skillsaw can't fool me. Ancient Aliens (the doom wad) isn't a parody of Ancient Aliens (the history channel show), but is actually a complimentary vibe piece to the oft-forgotten VICE TV show Action Bronson Watches Ancient Aliens. Anyone who has watched the somehow-still-running History channel show can tell you how surprisingly boring it is. The stuffy safe-for-8th-grade documentary style is a bad juxtaposition to the literal head-empty premise of extraterrestrials being behind some of the world's greatest wonders. What the show is good for, as both Action Bronson and skillsaw have figured out, is serving as background-noise and aesthetic inspiration for a smoke session. "Damn, you're telling me E.T. built this bitch?" is a lot more engaging when you're already kinda tweaking.

So it's only fitting then that the first level in this parody would have Doomguy walk up to a vaguely ancient temple-esque entrance, pick up a pipe of peyote, smoke it, and then be teleported by spirit wolves to incoming Cyberdemon rockets. From here till the finale, skillsaw never lets up on the smoked-out loced-out buffoonery, with every level he designs offering some twisted gimmick or bizarre architecture. MAP16, "Leave Your Sol Behind", centers around an ascending light bridge that leads inside a literal spaceship, which bolts you to some delightfully cliche lava and ice worlds, on some Super Mario Galaxy shit. MAP18, "Illuminati Revealed" is a chaotic slaughter map with a giant pyramid broadcasting a spinning Illuminati icon, with the spinning Illuminati icon gradually clouded out by a swarm of endless Cacodemons. MAP 28 "Floating Arena" is an aptly named island that will have you circle strafing on the literal boundaries of the level to corral the brutal crowding at the start of the level. The total irreverence and creativity shown by skillsaw here posterizes the TV show way harder than any academic counterargument--who gives a shit about the conspiratorial implications of antediluvian visitors when you have mood pieces like MAP24's "Culture Shock"? If extraterrestials inadvertly inspires stuff like this, they should come around more often.

If the map design of skillsaw went unhinged, it's somewhat surprising that skillsaw's gameplay design is more subdued. Unlike Valiant, skillsaw isn't interested in changing any major parts of the DOOM formula--there are only two new enemies, one grounded and one vertical, and they are both fragile glass-cannons who require similar prioritization. The somewhat-classical mechanics are spruced up with a smorgasbord of encounter design--Tyson, sniper, slaughter, trappy, and puzzle encounters all mesh together, albeit rarely in the same level. skillsaw is one of the premier 'modern' DOOM designers, so tight encounter-design is a given--the guest mappers throw in good contributions, though, save the aforementioned "Floating Arena", they lack the same 'punch' of skillsaw's maps. Perhaps skillsaw should've passed the pipe around more often!

john romero pulls up to this shit like a maestro. john romero pulls up to this shit like doom's his dimepiece and it's club night. john romero pulls up to this shit like he's been touched by the hand of God. anybody - and i mean anybody - who says that sigil isn't the best episode of doom is lying through their filthy fucking teeth. the level of complete ownage on display is rivaled only by the gnarliest of total conversions. the fact that it's sitting .3 below the base game (as of this review) and not being lauded over is nothing short of dumbfounding, dawg. i want anyone who disagrees with me to show me a smarter doom level than abaddon's void*.

the audacity of this romero, to map his enemy encounters and ammo stashes (and light sources!) like a survival horror title. either you grind out those secrets or you play sigil like it's resident evil with no inventory. enemy prioritization here is more important in half these levels than perfect hatred on ultraviolence. even with the secrets (which i found about half of) i was forced to run away from many enemies, rather than spill their guts. those baron of hell placements are perfect hatred pure evil. glorious, glorious Evil.

speaking of glorious, the music. Lord have mercy on my soul, these are the most killerest of tunes! i'm of course talking about the james paddock soundtrack that comes with the freeware version as filtered through my lovely timbres of heaven 3.4 soundfont. the buckethead soundtrack is... fine. i will take james' absolute mastery of midi rock over it any day. there is no truer joy than knowing that sigil's soundtrack sounds good through opl3 emulation. doom's soundtrack has always sounded like dogwater in opl3, but james... he gets it. he really gets it. if you won't play the wad, at least do yourself the favor of listening to its soundtrack.

it only took 25 years, but the truly ultimate doom episode that thy flesh consumed was promised to be is here. my hat is off and my knees are bruised. john romero has made me his bitch.

