There is an Irish Game from John Romero….

Okay I don’t know if that actually counts as Irish, I mean the dude just moved there but moving to a place doesn’t mean you become the thing. Whatever, I was just making a Paul Mason joke, settle down everyone.

Here’s some games I played in 2023, including the one I think is the best game I played this year that also came out this year. I am once again too lazy to really focus up on a numerical ranking, so you get arbitrary categories and at the end I’ll crown a winner which is also probably arbitrary if I’m being honest with myself and you.

The Game I’ve Started Too Many Goddamn Times Award: Persona 3 Portable

I’m going through a list of releases so these will be pretty much chronological in order, which is the only reason we’re starting with the PC releases of Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden. Because I’d had time to fall down an emulation rabbit hole, and because my Vita developed a habit of corrupting its save data, I think I’ve played the beginning of Persona 3 Portable roughly a million times. I have also (not surprising anyone) never finished the fucking thing. It’s good, but you already knew that. I don’t have anything to say apart from “I think the female MC rules” and “I think the P3P soundtrack is better than the other ones except for the new opening theme which doesn’t have shit on Burn my Dread.”

Best Grumpy Scottish Lady Representation

That’s right, it’s Hi-Fi Rush everybody! The game you definitely didn’t forget existed on account of 2023 having way too many video games. I’m not much of a rhythm game guy to be honest, but I do love me some 3^rd person character action or whatever this is, and it helps that the soundtrack for the game is excellent. This thing came out of nowhere and ended up being a hell of a good time, and also Korsica is in it! Damn! That’s what we call a masterpiece, everyone!

The ”This Game Doesn’t Really Count but Come On” Award for Excellence

IOI did their “World of Assassination” release and put in Freelancer mode this year and surprising nobody, Hitman is still fucking good. It’s been good since 2016 though, which is why it only gets this little line. I am fucking terrible at Freelancer mode, as it turns out, but I still love it.

Game That I Have Absolutely Played While Stoned Out of My Gourd

Akka Arrh feels like a little miracle. Like, two or three months before it came out I was thinking to myself “you know who makes great games is Jeff Minter,” and then he went and was like “hey you know that game that Atari tested and abandoned because people didn’t like it or whatever? I’ve made that game again but it’s me, Jeff Minter, so you know it is gonna have some weird visuals and sounds happening to you.” The generative soundtrack is kind of wild – I’m not always huge on the way it turns out, but then it will surprise me with a hook or something that really hits. It helps that the game itself is pretty compelling, and my love of high score chasing means that sometimes I’ll try to beat a level without using a bomb. You can do that, and it makes you feel powerful. It’s also great on the Steam Deck, but you have to put in some custom launch options to get it to display properly (this does not actually take much effort at all and it is well worth it).

Best Game With Little Lord Boy

Resident Evil 4’s remake was pretty good, huh? I think it looked great, and plays great, and (mostly) runs great, although my computer fucking hates the rainy village section, like, goddamn. The changes they made to the game’s structure are interesting and for the most part much-needed, although I still maintain the game goes downhill after you kill the titular Little Lord Boy himself. Plus I don’t like the change to his design, give Salazar his dumb hat back! Still, if Capcom wants to keep putting out these remakes, I’ll keep buying them for sure (especially if they actually put work in to remaking Code Veronica or 0).

Best Garbage Cans

Honkai Star Rail has the distinction of not just being full of anime ladies, but it turns out it’s well-written and the game itself is actually really fun. I’ve fallen off of it more or less completely at this point, because the gacha grind always gets tiresome for me eventually, but I’ll always cherish the time I had spending way too much time investigating garbage cans.

Game That Made Me Think About Zelda II for Like the Millionth Time

Tears of the Kingdom, everyone! It fucking rules, it took what Breath of the Wild gave us and expanded on it considerably, plus it told a story I got really invested in! It helps that the mechanics were just incredible to play with, and having that moment where I realized “oh my god there is a whole-ass world going on underground” is hard to beat. That and how fucking scary that place is until you get to a point of knowing how to deal with things down there and then it becomes a place you gear up for like a real goddamn explorer. I love it! This would have been my game of the year any other year and it wouldn’t even be close, but as we are all well aware, 2023 had a lot of good video games in it. Also grown up Purah? Good lord.

Most Systems Shocked

The System Shock remake finally came out and more than anything else it understood the assignment, which was to take System Shock and make it play better but without sacrificing all the stuff that made it, you know, System Shock. I’ve maybe put like an hour into the original System Shock and it was a baffling experience – I didn’t play it as a kid so I had zero idea how fucking weird the control scheme got. Fortunately the remake is way more understandable to my rapidly calcifying brain. Plus hearing SHODAN again is always a delight. Good villain! Spooky game! Great environments! That pixelated look they went with for the graphics really sings, and the lighting is exquisite. A real triumph for Nightdive.

Best Transformation of an Antagonist into a Shitty Loser Gremlin, I Love Her

Holy shit is Street Fighter 6 a triumph. Mechanically solid and there’s plenty to do even if you don’t want to go online and get murdered repeatedly by people who have been playing the game for way longer than you. The RE Engine can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned, the game looks incredible and feels great to play, and Drive Rushing is a fine mechanic that is a masterful tool when I use it and a fucking crutch for cheaters when it is used against me. Again, in another year I would probably have this as my game of the year! It’s a shame that other good games came out and also that I will probably have to wait at least a couple more years before Sakura gets added to the roster. At least Juri’s in the game to give me the failgirl energy I need.

Game I’ll Definitely Get Back to One of These Days I Swear

Baldur’s Gate 3! I don’t have anything much to say about this game – I think it rules, but I also think I don’t have the roughly six hundred hours I will need to play this fucking thing. I’m in Act I somewhere and it’s great but I dunno I’ll get there eventually and be like “yeah this is good.”

Best Game That Isn’t as Good as Quake 1

Quake II got a remake and that was cool. I like Quake II but as I’ve said before, I like the vibes of Quake roughly a billion times more than the Strogg.

Best-Defended Core

Armored Core 6 is, once again, From Software making a good-ass video game with weird mechanics you may or may not know about and I guess you play through it multiple times to get the full story? This is also the game that people will come out of the woodwork to tell you that um actually Armored Core was always good and I’m gonna be real I just don’t have the patience to play old Armored Core games, not when this one plays about a million times better. Plus that boost feels so fucking good, it’s unruly!

Game That Surprised the Hell Out of Me

El Paso Elsewhere was a game I didn’t pick up for ages, but then I heard Xalavier Nelson Jr. on an episode of Remap Radio and I was like “this dude sounds like he knows how to make cool games” and I was right, as it turned out! Max Payne meets Quake and I was absolutely not prepared for the music to be what it is. A real fucking surprise (the good kind) and I need to get back to it at some point.

Best Expansion I Almost Forgot to Mention

The expansion for TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge came out and added a roguelite mode plus some new characters, and that’s everything I wanted out of Shredder’s Revenge. I had a great time with it, and even now I can pick it up and get some good Turtle fights in whenever the mood strikes me. Another big Steam Deck game for me.

Best Game I Would Absolutely Give Game of the Year if Not for Alan Wake 2’s Existence

SIGIL II, a game I have already annoyed my brother by talking about too much in the two days of its existence. I’m not kidding. SIGIL II is the best DOOM has ever been, which is probably because John Romero made it and that guy knows DOOM pretty fucking well. A testament both to his own level design talents and the way that John Carmack’s engine and Adrian Carmack’s spritework is still capable of producing gameplay and moments and visuals that are arresting is testament to just how fucking incredible DOOM was and still is. I finished it last night and I am already like “what if I fire this up again but this time play through with the MIDI soundtrack” and you know what I will 100% probably do that sometime this week.

Alan Wake 2 Presents the Alan Wake 2 Award for Best Alan Wake 2

This is my game of the year. I think I’ve probably thought more about Alan Wake 2 since it came out than I’ve thought about most things. It is the Twin Peaks: The Return to Alan Wake’s Twin Peaks. It is a miracle that we got this game after thirteen years of waiting. It’s got fantastic performances from its actors, it’s got Sam Lake experiencing more joy than anyone has ever experienced, and it frankly scared the shit out of me on more than one occasion. I’m not always huge on the combat and it’s a little buggy in ways that are profoundly annoying from time to time, but who cares? I will forgive games so much for doing compelling shit, and there aren’t many things more compelling than “I snuck a twenty minute surrealist Finnish film into my video game and you are gonna watch the whole thing because you’re just that pulled into it.”

The Dark Place is fucking crazy and I think that rules, plus Bright Falls has never looked so good and all the locations have a sense of place that few games accomplish. Every time I think about it I think about booting it up again, and now that the New Game+ patch is out you better believe I’m going back for another bite of this apple while I wait for the DLC to come out. Seriously one of the best goddamn games I think I’ve ever played, and I haven’t even started gushing about how good the fucking soundtrack is yet, but hey, if you’re gonna get POE to release a new song for the first time in like 23 years you are going to get me thinking “oh yeah this fucking whips.” Game of the year! I said it! It’s the game of the year!

