why do i feel like all the bespoke queer games ive seen that came out in the last 10 years have been just so saccharine? this isn't really a knock against the game itself, and I don't really fault anyone who enjoys these types of games, its just I really want more games about being gay/trans that isnt just like "I'm a girl and I can kiss girls!!!!!!" I want a game thats bespokely queer, but through the lens of someone whos gotten past the initial euphoria of figuring out your queer identity, like a story thats about people's real world struggles and how they intertwine with their queerness to where its the focus? they speak from the abyss seems to fit that bill from what I've seen, maybe something like that? this is a genuine question btw. and hey maybe if this game eventually does become what im describing then i'll give it another go! i really just wasn't feelin it chief.

this game just starts and says "good luck fucko" and sends you into the fastest shmup youve ever played.

youre basically required to stay at the top of the screen and get risky, because otherwise you just get swarmed with enemies you cant break through.

Music genuinely goes insane, crazy fucking famicom rave music that makes me wanna do that lain dancing gif irl

I'm not photosensitive so the flickering didnt bother me but I'd definitely want to see it remade/remastered with the flickering remove so that more people can play it

There's a lot to take in with this game, and to be frank I don't think I like all of it.

Surely, the best place to start is what I hated most about the game, and I think the most egregious thing in this game is how things are upgraded. In previous installments, upgrades for your crew were unlocked by obtaining specific treasures hidden in the world, and offered buffs that were rarely that game breaking or overpowered (barring a certain five-man napsack). In Pikmin 4, the upgrading system is streamlined to a fault, letting you choose your upgrades by using naturally obtained currencies that you rarely have to go out of the way for. The upgrades are also pretty overpowered, ranging from simple health or walking speed upgrades, to making your dog a force of absolute destruction, one that puts Purple Pikmin in Pikmin 2 to shame. Everything about the upgrades in this game just make it feel like "a modern gaming take on a Pikmin game" and I don't like that.

How many Pikmin you're allowed to have in your current platoon is also tied to its own upgrade system in the form of obtaining Flarlic. I get capping the number of Pikmin you're allowed to have is supposed to be a means to prevent the game from being way too easy early on, but frankly the game is too easy across the board. If you want a game with a challenge on par with 1 or 3 (without reaching levels of bullshit like 2), you'd have to avoid upgrading your dog and deliberately limit your Pikmin capacity. I wouldn't mind them having just done away with the Flarlic system in exchange for making the game acutally difficult.

Speaking of making the game actually difficult, letting you rewind time by minutes at a time seems way too generous, but I guess that's just a matter of accessibility; if you want to have an actual challenge with the game, don't use the rewind feature so much, but if you want to experience a Pikmin game for the first time, go ahead. Besides that, the game just doesn't have a whole lot of stakes when you can just use your dog to destroy anything. It's pretty clear they wanted to do Pikmin 2 but more fair, with the dungeons returning and the lack of a day limit, but they overcorrected for that game's flaws. Instead of being bullshit with random traps and obnoxious fights in randomized dungeons, this game has pretty avoidable traps and not-very-thought-provoking fights. Dungeons having actual level design is a HUGE plus, though.

In general, the game comes off as baby's first Pikmin game, even more so than Pikmin 3. Nintendo wants Pikmin to succeed, and they probably wanted to start reeling new players in by being more accessible, but in a lot of places they went way overboard.

The dog itself also just kinda feels like a step down over similar systems in the previous games. Pikmin 2 gave you an extra captain that you could control in tandem with the other, and allowed you to split up your squadron pretty quickly. Pikmin 3 gave you a third captain and the ability to quickly pause time to direct what you want each captain to do. Pikmin 4 gives you a dog you have to dismount in order to split up from them, and then in order to send them off to do their own thing you have to go into a quick menu to split off from your Pikmin (you have to do this process twice if you want to have the dog take all of the Pikmin, because doing it once only splits the captain away from all but one Pikmin type), and then you have to change to the dog in order to command them where you want their AI to go. Really, the dog just kinda makes this game worse in a lot of ways. The fact that you have two captains that aren't made equal could be good on paper, allowing you to play to each one's strengths or weaknesses to have them do specific things, but in reality what you get is a character with like 15 different powers and then your actual captain who does the generic stuff.

