And here’s the thing with the Marauders, too. They were just in the wrong game.

If having to play silly distance and timing games with solitary enemies were Doom’s jam – If this were ever Doom’s jam – it would be one thing. But it’s not, and it never has been. The fuckers would fit right in the Dark Souls universe and nobody would even notice. But that’s just not how the rest of the game is structured.

The telltale heart thumping under the floorboard here is that the game feels the need to literally give you a popup that pauses the action the first time you encounter one for the explicit purpose of teaching you how to work the fight. If your mechanics are so non-discoverable that this is necessary, maybe that’s a clue that a stop and rethink is in order.

Doom Eternal was actually really bad at that across the board. You will recall that almost every new mechanic was preceded by an action stopping popup and in some cases an incongruous teleportation to a tutorial room to force-feed you the correct course of action (and the only correct course of action, which is my other gripe) for that monster or situation. Very few of its mechanics beyond stick-shotgun-down-monster’s-throat-pull-trigger are organically discoverable, and even the ones that could have been aren’t because of the tutorial popups.

I guess at least you can turn them off… If you know about them in advance.

I don’t know that this has been revealed yet, but it is likely that it runs in id Tech 7, which is the same as Doom Eternal (and not Doom 2016).

I can beat the Marauders no problem, and I can even cheese them with the shotgun trick. That doesn’t magically make them good game design.

That recycled yank-the-keycard-off-the-corpse animation, though…

It doesn’t look like they learned much from Eternal. I think I’m going to give this one a miss. All I’m seeing is more mechanic overload, and a really annoying parry system that’s just going to result in about 1/3 of the monster roster being, “The only way to deal with this guy is to wait for his green attack and parry it, then you get to hit him once. Other than that he’s functionally invulnerable.” Yeah, because the Marauders were totally the highlight of Eternal, and absolutely didn’t grind the entire game to a tedious three minute halt every time you encountered one and played its silly song-and-dance.

I will happily don my asbestos underpants and declare that I really don’t like the direction the new Doom games are taking. Whatever this is isn’t Doom; they could have just as well slapped a new original IP over top of it without any difference.

A God of War live service game? Who the fuck signed off on that? I’m glad the article was able to zero in on the blistering stupidity of such a thing.

'Member when Kyle’s Mom freaked the fuck out and tried to ban Pokémon Red and Blue because they “depicted gambling” in the game corner, which had no links to the outside world and could not be fed with real money in any capacity, was completely contained within the monochrome screen on your Gameboy, and could be save scummed anyway? Pepperidge Farm 'members.

My, how far the bullshit has come.

Anyway, 16 is sure a funny way to spell 18. Why the hell is the age requirement 16 when you can’t buy a lottery ticket until you’re 18 and in most places you can’t enter a casino until you’re 21? It’s the same thing.

Lootboxes is gambling. So are gacha pulls, and doubly so for both of the above when they can be fueled with real world money. People who are not adults should not be enabled to gamble.

Dead Cells?

Emphasis, perhaps, on the “lite” part of Roguelite. But it does have that Roguelike run structure where the levels and the items you find therein are randomized. But with side scrolling platforming gameplay with a very distinct set of fast double-jump-dodge-roll-parry-combo mechanics that I think can best be summed up as ninja gameplay. And you will get killed… a lot. There is a permanent progression system of a sort in the form of unlocking more weapons and items (and later, to re lock items you don’t like), but your core stats remain the same. This is one of those games where the real progression is on your own personal quest to git gud.

I think it’s pretty unique in that it has no dud weapons or items whatsoever. Everything – literally everything – has the potential to be viable and can be absolutely deadly when wielded in the right hands. Even the joke items.

It also has not one, but two weapons which involve beating the shit out of your enemies with frying pans. What’s not to love?

There is indeed a Switch version.

Dead Cells: The leading cause of gamepad breakages among PC players. 9 out of 10 ninjas agree.

Wow, I can’t believe I get to dredge up this ancient photo again:

(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)

“Incoming Memo: Stand by to receive memo?”

I don’t think you’re alone in this. I’m kind of becoming the same way, and I figure it’s because as you become older you become wiser, specifically wiser to the way that so many modern games are bullshit now.

Nowadays it seems like almost everything is just a cynical cash grab. And with a lifetime of experience, you know how to spot that bullshit. Oh look, it has always online components. And an in game store. And season content. And gatcha mechanics. And grind. Not only just regular old grind, you know, where you need to level up and be at least be this tall to beat the beef gate (which always has the tantalizing possibility of being able circumvent it by cheesing it or being very clever). No, it’s just grind with no mechanical justification. You must fill the bar before you’re allowed to access this content. Would you like to make a microtransaction to fill the bar faster?