Honorable Mentions: Games that aren’t really in my top games but I put time into them so here they are

Game I Play When I Don’t Feel Like Going for a Run

Fitness Boxing Fist of the North Star! THE COMBO

Souls Like Game I Played for Like Ten Hours Before Going Back to Elden Ring

Wo Long! I wish it were Wo Shorter, amirite?

Game That Made Me Depressed

It’s Redfall, everyone, the nadir of Games As A Service infecting a developer who consistently put out great video games and then shit out this turd of a production. I cannot fully articulate how disappointing it was to boot this thing up and have it feel so goddamn empty. Depressing! I didn’t like it! I haven’t gone back to see how it is now, I know they’ve put a lot of work into it, but frankly I’m depressed enough already without going back to this thing. Goddamn it Arkane, I need you to do better than this! I’m never gonna get a Prey sequel at this rate (not that I will ever get a Prey sequel anyway).

Game That I Should’ve Never Played in Early Access Because The Difficulty Was Fucked

Darkest Dungeon II, I want to love you. I think I probably will go back to you eventually, but I had such a miserable time playing it before they got the difficulty and mechanics tuned properly that I fell off and fell off hard. Ultimately I should’ve waited! I went back to Darkest Dungeon instead, which is still great. I’ll come back for you later, Darkest Dungeon II. I love the character interactions in this one, it’s a shining moment and kept me coming back even though I was having a miserable time.

Game I Played the Beta of and Then Never Thought About Again

Diablo IV! It… sure plays like a Diablo game! Yup! To this game’s credit, it did remind me that I owned a copy of the Diablo II remake Vicarious Visions did and then was like “yeah this is more or less what I’m after” and I never bought Diablo IV.

Last night at around 1:15 am my time I downloaded and booted up Romero's birthday present to DOOM on its 30th birthday, SIGIL II. I whacked the difficulty on Ultraviolence, because I'm an idiot, and the picture above is what greeted me. Compare that to the picture below, which is the game on Hurt Me Plenty, which is what I probably should have played this on but I didn't because I enjoy stories about arrogance leading to one's downfall because I am built different and I myself could never be so foolish as to be hoist by my own petard.

Literally the first thing you have to do is survive this, and what you can't see is that behind me there's a big wall, and walking on top of that wall are way too many imps (I think there's like four of them on HMP but I didn't look too hard) ready to rain fire down on my head as I try to dodge the fireballs from the three bastards in front of me and hopefully not get shotgunned to death. It took me roughly twenty minutes to get to a point in the proceedings where I could be said to have made any progress at all, progress that I then immediately shitcanned when I sat down to play again at a far more reasonable hour. I can't even get into the stuff that came after this, which included a Cyberdemon just roaming around and functioning less as an enemy to be overcome and more as a mobile rocket turret to be avoided and to discourage the player (me) from staying outside for more than was absolutely necessary.

I thought, foolishly, that having just gone through all of SIGIL on ultraviolence like, two weeks ago (and episode one and most of episode two when I realized I still craved DOOM and had a week to kill before SIGIL II came out) meant I was ready for the challenge of whatever Romero cooked up for SIGIL II and let me tell you, no I fucking wasn't.

I mean I say that but I've since sat down and gotten through the first five levels (three more to go and I'll be done, but I've stopped for today) of the game, so obviously I've managed to adjust a little. This game is fucking gorgeous, it's legitimately amazing to me what Romero managed to coax out of the stock (for the most part, I think the level exits are new art) DOOM assets - and more than that, how well he's constructed encounters that are only using the DOOM assets and nothing else. The way the geometry shifts in some of the levels (there is a moment in the first map that legitimately took my breath away) is so impressive I can't even begin to process it, like, I know that it is pretty basic mechanically but all the basic mechanics come together to do something you wouldn't think possible. It's a masterpiece.

I ponied up the money for the THORR soundtrack too, and hey let me tell you how much ass it kicks: a lot. I am generally a MIDI man when it comes to DOOM, but the guitars and drums just really help drive you forward. It's good demon killing music, a fine thing, and I think I might like it more than the Buckethead soundtrack for SIGIL but don't let that fool you, the Buckethead soundtrack in SIGIL kicks ass. More baffling is the fact that if you don't get that, you get to hear some sweet, sweet MIDI rock from James Paddock, who also did the SIGIL soundtrack, and that is also incredible.

My only complaint is that just like in SIGIL, you have to shoot these little eye switches to activate things, and Romero might have gotten a little too good at hiding some of them. I was at a loss for a while in level four, and it turned out that the thing I was missing was a switch you could only see if you went into a room and stared out the window at a specific angle, which also meant you had to shoot it at a specific angle, which wasn't great - some of the gaps are extremely narrow which means you end up spending a couple pistol shots to sight it in (I could just turn on crosshairs for this but for whatever reason I never play DOOM with crosshairs unless I'm on my Steam Deck, I know, this is probably stupid behavior but I've been playing DOOM this way for almost as long as DOOM as been a going concern, so shut up). That and sometimes I think maybe there is such a thing as too many Barons of Hell, but to his credit Romero is very good about giving you a BFG and enough cell ammo to solve those problems if you're willing to take a minute to poke around a bit in the middle of trying not to die. There's the off chance that somehow Romero fumbles the ending, but I really doubt it. I'll be sure to update my impressions accordingly when I get to the end (I gotta assume the final boss will be a Spider Mastermind, or, given the way this game's been turning up the heat at all possible opportunities, two Spiders Mastermind. Either way I'm sure I'll come back with some thoughts on that once I get there.

That said, I think I feel pretty comfortable saying Romero has once again delivered the goods, which is to say this new episode fucking owns and at the low cost of Free there's no reason you shouldn't play it if you have even the slightest interest in DOOM.

I am very excited to get the boxed version in the mail sometime in the next couple of weeks. Merry Christmas to me.

I feel like I’ve put this off for far too long, but hey, the series is hitting the big 3-0 pretty soon, which is a good excuse to jump into this thing and talk about why DOOM might be the only franchise out there that’s somehow still able to hold my interest across all of its iterations (yes, even Doom³).

Now part of this is pure nostalgia. I grew up playing Wolfenstein 3D on my buddy’s PC, because he was the only person I knew with a copy of the shareware. We liked killing Mecha Hitler, as one quite naturally would. There was also the one guy with the chaingun who would yell GUTEN TAG and open fire. We did a lot of cheating in those days to get by the hard parts, which to my memory were “all of them.” I think I probably haven’t run through the game again in… ever, actually. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve touched the game at all for at least like… 20 years?

Damn, maybe I should play Wolfenstein 3D again one of these days. I liked those new ones Machine Games did a lot, to be honest! Killing Nazis never gets old!

This isn’t the point, of course. The point is that unlike Wolfenstein 3D, my first encounter with a FPS ever, I don’t remember where exactly I was when I first sat down and played DOOM, although I think it was at my uncle’s house, at around 9 or 10 years old? The place isn’t particularly important – mostly because playing the game kind of turned my mind to dust upon seeing it. True, the concept of a FPS was not unknown to me (I just wasted a paragraph talking about Wolfenstein 3D, after all) but the jump in visuals – particularly the environment, to say nothing of the monster design – was something I wasn’t expecting. I mean you shoot Nazis in Wolfenstein, and sometimes dogs, and sometimes ghost Hitler or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be, but DOOM had Cacodemons, and Pinkies, and Imps, and also zombie soldiers, some of whom had shotguns. Plus instead of endless grey brick hallways broken up with endless wood hallways, you could go outside in DOOM and also the lighting effects like, existed at all and on top of that were impressive as hell. Look at them now! You’ll think to yourself “goddamn, they were doing shit with shadows and lights in 1993! That’s amazing!”

I mean these are not thoughts I had when I was a kid, the thoughts I had as a kid ran along the lines of “holy shit look at that guy’s blood going everywhere” and “does playing this game condemn me to hell” (I was able to rationalize this fear away because you know, you were killing demons, and that’s a good thing! God would surely let the whole “playing a violent video game” thing slide since it was killing demons (what it says about me that I had zero of these issues with killing Nazis is… a little weird, now that I think of it. Probably because DOOM was more overtly santanic? I’m not gonna delve too deeply in to young me’s mind here) and absolutely “oh fuck what are those big pink guys oh fuck oh fuck.”

At some point I learned the most important keystrokes a kid could learn, which were IDDQD and IDKFA and the game got less scary, but let’s be honest most of my first experience with the game was running around in a panic and dying. I don’t think I got out of E1M1 before I either had to cede the computer to someone else, got scared of my parents finding out what I was doing and telling me I was going to hell or whatever, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it and I kept thinking about it and I have continued to think about it to this day.

By the time Duke Nukem 3D came out I was more interested in that (did you know you can give the strippers money in that game and they will show their boobs because I knew, and back in 1996 we took our boobs where we could get them, pixelated or not. The internet wasn’t quite what it was today, you had to have a ton of patience to download a single 400x300 jpg of tits). Now look, Duke 3D has a better engine (the Build engine is fantastic, I love it) and arguably the graphics look better too (I was so impressed by the pistol in that game, the way the spent casings fly out the side and the reload animations alone were mind-blowing to a 12 year old) – and also it was the first game I ever deathmatched online with. I don’t think I did DOOM deathmatches until much later, when the game was already around ten years old and we couldn’t get Quake running on all of the computers in the high school computer lab for a bit (as soon as we solved that problem, we just played Quake deathmatch). I guess it is possible I did a little DOOM deathmatching before then, but I don’t remember it. Someone can correct me, assuming anyone reading this knew me when I was a wee lad.

