Really loved this, even as short as it is. It took roughly 3 or so hours to finish and I was fully immersed the whole time. This world has such a unique atmosphere and mystique, brought to life in Source. It looks just phenomenal, the animations and design of the world and its inhabitants feel so raw and bizarre but also impressive and inspiring. The combat loop is just complex enough, brawling and blocking, dodging and punishing, even shooting. It's enough to give you a good amount of control in how you play, with a decent skill ceiling that I never got a chance to master by the time the credits rolled. I'm glad I have Zeno Clash II and Clash: Artifacts of Chaos to look forward to.

This was a weird era for shooters. They had progressed past the "boomer shooter" template, but in the wake of Half-Life, many developers didn't really know what to do if they wanted to create something focused purely on action. Returning to monke was viewed as unacceptable -- we're living in a Three-Dimensional World now, soldier, the People demand a Cinematic Experience. As a result, many shooters from 2000-2006 feel like they're being pulled between two extremes and tearing apart in the process. In a pre-CoD2 time, a select few games managed to straddle this dichotomy (F.E.A.R. is one such example, Return to Castle Wolfenstein another) but the vast majority are worse off because of this. Black is one of them.

Described as "gun porn" by the developers, in one of the earliest recorded examples of "Extreme Cringe," Black was meant to show off the Power of Firearms, make you feel like a God with an AK-47, raining destruction against any of those who dare stand in your way. In practice, it's an underwhelming shooter with worse gunplay than Goldeneye, except it makes you look at the guns a lot. Yes, it has detailed reloading animations. It also released in 2006, when this wasn't really impressive anymore. It's not the developers' fault that this came out couple of months after CoD2, a better game in (almost) every single respect... But it sure doesn't help. They want you to look at these guns. They REQUIRE that you look at the guns. Every time you switch weapons, you chamber a round for no reason. Every time you reload, an incredibly obnoxious depth-of-field effect obscures the rest of the screen (I think this game in particular is the reason I hate DoF and turn it off whenever possible).

Despite this, the guns. Feel. WEAK. Enemies can take an ungodly amount of damage before dying, which is probably why every gun's magazine holds about double the amount of ammo that it should. You can riddle a guy with bullets like he's Kenny and you're ED-209, and he'll eventually go down after expending half of your AK's 60-round mag. You have grenades, but your character has a wrist that would get you called slurs in PE. The prevailing tactic seems to be to shoot the copious red barrels and other explosive objects strewn around, rather than shooting at the enemies themselves. Those explosives, and the destructible environmental elements, also dry up pretty quickly into the meager 4 hour campaign. The game is also completely bloodless, adding to the lack of impact, which is extra strange. It feels like it's a T rated game in every respect except for guys yelling the Fuck Word on your radio.

The controls also suck, of course. It has a bizarre control scheme, naturally, because that wasn't standardized yet, but at least it's fully customizable. The strangest part is that you have "cycle weapon forward/backward" buttons despite only being able to hold 2 at a time anyway. The aiming is as bad as you would expect from a console shooter of this era where you click the right stick to zoom in (not ADS). It's easy to talk shit about Left Trigger, Right Trigger controls, but it's vastly superior to this crap that we were dealing with in the Before Times.

The one thing I will praise in Black is the audio. It's the sole saving grace. The guns do sound loud as shit, and the music (from Chris Tilton and Michael Giacchino, composer for Maui Mallard in Cold Shadow and director of Werewolf by Night) is excellent. Until BF Bad Company came along, this was the best guns had ever sounded in a video game. So they had that crown for 2 years.

After this, Criterion went back to making racing games, which they're actually good at. Developers of Black went over to Codemasters and made a spiritual sequel, Bodycount. I remember it being pretty average, which is at least better than Black. Contemporary reviews loved this game. I never understood why. At least now I was able to get some enjoyment from the ridiculously pretentious opening cutscene, which is simply credits in the lower left of a black screen.

If you have a hankering to play a mid-2000s shooter with a focus on bombastic gunplay and a prominently-featured SPAS-12, make the right decision:

Play F.E.A.R.

