after churning through most of the 90s-00s metal slug entries this week i was taken by two things. first: the games have a hilarious sense of Vonnegutian violence that makes all entries difficult to be mad at even if i found some of them tedious and grueling. in metal slug 1 & 2 in particular you can be killed by all sorts of 'Top 10 Worst WW2 deaths' sketches, like being crushed by a falling tank in disrepair or getting struck with an ejected shell casing from a Comically Large Cannon, as well as dishing out dark comedy of your own like pumping 20 pistol rounds into a suntanning grenadier or instagibbing a riflemen with 5 grenades as he leaves the latrine. it's hard to single out what gives a metal slug game that approachable aura that makes it a hot commodity but i imagine this aesthetic of humor, along with the plainly good slapstick like the inflation sprites and its death animation, has aided in the series' canonization and perpetual status in the zeitgeist.

second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.

thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.

on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.

where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho


slaughter's I don't like shit I don't go outside, completely bleak and begging for (divine?) retribution to some unknowable crime. idk, probably the crime of being born. an apple from ribbik's tree of mixing slaughter with other gameplay elements, namely platforming, but this isn't the "oops!!!šŸ¤­ looks like you missed your jump! here's a teleport to restart ;)" nintenyearold platforming of other wads this is the "nigga fuck you" platforming of olde. maps 01 and 02 are aerial exercises of performing skates & figure eights around eroded neogothic pillars; i thought alot of NES sidescrollers and their derivatives in how benjogami will ask you to route yourself around projectiles, enemy bodies, and vertical gaps in quick succession. except, of course, the trick here being that all enemies are always moving towards you in a doom map, so the option to grind out muscle memory and timing is taken away, and now the requirement is left and right brain knowledge of which direction you need to be going at what speed and pastoral intuition on how you standing behind a wall for two seconds will herd the cyberdemon you can't see and the 12 cacodemons you can't see together to infight with each other. a notebook of Newtonian laws and velocity formulas in one hand and Joseph's shepherd crook in the other, real corpus callosum gaming.

it's claustrophobic and light on breathing room, felt like i needed a damn O2 mask by the time I hit map 03, which of course feeds into the visual work--this is by far benjogami's most striking WAD (not light praise, of the slaughter all-stars he's in the upper tier of aesthetics), undarkening Romero's brown into a low pH value bile of oranges & purples & neons. i love the Babylonian towers of toxins that serve as background to the action here too--depending on whether your philosophy says stalactite or stalagmite it's either god pissing on us or us sending our piss back to god. map 04 is otherworldly, vaguely resembling something akin to ribbik's frog & toad series but drenched in venom and supercharged with electricity. i had many (i.e. 1) drafts of words of map 04 prior to this and i could just not capture it's appeal or how it makes me feel, one of the rare things i feel that just goes beyond my aesthetic appreciation and into the sublime. realllly good shit man

becoming increasingly NFL brained. the sell here is Midway's tender love of turbo mixes with Blitz The League's grisly lust for gore mixes with generic dark fantasy at the 50 yard line--its an alluring alchemy for not real adolescents (surprised if anyone born after janet jackson's super bowl titty has any fondness for NFL Blitz '00) but adolescents in spirit like me. like alot of sports fans of a darker complexion I've developed an understanding that I might be challenged to a game of Madden (or really 2K) wherever & whenever, and so have come to an acceptance of the video game mega franchises for what it is and learned to enjoy it, but there's still a burn to see my favorite actually-kinda-mid QBs shake off 3 tackles in the pocket and then throw a 40 yard dart that the sim games can't give. MFL understands my wants, and provides me the experience of a juiced Matt Ryan (personified here as a skeleton named Ratty Ice) scrambling for an unheard of 15 yards and throwing 40 yard lasers as I desired--but then, it started asking questions that made me deeply uncomfortable. "If you gave Cooper Kupp steroids mid play, how many yards do you think he would get after the catch?" "Let's say Adrian Peterson lit himself on fire after the handoff. He isn't hurt by his own flames. Would the defense still try to tackle him?" "What if Josh Allen had a pump action in his off-hand during his run plays?" "If Trevor Lawrence could literally throw an IED at the opposing cornerbacks every half, would his QBR improve?" The other sell of this game are the "Dirty Plays", normal run option or play action plays that morph into Hanna-Barbera skits after the snap: all the aformentioned questions are scenarios you can find the answer to in here, along with the option to supersize one of your Dline men, jumping the line of scrimmage in an attempt to kill the quarterback within the next 5 seconds, completely Diavolo-ing the last touchdown pass, etc. although imposing at first each dirty play has some form of legitimate counterplay, or at least mitigation, and strategizing around timing and potentiality becomes this game's own unique metagame separating it out from the myriad of other arcade football prospects. And perhaps, most brutally, each player has their own health bar, meaning that taking too many late hits (completely legal btw) or being on the receiving end of a dirty play can actually just kill one of your players, with the only chance of revival being the reward for winning a half-time mini-game. while killing all of the team's opposing QBs is a win condition, and part of this game's market pitch, I've played about 60-70 games and never seen it happen, nor really come close; teams usually have 3 or more QBs on rotation and killing more than 2 requires alot of sacks or a lucky dirty play, and that's assuming a QB doesn't get revived. What I have seen happen though is me instantly killing Aaron Rodgers on the first snap of the game and dominating the ackers from there. if you have any vindications against a signed NFL player this is the time to let it loose.