Unsurprisingly high school was when I managed to get back to DOOM again, mostly because a buddy of mine had it (I do not think I owned my own copy of DOOM – like, the whole game – for years, although I definitely had a box copy of Final DOOM somehow at some point, and the fact that I do not have it any more is honestly a giant shame).

The point I am making here, in my extremely meandering way, is that DOOM – the first one in particular – is not a game I played like a million times as a kid, mostly because there were other games to play and I always died to the fucking Barons at the end of the shareware episode unless I was cheating because I didn’t play DOOM with mouselook for an extremely long time so circle-strafing was a mystery to me.

In fact, that was a giant part of why I preferred Duke Nukem 3D – you could just look around with the mouse! Way easier! At some point my buddy (the same one who showed me Wolfenstein 3D) either rented or owned a copy of DOOM 64 and I played some of that but you know what is not a fun way to play DOOM 64 is on a Nintendo 64 controller, and the music wasn’t DOOM music to me. I’ve softened on this stance considerably now, I think DOOM 64 actually kinda rules, and I might even like it more than DOOM II at this point.

You’ll notice I haven’t really mentioned DOOM II and that is because I never got into it that much beyond getting the Super Shotgun and thinking “oh my god this fucking rules” but the game turns into a slog in the middle so I never finished it. I mean, those fucking city levels are awful, there’s just no way around it, and Chaingunners are maybe the worst enemy in the series in terms of sheer frustration (I don’t mind Archviles or Revenants or even Pain Elementals (fuck Pain Elementals though)), so I never felt bad about never actually finishing DOOM II like, ever until back during the early days of the pandemic. I mean I’d watched people play DOOM II (either in person or on the internet) for years, but I never had the patience.

Quake will probably get its own essay at some point – suffice it to say that there are noises in Quake that trigger deep sense memories of sitting in the attic at 4am trying to get just one more match in with my cousins as we swapped out who was in the driver’s seat until, I think, either my uncle or my dad came upstairs and was like “you are being too loud turn this off and go to bed” and then the next night we did it again. Quake was great, it had shambling horrors and it looked fucking awesome and that main title theme ripped and Quake II also came out and my older brother brought a bootleg copy of it back from Russia that I played the hell out of and was like “wait where’s the death knights? What the fuck are the Strogg? What is this bullshit? Where the fuck are the Shamblers?” but also, you know, it still ruled in its own way.

Then DOOM 3 came out and I was fucking hooked. It was terrifying to me, it had the Devil in it chortling at you as he spawned in imps to kick your ass, and it made me go back to take another look at DOOM and oh baby, that was where it really started to click with me. Finally, I understood that reloading was for chumps, and also really solidified the understanding on some level that the shotgun in DOOM 3 is a fucking criminal act and someone should be put on trial for making it so shitty. I mean come on. I cheated my way to the end of DOOM 3 and was like “fuck yeah, this is great, I hope id makes another one of these DOOM games because I bet it will rule” and then I waited for so long that I forgot, for the most part, the way that DOOM had made me feel (and anyway there was Half Life 2 to play now, where the heads did not end in points the way everyone’s head in DOOM 3 do). Resurrection of Evil came out at some point but I never really played it (still haven’t, I keep meaning to go back and correct that error but mostly when I think about doing that I just end up playing DOOM 3’s campaign again).

When DOOM 2016 came out, however, that was where I really got lost in the sauce. Playing DOOM 2016 made all the memories of playing DOOM come flooding back and suddenly I needed to play the series, all of it, as much as possible. Except for DOOM 64 because that didn’t have a proper PC release at the time and I am pretty lazy about hunting down fan-made ports. So I actually bought DOOM for the first time (I know I mentioned the box copy of Final DOOM but that was definitely a gift and not something I would’ve spent my own money on at the time) and even picked up DOOM II because why not, but mostly I was playing DOOM 2016 and having a great time.

By the time DOOM Eternal got announced I was playing various DOOM games on a pretty regular basis, getting to the point where a lot of those early levels in 1, 2, and 2016 are basically memorized. Doom 3 I don’t play as much, but I have done the intro like a million times because I cannot get enough of “THE DEVIL… IS REAL! I SHOULD KNOW…I BUILT HIS CAGE!” It also suffered from me not having a copy of it that wasn’t the BFG edition for a long time, but I recently picked the original up on Steam and, well, guess I’ll be spending some time swapping between a flashlight and a gun as god intended (yeah, yeah, it was a technological thing, but the lighting in the BFG edition sucks ass compared to the original lighting and great art is often produced under constraints). If I actually admitted how many times I have seen the Doom Slayer punch the elevator controls in 2016 I think the police might actually show up. Then of course Romero put out SIGIL and I had to check that out too, and SIGIL is…

Look, I am not joking when I say that if I had actually sat down and played through SIGIL when it came out in 2019 it might have been a contender for my favorite game that year. As it was I didn’t get around to it until late in 2020, when I went back to it and then bought a signed collector’s box because it is just that fucking good that I was like “you know who should take some of my money is John Romero” and I was right to do so because the box rules and it turns out that the Buckethead soundtrack whips ass in a way that I wasn’t prepared for. I mean I’ve always had sweet MIDI tunes with my DOOM playing, and having like actual guitars and shit was weird, but hey, it worked for DOOM 3’s theme (an all-time banger) and the soundtracks for DOOM and DOOM Eternal are legitimately some of my favorite things to listen to, but of course they are (I will say here I am one of the probably two people who thinks the soundtracks Andrew Hulshult did for The Ancient Gods are good, actually, even if all the Mick Gordon stuff feels more iconic and all the stuff that happened between him and Bethesda bums me the fuck out). Anyway it was jarring at first but once I got used to it I was like “oh damn you know what this whips ass” and here we are.

When DOOM Eternal actually came out, we were all in lockdown and I was already playing through all the old DOOM games on my lunch breaks. This is where DOOM went from being a series I was fond of and enjoyed going back to from time to time to my go-to “I just wanna run around in a game for a bit” series of games. DOOM Eternal in particular might be a game that I go back to a ridiculous amount of times and that has a lot to do with the way its colors remind me of the original DOOM. It became, somehow, my ultimate de-stress game as well – you could probably track how stressed I’ve been at work based on how many hours of DOOM I have played lately (this is already autobiographical enough for me to comfortably say that I am dealing with some residence permit stuff at the moment and buddy, I have played through SIGIL twice this month, to say nothing of what I am currently doing in DOOM Eternal (the answer is “another run through the complete campaign on ultraviolence, because while Nightmare is a fun challenge, Ultraviolence (and its equivalent in DOOM 3 (Veteran) and DOOM 64 (Watch Me Die, I think? I’ve only run through that once)) is the platonic ideal for me vis a vis difficulty in all of these games. Challenging enough that I am barely making it out of tougher encounters but not so punishing that I spend like two hours trying to do a single Slayer Gate (I don’t remember which one it was, I think the one on Taras Nabad, but sweet jesus I was stuck on it for a long time on Nightmare – and I was fully kitted out! It just beat my ass into the dirt for that long!). I can pick it up and put it down and feel like I had a good time, and that goes for basically every game (except for some levels of DOOM II which are just a chore on any difficulty, and more or less the entirety of Thy Flesh Consumed which I do not know I will ever play again, that thing is hateful).

There’s just something about it – the speed, certainly, and not having to reload – but mostly I think it is the exhilaration of coming out of a combat encounter bloody and low on ammo but alive, something which for whatever reason other games don’t quite match, at least not for me. Again, DOOM Eternal is a big one for this – its whole “combat chess” concept makes some fights feel like puzzles – you figure out the best order in which to deal with the different demons (rule 1 for me at least is “hunt down and kill those dumb fucking carcasses as quickly as possible, those pieces of shit, I hope whoever designed the carcasses stubs their toe), you manage your resources and save your blood punches for when they’ll do the most damage, and when all else fails you pull out the BFG and hope for the best.

It’s pure power fantasy, and best of all it never gets too self-serious. DOOM isn’t really trying to say anything, what the first game is mostly saying is “we think the Devil is pretty cool, especially when you are shoving a chainsaw in its face” and while you can certainly look at the psychotic corporate-speak of DOOM 2016 and DOOM Eternal as being its own commentary on corporate culture, you can also ignore it (I myself adore the extremely overwrought lore in DOOM Eternal, it is the sort of shit you read in old metal album liner notes. A pity Christopher Lee wasn’t around to narrate it, that would have kicked ass). It’s just “here are some cool fucking weapons. Here are some demons. Sort it out,” and that’s it! Rip and tear until it is done!