The vibes of this game are pretty immaculate, it stands out against every other game in the series in that regard, for better and for worse. It's a very pretty game, the environments look great, and the game very deliberately makes a point of showing how small you really are in the grand scheme of things, seeing as how the game takes place in someone's backyard. On the other hand, everything feels a little bit too cutesy for its own good. The original Pikmin has a very gloomy, eerie feeling throughout, every environment in that game feels truly desolate and intimidating, a very deliberately alien setting. This game doesn't feel "alien" all that much, it just feels like you're an ant coming to raid someone's picnic. Not really a negative thing, just depends on what kind of atmosphere you're in the market for.

The enemy design on this game is still on point, typical of a Pikmin game, but as for your crew...it's very obvious they were put through the same character creator as you, with a few bonus features. No one feels like a very stand out design in the slightest. Then you have a self insert player character, which really does not suit this series well. In the first 3 games, all the captains had pretty interesting personality quirks demonstrated through their log notes, and in 2's case the emails you'd get from characters related to Olimar and Louie. In this game, you get a self insert who doesn't say anything, and a crew whose personalities and dialogues are even less interesting than those of any of 3's captains. It's like being stuck with 6 different variations of Alph who never shut up. But I like my little skrunkly I made, so it's okay.

Of course, being a Pikmin title, this game's shining qualities come from how satisfying it feels to pull off multitasking quickly and efficiently. Whatever the story mode has you doing is satisfying enough, but the real meat of the game comes in when you do the dandori challenges, where there's an actual sense of difficulty, and thus actual sense of achievement when you manage to get a high score. Really, that's probably how you can most enjoy this game, imposing challenges on yourself. Avoiding certain upgrades, going for completion under a certain number of days, there's a lot you can probably do, but playing the game as what feels like intended just doesn't let you express a lot of skill.

Also uhhh night stages? Yeah they're fun I guess I'd probably have more fun with them if I avoided upgrading Oatchi, but I do like the feel of what's basically Pikmin tower defense.

I probably sound like I tore the shit out of this game but I really did enjoy it, it was a very satisfying time that I didn't want to pull out from, had a handful of QoL improvements over previous installments, and despite the things I personally didn't like about it constantly sitting on my mind, I think the good I got out of this game far outweighs it. It still has those iconic Pikmin moments where you're taking in the world around you, getting treasures, when you're suddenly jumped by a group of giant enemies out of nowwhere. I don't think I can call this game a disappointment, even though it was a game that took 10 years to come out despite feeling like it was only in development for 3. I will probably truly appreciate it upon trying to challenge myself on another playthrough. I'll probably end up updating this review if I bother playing it in a more difficult fashion or when I finish the postgame.

At the current moment I think Pikmin 3 is the best game in the series in terms of gameplay, and Pikmin 1 is the best for atmosphere and worldbuilding. I don't think I'll budge on the latter opinion, but this game does have potential to be my favorite in terms of gameplay.

tutorial sucks btw, very bad very long

auto lock on makes me want to KILL MYSELF

i don't know if it's just bias talking since it's been 10 YEARS since the last full game, but i REALLY really could not get super into this game like i could with the previous three. the dog (and ice pikmin) completely annihilate every challenge the game could possibly try and set up for you. the previous games offered a challenge of higher squad = higher risk of death due to having to manage a million babies, but higher power. in pikmin 4, you can just make them all board the designated tiny hitbox and then hold x at a boss until it dies.

i think the characters in this game are the weakest. i was already turned away by the custom character creation, since one of the main appeals of pikmin is how you were playing as people with actual lives and actual personalities. i don't WANT to play as myself, i WANT TO PLAY AS A 40 YEAR OLD MAN WITH A WIFE AND CHILDREN

ok minor complaints time. the music is MEDIOCRE! the fact that the story is [REDACTED] is MEDIOCRE! the rewind feature makes it feel like there's no real sense of FAILURE! and really? they really did that to MY alph? MY brittany? MY charlie? i will KILL YOU

also somehow they managed to make pikmin with gyro control bad.