it's all a good time, and as i plummed deeper into this i found there is a core of being rewarded for playing the rosters of yesteryear the "right way"--running the damn ball with the falcons along with masterminded ref bribe management lead to an easy chip in a season mode, instead of trying to play honest 2008 peyton manning offense with a shit OLine like the 2021 falcons did. still i wasn't able to find a perfect happy medium of difficulty between the relatively somber arcade gameplay and the literal explosives of the series gimmicks for this to be a forever game, in spite of finding the base elements really appealing. turning off stage hazards and lessening the damage a bit was my standard mode of play, but I can't help but feel that more modulation, in spirit of the sim mega franchises, would help here. Being able to adjust or nix the ref bribery metagame, lessening the efficacy of stiff arms, and other under-the-hood tweaks would make this even more of my thing even if the rosters never updated again. there's a thread on the steam forums right now about how easy is too easy and normal is too punishing that I mostly agree with, and the dev rep mentions even more fine-tuning of the difficulty along with a roster update in store,,, which is all well and good but I'd rather have those fine-tuning sliders for myself than have devs try to calibrate for some abstract universal medium. I'm hoping MFL 2 will be a breakthrough in this regard, but for now I don't see this game getting a ring quite yet in spite of its elite talent...that might be for the other bitches

not a shmuphead by any means but i found the 2014 entry surprisingly entertaining and was in a car for 6 hours so I tapped in on this. manipulating bullet patterns on a crusty 2017 ASUS laptop with a suspect shift key is just only a notch below an arcade cabinet in terms of intended shmup experience, and after a bit of mangling with the different modes and ship types i was hittin that rhythmic groove that made me fall in love with PCB & Imperishable Night when I played them way back when. shmups are really good at creating this kind of paradoxical enforcement and lessening of failure anxiety--good performance lessens the feeling that you're gonna lose and builds confidence in your competency, but also said good performance moves you up the linear curve of higher stakes, to where your prior good performance might not cut it anymore, which actually just reinforces the initial anxiety, and so on and so on. new breed trapper imposter syndrome not the fake bullshit for corporate eaters they talk about in litmags. anyway i really like this one because it kind of lets you set the variables for that anxiety game--do you want to be anxious about keeping up a high standard for an indefinite period of time, do you want to be anxious about keeping pace with an ever-evolving environment, do you want to be anxious about the precarious, 'zig when you shoulda zagged' nature of timing your next big move, etc. then the internal slip n slide of affect plays out from there depending on how you've set the board up. idk just really fun stuff at the end of the day.

a kind of surprising entry into the ps1 jank fighter history, shigeru mikuzi's demented yet blemishless circus house yokai meeting with the ground zero dirt & grime that's implied in this era of experimentation. even ignoring my ignorance of mikuzi's work and my general unfamiliarity with this microgenre of fighters, playing and watching this felt like two ghoulified rams run headfirst into each other over and over--nary a movelist exists in game or in my usual EOP resources, forcing me to return to a childlike state of doing button combinations and seeing what happens. Triangle + Circle is a throw and QCF + triangle did something unique, i think, but by the time I figured out there was an OTG attack the stiffness and dullness of this frankenstein had brought me to boredom. make no mistake, there is a genuine uncanniness in mizuki's designs that gets a super saiyan boost with the ps1's polygonal sorcery, that baby beetle being the weirdest shit you'll see tonight. and there's one stage here that has just a raw-ass rain overlay that is as amateurish and as it is atmospheric. but the thrills aren't enough to sustain this past a 1 hour session for most i think. certainly not the worst thing to download off a cdromance dive though.