It helps that (again, apart from some notoriously bad maps (aka probably like 30-40% of the maps in DOOM II, let’s be honest) which are just dogshit awful, to me (Romero I know you designed Perfect Hatred in like eight hours or whatever which is impressive but come on), just some real fucking slogs) the level design is fantastic – especially when it’s Romero, even more especially when it is Romero taking his time, which is what SIGIL is, which is why I am seriously debating calling in sick on the 11^th of December, because SIGIL II is supposed to release on the 10^th and I, at least, intend to play the absolute shit out of it (did I pre-order one of the fancy-ass boxes? Reader, of course I fucking did). I think the game wouldn’t stick in my mind the way it does if the levels were not extremely cool, and if they did not reward exploration with

1. More demons trying to kill you
2. Cool weapons and (in the case of 2016 and Eternal) collectable gubbins which are either stupid (little toy demons!) or useful (upgrade materials, cheat codes for when you just wanna go back and pick up the secret you missed on the first run)

I would not obsess over the level design as much as I do. It is not just running along a set path – there is always a secret to find, or some challenge thing to investigate. 2016 and Eternal might be the most linear of the lot, but even those are sprawling in a way that does not feel like every other post-Half Life game where you cannot get lost. DOOM 2016 still lets you get lost (so does Eternal in a few bits, I think I ran around the Super Gore Nest for way longer than I needed to if I’d been paying attention the first time I played through it). You feel less constrained, even the bits where you’re in corridors. DOOM 3 might be the only real exception to this, except even that lets you backtrack and hunt down cabinet codes and whatnot (I also managed to get lost in the Delta Labs and the dig site at the end, so they are still open in spite of DOOM 3 being the most linear of the games in terms of level design).

DOOM as a whole is one of the few series that I am willing to go meet on its own terms – that is to say, generally I am a proponent of “just play the game on easy if you’re having trouble, who cares” but I have become physically incapable of going below Ultraviolence, because it just feels wrong. That isn’t meant to be a boast, it is just saying that the game has altered my brain chemistry to the point where if I boot up E1M1 and there are not two shotgunners hiding behind pillars and two up top my brain recoils instinctively. Likewise if an Imp cannot absolutely wreck my entire shit with like 2-3 swipes in 2016 or Eternal I feel like I have gotten away with something illicit (although in Eternal I will 100% cop to activating the IDDQD cheat if I get through a level, realize I’ve missed one of the collectables, and have to go back in to satisfy my heinous completionist urges which only apply to DOOM Eternal and no other game).

I don’t really have anything revolutionary to say, here. I think the DOOM games are all stupid good in their own ways – yes, even DOOM 3, even if I think the Cacodemon in DOOM 3 looks like dogshit, just a fucking criminal redesign made worse by the fact that you can blow up its projectiles as it spits them and kill it with the splash damage alone, even with how much the shotgun sucks and the sound on the machine gun is one of the worst things I have heard in my life – and it seems weird to me that they’ve been around for 30 fucking years and I have played them, on and off, for more or less 30 years (more accurately for 28 years, I was only a wee lad of eight years old when it came out – but also it is not out of the question, since I absolutely played Wolfenstein 3D when I was like, 6 or 7). They’re just fucking good! If you have somehow never played them, you can even get them for extremely cheap! GoG sells the originals for like €2, and if you download gzdoom and toss the .wads in there, you get some nice graphical options and such. You can also get the Bethesda re-releases, they’re fine too, but for whatever reason something feels off about them to me? I think it’s something about the lighting; I can’t quite put my finger on it, I would have to really sit down and do some side-by-side testing and I don’t have time for that. Shit, I barely had time to sit down and write this.

Seriously though, if you haven’t played the original DOOM I think you probably should. Whack it on Ultraviolence if you’re up for it, don’t forget to hump the walls to find some secrets, and remember that you can always stunlock a cacodemon with the chainsaw if you get in quick enough to save ammunition. You don’t have to play DOOM II, although I’ve been playing it again (shocking, I know) and I think I might be more into it this time than I was last time around. Chaingunners can still get fucked though, I would rather fight Pain Elementals if I had to choose, and nobody wants to fight Pain Elementals, those fuckers spawn Lost Souls like it’s going out of style.

Anyway, happy 30^th birthday, DOOM! I will celebrate by playing SIGIL II like it is going out of style and foolishly hoping that id announces another DOOM soon (maybe on the 10^th, when the actual 30^th birthday is).

Although if I’m being honest, I kinda want them to announce a new Quake that is an actual follow-up to Quake 1. Give me more Shamblers! I want more Shamblers!

Games I Definitely Played in 2021

Oh hey I forgot I could just post this shit here, huh? Well, here are the games of 2021 that I thought were good, along with some other shit in there. My brain is rapidly decaying so I probably forgot something, but ehhhhhh good enough.

1. Hitman 3

This game whips ass and I will hear no word against it. I think I have put well over a hundred hours into it and I still go back to it! Killing capitalists is its own reward, and I found this just absurdly relaxing/cathartic/hilarious. The murder train did nothing wrong.

2. Melty Blood: Type Lumina

The record will show I am a huge slut for Melty Blood. It is tied up in a lot of nostalgia for me, and while I think it is a GODDAMNED CRIME to have no Reisbyfe or Sion, I’m extremely pleased with this game. This game makes me feel cool as hell, even though my skill level is low. I like a fighting game that does that.

3. Guilty Gear Strive

I don’t feel as cool when I play this game, but it doesn’t matter. Soundtrack whips, visuals whip, and they’re even giving us Baiken! Plus they kept the Millia redesign, which is objectively cool.

4. Monster Hunter Rise

This is my fourth Monster Hunter game, which is weird to say! I never played the first two (do I have emulated copies of them somewhere? Absolutely. Do I also have a copy of Monster Hunter 3 that I got just because? You bet your ass). Visually it can be a little muddy on the tv, but boy it looks nice on my OLED Switch. I’m not a huge fan of the whole Rampage thing, but also, you can just ignore those for the most part. The wirebug mechanic rules, is the main thing.

5. Shin Megami Tensei V

Oh baby oh baybee. I have always liked the SMT series from a distance and also fond memories of playing SMT III Nocturne ft. Dante from Devil May Cry as a younger dude (see honorable mentions for the HD re-release) but this one really grabbed me in a way that I am delighted by. Let me befriend the demons who show affection by insulting my hair and calling me a turd. I also like a game that starts off with god getting killed. That’s a good start to any story.

6. Solar Ash

I love how this game looks, plays, and sounds. I also think the story is interesting enough, and look, I fucking loved Hyper Light Drifter so this was always gonna rank pretty high for me, okay? Leave me alone.

7. Metroid Dread

True story: I forgot this game existed, briefly, which is ridiculous because I got super into playing all the Metroid games earlier this year! Dread is extremely good, and I think it looks fantastic and also plays fantastic. Plus there’s a plot that isn’t too bad! I do enjoy Samus Aran’s continuing adventures, yessir.

8. Scarlet Nexus

Did not expect to get as into this as I have gotten into it, but here we are! Turns out I do in fact like the JRPG teens making their way in the world, particularly when the world includes monsters that EAT BRAINS. Very stupid. The soundtrack whips! Combat feels great! There’s a lot going on!

9. Deltarune Chapter 2

I don’t know for some reason in spite of the fact that I really don’t like the combat mechanic much (arguably the central mechanic of the game) I can’t help but love this game. I had the same feeling about Undertale and the first chapter! I replayed the first chapter just to get the second chapter in context! I have a real problem! The problem is I am susceptible to anime bullshit!

10. Loop Hero

You walk around in a circle and listen to great music and think about eternity and the overwhelming void and building something in defiance of both. AND IN THE GAME, TOO.

Honorable (sort of) Mentions

1. Death’s Door

I love the tiny crow man just trying to make his way in the universe.

2. Final Fantasy VII Remake Integrade

Okay really just FF7R, because I got it on the PC and started playing it. I didn’t think I cared about FF7 that much, but damn if that music didn’t start going and get me feeling things. The fact the game plays real good helps too, and also (maybe even most importantly?) it isn’t just doing a beat for beat retelling. They made Cloud a real character! Wild!

3. Sable

This game is chill as hell, but I didn’t play enough of it. I keep meaning to go back to it and enjoy its aesthetics and soundtrack and just wander around, but then other stuff distracts me. I’ll come back for you, Sable. I swear it.

4. Deathloop

I should have liked this more. I liked it quite a bit, but also I forgot it came out this year. I don’t know what that says about time, or me, or the quality of the game but there we are. I haven’t finished it and I do not know that I ever will!

5. Halo Infinite

Speaking of games I should’ve liked more, there’s this thing. I have played all the games in this series, but for some reason I’ve not managed to get into this one! It looks extremely good on my fancy new PC! It plays great! I just don’t… care, I guess? I’ll go back to this when co-op is put in and probably enjoy it more.

6. Backbone

I wanted to like this more. It has a vibe that is incredible, and the writing and dialogue absolutely nails the tone, but goddamn if the ending does not fall flat on its ass so hard that it actually punches through the crust of the earth.

Ah Shit Why Haven’t I Played These Yet?

No More Heroes 3

Wait, this came out last year? Fuck! I was replaying all the No More Heroeses but I guess I got distracted at some point. Shit. I’ll get to you eventually.

