Doom

Here's a Doom tidbit I didn't put in the Doom 3 review: I disliked Doom 2 because it didn't have the little map screen the original game did. It's total window dressing, but for some reason to my young mind it put in this extra layer of immersion. I used to imagine the Space Marine hiking his way to these remote locations along the surface of the Martian moons, hoping each time they wouldn't be overrun with Demonic nonsense and then solemnly rip/tearing through them. (Actually that might have been in there, but I don't remember and it amuses me to this day)

Here's another tidbit: AMD named a processor the threadripper. Huge threads. Huge threads to rip and tear.

Also, worth noting, the original Doom never goes to Mars. Episode 1 is set on Phobos, which is a tiny as tiny gets moon orbiting Mars. Episode 2 involves teleporting to Deimos, which now orbits Hell itself, and then you just climb down to Hell in episode 3. Seriously, I swear the plot was you just threw a rope down and casually climbed down to Hell like it wasn't any sort of thing.

Anyway, so in this, Doom 4 which we'll just call Doom from now on actually lifts a lot of its genome from Doom 3. There's a lot of weird overlap that doesn't feel so much intentional as parallel evolution, although Doom 4 skips act 1 of Doom 3 and just kinda rushes forward from there, as well as having a completely weird story that has equal parts schlock and Jacob Hargreave going on in it.

It's also the first shooter in a long, long time to truly abandon the "realism" elements that drag down shooters and instead says F-it, you're the DOOMSLAYER.

Superhot

SUPERHOT, SUPERHOT, SUPETHOP, etc.

The thing that made Portal so successful, you'd think, was it's wonderful excellence in terms of memetic suggestion.You can say a lot of things about Super Hot, but there's a temptation to say what the game instructs you to say instead of actually reviewing what the game actually is. You'd be surprised, once you're "in on the joke".

Me, I don't know, I don't think I really felt much for the joke.

Regardless: Superhot's description almost always starts with a lie. The line is, I believe, a shooter that moves when you move. This isn't precisely true, though it isn't precisely untrue either. Instead, Superhot is a very simple shooter with a single enemy type and a weird meta story I won't get into that moves faster as you move faster, but is always moving just a little.

The end result could actually be described as a FPS-puzzle game, though that 'just a little' thing and certain other components degrade that puzzle element as well. So you end up with a shooter that is puzzling, both in gameplay and description.

Superhot, etc

A real lack of recent games: Enter the Gungeon

There's this super weird thing about using this blog as a writing exercise in that sometimes I just, uh, forget to finish up a review and never hit that publish button. Or I go back to a game after the review is done and feel like it should be re-written but can't find the energy.

I finished ETG several months ago. Finished with, that is to say, since it is a roguelite.

I have mixed feelings when it comes to roguelite design. Some of my favorite games in recent memory were roguelites, but most of them I find rapidly tedious and get sick of very quickly. They're plagued by forcing you to repeat the first level endlessly and even worse have this sickening unwillingness to program in any amount of conveyance. They're built around the idea that fun is something you need to work for and knowledge is something you acquire through repeated, repetitive play throughs. It's pretty easy for the latter two to turn into pure tedium.

The moment I saw Enter the Gungeon, hereby shortened to Gungeon, I was certain it was a game I wanted to play. For a while I waited on the game to show up in the humble monthly bundle, as I have a sub rolling ever still and humble puts up most Devolver Digital titles sooner than later. But it went cheap on the humble store and they'd given me credit for a referral so I decided the time was now!

I'm pretty certain I'll end up with an extra key sooner than later, it's probably in this month's bundle, knowing my luck.

Regardless, Gungeon is presented as a roguelite dungeon crawler fused with a shmup and a twinstick shooter with cool boss battles; the results lean a fair bit more toward the former than the latter, though this game certainly co-habits the design space you'd put Nuclear Throne and probably several other games I haven't played in. It has a few more buttons that Nuclear Throne and leans harder on the roguelite looting side than gaining XP or gaining loot, with various results.

It also loves puns and loves guns.

March to War Month: XCom 2

The original X-Com, which I'll call X-Com OG to try to be easier to read, is permanently lodged in my brain. I've played hundreds if not thousands of hours of it, and through at least one successful campaign of its sequel, the highly derivative Terror from the Deep, or Lobster men from the Ocean rise from the depths to touch your no-no zone.

I couldn't get into the XCom reboot, as it felt too close to X-Com OG while not offering much, if anything, to really get over my subjective distaste for the game. It reminded me too much of the usual dumbing down of strategic games, but it sold really well and lots of people liked it, so I'm not saying I think it's bad. Just, you know, it didn't quite line up with it. It's still very cool that they made a triple A big budget strategy game, even if I'd somewhat pull away from calling this a strategy game.

As for X-Com 2, the reality is, I have a 12 month humble bundle sub rolling and I was getting this game whether I liked it or not. Having clearly put the money in, well, I wasn't going to be deterred on giving it a try and wasn't going to be deterred by the first hour being bad since damn it, they already had my money.

March to war month: The Last Federation

Some games are easy to introduce and discuss, and others are difficult. But Arcen, makers of Last Federation, is generally a well-spring of being difficult to discuss in and of themselves, and then their games take it to the next level. Admittedly the last Arcen game I reviewed was Starward Rogue, which was a very different game.

The Last Federation is a very, very strange game to talk about. It bends a lot of what you'd expect from the genre around trying to set up this one, rather perfect little scenario that the game takes place in. But I guess I should explain the genre before I go anywhere else. TLF is a space simulation game, likely to be compared to the lineage of Master of Orion. However, if MoO and its variety of descendant games are described as "4x" games (or x4, I can never remember) then TFL is more like an 2.5x game. Most of the elements are there, but not all of them.

For one thing, the basic story is you're the last Hydral, the first race to gain space travel in a planetary system with almost ten different races. And your race was wiped out, as they were cruel dictators of the system until that wiping out. It isn't well explained why a space-faring race would be wiped out as such, but hey, it worked for Dragonball Z!

As the Last Hydral, you don't really have an empire per se and you don't really have anything approaching imperial resources. Oddly enough, though, the elements you'd expect to be dropped from a 4x given those restraints aren't the ones TFL is missing.

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.

A break in the role for action - Wolfenstein The New Order

Shooters are such a weird thing to me, nowadays.

First off, not that many people played Doom or Quake. Not among the gamers you see talking about "old school" shooter design. I've come to the conclusion "old school" is basically the most meaningless pair of words you can see applied to a shooter, and that people say they played old school in the same way people claim nintendo and apple are innovators.

Wolfenstein The New Order is old school, according to the usual chorus of voices on the internet that always say that. But that doesn't actually mean anything, and if you're like me and expecting a Doom/Quake early era design... Welp, forget it, that's not this game. That's not this game at all.

Second, texture pop in is so strange. I only ever see it in shooters, for obvious reasons, but it's just so wonky to me. It feels like something you shouldn't ever see, but you clearly do, and what's up with that?

Also was I the only one who seriously thought this game would pick up after the earlier Wolfenstein and just involve a time travel plot? I guess that's sort of a spoiler, but it doesn't involve any time travel, which totally disappointed me. I guess that's sort of the theme of this game and my interactions with it.

Wolfenstein TNO is a first person shooter about violently attacking fascist ideology with firearms, and then a lot of strangeness around that. If you played the last Wolfenstein shooter, though, you'll be confused to find this is more of a "weird science" than "occultism" centric shooter, which I believe goes more toward the game's roots but I could be remembering wrong.

It's also kind of generic among id games for that. Actually it kinda reminds me of Fallout mixed with Quake 2. It sort of does that more than anything, though.