Bruh Had The Nerve To Call Sengoku Basara Gay.........But Metal Gear Rising His Favorite Platinum Game..........#KiLLYOSELFTWICE

sony porting their own self-produced "canon" of games that are solid but risk-less and marketing it with irrelevant "exclusive" changes and Advanced Graphics Menu technobabble: A Moment, a changing of the guard, bridge-building, empowering

koei tecmo caving to scant but fervent enthusiast demand and porting their most gluttonous and attention-seeking passion project that has gone onto to find its own niche cult and influence in the musou genre: who cares, sloppy, irrelevant, put a shirt on nigga

nah yall cant fuck with ribbiks tho. map02 is a nice iteration on mixing the purple (stargate) with the blue (oceanic moodiness) but map 03 is on some other other shitt entirely. a flooded amusement park thats actually your prison + doom's most devious sniper cyberdemon + a 40 minute long math problem disguised as "ammo scarcity" are just the base elements, what happens after that are some fucked up fucked up encounters with the demon kind--its "slaughter+plutonia" sort of still yea but this time instead of just straight up negating safety ribbiks is on his manipulator bullshit and will triangulate in third parties to make you understand that safety was nothing more than a delusion. any given 2x2 area of "safe space" in a room is just bait setup so that you get munched by the sniper cyberdemon, or get sent packing by a homing reveant missile from 100 yards away, or get tag teamed by the archville you ran out of ammo to kill 2 rooms back and the one behind the 20 revenants in front of you. or lose 50 health damn near instantly because its a chaingunner right above you. fuck you. and the infamous cyberdemon room in here is just like...damn. you get put into a room with about 40 hell knights and revenants while you're locked in a new york studio apartment-sized box, then 4 cyberdemons teleport into this same box and you're asked to not die instantly within the next 30 seconds. while the difficulty of that isn't as alarming in the 2022 era the immediate flex-or-die demand is still as arresting as it was damn near ten years ago. and when you step onto the final platform and hit the intermission screen you can't help but feel like the #1 stunna despite the sprite of doomguy's no dobut near-death visage on the bottom of your screen just seconds prior...but fuck it we swag n we surf.

(list&writeup of slaughter stuff impending by the way twizzys šŸ¤žthere's about 20-25 major entries i needa hit & 50+ entries i need to add in igdb still but im seeing the sunset. gives me grief that i won't have that discovery high anymore but equal excitement that i'll be able to contextualize and narrative this shit cuz literally all of it was fucking crazy lmao. like look @ some of this shit dawg this shit doesn't even look like it was meant to be played by humans anymore lmao its so techno-mystical & esoteric)

katherine need to worry about her pussy skills šŸ¤”šŸ¤” if every nigga she dated CHEATED (pussy trash) šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚ u know how horrible yo pussy gotta be for a nigha to fuck a (22 year old) ?? She only been using her pussy for a few years šŸ¤”šŸ¤£šŸ¤£šŸ¤£ she ain't even a professional fucker yet and he would rather deal with (C- minus vagina) he didn't even cheat on u with a (lebron type of talent #veteran) he went for a dejounte murray "exciting BUT no playoff experience šŸ™ŒšŸ¤£

maybe banpresto's most earnest attempt at crafting a straight-laced, black & white mecha story a la Toei's mazinger z anime. i mean im firmly in the camp that says pessimism is mecha's strongest quality but its hard to not to smile when a 3 foot kid climbs ontop of a 4 foot mecha and yells 'CANT YOU SEE THAT YOUR BEING RUDE'!!!!!!!! šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”šŸ˜”' then cleaves the literal CEO of pollution in half with a dragon. the common criticism against this game is that wataru flattens all the other plots but i honestly though it could use more wataru: lil jit should be everywhere and in both route splits. if wataru isn't on screen other characters should ask 'what would wataru do' etc etc. he's the only true child written in mecha because he sees past deception with an ease that can only come from naivety and engages the future without any concern about hedging against calamity. "children have a stronger reality principle than adults" as they say.