Get In the Car, Loser

I am fascinated by everything Christine Love does, and making the jump from VNs to RPG Road Trip game is one hell of a power move. Plus this shit is free, I basically have no excuse.

The “I Just Got a New PC Let Me Play This With the Settings Jacked” Award

Doom Eternal

Aw yeah we ray tracing now, baby

Hey so remember when I said I was going to run this series? Remember when I was like "hey see you in a month or two?"

Well. Life, as it happens, had other plans. Namely, a bunch of other games came out and somewhere in there I upgraded my video card and look. Look. I love writing, and even writing about Video James, but sometimes finding time is hard, especially when I think November is when I started writing the serialized fiction thing I do, so I didn't actually get back to the Witcher 2 until like, last week? I was halfway into act 2 when I stopped, so I had basically half the game to finish. Once I sat down to do it, the game was suitably fun to allow me to stick with it and finish it off without much fuss. So hey, let's talk a little about the Witcher 2, huh?

The Delivery got Better

Or more accurately, the dialogue got better. Which is to say, they had a budget to hire actual voice talent and probably even do multiple takes of lines! The NPCs sound a lot better, the quality of writing is vastly improved (and there's no weird like, 'we definitely re-wrote and re-recorded this line over skype' moments, at least none that I saw), and even in the year of our Lord two-thousand-nineteen, it's actually pretty gorgeous?

The other big change is making the combat twitchier. It's still got a very particular feel to it, which is to say it still wants you to pay attention to the way you're moving and I found that just mashing buttons to attack was less-effective than waiting to the end of an attack animation and chaining it together, but you actually can mash buttons, on a controller even, which is what I preferred to play with (mostly because I have my TV wired up to my PC and I like playing on the couch). I did find the controller to be a little fussy - sometimes I felt like I needed to press a button twice to do stuff like open doors and loot corpses and the like, for example - but it worked when I needed it to, which is to say it worked when I got into big fights with lots of monsters. I did, surprisingly, run into some framerate issues in a couple of the bigger fights, which is either because my PC is old or because the engine wasn't quite up to the task of rendering like twenty dudes all swinging swords around (I'm inclined to think the latter, given the way the Witcher 3 looks and runs on my PC, but who knows? Maybe there was some setting that just kills PCs I left toggled on). The combat though! It's good! Not quite as good as it is in Witcher 3, but still an improvement over Witcher 1 (although I do kind of think that if they'd kept stance-switching in I would've been cool with that).

Also changed: Potions! They don't last quite as long, generally. Plus, you don't need to find a place to meditate to take them - Geralt can just kneel down and meditate basically anywhere, provided there aren't monsters skittering about. There's still an emphasis on preparation with Witcher 2 - you can still buy books and learn more about monsters to boot - Geralt hasn't remembered everything, apparently - but as reading books to learn about monsters and the rest of the world was one of my favorite parts of Witcher 1, it's good to have it in Witcher 2. The potion making interface is improved, although it's largely unchanged beyond one key detail - it no longer takes time. In fact, nothing Geralt does in the meditation state takes time, which is kind of a bummer if I'm being honest. I liked that brewing potions required you to advance the clock, even if the clock advancing didn't really do much beyond move the locations of NPCs around. Which, hey by the way, the NPCs still move around in Witcher 2 and have their little schedules and all (did I spend a lot of time waking people up from slumber to turn in quests? I SURE DID), which I mean, if they'd taken that out it would have been a bad decision.

The Story is Bigger but the World is Smaller

So here's the thing: the Witcher 1 involves a plot to fuck up a kingdom and establish a sort of survivalist's wet dream, but it's largely a story of revenge. Someone fucked up the Witchers' fortress, and Geralt is going to fuck them up in return. Yes, there's also some stuff about destiny and time travel and all kinds of ill shit, and whether or not the world will end in fire or ice, but Geralt sort of stumbles into saving the day as a consequence of the villains having been complete pricks to him earlier in the game. Also, the world is Giant, at least by the standards of 2007, giving life to an entire city and its surrounding countryside in a way that is incredibly fucking impressive.

Witcher 2 is full to the brim of political intrigue, and while Geralt's involvement in said intrigue is once again sort of down to "this dude got me accused of a crime and so I've got to clear my name," it is not quite as personal as it is in Witcher 1. That the titular Assassin of Kings also happens to be a witcher himself, and seems to know Geralt's whole deal, is important - of course it is - but a lot of what Geralt does is because someone asks him nicely. Or less nicely, but promises to provide Geralt with important information so he does it anyway (and then, depending on how you want to play it, murders them for being kind of a prick about it). It also forces you to take a side - quite literally, as there are literally two separate act twos. That's wild, and from a narrative perspective, it's expansive as all hell. Except...

Well, except the world itself feels more restricted. There's a lot more walking down narrow paths in Witcher 2 - far fewer big fields where you can wander anywhere - and even the cities you visit feel far more compact. This extends to side quests, of course: there's just not a lot of them! There are a few really excellent ones, but do you ever get shitfaced and steal an old lady's pickles? No you do not (although you do have the option to get blind drunk and wake up with a neck tattoo which, if you don't choose to get it removed by the time the game is over, will show up on Geralt in Witcher 3 if you import your save). The best quests are mostly in act 1, while acts 2 and 3 have maybe one really good sidequest apiece and that's kind of it. There are a lot of monster contracts, and you can uncover some shady doings here and there and either leave them be or Fuck Them Up, but there's much fewer of the weird side-events you could get in Witcher 1. There are also, blessedly, no pin-up cards to collect, although Geralt can of course sleep with numerous folks if you so choose. The sex bits are, surprisingly, Not Awful (Bioware could learn a thing or two), with one in particular being downright romantic. They fit the fiction and the world, is basically what I'm trying to get at, though I don't know, they weren't a big part of the game for me. If you're just playing for sex bits though, might I suggest just watching some porn?

Goddamn the Story is Good Though

At least, the story I played is good. See, I chose to go with the elves, continuing my Geralt's trend from the first game of kind of relating more to the Scoia'tael than the humans, and hot damn does shit pop off when you do that. I became a dude involved in a fight for Freedom, whatever that means. That it also includes a callback to my favorite Witcher story ever

and allows for the final (well, depending on how you play it) showdown to feel like it has even more stakes than it already has, is tremendous. I quite simply can't fathom how they could do something similarly cool on the other side of the split (and honestly, some of the things I've heard about the other side of the split's handling of some things sounds like a Big Yikes, though I obviously can't speak to it as I've not played it nor seen it), but I'm kind of curious to go see how it plays out. Apparently there's some pretty Ill Shit that happened as a result of my choice, and I wonder what awful fates await my Scoia'tael friends if I let them run off alone. Probably nothing good!

Damn You Weight Management

I regret to inform you that the inventory still kind of sucks. You no longer have to play tetris, and everything stacks forever, but there's a weight limit and it can eat my entire ass. I spent too much time dropping stuff on the ground so I could pick up other, cooler stuff. By the end I was leaving tons of stuff on the ground because I didn't want to bother with it anymore. It just became something of a bummer by the end, although to be fair by that point I had all the gear I wanted and just wanted to see all the quests and figure out how the story turned out. Gear wasn't a problem, is what I'm saying, but my inclination to hoover up anything that isn't nailed down in games like this proved Troublesome.

So Anyway

In the end, I think Witcher 2 is pretty fucking good, and way more accessible in a way that Witcher 1 just isn't. It provides you with a Geralt who is slightly more competent than in Witcher 1 - which is to say he knows all his signs again, and is able to grab monster parts from most creatures without any fuss (some monster hunting quests will require him to kill a certain amount of monster/read a book about them before he figures out precisely how to solve the problem). You feel more capable, which makes sense because you also have regained some of your memories by now, so hooray for continuity. It was a nice improvement on what they attempted in the first game, and certainly worth the praise heaped upon it back when it released. It's sleeker, and a little friendlier, but without sacrificing too much of the features that made it feel like you were, in fact, a Witcher, out there Witching.

One Last Thing (spoilery as all hell)

I liked it quite a bit! I sincerely hope there's similarly cool things in Witcher 3, which obviously I'm like 10 or 12 hours into a new playthrough of, because obviously I needed to play through with an imported Witcher 2 save, come on. I got a shitty tattoo! I want to see what happened to all my friends who, you know, took part in that rebellion with me that one time!

In three years, when I've finally finished Witcher 3 and its expansions, you can look forward to another one of these. Why not?

I should start with the normal disclaimers that come with discussing older PC games, which is to say that in spite of all the efforts and polish CD Projekt put into the Enhanced Edition of the Witcher it still crashed on me kind of more than you want a game to crash (particularly because it did not choose to start crashing until chapter 4, when the plot is cooking and maybe if you're me you don't remember to mash that quicksave button as often as you should), and also the sex card collecting thing, which felt weird and gross back in fucking 2007 when the game came out, has managed to age even more poorly! So yeah, forewarned is forearmed, and there's some Issues that you'll need to make your peace with to play it. Hey, on the bright side running the game in administrator mode seemed to stop the crashing problem at least!

Anyway, here's Wonderwall a few thoughts on having finished the first of the Witcher games.