2/10

Damn, this is just immense and endlessly creative and honestly it's the type of thing that really expands on Doom while turning it into its own thing entirely, and I just loved all the environments and level design in this. When I mean immense I mean IMMENSE, and god there's something about the way this map plays with DOOM's terrain where so many of the individual levels are just so distinctive in their own right. I mean it's also a heavily collaborative effort but it really does seem to work so well even if fundamentally this game is just "kill monsters, collect three keys." and so forth. There's levels in this that took me literally DAYS to finish with just how huge they were and it's also weird how like they're just in the middle of the game and then the next level afterwards would be completed within a few minutes. Also just the way that this plays with hidden areas and Doom's puzzle solving mechanics were certainly interesting, just with how intuitive it is. There's a whole bunch of times where I flipped a switch, an entirely new areas opened up where I killed hundreds of imps with my chaingun and BFG and what proved to be the deadliest weapon of all in this game... monster infighting, which is just yeah, you know.

This was really good though. Doom's gameplay has that nice combination of simple yet intuitive crossed with graphic violence that gives it such a rhythmic quality to it and yeah, I played this a lot and found it weirdly relaxing. That, and I liked how each of the episodes in this felt so distinctive from each other in terms of their settings and oddly it gave it kind of an abstract storytelling vibe to it. One thing I will say is like before this game is IMMENSE, like it's huge. It's weird when like one of the main things I may or may not have against it is that it's overwhelming but my god, you know. Definitely a must play for Doom fans.

Honestly a perfect afternoons worth of doom. It's a really solid nine level set that shows what 15+ years worth of experience with level design can achieve, while also being approachable enough for people who have just played doom 1, 2 & 64 to appreciate.

Also if you can I HIGHLY recomend playing through this with the original soundtrack by Peter Laurence and various artists as adds so much to each level.
https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/119301-no-rest-for-the-living-community-midi-pack-released/

Eviternity may not be the best doom megawad (32 map replacement for doom 1 or 2) but it's undoubtedly in the top 5. And probably the closest a megawad has come to feeling like a proper doom 3. Now what I mean by that is that there have been hundreds of great megawad's since doom 1 released in December 1993. However, most of those map packs end up falling into one of two camps. Ether they go down the route that the two megawad's included in final doom went (TNT and Plutonia) Where their a tighter more challenging variant of what came before. Or the they go for something unique and challenging that while great is deliberately trying not to be traditional doom. It's worth noting that both of these paths have led to fantastic experiences, but they don't escape feeling like map packs. Map packs that might be better than the commercial classic doom levels but still map packs. (Didn't realize it at the time but this is kinda wrong other examples of wads in eviternity's style are valiant and scythe 2)

Eviternity on the other hand goes for something distinct that still feels like it could appear in a doom game. In fact considering that the megawad first released on December 13th 2018 (25th anniversary of doom) and got the final release in February 2019 it's shocking how much this map pack shares with doom eternal. Both share a dark angelic force as the main villain. There's a lot of overlap in level theme's as Doom Eternal and Eviternity share levels/episodes based on lush medieval castles, frosty snow areas, and an angelic home world mixed in with the standard tech base and hell levels doom is known for.

And that level variety is a huge part of what makes eternity so fantastic with each of the 6 episodes being divided up into 5 levels (with two secret levels on top of that) it means that Eviternity avoids falling into the repetition that often hits doom games around 2/3's of the way in. If I had to pick a favorite episode it would probably be Chapter III: Crystalline. Due to not only making great use of variety. Considering that it's not just cold themed, you have icey caverns. Snow fields. Levels based around hunting lodges and snowed in abandon castles. While it doesn't have my favorite maps in the wad (my top 3 are map 9, map 19 and map 27). It's got the tightest and most consistent map set of any of the episodes with map 12 and 15 being particularly excellent.

Another thing that sets this map set apart is it's fantastic soundtrack. Done mostly by Jimmy Paddock (a legend in the doom music community), but also several other composers. The wad's music does an excellent job giving each map it's tone. From exciting and tense, to calming and peaceful. This soundtrack is something you should check out even if you don't like doom.