With "Let's Create: Improvised Explosives" making tools of anarchy has never been more simple and fun! Become a true revolutionary and create "highly explosive" devices and share them with your local police officer! Hit the switch on the igniter, release all your righteous anger and take back the means of production in order to create an egalitarian society! Even when you behead and impale your very first landlord you will feel accomplished and relaxed as revolution is the best way to relieve your everyday stress and find your inner peace. An amazing, therapeutic and uplifting experience you can enjoy with your family and friends!

I'm somewhat torn on this work in the sense that I think it wants to be culturally specific but also broadly relatable to diasporic audiences in a grander sense (and of course, non-diasporic audiences with their pre-conceived notions of what the diasporic experience is) and in turn ends up sacrificing some specificity in order to do so. I love that every chapter opens with a quote from the Tirukkural, but it's contextualised as being displayed on a tacky calendar that's publicity merch from some random company in India. I love that you wouldn't know it's from the Tirukkural if you don't know what the Tirukkural is or that the picture on the calendar is of Valluvar and who Valluvar is. It took me halfway through the game before I put two and two together because I'm not Tamil, my parents are from Kerala, so I'm one step removed from Tamil culture but still broadly knowledgeable in it. I wish that was more of the game. I wish the game was written with less North American idiomatic expressions even knowing that much of the game is in Tamil that's abstracted and "translated" into English for the player's benefit. This English abstraction could have been closer to Indian English I think. For all the alienation the game wants you to feel through language, it wants the alienation to remain between the characters and not between text and audience. It's smoothed over for palatability, which is ultimately where I land overall, and is ultimately a problem I have with diasporic fiction at large. But, this is a good first step in games, and I hope to see more in the future.

Regardless of my criticisms, if you have no/limited knowledge of Tamil and/or broadly South Indian culture and have Game Pass and two hours to spare, you should play this. It's a good introduction to us from that perspective. I will be recommending this game to my brother and my parents as a little transient, relatable experience for what its worth.

March 4th, 2020: I start a new job as software developer at a bank. 


March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".


March 9th, 2020:  Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.


March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins. 


March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".


March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time. 


March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).


March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.


April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony. 


April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993). 


April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.

April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.


May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.


May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.

June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.

July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel. 


July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.


August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.


August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.


August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.


September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game. 


September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.


September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.


September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.


September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map. 


September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.


September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day. 


October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.  


October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.


October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.

October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".


November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.


November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus,  a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and  I can’t get it open. 


November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.


November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it. 


November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.


December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.

December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.

December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.

January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.

February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.


March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.


March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at. 


March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.


March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times. 


April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99. 


April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP


April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.


April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.

April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.


April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.

April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.

April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.


May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime. 


May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.


May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".

June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.

June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.

June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.

June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.


June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.

June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.

July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.

July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.

July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.

July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.

July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.

August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.

August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.

August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.

August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.

August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.

September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.

September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.

September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.

September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.

September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.


September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.

September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.

September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.

September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.

September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.

At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.


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Still with me? Great. Thank you.

So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.

When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.

A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.

After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)

In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.

Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!

One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.

When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.

I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.

This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.

Verticality is mostly always seen as indication of good and creative level design in the video game sphere - this is especially true for platformers for which I can see the case being made but I do think that holding this as some sort of universal fact limits creativity and can make everything feel the same; when all the designers are striking for the same goal of verticality it can all start feeling ridiculous.

I wouldn't say verticality always conducts to good level design. Point in case is the DOOM franchise, where my favorite official maps to date are still those designed by John Romero for Episode 1 (1993) which do have this element but it's restrained to the point of working well with the nuances of classic DOOM gameplay or even Sandy Petersen's Mt. Erebus where most of the enemy encounters happen in a horizontal fashion.

When this element gets out of hand you get things like Industrial Zone for Doom II which I appreciate for existing for being so ridiculous, having enemies on top of skyscrapers shooting at you and then having to jump off buildings to reach the bit of land where you need to go is interesting but it's not fun on the whole - all of this in a game where you cannot look up or down.

On this same line of thought, corridor and maze-like levels in first-person shooters are often seen as something boring and indicative of bad design but I especially don't agree with this at all.

DOOM 64 had to work with the limitations of the N64 which is partly the reason that there's an emphasis on back-tracking, compact level design (which conduct to what people call corridor-like/maze-like) and even absense of verticality.