* = (i maybe prefer slough of despair, though i don't respect it nearly as much. )

Un ejemplo bastante logrado de vandalismo cultural que se asemeja a una instalación de arte del movimiento No Wave. Al igual que DK hizo con Oikospiel y Kate B con Pottergame, hay algo juguetón y gamberro en a estas figuras retorcerse y descontextualizarse. Sin embargo, en el fondo se trata de un intento serio de reconciliar nuestra propia mortalidad. Por tonto que sea el marco (y el propio autore lo reconoce mostrándote su Discord), esta obra acaba sintiéndose muy Millennial por la forma en que aborda la muerte y la idea de desaparecer. No sé qué pasará cuando llegue el final, pero este juego cree que estaré inmerso en basura cultural y acabaré pasando sin darme cuenta.

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A great work of cultural vandalism that sits closer to a No Wave art installation. Just like DK did with Oikospiel several years ago and Kate B did with Pottergame, there's a playful nature in seeing these models twisted and dcontextualized. Deeper than that though, you have a frank attempt at trying to reconcile with one's own mortality. As silly as the framework is (and the author themselves lampshades the fact by showing you his discord messages), this work can't help but feel distinctly Millennial in the way it approaches death and the idea of disappearing. I don't know what I'll experience when I'll confront my own end, but this game thinks that I'll be way too immersed in meaningless cultural detritus to notice.

the greatest Doom wad of all-time - more than a Doom wad, really. one of the great games of the 2010's in general. a confoundingly multi-faceted piece of art, with some questionable bits that only enhance the mystery. a poetic statement about the nature of memory and death presented in the context of a Doom fan wad. more fun than you think it's going to be from what i just said in the previous sentence. weirdly coherent for a set with so many different authors. has more creativity in a lone fingernail than many commercial games have in their entire body. i know games don't have bodies, i'm just speaking metaphorically here.

i wrote TWO articles about this wad, so you know i have a healthy relationship with it. see my article in Vice from several years ago about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/paq5bz/alt-doom-mod-stalker
and my older post on Unwinnable about it: https://unwinnable.com/2013/10/24/lost-worlds-a-l-t/

almost a good game, held back by memes and insecurity

doom (1993) is a game entirely focused on level design. you are 'exploring the level' at all times. combat encounters are part of the exploration. weapon pickups are part of the exploration. secret hunting is part of the exploration. every single action you take, sans the minutiae of combat (projectile dodging, bfg trickery, etc), is you engaging with the design of the level. you can beat every map in the game launched directly, with just the starting pistol and health. this is not an accident. levels are not scenes in a movie, or episodes in a show, but songs in an album. in this sense it (and doom 2, and quake) is much like an early mario, or sonic, or dungeon crawler. that hint of dungeon crawl is extremely important to doom; many spaces are designed to mess with you. you need to master the spaces to even finish the level. they're called "maps" for a reason!

doom 2016 is a game about systems. encounter design, weapon pickups, and secret hunting are all constrained based on how they want you to engage with the combat and progression systems. levels get cleaved into two modes: "looking around for stuff to unlock" and "boxed off combat." let me explain.

this game is structured around upgrades. in order to fully kit out doomslayer, you need to find all of the:
-weapons
-points to unlock weapon mods (hot-swappable altfire modes, two per weapon)
-points to upgrade weapon mods (2-3 per weapon mod)
-"mastery" upgrades for fully upgraded weapon mods
-points to upgrade the praetor suit
-second type of points for second type of praetor suit upgrade
-runes (think CoD perk system, or old LoL runepages), unlocked for doing specific instanced challenges
-slots for runes, unlocked for doing an amount of instanced challenges
-"mastery" upgrades for runes

that's nine different types of unlock. nine. for reference, the only one of these systems in the original games is "finding the weapons."

these upgrades aren't tiny, either. there's no Path of Exile "+1.3% Shock damage to Undead type enemies (Melee only)" here. instead you're unlocking things like "weapon switch speed." "immunity to explosive barrels." "bullet penetration." "reload speed for your altfire." "maximum health." these aren't minor things, they are the fundamentals of the actual combat system, the sort of thing you argue about in a competitive game. and because the game is entirely focused on its combat system, this means you only get to start playing The Actual Game - juggling weapons with the actual swap speed, using the various types of weapon mod, being able to double-jump with proper air control, or do glory kills from full range - once you find the right number of these upgrades. it's maddening.