Fuck that, and count me out.

The current fascination is on delivering games as a “service,” and that just rubs me the wrong way. Everything is transient, nothing is permanent, and everyone is making a desperate grab for recurring revenue over creating a compelling experience or indeed anything anyone would ever want to go back to and play again. It’s all just crap designed to feed into people’s sunk cost brains, and it feels like damn near every major title wants to be your full time job.

I have even started eschewing Nintendo titles and some modern indie stuff specifically because they display a complete and utter disrespect for not only the player’s intelligence, but also their time.

Yeah, well, they promised Windows 10 would be the “last Windows,” too. We know how their track record goes on that.

I’ve had a very successful lifelong policy of never giving Microsoft any money for anything ever since I was knee high to a grasshopper gnawing on the keyboard of my first 286, and it’s served me pretty damn well so far.

I think most gamers would have been perfectly happy with a trip to the Borealis just for the closure of the thing, even if the gameplay brought little to nothing new to the table other than some nice new visuals and arctic setpieces.

Instead we got Half Life: Alyx which was a stunning albeit niche experience in the same old City 17, which retconned Episode 2’s cliffhanger with another, different cliffhanger. For fuck’s sake, Gabe.

My account is so old I have (or had, before they normalized the format) a four digit steam ID. I “owned” Half Life 2 for like four months before it released thanks to getting a code free in the box with my Radeon 9800 Pro back in the day. For a short and glorious flash of time in the summer of 2004, I was guaranteed a copy of the most hotly anticipated game ever, even though nobody could play it yet, and also owned an example of the fastest video card on the planet. Damned if I didn’t mow a fuckton of lawns and reinstall Windows and Outlook an a horde of septuagenarians’ computers to afford that card.

And no, they do not stop asking about your age.

Neat, but.

Even HL: Alyx left us with just as much of a cliffhanger as the end of HL2 Episode 2…

CIVIVI knives are generally pretty legit. Trust me, I can go much more mall ninja if you like.

This leaps to mind.

Gee, for the same money… a digital brontosaurus for Orc Game that you need to pay a recurring subscription to actually use, can be taken away from you at any time, or one day the servers may simply be turned off erasing not only your “investments” but also your years of “work.” Or, I don’t know, a CIVIVI Hyperpulse with a groovy pattern welded blade that also happens to be a physical object you can actually hold in your hands and keep forever. Just to pick something out of a hat.

What a tough choice!

I think the best way to approach Spiritfarer is as a somewhat cryptic expression if its core conceit: Thanklessly doing a bunch of repetitive chores for dying relatives who mostly act still like dicks towards you for your trouble, and bending over backwards to structure your time and living space around catering to them. The only reward for hard work is more work, and ever more specific and petulant demands. This inevitably evolves to all of your obligations piling up to the point that there literally aren’t enough hours in the day and your progress in your own life (or your boat) grinds to a halt. And when they finally die you’re stuck dealing with all their stuff, forever.

It’s an interactive metaphor. And while hilarious when taken as a whole, perhaps from the perspective of it all being an elaborate troll, it actually makes for a kind of lousy video game.

As much as the rest of the game is an exercise in tedium and complete disrespect of the player’s time and intelligence, the thunderstorm event in Spiritfarer is pretty rad, and definitely one of its high points.

At least the first time. The charm wears off after the 9th or 10th time you do it just because you need to grind for the one material you can get from it, and only from it.

The cartridge connector is not proprietary. It’s just a commodity off the shelf card edge socket.

Shitpost level reply: Any of the Gradius games.

One of the power ups you can buy is literally to dispense friends (options) which follow you around and shoot alongside you. You can crank out as many as you want, at least within reason. And in some of the Parodius games they are literally little dudes. Or depending on your character, little octopi, cats, or penguins.

Katamari Damacy

Which typically culminates in rolling up everyone on Earth by the time you get to the final stage, no less. If that’s not a group hug, I don’t know what is.

Edit: I’m also going to second the Psychonauts recommendation, especially the second game. Despite the gameplay itself inevitably lending itself to the protagonist performing every little bit of work by himself, there are strong themes of teamwork all throughout the game’s story and the excellence of its final sequence cannot be understated:

Ding dong.

Whale-O-Gram.

Obviously no one’s seen it happen first hand. It’s a projection based on what’s known about the materials and how they’re made. Burned CD-R’s have definitely been out in the real world for people to learn how short their lifespans can be, though.

Nobody could “prove,” for instance, that the Voyager 1 could stay operational in deep space for 47+ years when it was launched in 1977, but the engineers could still predict and they launched it anyway, and it did. I don’t think your argument really holds water.