forgot i played this one lol. from what i remember it's a really unique entry in the gundam game canon--a canon which has a really strong track record so im not just bullshitting. main appeal of the game is that it totalizes the 'relevant' UC timeline into one cohesive branching path action game for you to run amok in, which is p baller tbh. campaign tasks you with creating a custom character as you guide through them oyw to cca, in a somewhat extensive fashion, with the option to switch allegiances in between each stage of the conflict. there isn't really much of a personal reason why your OC switches sides iirc so feel free to make up your own, but its dope that the option exists, given how well considered the allegiance dynamics were setup in tomino's quadrilogy. also offers a gamut of side missions to involve yourself that covers UC side material. i cant quite recall either if that coverage was even adequate, but it was cool to see that said side material gets integrated in the 'main' moments of the UC campaign: like in one mission where you're attacking jaburo as zeon and you have to fight against the mudrock or when in one branching path christine from 0080 shows up in the battle of a baoa qu. won't mean shit to non-gundam fans but if you know it imbues the campaign with a certain tragedy to see these characters escape their canon narrative fates but ultimately be done in by the war machine & their own dysfunction regardless. its a move which extends not just tomino's ethics of war as horror but also his view of war as Freudian prison in which neurotic overseers conscript unsociable & neglected children to defend resources & ideas they only superficially care about.

in terms of game its a little less interesting, its a few notches above serviceable but is in a rather awkward stage in that it treats the nu gundam and the zakrello as functionally the same machine with just different variables. while a suit will generally 'feel' more light and aerial as you advance further in the timeline there's a few general archetypes that all suits fall under, erasing the uniqueness & differentiation that these suits have gotten over the years. not a huge deal, because on the flip side you can crank the variables under the hood to in the free battle mode to an absurd degree. feels like i just bought a brand new tonka & an ap when i crank the speed of the zaku ii to the max level so im outrunning a team of 3 f91s.

This review contains spoilers

(Spoilers for Doom Eternal and its DLCs, not in an indepth discussion of them but I guess I imply the shakeout of them. I donā€™t mention anything here that would qualify as spoilers for Sunder itself)


What a project. If whatever Bethesda was doing in the lore of Doom Eternal and The Ancient Gods is to be taken seriously, Sunder is a jaded boomer chiming in with a welcome "it's not that deep" and reasserting that doomguy is first and foremost, a guy. Obviously the Brutalism/Neo-Gothic aesthetic help counter the conceit that an individual could be of cosmic importance, but really the pedestrian aspect of doomguy is most plainly reinforced through the WAD's combat. Maps 1-14 reiterate that DOOM Is Hell, and so the room design is less neat arenas designed for efficient circlestrafing and instead asymmetric, incongruent hazardrooms designed to fuck over intruders, i.e. you. Map 5 is really egregious with the "hazard" part of that philosophy but in general completing a Sunder map requires erasing the mental map of DOOMā€™s geography hithertho, and instead engaging with the world laid out before us. It flies in the face of typical DOOM convention to have inescapable pits, instant-death platforming, and damaging floors on every would-be safe space, but it's in here all the same. Also noticeable that insane_gazebo doesn't even really employ crushers, DOOM's intended environmental hazard, for this to workā€”since you canā€™t even flip the environment on the demons, itā€™s only doomguy who struggles to move in this world.

Sunder transforms this combat philosophy into something profound in maps 15-19ā€”the theme of environment-as-enemy continues in this set but we also find insane_gazebo using more targeted and choreographed encounters. Generally in slaughter-based mapsets, youā€™ll see encounters where around 100+ Hell Knights + Revenants drop in an open area with a BFG to clear them out; in this set however, youā€™ll find not only stereotypical slaughter encounters but also encounters in very tight rooms, with more frequent ā€œproblem enemiesā€ such as Archvilles, Pain Elementals, or Cyberdemons joining in with typical Hell Knight + Revenant combo. You think this might be a return to combat that is more doomguy-centric, but nope, it's even more alienating. The reason being is that the key element of slaughter-maps, the BFG, is just straight up unavailable for most of the maps in this set until the very end. Thus, in an inversion of power, Cyberdemon infighting becomes the new BFG--the intended clears of some rooms in this stretch will have Cyberdemons picking up more kills than doomguy! what the fuck! I've never seen something like it outside of some self-designated challenge and puzzle maps. Sunderā€™s combat truly felt like something different when I realized that doomguy wasnā€™t the most dangerous person in the room.

