sort of like world of warcraft if the barrens was 200 hours long instead of 15 and you couldnt roll a character that didnt have to go to the barrens and everyone yelled at you for skipping the quest text, not because it's actually relevant for the quest design or anything (no mankrik's wife here) but because narrative payoff is the only way the game ends up being "worth your time."

everyone ive ever known who liked this game considered themselves ~too good for~ wow, everquest, runescape, ffxi, second life, other infinitely more interesting mmos. they simply do not have the context to understand they are paying a monthly subscription for boxed mashed potatoes. i don't think that's coincidence. every character is mechanically and narratively identical and nobody cares. they just want to gpose and read the worst high fantasy dialogue ever written. or they're fully aware they play it for sunk cost reasons, and keep at it anyways. sad!

consider whether you are having fun playing the video game or having fun fumbling transgender women

this would have ruined my life if i'd read it at 19
now im just going "you're allowed to say half-life is bad. it feels like boring sludge because it is. it exists to make you proud of the price tag on your graphics card."

which i guess means she's right. games could have been so much more than what they became. they very nearly were, but alas, Long 2014. i can cope with that, though. i'm still having fun despite it all.

i like to play games for the same reason i like to play with synthesizers. someone made a little guy and now its in my computer. it has wants and needs and ideas of what we should do next after we get done with this. we develop a little relationship, the game and i. that's cute, even if it's showing me sweaty men getting turned into red#40 velveeta. a bad date is still a date. maybe i wouldn't have realized this if i didnt have other computer hobbies. but i do, so,
if this gets someone there then who am i to say it's bad

software is art too
see now i'm writing like her
theres love in my heart despite it all
i wish i'd never gone on /lgbt/

haven't gasped at a game this much since i first installed phantasy star online. doom, ripped to shreds, thrown in blender, poured back in a mold of itself, then used to test experimental firearms. grotesque, gorgeous, totally disorienting. absolute mastery of toolset+expectations. m.fisher would still be here if she'd made it long enough to be able to play this.

rip glitchy transgressive transsexual freeware indie game dev 2009-2019, murdered in cold blood by creepypasta wiki brain and 45 minute video essays. gone but never forgotten.

the last two levels kind of blow though

the more tacticool animations we make you sit through before pressing forward, the more epicerestous the series of hallways becomes, right?

regroup with corporal stryker. walk through these hallways to find tech li (actual character name). shoot one monster. bring tech li back to corporal stryker (not an actual character name). shoot two monsters. sit through this bad version of a halo 2 setpiece. shoot one monster. watch two other guys shoot a monster. regroup with corporal stryker - he needs to debrief you on the monster you just watched two other guys shoot. walk through this hallway. your sensitivity is halved now because this is a badly ported 360 game and we wanted it to feel like halo 2. i barely made it through the third(!) vehicle sequence before dropping it. almost makes one appreciate doom 2016...

the q4max mod is maybe the best mp in the series - thin hitboxes+hitscan, q2 rampjumps, vq3 strafejumping but with a "crouchslide" mechanic to maintain/build momentum around corners - but good luck playing it outside european pickup lobbies. anyone you do play with in NA will just force bouncymap (2nd worst quake map of all time) or longest yard (actual worst quake map of all time), or one of the homophobically titled remixes of the two. oh, well. at least quake champions has crouchsliding, too.

game's still got it, even if i don't. it's quake 3 cranked to 11. only for a specific sort of fps player, who wants Melty Blood or kof02 more than Street Fighter or Tekken. emphasis is on aggressive play: fast forward movement, near-instant weapon switching allowing free weapon combos, tanky quakeworld armor system forcing constant position shifting. best for tight interconnected maps (aerowalk, toxicity, use&abuse) more than the huge itemcontrol playgrounds of q3dm6/13 or q2dm1.

to drop the genre jargon: this is the fastest competitive shooter you will ever play, beyond tribes, titanfall, gunz, gears2, team fortress, any UT, or honestly even derivatives like xonotic and warsow. no surprise it ruined the quake community forever. just get used to wiggling your mouse around.