If I had to have a gripe with anything in Eviternity it's that the final boss is a bit of a let-down. It's far better and more challenging than any boss in doom 1 and 2 but that's not saying much. While the idea of fighting a giant angel that can use all of the demon's most deadly attacks sounds cool the fight kinda just comes down to BFG spam and knowing when to use the invulnerability spheres. It's a let-down especially when you consider how well used Eviternity's 4 other regular enemies are used. The nightmare demon, the annihilator, the former captain, and the astral cacodemon are all introduced and used to great effect throughout the wad.

So,I think it's worth letting my cards on the table. I only beat Eviternity on "hey not so rough" which is the second lowest difficulty in doom (though for context I always play doom 1 and 2 on ultra violence which is what hurt me plenty is about the same as playing on doom 1 or 2's ultra violence for most wads) And I also played it single segment with plenty of saves. So, I didn't play Eviternity in the same way that most people who are good at doom play it. However, I think it's testament to the quality of a mod like this that I can play it on a lower difficulty a difficulty that wasn't the intended way to play and still have a great time.

Eviternity is a doom masterpiece. It's creative, varied, challenging, atmospheric. But most of all it's just plain fun and easily on of the best doom wads of all time. Easily one of the best experiences you can have in doom and not even the occasional weaker level or medicore final boss can take that away from it. Plus, since it's a mod it's free if you own doom 1 or 2. So go ahead and try it.

Actual so fun but also immensely challenging which I think might put some people off, but the way that the maps in this are designed are just so tight and also something where it really makes a lot of usage of enemy spam and relative ammo scarcity, but I also love just how inventive this WAD can be without straying too far away from the original DOOM's design. Romero seems to love just getting back to the basics with what he's doing, notably that this is a DOOM WAD and not a DOOMII WAD (so less enemy roster and no super shotgun) but it's also just really nice for what it is. Extra credit would probably go to the way this game handles dark rooms and lighting and what not, reminding me a lot of the jump scares that used to pop up in the original DOOM. Really, DOOM can be quite creepy if you just juxtapose immense challenge and relentlessness with surprises and yeah.

Completed this on Ultra-Violence difficulty like the badass gamer girl that I am!

after churning through most of the 90s-00s metal slug entries this week i was taken by two things. first: the games have a hilarious sense of Vonnegutian violence that makes all entries difficult to be mad at even if i found some of them tedious and grueling. in metal slug 1 & 2 in particular you can be killed by all sorts of 'Top 10 Worst WW2 deaths' sketches, like being crushed by a falling tank in disrepair or getting struck with an ejected shell casing from a Comically Large Cannon, as well as dishing out dark comedy of your own like pumping 20 pistol rounds into a suntanning grenadier or instagibbing a riflemen with 5 grenades as he leaves the latrine. it's hard to single out what gives a metal slug game that approachable aura that makes it a hot commodity but i imagine this aesthetic of humor, along with the plainly good slapstick like the inflation sprites and its death animation, has aided in the series' canonization and perpetual status in the zeitgeist.

second, these titles were alot slower than i remember. after perusing for a bit you can find dev interviews that state that metal slug was conceived as being branched off side-scrolling shmups like Irem's own R-TYPE instead of Contra, and its felt in the way hitboxes in the series are meant to imprison a poor position into a guaranteed death as in the shmup's philosophy rather than hitboxes being quick tests to jump or duck as in contra's philosophy. or at least, that's my perusal of the motivation--i'm nothing but a fledgling to both genres really but my main point is that I often "foresaw" my death happening in metal slug in the same way i "foresaw" my deaths in shmups, realizing too late i had put myself in an unwinnable screen position due to prior mistakes in dodging. i learned to accept this sort of difficulty for what it is as i moved on, but i wondered what a metal slug title might look like if it's challenges was more chaotic & reactive rather than guided & premeditated.

