there's something so interesting about games like these. a great doom-like shooter relies on 2d illusions of 3d spaces, an informative hud, and enemy sprites with convincing movement patterns and damage feedback to keep you immersed in a facsimile of a killing spree of whatever fictional peoplegroup. in playing this less-than-great-kinda-terrible-honestly early clone i become hyper aware of things like how my characters hands and weapons are just an image superimposed over the actual game world and not a real thing inside of it, or how enemies are just pngs that play certain animations and tick down an invisible number when i click on them. i'm not firing a gun, i'm interacting with rickety dos code constructions. fascinating shit.

also, this game was used to train special forces in the u.s.