Don’t conflate a mastered CD with an aluminum data layer with a recordable CD-R or CD-RW, which use organic dyes that have a significantly shorter lifespan.

A properly manufactured CD can last 200+ years if it’s stored in a dry environment free of UV exposure and high levels of moisture.

Even a quality CD-R can’t really be expected to retain all of its data integrity for much more than 10 years.

Sony shipped fucking root kits on their CD that would hijack your PC and screw with backup software.

Worse, this thing from Sony was on music CD’s and not even games.

The Sony Rootkit debacle is one of the reasons that I still will not do business with Sony in any of its guises, for any reason, no matter the price. And believe me, I have a long memory.

I would wager someone with an MBA got their knickers in a twist about “PC being the most pirated platform,” did that thing like in cartoons where the dollar signs in their eyes turn into cents signs instead, and decided to just 86 the whole thing because they were deathly afraid that a couple hundred people who never in a million years would have paid for it in the first place would download it off of Kazaa or whatever was popular back then instead of giving Rockstar any money.

Just a guess.

In that vein, maybe Power Washing Simulator?

The new port is not perfectly fine if it randomly crashes to desktop all the time.

Oh, and I also forgot to mention that several of the achievements are still bugged and don’t pop, which has been a known issue since release and still hasn’t been fixed. So yeah. Bethesda is gonna do Bethesda stuff.

You can still have a “vanilla” experience using other source ports. That’s what, e.g. Chocolate Doom is for. Except it may stay running on your PC for more than eleven consecutive minutes at a time. So if that’s what turns your crank, go for it. You’re right – not everything needs to be GZDoom and Brutal. But other options definitely exist, and I recommend any of them over what was shoveled out officially. You can even have a pretty durn vanilla experience in GZDoom if you want to, while still retaining much broader support for mods than the official release. Me personally, I can’t do mouse control with no vertical look. It made me seasick in the 90’s, and it still does now. That’s a deal breaker. I was a keyboard-only player in the DOS era.

I will also add that if you are going to play the new Sigil expansions or Legacy of Rust, they’re virtually impossible on Ultra Violence and Nightmare without mouselook. These maps were clearly designed with a modern source port including mouse aim in mind, and this was apparently shitcanned later in development for some unfathomable reason. Like, why even leave the crosshair there, then?

I will also add to this that there is absolutely no reason to buy the “new” re-release of Doom and Doom 2 that’s out on Steam now except to rip the IWADS out of it to put in a source port – any other source port – rather than the garbage it comes with. And only do so if you want the new Legacy of Rust episodes. Everything else is, er, readily available online. And has been for decades.

The new NEX based engine these run on now is maddeningly inferior to basically every open source Doom engine port currently available. In addition to not supporting vertical mouse look at all, “for authenticity,” (but by default it slaps a crosshair on your screen, which the original didn’t have…) it also looks like garbage on modern displays and crashes constantly which is something that baffles me. Running Doom ought to be a solved problem by now in 2024, but this fucker crashes on me more now than it did on my 486 back in 1994. It’s buggier than a trailer park mattress in a swamp.

I recommend GZDoom, personally. You can add Brutal Doom to make the gameplay experience significantly more bombastic as well, if that sort of thing appeals to you.

Well, as others have noted I think “cozy” is probably a loaded term in this context. However, I will throw these recommendations into the ring also: The first couple of Serious Sam games, and also Painkiller. Both of them are firmly in the “murdering tons of dudes” genre, and are significantly less tactical than the likes of Medal of Honor/Call of Duty/Battlefield.

That is to say, not at all.

There is none of that sucking your thumb to regenerate health, popping out from the chest-high walls inexplicably strewn everywhere taking potshots with your gun like a hillbilly jack-in-the-box. Rather, their gameplay loop involves herding and managing a massive horde of enemies, prioritizing your targets, and keeping yourself moving. Like a sheep dog with a chaingun.

People try to call the original Doom games a horde shooter. They really aren’t. These two, however, definitely are.

Bethesda was obviously already toast to anyone paying attention when Fallout '76 came out. They certainly haven’t improved since.

…And I can’t believe that these are the motherfuckers who own the rights to Doom now.

* Rather, a program superficially imitating the first level of Doom is able to run on a simulator of a quantum computer.

Not to diminish this accomplishment, but based on the level geometry on display there this is obviously a bespoke but very basic 3D-ish engine, extremely simplified, built from the ground up to do this and is not an actual source port of Doom before anybody gets too excited.