thus i have my question answered in gunforce ii, ironically the closest spiritual predecessor to metal slug, which manages to completely invert these two observations and separate itself out as a underplayed gem with its own sensibilities rather than some historical trivia for metal slug fiends. on the first observation, metal slug's wartime clownery is replaced instead with a mostly self-serious aesthetic of metal (in all forms), mecha, and masculinity: gunforce II stands next to SNK's Search and Rescue as perhaps the most attentive arcade title (to my knowledge) towards the late 80s-90s OVA & TV scene of seinen mecha and go nagai-derivated creature horror. the latter shows up only towards the ending stretch of bosses but this game is knee-deep in the bag of the former--the work of that era's staple mech designers like Katoki or Kawamori seemed like go-to references here, and shit like Bubblegum Crisis, 8th MS Team, Dragonar, L-Gaim, and Mellowlink were constantly running through my mind as i replayed this, not necessarily out of any explicit reference but just as being on the same wavelength as the game. its hard to notice this reference point of design at the game's breakneck speed but watching this HD run really honed it in--the sort of Neue Ziel-esque design of many of the common enemies, the power suited mini boss trio that appears in stage 2-1, a skeleton alien centipede demon inside a tekkaman blade-esque suit as the final boss--all of it feels crafted from a shared appreciation & study for that era's ability to engineer sleek instant classics of designs for narratives of dark melodramas and dystopian vignettes. in fact, the game cares so much for rendering these designs, for showing every healthy/damaged/destroyed state between pinion and gear, driver and driven, shear out and tear out that'll you probably spend at least 10% of your run time here in frame spikes of dropping to around 15 fps. while slowdown in metal slug becomes a crucial aid in assessment, gunforce ii never really ascends above being moderately hard for most of the time, so with slowdown often occurring in the denouement or initialization of encounters you'll just accept it for what it is. (tho I do find it really funny that the first 30 seconds of level one has the game's most noticeable slowdown). but it's rather serious passion for mecha without overt recapitulation or veneration makes it at really pretty & unique to look at it motion, and it's hard not to be charitable towards the title when you because of how singular it looks, in spite of its obvious ties to metal slug in user interface.

on the second observation, gunforce ii diverges from metal slug in being explicitly connected with Contra over any shmup, especially in how every platform, ledge, and wire in this game is scalable, similar to the former's platforming. this adds a much needed (for my tastes) dynamism to the greater metal slug encounter philosophy, letting you craft your own screen real-estate and angles of attack rather than following the rules as the encounter lays out for you. frankly, this scaling element is often not really necessary because again the game isn't that hard (stage 2-2 being a great example of where it's absence isn't even noticed), but there is great fun to be had in abusing the protagonists' absurdly double jointed arms to launch 360-degree assaults while hanging from the ceiling or bear hugging a ledge. it also adds a bit of strategy to the vehicular gameplay--since vehicles often aren't capable of switching vertical planes as easily as you are on foot, and because the game's equivalent of metal slug POWs can roam about both above and below your current height, there is some genuine strategy in regards to whether to abuse the hitpoints and firepower of vehicles for greater safety but miss the POWs, or to trust in your parkour skills and aim for saving all POWs even if it means a riskier section, or to mix the two and believe you can dismount & mount with the proper timings. again not every level engages with this idea to its full extent but it complicates the treatment of vehicles as a strict powerup as in metal slug, where losing a vehicle early often meant playing the rest of an encounter out at a tedious disadvantage.

where i fall off the train is unfortunate in that this is just not enough of a good thing--it's shorter than just about every metal slug title I'm sure, and the levels it really clicks on, the third and final levels, just remind me of how elite this or the planned third entry could have been if Irem didn't get the can right after gunforce ii released. but to be clear i think the rest of the levels are great, occasionally dipping into amazing on select sections and bosses, but not a consistent "damn..." like those two. in my opinion it's pretty tied with metal slug X as this dev's team best attempt at the whole idea honestly. also i'm mentioning it again but god these protagonists' arms are so fucking weird, please look at a clip or something it's like addicting-games.com tier in how you can get the arms to go out at weird angles. really endearing tho