The World is Surprisingly Lively

I know this is kind of old news in 2018, but while the action of the game is centered around one city and a few swamps (we'll get to the swamps later) it's taking place in a surprisingly lively world. It's nothing particularly groundbreaking, but you can pick a pedestrian and follow them along their daily routine, as they wake up, wander about the city doing whatever it is they feel like doing, and then go home when it gets dark to go to sleep. Then you can take all their shit, if you are me and cannot help but steal bread from people (or whatever else isn't nailed down).

It's the sort of stuff that most open world games do now, but the bit that stood out to me the most is probably how the weather will change the routine of some of the people. Merchants and other pedestrians will seek shelter from the downpour (essentially changing their shop locations to somewhere out of the rain), and the ambient dialogue will shift to comment on the weather (my personal favorite line is "my head's getting wet," delivered in the tone of someone who is highly offended by this development. It's endearing). There's a surprising amount of variety to the ambient lines too - yes, by the end I'd heard most of them at least three or four times, but that was 45-50 hours in and, lest we forget, the Witcher was made on something of a small budget. Considering how much they managed to wring out of the Aurora engine, it's something of a miracle. It's a hell of an achievement for 2007, and holds up surprisingly well against other games with that sort of interactivity (looking at you, Skyrim).

I Love Buying Books

And in the game.

Look, the amnesia stuff is some well-worn territory when it comes to RPGs, but I love that Geralt's amnesia extends to his knowledge about how to best combat particular monsters and what useful plants and such are needed for potions. I love this because of the way the game deals with it, which is that Geralt ends up buying books on monsters in order to learn about how to best kill them (also, how to harvest their delicious organs).

This is also how you learn to make new potions and bombs and stuff, which is precisely how you expect it would go. It also ties into the plot of the narrative in its way - the secrets of Kaer Morhen got fuckin' stolen, and in the time it's taken Geralt to get to the city and start his investigation, copies of what once were proprietary Witcher potion recipies are now just floating around the marketplace. It actually makes sense in the mechanics of the world and hey, that's kind of fucking cool? They soften this mechanic in Witcher 2 and 3, but that also makes a kind of sense, as Geralt's had a whole game's worth of monster hunting experience by the time we get to Witcher 2.

The other thing I like is that every book (not just the ones titled something like "How to kill Wyverns vol. 1") adds to your store of knowledge. It's how you fill out the game's codex, and you can also pick up hints as to how to solve some quests as well. This is extremely my shit, and one of the best parts of the game. I loves me some fucking research, y'all.

God Help me the Writing is Good

Everything about the elevator pitch of the Witcher, including the visuals, contributes to the idea that it is one in a long line of GRIMDARK FANTASY things that mistake tits and swearing for maturity. Maybe it's a result of years of Game of Thrones clones (which wasn't really a thing back in 2007) but if you come to me today and say "hey we made a mature fantasy game where morality is expressed in shades of grey," I will probably not bother taking a look. Especially if you also put "collect sex cards" as a bullet point on the box.

Like so many things, the marketing for the game potentially did it a disservice (well, what little marketing the game got in the US). At any rate, if you can get past all that nonsense and get into the actual game, you'll be fucking delighted by the quality of the writing (particularly since they went back and retranslated everything for the Enhanced Edition - this means they also re-recorded a lot of things, which is sometimes pretty goddamn obvious, but hey, that gives it a bit of charm). Damn near every quest gets more complicated than it first appears, or leads you to somewhere you didn't expect, or hey, allows you to make friends with a goddamned intelligent ghoul who's just kind of chilling out in a graveyard. Which, if we're being honest, might have been my favorite quest in the whole game.

The main plot is equally good, and manages to provide not just a meditation on what makes a monster, but it's also concerned with legacy in a way that I found fascinating - there's a concern with how the things we say to others can end up coming back to bite us in the ass later, even if what we said and did was done with the best of intentions. I was quite simply stunned with how well the game manages to avoid hitting you over the head with its themes - even if one of those themes is something as cliche as maybe the human race is the real monster, maaaaaaan the execution is incredibly impressive. More importantly, it doesn't make the other side of the equation (the Scoia'tael) out as being saintly. At the same time, they aren't necessarily equal in villainy. You can see how they find themselves in such a desparate position where guerilla warfare seems like the only way out. Equally, even the primary villain is acting in what he believes to be the best interests of the world - like any well-written villain (and real-life villain), he's convinced he's the hero. There's a nuance that's not present in a lot of games. Even Dragon Age, a series of games that I quite enjoy and generally consider to be well-written, has its villains be almost cartoonish in their desire to Fucking Murder Everyone, (and their attempt at nuance in Dragon Age 2 kind of falls into an unfortunate both-sides-are-bad trap that is downright jarring in its suddenness).

The Combat is Weird, but Good? Mostly?

With its Aurora Engine pedigree, and original concept of being a bit like Diablo in terms of gameplay, it's not surprising that the combat isn't particularly mashy. Indeed, it's got a weird rhythm-based mechanic to it that takes some getting used to, but is surprisingly deep. You have to manage your sword choice (steel for humans, silver for monsters) but also your stance and style based on the sort of foe you're fighting. Additionally, the game rewards preparation - consume the right potions, prepare the right bombs, use the right oils on your sword, and you'll breeze through most fights, although some will be a real motherfucker no matter what you do. Also, the early sections leave you with no silver sword, meaning that fights against monsters can be intensly frustrating. Which kind of brings me to the next bit...

The Quest Pathing Can Be Real Bad

They can also break in ways you don't expect. I had a quest to give this dude badges taken from bandits (it goes somewhere, I promise), but if you go a step too far in another quest, not only does said dude relocate, but you will forever have the quest marked as being active and in-progress until like, basically the end of the game. If you, like me, enjoy the feeling of seeing quests marked as complete, it will drive you insane to see this quest constantly taunting you. Plus you'll have a bunch of bloody badges you can't do shit with taking up room in your inventory which I'll get to in a minute.

Also some of the monster hunting contracts are pretty prefunctory in design - go bring me six claws from this monster so I know you've killed them, etc., but they also are excellent sources of income so, you know, there's that at least. What's really frustrating is that sometimes you'll find yourself up against a horde of a particular sort of monsters that you've got a contract for, only you forgot to read the right book so you can't harvest the necessary proofs of your murderin'.

It can also really be bad about what you're meant to do next. One in particular involves a guy asking you to find his sister, and the quest gives you zero direction as to where to go or indeed, what to do once you find her. I kind of ended up keeping a walkthrough open and looking over at it when I needed to get past particular parts. The game does offer waypoints, but if the person you're meant to talk to wanders off or changes location, the game does not adjust at all, so it will literally point you in the wrong direction. Like I said, I kept a walkthrough up to get through some of the worse offenders, and blindly stumbled into the solution for others.

Hoo Boy The Inventory Sucks

I mean that says it all, really. You can't pick up weapons without dropping the ones you're using (so you can't sell off your old stuff), and everything else is on a pathetically small grid. Some items stack, but others don't in The Most Frustrating Way, in amounts determined by the game's own weird logic (why does water stack in 7s? Who made that choice?). You can, of course, store stuff in a Resident Evil style item box at inns in order to manage, but it's still a fucking misery. I think I probably spent most of the game throwing away stuff I wanted to sell, or getting collectables for quests that were over but couldn't get rid of (I had like five stacks of Salamandra badges by the end of the game taking up space in my item box and it was infuriating). Rough times, man. Let me tell you about how I got rid of a bunch of quest items that I had no use for at the time only to get a quest for three of them which, as it turns out, I literally never got again - until the next chapter, when I couldn't turn the quest in but was swimming in the fucking things.

It's Still Pretty Good Though

In spite of my frustrations with some of the game (and, one more time, the creepy porn card thing), I think I kind of love the Witcher. It's got moxie, and it remains one of the better RPGs out there. It helps that the sequel improved upon it in basically every way, although the smoke on the street is there's less to do in terms of sidequests and such (I'm not super-far into it yet so I can't say one way or the other). That I was able to import my Witcher 1 save into the Witcher 2 and get some dope fucking armor and also cool swords from the jump was a nice bonus, and surprisingly the game seemed to carry over some of my decisions - particularly where a certain princess was involved, which is cool! I like when things carry over from game to game.

I'm taking my time with Witcher 2, but I'll probably write up some other thoughts on that once I get through. Shockingly, it appears that I'm running the series. Hope y'all like reading another one of these things in like two months or however long it takes me to beat this thing!

A few weeks ago (I think. Time has gotten increasingly difficult to keep track of as we enter the tenth year of 2018) I decided that my launch Xbox One had inexplicably desynced with my controller for the last fucking time and so would pay the price of being resigned to the dustbin of history (at least until I replace my tv and move the old one to the bedroom, and hook it back up to serve as a way to watch movies in bed). So I left work a little early and went down to the local Media Markt, spent €420 (BLAZE IT) and walked out with a brand new Xbox One X (or, as my brother and I refer to it, an Xbonx). Most of my games were installed on an external hard drive, so it didn't especially matter that I had a bunch of games to re-install on what is a decadent 1TB internal hard drive - and so while setting the old standbys to download, I looked over the assorted titles available to me and booted up Dark Souls III to see if the load times and framerate were better - even though, of course, it is not among the Xbox One X Enhanced titles.