The "doomguy ain't shit" narrative also bleeds over into the aesthetic in this set. Aesthetics which can only be described as Bronze Age Temple Architecture combined with surreal Futurism combined with the Neo-Gothicism of the early levels. And a Beehive motif? IDK what fukken architecture movements I should pull on to sell the point here, I dropped the Annotated Mona Lisa 50 pages in, the levels are genuinely imposing and uniquely beautiful is what Iā€™m saying here. Anyone who has loaded map 15 and stepped out the first room can tell you how immediately insignificant they feel. This invocation of things grander than doomguy is also in this set's 'lore' so to speak--unlike Sunlust's reference to religious ritual and violent machinery, Sunder's evocations are all to mythology, from both Sunder's world and our world. "Archives of the Technomancer", "Whispers of the Gnarled King" and the openly blunt "Babylon's Chimera" are all titles which summon historical specters across the maps, hinting at a chronology of how we ended up here at this time fighting these demons, a chronology that doomguy has nothing to do with.

It is with that realization is where I felt that Sunder as a whole became profound to me. Sure we are nominally the protagonist in these maps, the one who sets everything in motion and clears out the enemies, but itā€™s hard to look at the encounters, the buildings, the titles, and the grand scale of these maps and surmise that they are still about doomguy. The only thing that can be fairly surmised is that the locations here, their vastness in history and architecture, were the life-projects of somebody else. The thought that broke their sleep schedule, the idea they couldn't stop namedropping in casual conversation, the blueprint not on-paper but in-memory, the dream that spawned endless self-dialogue. We arenā€™t even poised as some far-flung adventurer who is passing judgment on the projects of history either. These projects are indeed presented without criticismā€”they arenā€™t in ruins, thereā€™s no demented final boss guarding these locations, thereā€™s no voiceover thatā€™s trying to guide us to view them as vanities of all vanities. It is in fact a little misleading to talk about this aspect so much because insane_gazebo doesnā€™t even draw attention to it as Something to Be Admiredā€” he takes that theyā€™re worth and beauty is self-evidently observable.

And you know what? Heā€™s fucking rightā€”maybe thereā€™s something inherently ā€œworth itā€ about the concept of the life-project. I don't have a strong argument for this, and maybe I don't need to since I'm on a video game hobbyist website, but engaging in any project of research, creativity, or expression is a good in and of itself. That too relates back into what Sunder is: a perpetual project for a nearly 30 year old game that after 12 years of development is just now over it's halfway point. Maybe for most of those years Sunder wasnā€™t in insane_gazeboā€™s mind, but maps 15-19 certainly feel like insane_gazeboā€™s thoughts for the past decade. They are unapologetically long, nuanced, surreal, engaging, and deranged. The README file for the WAD details as much: ā€œLong ago I had a vision...ā€, ā€œIn my dream I saw that...ā€, ā€œSo in my head...ā€. A brain spilled on canvas.

In spite of it all though, playing Sunder felt thoroughly unpretentious and just fun. It is after all a game that, unless your a doomgod, will likely take 30+ hours to complete, with many of those hours spent reloading combat encounters until you ekk out the correct path. Yet beating the WAD as-is won't get you anything--there's no sequel, there's no end credits, thereā€™s no capital M message, nothing even remotely climatic. There's not even a relevant Discourse where beating Sunder will get you a crumb of clout. For most people beating Sunder will become as much of a project as making it was, complete with its own requirements for determination, research, and intuition. A Problem to Be Solved, for sure. And yet, this aspect of finding projects, problems, hobbies, ideas, and obscurities to obsessively tinker about over and over for no particular reason is what makes life interesting, and is why that in spite of the cornucopia of things happening in my life, solving Sunderā€™s rooms became a past-time both in my head and in the world. This is perhaps, more than cosmic power level stuff, where Bethesda lost me the most with the new loreā€”the transition from doomguy to Doom Slayer turns his demon-slaying project, an expression of idiosyncrasy and circumstance, into a matter of all-importance. He doesnā€™t kill demons because itā€™s fun, or because he thinks its important, or because he has something to protect, or simply because it gives him something to think about itā€”he kills demons because long ago the cosmic rolling ball set off events that trapped in him in his Sisyphean, Godlike wrath. A perpetual motion machine disguised as the janitor of the universe. He even does it for free!