Instead of a "DOOM lite" coming out of these limitations, the developers justified these elements by giving DOOM 64 an atmospheric and survival horror spin. Whereas 1993 and DOOM II are a gamer fantasy of being an overpowered macho marine listening to heavy metal and blasting through hordes of demons (okay maybe DOOM II on UV not so much); 64 exists to oppress you, scare you and make you realize you had claustrophobia all along and need a big open space to breath some fresh air.

The soundtrack was changed from renditions of heavy metal classics to oppressive atmospheric sounds. Deciding not to go with these dopamine-inducing tracks was a great choice thematically for 64, it does play with the theme of you being somewhere you don't really belong. Just have a listen to Final Outpost for example

I love the art design for 64: the darker color palette, the environments, the weapons and enemy re-design were all done incredibly well. My favorite redesigns probably being the Imp and the Pain Elemental, Nightmare Imps are also a really cool new addition.

Difficulty is also really important for me, I usually enjoy challenging things. I would say the hardest difficulty level of 64 (Watch Me Die!) sits somewhere in between DOOM II's UV and 1993's UV (closer to the latter) so I was not disappointed in this regard. I did play Sunlust on UV (cbt) before this so my concept of difficulty might be a little distorted.

The only reason I'm not giving this 5 stars is because I did feel the levels had some predictability to them, maybe a byproduct of me already having beaten 1993, DOOM II and Sunlust so it's harder to surprise me. I still miss that feeling of wonder and surprise that 1993 gave me though so that one is still my favorite.

if you played TETRIS ATTACK instead of PANEPON you have been played for an ABSOLUTE FOOL and i shall impress upon you the DEPTH OF YOUR FOLLY

TETRIS ATTACK is for PAWNS and BABIES, UNDERSTUDIES and BIT PLAYERS dancing to the tune of a MADMAN, PERVERSE AND EVIL, the landscape of PEAK 90'S ANIME AESTHETIC EXPUNGED and LEAVENED with LIES by THE FALSE IDOL, YOSHI

will you remain PREY TO HIS AMBITIONS? remain ENSLAVED to a SHAMBLING SHADE OF PERFECTION?

REAL ONES will answer NO

REAL ONES will play PANEPON

for context, ive been playing temtem since the official public beta launch in 2020, and i really loved it back then. ive felt very comfortable keeping my rating for it a 5/5 for a very long time. the passion these devs have for this game can be felt oozing out of every design, every city, every temtem, very rarely do i find a pokemon-like that feels so well crafted and lovingly produced. the battle mechanics are easy to understand but hard to master, just like pokemon itself. so why did i drop the rating by 2 stars?

simply put, i just am not pleased with how temtem handled its launch. the game now has a battle pass, called the tamer pass, which lasts for roughly 3 months and it's awful. there's a regular free version of it with less rewards and a paid version with rewards for every level that you can only buy using the game's new in-game currency, novas. and, you guessed it, novas can only be bought using real money. oh, sure, you can get novas from leveling up the tamer pass, and maybe you'll EVENTUALLY get enough to buy the premium pass. the devs have stated that the premium pass will be free in the following seasons if you have already bought it prior to the beginning of said new season... but only if you actually finish the tamer pass. and that's where the big problem comes in, leveling up the tamer pass is agonizingly slow. you need 3,300 exp to level up once, and the game offers paltry sums of exp for certain tasks. defeating a wild tem gives you 6 exp, catching one gives you 10. you get exp for doing the daily mail run, usually less than 30, iirc, for doing the 4/5 AND 5/5 koish for the week, which together give a handsome amount, but that's still only once a week. there's still several activities like doing lair raids and dojo rematches that give tamer pass exp, but the main thing the devs want you to do are the weekly activities. and that's the huge problem, you don't get weekly activities until after beating the main campaign. now, granted, the devs have said themselves that the campaign was meant to played nonstop with little to no breaks in-between story missions, but im sorry. that's just not acceptable, like at all. i can meet the devs on their level with a lot of things. the best way to get pansuns early on in the games lifespan was to do freetem, which fed into the loop of catching temtem with ideal stats and breeding them into perfect tems, and releasing all the ones you don't need. i can accept that part of the game since it's fairly open ended at to how it can be approached and, although it can be a bit obtuse and weird, it's how they want you to play the game. they meet with the player halfway, and vice versa, in these regards.
so having the fucking gall to just lock the most effective way to level up the tamer pass behind the story's ending and trying to force players to rush it is just shitty. it demonstrates a lack of understanding what made the game's mechanics so interesting and engaging in the long run, and shows that the developers don't respect your time or patience. this isn't even mentioning that temtem is a really hard game, one that you'll most likely need to grind for on several occasions, be that for levels or TVs (this game's equivalent to EVs.)

i say all of this out of love and respect for the game, because i really do think it's great and engaging, but the tamer's pass has left a real sour taste in my mouth, and makes me feel as though the devs don't actually care about their playerbase, despite what they've shown in the past.