Turns out that yeah, the framerate is a lot more stable! So that was nice. I ran around a bit and then decided to check out some other games which did have the Enhanced tag (Monster Hunter World being one of the first games I was concerned with - let me tell you, the faster load times and smoother frame rate is a delight). It was then that I saw the Witcher 3 was also included among the enhanced titles, and, because it happened to be installed on my external drive (and I had some time before Forza Horizon 4 downloaded), I figured I'd check it out.

I have yet to boot up Forza Horizon 4 (before you get worried that I've wasted money on it, I have Game Pass, which has probably saved me like at least €180 by this point).

A Brief History

Way back in 2007 (or thereabouts), I picked up a copy of the Witcher for what was, I assume, not much money because I clearly grabbed it on a whim. Doubtless I'd seen some scuttlebutt praising it as being surprisingly cool, and as someone who couldn't help but be interested in surprisingly cool fantasy RPGs, I picked it up. Later, GoG ran a deal which upgraded it to the Enhanced Edition and also bundled together the Enhanced Edition of the Witcher 2 (I think this was in 2013, because that's when my earliest save is from). Because my mind is broken, and I have to play things in order, I started a game of The Witcher, and then got promptly distracted by.... well, something or other, clearly. Or maybe the fact that even in 2013 the Witcher was not exactly taking home any prizes for graphics turned me off it? Who can say? When the Witcher 3 released in 2015, I went back to the Witcher, probably because I was still sort of determined to run the series in order. That didn't last long, as I also bought a copy of the Witcher 3 for the Xbox One. I then almost immediately bounced off the Witcher 3 - the framerate was less stable than I'd like, and for whatever reason I just... wasn't into it. It doesn't help that dying meant losing a solid like, minute and a half while it loaded up again. I beefed it on the initial fight with the Bloody Baron's men at the crossroads enough that I appear to have just given up.

Later, there was a sale for it on the PC, and I grabbed it because it was cheap, but my computer was a bit old and it didn't quite work as well as I hoped it would - still an improvement over the Xbox version, but not enough to get me to really settle down with it. So I bounced off again. Later I got out of the jam with the Baron's men I was in on the Xbox by just loading an earlier save, but bounced off yet again to play... again, I don't remember. I just remember kind of resigning myself to the games not being for me (and so of course, the books probably weren't for me either). I carried some regret, as I'd definitely spent way too much on a series I couldn't get into, but there you go. My game library is full of games I wanted to like but didn't (I'm looking at you, Ruiner), so one more corpse in the graveyard wasn't gonna kill me. Eventually, I figured, I would delete Witcher 3 off my xbox to make space for something else. I'm glad I didn't!

All-in on Witchering

I don't know exactly what's happened this time around, but popping into the Witcher 3 this time (this is, for those keeping score, my fourth attempt at getting into the game/series) hooked me in the way that I remember Dragon Age Origins hooking me way back when. Suddenly I was getting to bed late because I kept wanting to see one more twist in its surprisingly twisty side-quests, to say nothing of the main plot itself, which has got me wanting to see where things go. More to the point, the few oblique references to the events of the last two games got me to sit down with the goal of getting through the first two games - and, much like with Witcher 3, I've gotten pretty into the first Witcher now, and just hit the halfway point. So now I'm just kind of bouncing between 1 and 3 - my eventual goal is to play the series in order on the PC (my old PC was replaced with one that can actually handle Witcher 3's vistas) while dicking around on the Xbox with the current 3 - the advantage being, of course, that I can see myself doing a second run of the Witcher 3 just to see how things turn out if I do them differently. For example, I definitely got the Baron's wife killed (and then he hanged himself), and I want to find out whether or not I can get a different outcome. At the very least I reckon I ought to be able to keep the wife alive. There's other, larger-scale choices to make too, of course, but time will inevitably tell how everything shakes out. Also, because when I go all-in on something I tend to go all-in, I've been working my way through the books (which hey, those are good books! Certainly they've not worn their welcome out for me the way Game of Thrones did), and I fell down a serious Gwent hole, and uh... I guess I'm actually curious to see how the whole Netflix series shakes out now?

The point is, I can't remember the last time I suddenly found myself so suddenly in love with a series that I'd bounced off of multiple times. Indeed, I'm not actually sure it's ever happened before - and if not for the idle decision to just check out the enhanced features of my new console, I might have never gotten back into it at all! Obviously, destiny is at work here, right?

I probably should check out Forza Horizon 4 though.

Recently, for a bunch of reasons which probably all have to do with barreling headlong into the uncertainty of moving across the globe for work and adventure and a couple other dumb reasons that I promise I’m okay with having as reasons even if they are dumb, I’ve been thinking a lot about my own inevitable demise and what precisely it is I will leave behind when I go--if indeed I leave behind anything of value at all. The sudden demise of a dude I used to give rides to/play football with in high school over the Christmas holiday combined with the the passing of (David Bowie/Alan Rickman/pick a celebrity they’re fucking dropping like flies this year (but let’s be honest it was David Bowie)) probably contributed a little to it as well, plus it’s winter and everything is kind of dead anyway.

I think the idea of death is damn near impossible to get my head around. The mind rebels at the very idea that this could stop at any moment and then there’s nothing else--like I will cease to be and might not even be aware that I’ve ceased to be, because I won’t be aware of anything ever again, because I’ll be dead and the dead lack awareness. Whatever quirk that gives me consciousness will cease to be, and that will be that. The only thing that will remotely remain of me would be a sprawling online footprint, a couple blogs, some poems and a short story that got published in a college literary magazine once, oh and that porn game I helped write that one time. It’s made me want to have the last word, somehow.

It doesn’t help (or does help) that everything I’ve been playing recently has been super concerned with death, or getting over death, or saying goodbye, or ripping apart time and space to escape death or outrun it just a little longer. Namely, I’ve been playing Life is Strange--sure, I watched a playthrough of it but there’s enough choice in there that I want to experience it for myself--and Oxenfree (have you played Oxenfree? You probably should). I also finally sat down and finished up D4*, which is literally about jumping through time in an effort to bring your dead wife back (as opposed to Life is Strange, which is about jumping through time to keep your (girl)friend alive, or Oxenfree, which teases you with the ability to maybe prevent your brother’s death by jumping through time (also let’s just mention Kentucky Route Zero here, which I haven’t played recently but is very much about loss and regret (which I’ve written about before), and Pathologic, which is about people dying that you simply cannot save)). The game that really started this whole train of thought, however, was Hacknet. You know, the game about Hollywood-style hacking? You against the vast corporate conspiracy, or something like that? Solving a mystery by committing crimes?

See, Hacknet starts with you getting an email from a dead man. The man knows he is dead, because he set up a dead man’s switch--and it’s that mechanism that fascinates me. The Shadowrun reboot’s first campaign begins with the activation of a dead man’s switch, as do probably a million other games and stories set in a cyberpunk future. It’s an easy trope to lean into, and an easy way to give your investigator something to investigate. It also perfectly lines up with the very human desire to want to say goodbye properly, to leave some mark that says we were here--and say the million things we want to say and never get around to saying, of course.

Here’s a true story about me: I got my Master’s degree in Wales, which meant that I did a not-insignificant amount of flying to and from the US for various vacations. I love flying--it’s doing something that should be impossible and I find every takeoff to be exhilarating, even on shitty fucking airlines in shitty fucking uncomfortable airline seats. At the same time, part of me is absolutely fucking terrified every time I fly because it feels like if something goes wrong during a transatlantic flight you’re basically dead, and by “basically” I mean that shit is like guaranteed because who’s going to find your ass in the middle of the goddamn ocean? And yeah, I know all the statistics and it’s super-unlikely and all that but tell that to my irrational anxieties and they’ll tell you to go fuck yourself and then concoct a doomsday scenario.

Anyway in order to make it so I could relax on flights I started to leave an external hard drive with a letter to be read in the event of my demise. Said letter would essentially be an opportunity for me to leave a sort of farewell to the people I most needed to say some kind of final farewell to, and so I was able to relax on flights. Obviously, however, this plan had some flaws--namely there was no guarantee anyone would think to look on my hard drive (a problem solved by hiding a note with instructions in my room). The worse flaw, really, was that I sometimes needed that hard drive with me which defeated the whole damn purpose of the exercise.

Of course now there are services that just do it for you. Some will even do it for free--or at least free for the first two recipients. That obliges you to whittle down the list of people you absolutely must have the last word with to a mere two (I have my two people already in mind, obviously, because I live in the US and so obviously I need to know who to call/text in the event someone decides to try shooting up the office/shopping center/movie theater and I’m barricaded in somewhere waiting to die). These services will email you every month or so, like a worried aunt, until you stop responding. At that point they’ll wait a few more days/weeks and finally assume you’re dead, releasing the email. Google also lets you will your account data to trustees after a set period of inactivity, which is like a dead man’s switch only you’re releasing everything and not just a message (or maybe not? I haven’t looked into it yet myself).