First played, and enjoyed, some time in the mid 2010s. Abandoned this playthrough in the final dungeon, because I made my character a "rigger" (drones, basically a summon character) and the game doesn't want you to have done that.

One of the blandest things I've ever played. Stock cyberpunk setting (yeah, there's orcs and magic, but that's less consequential than you'd expect) plays host to stock murder mystery plot, which is given up on halfway through in favor of stock Crazy Vindictive Woman Ruins The World With Evil Scheme, Because She's Just So Crazy And Evil. You go from point A to point B, do some XCOM combat with animations that take too long, wiggle your mouse around until the game shows you the stuff you can interact with, click through Whedonesque "Umm, is this a fragging cult or something!?" dialogue (Or, worse, "Mrs. Kubota" telling you about "the concept of 'giri' - the debt of honor" (eugh)) to find your next point B to travel to, rinse and repeat for two dozen hours. I want, so badly, to believe the actual Shadowrun universe, with magic and ultra-hi-tech, unknowably ancient spiritual tradition and uncontrollable neoliberal hypercapitalism existing together, is something that could be interesting in the right hands. But unfortunately it was not dreamt up by an inspired, talented writer, or someone with any sincere interest in anything, but by boring nerds grasping at daddy's library to make a competitor to R. Talsorian's much cooler Cyberpunk TTRPG in 1989.

Of course, Returns is a Kickstarted proof of concept for a Shadowrun CRPG engine, so it sort of makes sense it would be bland. It has a level editor, like Neverwinter Nights, with Steam workshop support. But "The Dead Man's Switch", the actual campaign it ships with, is honestly even more boring than NWN's three act Bioware chosen one thing (like, "The Dead Man's Switch" was the best title they could come up with! in the 2010s!). And a custom campaign scene never really materialized, because they made two sequels that revamped a bunch of systems, rather than just building on Returns with patches and expansions.

I remember the sequels being much better than this (again, like how NWN's expansions are leagues better than the base game), and I was only playing this "for context" before going back to the sequels, but I was having so little fun with this one I'm not sure I'll even bother.

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

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

put this off for years, but i think i'm playing it at the right time. game owns!! it's a 2d platformer with no platforms or jump button. plan your routes thru the levels, collect orb, blow up machine, go fast. yknow, like sonic! HOWEVER: you go fast not to complete the level sooner, but to loop through it more times before you run out of time. more loops=more collectables=more score. finishing with one second left is good here!! really cool idea, great execution, art, music, everything. eternal praise for sonic team.

PROTIP FOR THE PC VERSION: Gamebanana has MODS for this game now, that let you increase the framerate cap, turn off texture filtering in Sega Saturn mode, and render the game at a low internal resolution for authentically chunky pixels. probably the best way to play if you don't have a saturn.

almost a good game, held back by memes and insecurity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WoW's coming on 20 years old soon, believe it or not. In that time, dozens of teams, official and pirate, have tried to improve on it, and all of them fell for the same trap: trying to build on the endgame, max level, external-grouping experience. modern retail wow is built entirely around doing your Content tasks for the week, to prepare for doing your content for next week, ad infinitum. most pirate vanilla+, wrath+, etc servers tried to add raids, or expand on arena mode, or focus on WPvP balance, and all of them petered out before Activision even bothered to send the lawyers knocking. only the Turtle team (and probably someone with an RO server) have understood the true soul of the MMO: hanging out with a bunch of computer weirdos while leveling though an RPG at your own pace, phasing in and out of adhoc overworld groups with a mechanically distinct character (a concept that doesn't even exist in Runescape or XIV). people on here don't powerlevel, they play, specifically because of the approach the team took to balance, faction mechanics, professions, the hardcore mode, etc etc. it's great! even Blizz is cribbing their ideas now, with official challenge modes in Classic, and now a misguided attempt at "rebalanced," funserver-y mid-level content with Season of Discovery. but there is a reason TWoW's cities are full of people playing the game, where Classic's cities are full of identical max level, fully geared characters sitting around, hoping someone walks by and thinks they're cool.

This is the only good theme park MMO there's ever been. I will cry when it dies.