note i am saying "find." not "get," but "find." because, yes, the obsession with upgrade systems infected the secrets too. the upgrades , or the challenges you have to do to get the upgrades, are scattered around the levels in random dead ends, or vents, at the end of "platforming" segments, or occasionally in actually optional chunks of level. you are often given three paths, two which lead to objectives (sometimes the same objective) and one slightly hidden one which leads you to the body of an Elite Guard with a Praetor Token, or an Argent Cell, or a portal to a Rune Trial, or one of 48 collectible Funko Pops, or some other nonsense. i think this is done to make secrets "Feel Rewarding," compared to the original Doom, where you'd usually just be given full health and armor, or maybe a temporary powerup. but really, it does the opposite. you have to find secrets, or else you are going to be behind on upgrades, and the secrets can't be too secret or else people won't be able to find them. the automap marks them on the map screen before you even find them, because they know you are going to need them. so, you are not engaging with the design of the level. there is no feeling of solving a puzzle, or "getting the joke," or just finding something interesting. you are just checking things off a list in the corner of the map screen.

i can imagine some rebuttals to this. "you can just not get the upgrade points," etc. sure. they can also "just" not make me unlock half of the mechanics in the game. this is one of the oldest complaints about Devil May Cry (a game these designers are clearly enamored with), or God of War, or any other Action-First Action Game w/ this sort of system - "the game doesn't start until you unlock a bunch of moves," "why can't you just start with Enemy Step," etc. I am not really fond of DMC in the first place, but it does eventually become a very good game once you get over that hump. i do not understand why idsoft decided to triple down on this, instead. and either way, these "you control the buttons you press" type responses ignore the actual incentives set by the progression systems, which the designers were clearly quite excited about having come up with, what with it dictating every part of the game. nobody would make a complaint like this if they hadn't built the game in this way!

anyways, while you're scrounging for upgrade points, you will eventually find yourself in a Combat Zone. these are (either functionally or actually) boxed off areas where enemies spawn, repeatedly, for a certain amount of time, much like DMC, or Serious Sam, or Painkiller, or other games I don't really enjoy specifically because of this "boxes connected by hallways" format. but at least the actual combat you do in here is pretty good. ultraviolence difficulty forces you to do a lot of weapon swapping, a la Quake 3 rocket/clan arena mode, with the positioning dances of Quake 1 or a Halo. the glory kill system is cool and gives fights a nice ebb and flow. it's pretty fun! at least, once you unlock the fun version of the game, where you're able to do the weapon swapping and do glory kills from full range and take more than 150 damage before dying and and and...

actually, no, let's talk about the combat. it's the only thing this game has going for it, so i have to give it more than two sentences. i want to compare it, again, to doom 93, because its the only way to explain the differences between the two.

the combat in the original doom is extremely similar to arcade scrolling shooters - gradius, xevious, eXceed 3rd Jade Penetrate Black Package, etc etc. you can strafe, you can fire hitscan weapons, you can fire projectile weapons, you can fire slower projectile weapons that explode on impact. some enemies shoot hitscan, others shoot projectiles, others do melee stuff. the game mostly boils down to dodging projectiles, circle strafing, and occasional cover peeking. this is not a problem. it's simple, it's fun to handle, and given good level and encounter design, it can be incredibly fun and interesting. your ammo economy decisions happen across the entire level: "i won't use this weapon in this fight because i want to have ammo for it in the next fight, which has these enemies," etc. this is, again, a strategic decision that can be fun, or interesting, or stressful, or whathaveyou, in the hands of the right designer. in this way, Doom is closer to an older dungeon crawler than a modern first-person shooter. remember that the original inspiration for the id FPS games was Carmack seeing a demo of Ultima Underworld at a trade show, and going "I could do that, but faster!" Ultima Underworld is a very slow, simulationist game about having to survive in a locked dungeon. It was a direct response to Dungeon Master, which itself was a real-time, semi-simulationist take on the Wizardry/Bard's Tale/Might&Magic style of first-person party-based grid-movement dungeon crawler (if you've played Legend of Grimrock, you've basically played Dungeon Master). With this info, we can start to understand these early id games as a type of dungeon crawler. The first of the "real" FPS games they made, Catacomb 3D (Hovertank is a tech demo shut up), lifted heavily from Gauntlet, an early arcade Action RPG. Wolf3D is faster, more refined Catacomb. Doom is faster, more refined Wolf3D. Quake is... etc. This is why the level design is like that. This is why the item economy is like that, why Wolf3D had "meaningless" rooms where you pick up treasure, why you were meant to get lost. Even the "bumping into walls trying to find the last secret in the map" bullshit is lifted directly from Wizardry.