It’s an immensely selfish thing to do, of course. You’re talking about activating something which will go out a solid month after death, when the wound of your absence is just starting to heal up. I think maybe the last thing I’d do, were I near death, would be to turn the damn thing off. But there’s always the urge to say more, and my own anxiety over not having the time to say what I need to say before I disappear from the human experience is, to say the least, sufficient to make the idea of having such a dead man’s switch set up an attractive proposition. It’s the one bit of the future promised in the books I read as a kid that actually exists now (well, also we’re in a terrible cyberpunk surveillance state). A chance to have the last word--and as I’m a chatty bastard, at least to the people I’m close with--isn’t a bad idea.

*IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: Please god let there be another season of D4. I don’t know how it would possibly ever happen, but please.

I’ve often expressed the opinion that the third installment in the Metal Gear Solid franchise is the worst installment--an opinion based, admittedly, upon hazy memories of playing the original PS2 version on a small television in my (equally) small dorm room in college. The visuals were muddy, the sound was tinny, and detecting the presence of enemy soldiers was all but impossible given the lack of a Soliton Radar (which is primarily how I’d gotten through the previous two games, although in reality I’d never beaten the second installment solo--my friend and I sat in his basement playing through the game and were suitably baffled by the ending in high school). The (recently concluded, until it’s not) Metal Gear Scanlon series, however, gave me the final burst of motivation needed to go back to the Metal Gear Solid franchise. I picked up the Legacy collection--including MGS1, 2, 3, 4, Peace Walker, and (last but not least) the original MSX games--and began my trip down memory lane.

I’ll probably come back and talk about my return to the first two games at some point--basically, MGS1 holds up better than it has any right to, and MGS2 is far better than it has any right to be (and it has a plot I actually followed the second time around, which I never did before), but it wasn’t until I got to Metal Gear Solid 3 that the series really came together for me (I haven’t started a replay of 4 yet--a game I’ve never actually played all the way through, and indeed before the final episode of Metal Gear Scanlon had never seen the complete ending of; my brother finished the game while I was at work and every other time I’ve seen the game most of the final cutscenes and exposition got skipped through). The gameplay is much improved, and (unlike a fair few other folk I’ve spoken to about the game) I really enjoyed the hunting and camo systems and the overall open feeling of the earlier levels--and the fights against The End and The Boss might be two of my favorite boss fights in any game to date (the fights against Volgin, the Shagohod, the Shagohod’s front section, and the Shagohod’s front section with Volgin on top, however, are uniformly awful--the Volgin fight for being a king bastard, and all the Shagohod fights for being tedious as hell). But that’s getting away from my intended point, here: what I really liked about Metal Gear Solid 3 was its story. Specifically, what I really liked was the way the story of Metal Gear Solid 3 initially presents itself as a Cold War spy thriller, but what it becomes by the end is a classic noir that happens to have a Cold War spy thriller backdrop.

Like all classic noir films, our hero is a smart, self-assured tough guy who is, as it turns out, in over his head, although he’s got no idea this is the case. We’re told up front that John is not just capable, but he’s one of the best soldiers there is--second only to the Boss, you’re led to believe. That this boss of yours--an old friend and comrade--performs an egregious betrayal is what kicks off the central mystery that John spends the whole game trying to solve--namely, why did the Boss do what she did? This is where the narrative shifts a bit to create another noir situation--the guy strong-armed into performing a service for shady people (in this case, the “shady people” are the CIA instead of say, crooked cops or mobsters, but I think the comparison (especially these days) works pretty damn well). Your mission--stop Volgin and kill the Boss--takes priority, but John is haunted by the Boss’ seeming betrayal throughout. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that the Boss’ defection has much more driving it than merely Volgin’s Russian escapades--and things start to come together, at least in the sense that so much more is going on than John’s been told--and large-reaching conspiracies being another large part of modern noir, it makes perfect sense that there would be more going on.

By the time we get the full picture of what’s happening, it is far too late for John to do anything about it. The plot was set in motion before the Virtuous Mission even started, with the only wrinkle being the use of the Davy Crockett by Volgin. Like most noir protagonists, John comes out of the experience completely worse for the wear--minus an eye, traumatized by having to fight and kill his mentor, and left with a deep feeling of betrayal at how much of a pawn he’d allowed himself to be. It is often traditional for the protagonists of a noir film to wind up battered and bruised (see: Jack Nicholson’s nose in Chinatown (or really any of the shit that happened in Chinatown)). The difference between the two is that nobody was there to throw their arm around John’s shoulder and encourage him to forget it. Instead, John elects to become a conspiracy-driving mastermind himself--an ultimately doomed mastermind, but a mastermind nonetheless.

Of course, this is all without mentioning EVA, who fits the femme fatale role so perfectly (beautiful, deadly, and of questionable loyalties until the very end) that considering her role is what brought me to the conclusion that MGS 3 is one big noir. EVA relies on her sex appeal to carry out her mission, although she is unable to sway John in what feels much like a mirror of the mostly sexless noir protagonists of cinema--the Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade in particular sprang to mind for me, but pick your favorite Bogart of choice and odds are he’ll spend a lot of the film rebuffing the advances of the fatale before giving in (which will either lead to his downfall or, in the case of a film like The Big Sleep, the end of the movie and a poorly-revised happy ending deviating from the book that pissed me off to no end).

The other argument you could make would be that this is in fact not a noir but a good old fashioned spy film--and that’s easy to see too, particularly since Kojima has his characters talk about James Bond at least once--but then again, I think there’s a lot of the DNA of noir in spy film, too. I actually toyed with the idea of MGS3 being a Bond film where you play as one of the side characters--maybe even the “Bond girl”--while EVA takes the role of James Bond, but I’m not 100% sold on that interpretation. The noir comparison works a lot better to my mind, although I should be clear that this is only really when it comes to the plot, and not so much the art style--no high-contrast colors here. Still, I like the way the plot fits the structure as it gives an extra bit of weight to the doomed John’s tale--bested, like so many noir protagonists, by forces they never really had a chance of beating in the first place. Forget it, John. It’s Metal Gear.

I’m approaching the point where it is entirely possible I have completely lost my goddamn mind, as my fighting game library has expanded further since the last time I checked in a mere two weeks ago—not only did I wind up grabbing Under Night In-Birth, I broke down and grabbed King of Fighters XIII and Yatagaseru, because I figured I was on a roll and might as well keep this train going (it helps that the two of them are like $30 combined). I haven’t spent a ton of time with either, but the little time I’ve spent with KOF has been kind of neat (I am still dicking around with the characters to figure out who I want to focus on—I really like King a lot so far, but who knows where I’ll end up). Plus, KOF’s sprites are gorgeous like woah.

Of course, I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time with the newest fighting game to drop recently, which is Rising Thunder. As an admitted novice to this whole fighting games thing (this series started back in May, for reference, so I’ve been focusing on fighting games for the last…four months?), a game like Rising Thunder is aimed directly at me—my execution in most games is solid enough at this point that I can do some basic combos in most of the games I’ve got, but I still run into input errors from time to time (which is partially due to an unfortunate tendency to fall back to mashing when I panic), and Rising Thunder takes input errors out of the equation entirely (well, almost entirely. You can still wind up hitting the wrong button if you aren’t careful (I am not careful)).

So it’s neat, because instead of having to learn the stick motions and such before jumping into trying to learn combos and defensive strategies, you skip directly to the combo/defensive strategy parts. Which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time actually fighting people rather than sitting in the training mode. What I’ve found, unfortunately, is that my heavy anime fighter addiction has caused me to become used to a faster combo system than Rising Thunder seems willing to provide. This isn’t necessarily a knock on Rising Thunder, more of a problem I’ve caused by playing too much goddamn Melty Blood.

Or at least that was my initial read—I’ve since gone through and played some other “slower” games (USFIV, with whom Rising Thunder shares a not-insignificant bit of DNA, both Yatagaseru and King of Fighters XIII), and on second glance, I think Rising Thunder just feels sluggish in a way other games don’t. It doesn’t help that I’ve mostly been playing as Vlad (VLAD BEST. RUSSIA BEST) , who lacks any kind of a solid dash—a Looney Toons-esque step—though his jetpack does allow for faster air traversal, the only other option is to lumber slowly forward (and no good backdash option either). It’s possible that if I spend some time with other, not Russian robots, I’ll feel like it’s a little faster than I currently do.

Then again, perhaps that is part of the point of this game—if it is for beginners and experts alike, a slower pace does make the learning curve less steep. It’s a little easier to see what’s going on and exactly how it is you fucked up when you fuck up (I do a lot of fucking up), so there’s a perfectly good reason for it to move the way it does. Unfortunately, it also tends to leave me wanting to play something a little faster—which is basically any game that isn’t Rising Thunder (well, maybe Mortal Kombat X feels slower, but I don’t think so. It’s been a while since I played any MKX).

Bear in mind, this is an alpha—so it’s not like the game is set in stone by any means. They’ll continue to tweak the game engine, and tighten the controls even more, and maybe that sluggishness I’m feeling will disappear. I hope so, because I like just about everything about the game—I just wish it felt a little faster, is all.

I actually streamed a good chunk of me playing Rising Thunder last week, if you want hard photographic evidence of my hideous Vlad game. It's below.