While it’s amusing I don’t think it really serves to illustrate too well the actual exciting parts of what quantum computing is actually theoretically capable of. Regular old boring Turing-compatible binary computers are already perfectly capable of running Doom already. ^{[citation needed]}

A revocable license for a virtual “product” whereupon they absolutely do not give you back your real world dollars if they terminate said license.

There’s no power imbalance in this transaction at all, no siree.

Anyway, I’m all for making backups of things. So you de-licensed me. Big whoop. I still have the file and I can still play it, and nobody can physically stop me.

Negative, unfortunately. I’ve never had a use case to mess with the option.

I found a few on github, though. I imagine any open source tools are probably… less… likely to be thinly disguised vectors to pwning your device.

The option you’re looking for is “mock location,” and it is buried in the developer options in the settings menu on your phone.

You will probably have to enable the developer options menu on your phone, which is done by tapping the build number in “about phone” five times. You will get a popup message when developer options are enabled, and then the Developer Options entry will appear under “System” (at least on recent Android versions) in your settings menu.

Note that this is not a complete solution. You still need a mock location app, which you will give permission via this screen to override your phone’s reported GPS location.

The annoying thing is, the problem with this from a design perspective was well known and there were already some efforts to improve upon matters as early as the SNES era. Both Chrono Trigger and Earthbound leap to mind. It’s just that following this, most developers forgot to learn a lesson from these for another decade or two.

In Earthbound, all non-story, non-boss encounters are visible on the overworld and you can either:

• Avoid them entirely with some foresight and skill
• Get a backstab advantage if you manage to maneuver yourself behind the enemy, or
• Instantly win the battle if your level significantly exceeds that of the enemy
• Battles can be auto-fought with the computer controlling your party if you are e.g. trying to eat a sandwich at the same time or something

In Chrono Trigger, most trivial encounters can be avoided, with some scripted exceptions that always initiate when you cross a certain area presumably to prevent players from completely avoiding all combat entirely and subsequently getting their asses stomped by the bosses. Chrono Trigger’s overworld map also features no random encounters whatsoever. You can wander the world freely and will only encounter monsters if you actually enter a location.

I harp on this a lot, but only because it’s true. Despite its faults, some of which it definitely has, Chrono Trigger had some incredible design innovations and was easily the high water mark for JRPG design not only for its time, but even compared to subsequent games for a long time – maybe even still to this day.

• Many trash mob encounters can simply be avoided if you can’t be bothered or are low on resources
• Those that can’t can usually be wiped in a single move if the enemy is far beneath you via double/triple techs
• Encounters happen on the screen you’re already on, so you don’t get disoriented after the battle ends
• Positioning on the battlefield matters for techs, making fights more interesting than the usual you line up on one side/they line up on the other side method…
• …However, positioning on the battlefield absolutely does not matter for single magic spells or melee attacks, meaning you never get completely screwed by how the chessboard is laid out
• You can walk diagonally (seriously, the inability in even much later games to do this bugs me to no end – Pokémon, I’m lookin’ at you)
• If a non-story-critical NPC is yammering at you and you can’t be bothered, you can just walk away even when the text box is still open
• Not only can you rearrange your party however you want including not putting the protagonist at the head of the conga line (and even being able to remove him fully, after a certain plot event), but which combination of party members you have actually matters for techs and not just a perpetual case of, “I need one tank, one caster, and one healer” like prior/later games
• The entire concept of the New Game+ is called what it is and works how it does because of how Chrono Trigger did it
• You can fight the final boss pretty much any time as soon as you learn about him, and if you get your ass whooped trying that’s on you

Etc.

Apparently the Chrono Trigger devs originally planned to give the player even more freedom but several additional concepts such as being able to freely position your fighters on the field were cut due to time constraints and not being able to figure out a sufficiently elegant way to do it on the SNES hardware and controller.

“I don’t share your use case, therefore your preference is invalid and only mine is correct.”

Yeah, I know that one very well.

What? I don’t have to “imagine” anything. I literally owned one, for two years. Nothing was “sacrificed” on the Priv. It was in all aspects a completely modern phone, even managing to include a headphone jack and memory card slot, a curved edge display, wireless charging, and a 3400 mAh battery. And don’t try to come at me about battery capacity, either. Just to name an example, its contemporary in the Galaxy S7 had a 3000 mAh battery, was the flagship phone of its time, and sold bucketloads of units.

Your argument is bullshit. Slider phones aren’t made because manufacturers don’t want to make them – be that for low projected sales reasons or whatever else – not because there is any physical reason they can’t.

The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.

Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.

I had one of those for a while. That was the best worst phone I ever owned. It was awesome at absolutely everything except being a phone…