unfortunately, while making their weird arcade-action dungeon crawler, they also decided to give it a gory, hypermasculine speed metal aesthetic to complement its Blazing Fast Graphics. this opened them up to controversy, reinterpretation, and controversy-fueled reinterpretation. Doom, a game where you stumble your way through weird pitch black corridors filled with nonsense monsters, became something you played to prove you were a Real, Hardened Man of a 17 year old. (yes, it always had the chainsaw, the rampage powerup, the gore sprites - i've played it dozens of times, I know). this feedback loop brings us to the doom comic.

in 1996, which I want to remind you was four years after doom came out, Marvel released a one-off Doom promotional comic. it cold opens with Doomguy punching a bunch of demons while dropping bad one-liners. "I'm a 12.0 on the 10.0 scale of badness!" "Knock knock, who's there? ME!" etc. on page 3, Methguy finds himself a cyberdemon. he exclaims, "You are huge! That means you have huge guts! Rip and tear! Rip and tear your guts!" And then he, well, who cares. Nobody cared at the time, at least. Only a few more people cared after Lowtax (eugh) dug it up for a Planetquake article 5 years later. But eventually, through the power of memetics, the phrase "Rip And Tear Your Guts," a dumb one-liner from a comic nobody had ever read, became the soul of Doom, to a certain kind of person. When the mod "Brutal Doom" came out in 2010, and added fancier gore, headshot mechanics, Mortal Kombat fatalities, and a bunch of other superfluous dumb shit, that impression of Doom went well beyond the Doomworld shitposters and landed straight in people's Youtube recommendations. That, I'm fairly sure, is how Doom 2016 ended up more inspired by a line from an ad than the actual game it's actually meant to "reboot."

The opening cutscene of 2016 ends with the line "rip and tear until it is done." The glory kill, the game's Clever Mechanic, is a "rip and tear" button. That's not to say it's not fun. Being able to turn enemies into health is cool, and keeps the game from feeling as bland as other "boxes in a row" shooters. But it serves that meme revisionism just as much as it serves the game design. This game is not in conversation with Doom. It is not building on what id was doing with Doom. It does not "bring Doom forward to a new generation." It is an adaptation of one single panel from a shitty advertisement comic book the creators had no hand in, by way of mechanics from "Character Action" games and the worst Eurotrash shooters of the mid 2000s. This frustrated me in 2016, and it frustrates me now, years after the initial disappointment wore off.

so. the level design sucks. the cutscenes suck. (have i mentioned this game has unskippable cutscenes? they're bad!). the sections where you have to stand around and listen to someone tell you that someone is trying to access someone's secret files through the Vega terminus in the ruins of the Archon reprocessor core or whatever before you can start playing the level, suck. they even do that Whedon thing where the protagonist, in world, gets mad that someone would have the gall to make him sit through an exposition dump in a Doom game, in the first five minutes of the game, and then they keep fucking doing it! the platforming, something they stuck in here even having eighteen years to take a semicritical look at Half-Life, also kinda sucks, until halfway thru the game when you find the challenge to unlock tier 1 of the perk that gives you vaguely Quake air-control instead of Halo floatiness. really, every part of the game, outside the boxes where you're doing combat, is either bland, or annoying, or Actively Bad. and the combat's only good once you've spent a few hours dealing with the upgrade system, which also sucks. the most fun I've had is cranking the difficulty in arcade mode, which lets you skip most of that fluff. not all, just most. i dunno, man!

I am sure the people who were peeing their pants over this game in 2016 were doing so sincerely. but i find myself wondering how many of them had played the original game, or how long it had been since they'd done so, and what they would say they liked about it if asked, because absolutely none of what's kept that game fun, interesting good for thirty years is present here. just download some mods for that instead.

third time giving this a shot. was not the charm. for all the comparisons people made to quake when hyping it up, it fails to do ANYTHING that made quake good. movement is Amiga level bad, weapons are lame (so much hitscan...), music is filler, levels are Alright at best, except for the part where every single one of them has a rape joke hidden in it so you can unlock a rape joke steam achievement. had this actually come out in the 90s it would be relegated to the same bins as SiN and Gunman Chronicles; the idea anyone likes it more than Doom is, genuinely, driving me to drink as i type.

there's a reason the multiplayer is deader than Daikatana's.