PS1 emulator, and does it on Doom, they will be bewildered, like what is this tight mess of microtriangles for the whole visuals? (Also look at the same triangles on the floor where the 64x64 will tile frequently) I am surprised PS1 manages to pull that. They mimic the Doom engine, possible avoided the visplanes algorithm, replaced it with something else, but the final result still uses the wall column and floor scanlines individual with many triangles mimicking those, not big triangle filling individual wall segments, but many many small ones but much higher in number. So, possibly with taller walls they would exceed certain values and need a bit more memory and maybe harm performance too.
I imagine the co-op thing is based in limitations of the console. Having to render the game screen from two different perspectives isn't too easy, and as you noted with the missing Spider Masterminds, the maps are hefty. Split-screen Doom likely would've been too taxing on one console to be possible, or otherwise would've been a bad experience for both players with low performance and fewer monsters per level.
When I was a lot younger playing this doom on my PS1 I only was ever able to play the first few levels and I didn't really explore everything. But I remember how much I loved the soundtrack and the ambience of this doom so I would listen to the music by turning on the PS1 without a disk and going to the soundtrack options, placing the disc while looking at that screen, and I remember it was a very very late night I prolly should have been well asleep for. So you can imagine how startled I was when I went to one of the last sound tracks and the club doom song played out. It starts out so jarringly loud and at the time it made absolutely no sense what it was used for. I tried so long to imagine what on earth kind of level would need a strange track. It was a club. I missed out on a demonic club omfg. Thank you for finally answering a childhood answer xD
I recently played through doom 1 and final doom using the PsyDoom backport. Much easier with good controls and a solid framerate, but still challenging enough to be enjoyable. It's also the most intense nostalgia possible for me since i played PS doom a lot when i was 5.
The quintessential PS1 Doom experience has been on my Miyoo Mini v4- a tiny handheld console with a 2.8 inch screen and all the same buttons that a PS1 controller has. The experience is playing the vastly inferior PS1 port when the PC port is a few clicks away on the same handheld, containing the Doom II port as well as choice mods like Sigil.
Maybe, though considering this was early on the PS1 lifespan and the Doom engine wasnt exactly perfectly optimized in consoles i can see why. PS1 if perfectly optimized it could handle 4 player split screen like Quake 2 and Crash Team Racing which were way better looking games and ran at almost 30 fps.
Oh geez, I didn't realise the super shotgun wasn't in Doom 1, I remember several levels in I was frustrated I hadn't found it and said "sod it" and used the cheat to gain what was my Doom bestie. Also, maybe it's just me. But there were some levels I could only access by entering level codes from a cheat guide.
The only "Quirk" I really care about is the changed music & sound effects. That ruined the experience for me. The original music & sound effects were so iconic! I don't get why they'd want to change them like that. Is there a fan mod or hack that restores the original music & sound effects by chance? If so I really would like that!
I would always use the all weapons cheat right at the beginning of hanger and then deplete all ammo except 50 bullets and only start using the weapons when I first pick them up. Start using dbl barrel for E1M9 and on.
I had never heard of the spectr caco before, played it when I was in my teans, and would like to try it again after all these years, but I think the ps 4 has so much to offer doom wise.
I'm familiar with changes to a few enemies for the PSX port of Doom. 1. Lost Souls have less HP than the PC version, only having 50 instead of 100. 2. Zombiemen got a damage buff, with their pistol shots now able to inflict up to 24 damage max instead of 15. 3. Revenants got nerfed badly for the port as their running speed was greatly reduced and while they now only fire homing missiles, the missiles also go much slower hence they're easier to avoid.
IIRC, the quirk about the SSG in Doom 1 levels is legitimately the first way to achieve this in a properly working fashion. You could do some hackery to get the SSG if you were using Doom 1.9 and had access to all of the resources, but Doom would check if you were in Doom 2 or not and make it so you couldn't switch to the SSG, even if you had it. I remember having to do quite of bit of shenanigans to get it to work, even in Doomsday. Fortunately, with (G)ZDoom, there are no such limitations so you can do conditional replacements and change the chainsaw into the SSG if you already have the chainsaw. Many many years later.
maybe not a quirk cause it was mentioned on the jewel case but there was a rapid fire cheat that made everything fire like 4x as fast including the BFG
My parent's new PC (at the time) with Windows 3.1 had Doom 2 already installed on it in 1995, but you could only play it through DOS. Somehow the game file became damaged and I couldn't play it anymore. I was in 6th grade at the time and wanted to try the PS1 version of Doom so I convinced my mom to rent it. I played Doom 1 and thought okay this is cool. Little did I know that you could also play Doom 2 on it because IIRC, it didn't advertise that on the game case. I was happy to play Doom 2 again, but it just wasn't the same. I wasn't a fan of PS1 Doom's soundtrack and gloomy atmosphere because it gave me the creeps. I could barely hear the soundtrack through a crappy TV speaker anyway. It wasn't until 20 years later that I'd come to appreciate the differences between the two versions because I had matured and was curious to try playing it again. However, I played the TC version on gzdoom, which is 100x better IMO. Soundtrack had to be downloaded separately. It was fun while it lasted.