In a way I appreciate what Mega Man 6 was trying to do here. It’s got a lot in common with 3, where it sees the need to shake some things up, but the danger is so much more severe after 5 of these than two, and unfortunately, also like 3, I think it’s almost entirely unsuccessful.

Where 3 radically changed the entire structure of Mega Man to essentially double the length of every game, 6’s Big Innovation is a relatively more reserved thing: another iteration on the series’ constant tinkering with the Rush powers, albeit the most extreme one so far. Instead of temporary single use weapons, they’re now equippable power armors with EXTREMELY useful gifts of either extremely powerful close range attacks or the ability to literally fly for a few seconds with OUTRAGEOUSLY generous recharge times, at the relatively minor tradeoff of not being able to slide or use the charge beam while they’re equipped. Immediately, these are fun to use; they look goofy (complimentary), they feel good, they’re powerful…maybe…TOO powerful? Oh nooooooooooooooooooooo

So these two upgrades impact the gameplay in two ways: the ways the levels are designed around them and the ways they’re not, both of which I think affect the experience really negatively.

Previous Mega Mans have squirrelled a fair number of little secrets, usually in the form of extra lives and similar but in later games also little bonus stuff that leads to powerful secret weapons. It’ll be things like false walls, hidden paths, typical NES game stuff. Now though, with the additions of these armors, all of that is gone. It’s been replaced with either a large conspicuous block that needs to be punched by the punch armor or a large conspicuous ladder that needs to be reached with the jetpack. They’re always right there, it’s never hard to reach, it’s never hard to notice, it always leads to full health recharges, etanks, extra lives, power refills, and shortcuts through huge swathes of the level. What’s the point of this? It’s a reward for nothing, AND I get to play less game. Weird choice! So that’s how levels have changed to incorporate the armors.

The way the haven’t is equally baffling. Once you have the jetpack there are very few scenarios where you can’t just use it to completely bypass any enemy or platforming challenge almost completely unscathed. It’s technically limited in use, but you get maybe four or five seconds of flight and it takes maybe one or two to recharge once you’ve touched the ground, and both of these are more than ample to overcome every single challenge in the game.

I want to be clear that I’m not a git gud games have to be hard kind of person, and I love accessibility options in general and I think games that let you just power the fuck up and mow through them rule and having that option should be the norm in every game, but here that doesn’t seem to be the intent. It just feels like bad level design, like they had an idea to expand and flesh out part of the play experience that’s super undercooked and only made it in for the sake of having something different in Mega Man 6 because shit dude the SNES is already out and Mega Man X already came out and you want us to make another Mega Man? How the fuck are we supposed to do this we need SOMETHING. And the something was this and it sucks lol

Otherwise everything else is like, aggressively middling. The premise to this one is a cute riff on the Astro Boy strongest robot in the world story arc, an appropriate story to adapt to a series that owes basically everything it has to Tezuka’s OG sweet little killer, and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, this game manages to somehow be even more racist than your average Tezuka book (everyone likes to laugh about Tomohawk Man but he is really only the most obvious tip of this iceberg). The music is par for the series which is to say generally very good. The graphics are fine, they’re what you’d expect for a late NES game at this point, although the only level that even comes close to anything in 5 is Centaur Man’s and HEY can we TALK about CENTAUR MAN for a second

What the fuck is up with that guy??? He’s a centaur okay cool. He’s in the Greece level I think, this tracks. This is also the water level. Okay, you’re losing me a bit. He turns invisible. Weird! He ALSO stops time?? What is this guy’s deal! Centaur man wearing too many hats. Fucked up.

Anyway Mega Man 6 sucks I didn’t like it very much.