Actually underestimated how dry and pointless this would be. I've been thinking a fair amount about dating/relationships and doing my own share and this still didn't strike a note with me--especially because you don't actually get left on read. The phenomenon of being left on read is so incendiary because for some folks text is where their thoughts and emotions can go unfiltered by meatspace, so for a love interest to go "k, not replying to that" can be pretty scarring. Yet the game is totally oblivious and uninterested in what its title phrase actually means, instead portraying cousin-who-you-text-annually-tier convos as some promising pen-pal romance instead of the banal drivel that it is. Not even cringe, because neither participants say anything remotely risky or potentially undesirable.

Sidebar: it's a personal pet peeve of mine when people pretend as if text is some alien & hobbled form of communication, and that nothing 'real' can form out of it. text-based friendships and romances have existed since dudes could put words on a page circa 4 millennia ago, pick up a history book.

admirably janky and esoteric? contemporary blizzard's calculated & castrated style of development has increasingly irritated pretty much every type of person I know--storyheads are mad at the sloppiness that has become starcraft/warcraft lore, hardcoreheads are mad at the removal of the legitimate labyrinth and arcane knowledge and dedication required to compete at the higher level of their games, aestheticheads are mad at the pretty homogenous 3d cartoon style that has ran blizzard's art direction for a decade now. overwatch has flipped from a rally point of team fortress 3 to a common point of derision, only relevant in so far as to how quickly the character designs can send hornytime signals to the brain. all of this piled upon a really horrid culture of abuse (not just the sadistic misogyny of contemporary blizzard, but also the labor abuse of the blizzard of past--this game did have about a year and a half of crunch) has pretty much soiled blizzard's reputation, and deservedly so.

picking up D2 then with the context of all of that, I was pleasantly surprised by how playful and whimsical a mess of a game this is. as in, its actively encouraged to trick the game into believing you are playing with 8 players if you're doing a single-player run in order to get better gear. as in, you can and should abuse the town portal spell in combat to literally teleport in and out of boss fights to reup on health and mana potions to have effectively infinite HP&MP. as in, one of the main builds in this game is to teleport into a crowd of enemies, send out some comically small floating hammers, and then watch the corpses pile up. as in, one of the most important aspects of gear in this game, runewords, isn't mentioned at all in the actual game and requires players to look it up, but can turn your painfully average loot drops into gear that can last a whole playthrough.

and underneath all that outwardly goofy design and "is this intended?" mechanics is some really rather ingenious game design--there's this article that I was just reading that breaks down how D2 uses randomness and procgen in a way other ARPGs haven't replicated, and looking at how this game has had several "close, but not quite" imitators 21 years on, you cannot discredit that blizzard north had struck magic. this is blizzard (more accurately blizzard's former employees as most of the talent behind this game would leave the company) being calculated not in PR but in understanding the history of RPGs, of what Y2K PC players were expecting of level systems, of how to reroute the dopamine rush of action games to the frontal-lobe focused role playing genre. even if the status reveals I ultimately bounced off this for now, when this was clicking I felt like a B.F. Skinner rat giddily planning out my build paths and gear progression as I was dripfed items and levels I wanted. each 30 minute trek before teleporting back to base being like a small map of DOOM or a quick level of Mario, in that I progressed enough to have a marked difference an hour ago but not enough to truly feel accomplished, which strangely felt me wanting more instead of frustrated. its a progression loop few others replicated, and when I feel the urge to delve into this tome of weirdness again it'll have me just as captivated. except next time I won't pick such a heavy mouse 1 build like holy fire paladin, man that was starting to get boring.

= http://thegamedesignforum.com/features/RD_D2_2.html

I was tweaking when I had this at 3 stars. Unironically a kafkaesque comedy of errors, wholesomely committed to painting Doomguy as the "aw, shucks :(" down-on-his-luck Everyman who is able to sustain this weird, hostile world through determination and ingenuity. Encounter design is A-1, a return to the frantic, claustrophobic combat design of retro WAD culture over modern WAD's slaughter-tendencies--even Barons became threatening when you have no room to run. Thoroughly meticulous in environmental design too--there's a skeleton in the closet joke that I didn't even realize until I was watching a YT playthrough. So goofy, yet so earnest! One of my favorites that will probably become an annual revisit.