You could play link up doom with one copy of the game if you swapped the disc to the 2nd console at the right time, I remember my uncle using this method from when I wad kid lol
I believe there are also different sets of passwords. If I remember correctly, we got passwords to start levels with some weapons, all weapons, or just the pistol.
You didn't mention how the memory issue led to the revenant being much slower. And I don't fully remember but I think revs don't fire any unguided missiles in PSX DOOM either There are also different damage values for some weapons and the Lost Soul has less health so it is far easier to deal with, dying in one shotgun blast now
In PS1 Doom nightmare demon is not a new type of enemy, it is a just a tick in map editor! Actually you can made any thing nightmare or translucent (even barrels or box of rockets, the same goes to that spectre cacodemon in cell). GEC team is prove it, they used special version of map editor which can make and edit PS1 Doom maps.
There are a handful of early PS1 games that used the link cable for two player. I'm sure it was simple too add since Doom already has LAN on PC before this port. Adding split screen would have taken a lot more time. It also would have consumed a lot more resources, potentially making it unplayable.
You could play the games with two players via the link cable of course. But did you know, that you only need one copy to do so? You only need to swap the CD once the game has loaded on the one console.
I know this is a PSX video, but since there will probably be no reason to make a quirks video for the Saturn port, will just say it here. Will forever be letdown that the hardware accelerated Saturn build was canned, especially since they got it running at 60fps. Would have been amazing to play.
Why didn't it have split-screen multiplayer??? Because the PS1 could barely keep up with the game to begin with on later levels. Two viewpoints means a significantly larger amount of processing power.
8:21 yes, we'll probably never see any more official versions of Doom 1 with Doom 2 monsters. Buuuuuuuut since Doom is so modifiable, I'm pretty sure someone out there has already made an unofficial version which is exactly that. And that's the beauty of Doom community.
1:00 Back in the day I managed to get it just by getting lucky with passwords and just mashing random ones in and hoping for the best so I could see more of the game (because I was a child and terrible at videogames lol) I got put into phobos anomaly with it.
I tried the version included on disc with Doom 3 and noticed it had rumble. The only version I have seen with that feature. Not sure if that is the ps1 exact version or not.
Would be cool as a tech demo to rewrite even further the PS1 Doom engine to handle 4 player split screen. I mean, Quake 2 was able to do it and was much more newer than Doom.
@@sebastiankulche Currently, the only effort I've seen from the fan community with the PSX Doom engine is "PSX Doom Master Edition", which is an ongoing project of porting every single level from all expansions that got official commercial releases.
There is for both PS1 Doom and PS1 Final Doom, you can play them both on GZDoom with enhanced features like proper keyboard/mouse controls or proper fps controller controls, and the Arch Vile being restored back in the game, the mods are called "PSX Doom CE" and "PSX Final Doom CE"
2:22 ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-9HLhXxamnTs.htmlsi=zQDTtJN7xeiAfT9g actually the SSG sprites were the same across the region, someone just came up with that in the wiki and it passed through.
My hot take is that the SFX and music from the Playstation version are better. The farting MIDIs and goofy noises of varying quality in the original have probably aged the worst.
While i think the music in PC is still good in its own right, it didnt feel like you were in hell and you have to scare about demons, but rather demons are scared of you. And weapons in PC sounds like toys, especially the pistol, on PS1 they sound like actual weapons with more "impact" to it. I think it also helps how some enemies like zombieman or shotgunner do more damage than the PC version and when you hear the shot and the echo, you feel the extra damage, while on PC i dont even notice when im hit by a zombieman. Plus they fixed the chaingunner and spidermastermind sound effect, being the chaingun sfx instead of the shotgun but repeated quickly.
I'm surprised you didn't mention how you can crash the game by using the BFG on a crowd of enemies: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-eCaY9c-jDxQ.html You can also do extensive memory corruption by having Lost Souls go out of bounds ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-2aEieCneKcg.html
Idk man, games like Quake 2 or Crash Team Racing showcased way more the capabilities of the PS1 than this and they had 4 player split screen. The only reason i can think of is that this was early in the PS1 lifespan. The same reason as to why HL1 on PS2 is very smooth (and im insist, very smooth) but not perfectly smooth despite being a more newer console than the game itself.