An experienced dev team's first foray into true 3D that, shockingly, gets it right all the way back in June 1996.

Absolutely rock-solid fundamentals which set the tone for the rest of the genre. Analog controls enable precise adjustment of angles which have huge downstream effects. A signature focus on momentum, combined with tricks both intentional and unintentional, birthed one of the most legendary and iconic speedrunning scenes of all time. Systems like this in a casual single player context, balanced to enhance rather than subvert challenges, are rare to find, and even the devs themselves never quite managed to recapture this particular flavor.

The level design here is emblematic of the early 3D era "golden age": enough detail and representation to evoke sense of place, but with the abstraction necessitated by the time's technology both facilitating dense layouts and imbuing the atmosphere with a surreal, dreamlike quality. No established formulas for success existed yet, so levels aren't overly concerned with providing the player a frictionless experience. Each expresses their own quirky character, something felt even more strongly than usual since gameplay is so contextualized by the precise placement of nearby geometry.

Shortcomings mainly occur in obtuse progression/secrets and a handful of stages (more concentrated in the latter half) that don't play to the game's strengths. Luckily, the huge modding scene has leveraged this fantastic foundation and learned from these mistakes to create a veritable cornucopia of visions, both vanilla-like and experimental, for you as a player to explore.

Yup, Quake is a pretty great game!

Far and away the most egregiously misguided attempt at myth-making in games history. This isn't the worst game ever. It's not the weirdest game ever. It is not the 'first American produced visual novel.' Limited Run Games seems content to simply upend truth and provenance to push a valueless narrative. The 'so bad it's good' shtick serves only to lessen the importance of early multimedia CD-ROM software, and drenching it in WordArt and clip art imparts the notion that this digital heritage was low class, low brow, low effort, and altogether primitive.

This repackaging of an overlong workplace sexual harassment/rape joke is altogether uncomfortable at best. Further problematising this, accompanying merch is resplendent with Edward J. Fasulo's bare chest despite him seemingly wanting nothing to do with the project. We've got industry veterans and games historians talking up the importance of digital detritus alongside YouTubers and LRG employees, the latter making the former less credible. We've got a novelisation by Twitter 'comedian' Mike Drucker. We've got skate decks and body pillows and more heaps of plastic garbage for video game 'collectors' to shove on a dusty shelf next to their four colour variants of Jay and Silent Bob Mall Brawl on NES, cum-encrusted Shantae statue, and countless other bits of mass-produced waste that belongs in a landfill. Utterly shameful how we engage with the past.

Bonus Definitive Edition content:
Limited Run Games is genuinely one of the most poorly managed companies on earth and I will never forgive them for giving me a PS5 copy of Cthulhu Saves Christmas instead of what I had actually ordered, a System Shock boxart poster. They also keep sending me extra copies of Jeremy Parish's books. Please, I do not need three copies of Virtual Boy Works.

"Find out who you really are" says the slogan on the game box (member those?), and whoever wrote the description over at MyAbandonware is evidently a coping expert with less than stellar management and parenting skills. Given that this was one of the most overhyped PC games back in the day and is still thoroughly unique and technologically impressive, it naturally has less reviews here in this den of histrionic hipsters than your average pokemon romhack. Sadly these days it's only available to folX willing to go through the arduous endeavor of downloading it online and installing a fan patch that makes it work spotlessly on Microsoft's freshest spyware (because who has time to set up a VM these days). My condolences to all my fellow kids who'd love to pay 29,99 for a Naught Dive published hackjob on their favorite DRM platform, so that they could then do a scathing write-up about how dumb and bad the tamagotchi's AI is in this "gimmicky" game after babying/neglecting it to act like a helpless moron (you are what you nurture boys and gUrls).

Yo what's up MTV, it's Lieutenant Commander Beach and I'd like to welcome you into my crib

There's nothing here to really sweep me off my feet, but I'm definitely taken by certain aspects of this game's presentation. Seeing a rudimentary 3d simulation from select viewpoints inside of your curated little 2d sprite cockpit is sick beyond actual belief in my humble. I would love to see the vignette captured in a new game with the incredible things we can now do with shaders on sprites.

Enter November 2004. Linkin Park's 'Meteora' was released over a year ago. We are approaching peak nu-metal. Effeminate yet hypermasculine bands screaming their angst to the pattern of 0-3-5 guitar riffs have a stranglehold on the youth. Although the 90s effectively killed edge with poor marketing campaigns - John Romero did not make us his bitch - the aughties couldn't resist a flirtatious dance with our shadow selves. Having signed up with Stuart Chatwood, Ubisoft endeavoured to make a timeless Iranian metal classic wrapped in the skin of a video game. For those who believe 'authentic Persian aesthetics' must resemble a Disney movie, this is processed as mere 'heavy metal' - seen to be a jarring tonal shift away from the idyllic fantasy of despotic regimes sporting a human face. Their suffering is intensified by Godsmack being nominally involved with this entry: the instrumental version of 'I Stand Alone' making its way into Dahaka chase sequences - their music generally present across the marketing trailers for this game; trailers that are wonderfully crafted like any semi-professional AMV typical of 2004.

"I can't control you: you're not my destiny." The title credits rolling to the tune of 'Straight Out Of Line' act as a mission statement: You will bathe in individualistic ultra-edge, and you shall enjoy it. What's striking are the cherry-picked moments of controversy that precipitated this game's launch. BDSM-themed enemies who masochistically get off to you killing them sparked no reaction. Nobody observed the fact that every character is deeply sociopathic, angry, and self-centred. What sparked the ire of mother culture nerds scared of feeling emotions was the Prince uttering the lines: "You bitch!" It seems we will never be free from the curse of middle-class morality.

Although I oppose self-insert characterization, I have to confess something: the Prince is exactly like me. You see, I too know what it's like to have my midlife crisis confused for teenage angst. What is understood by spiritual jarheads to be free-floating rebellion is actually the weight of trauma and hardship bearing down on one's soul. When this condition commingles with a warrior's spirit, metastasizing your fight-or-flight reflex across the entire body, a certain pulverization of spirit obtains - the existential mineralization fed by tooth decay and atrophied bone density. Such is the imagery invoked by the subtitle: 'Warrior Within.' This is a surprisingly uplifting message for a game otherwise drenched in tonal darkness, but for yuppified comfort addicts, legitimate struggles are a myth. There is only the dissatisfied whine of ingrates and malcontents. Recalling superfluous internet memes boosted by hypernormies: that every expression of anguish is tantamount to screaming at your factory-ready mother and caretaker.

The sneering ignorance of the privileged and the dead aside, 'Warrior Within' tells an intelligent tale on par with mainline Legacy of Kain entries. It expects us to intuitively understand psychological bifurcation, the routine possibility of holding unspoken goals in mind. It doesn't expect us to apply ultra-naive 3D spacetime to every twist and turn in the story - it recognizes that the philosophy of time is a complicated affair. Should you be corrupted with some Cinema Sins neurotype, the plot beats will agonize you. As if the Prince's expository monologues are not enough, you will cry for formal explanations - your narrative choccy milk and nuggies to keep your clockwork brain well-oiled and safe from novel stimuli.

Unlike many ill-fated conceptual reboots, the Prince of Persia fan base grew up with 'Warrior Within.' As they grew into angry middle-aged men fighting fatal odds, the delicate craftsmanship once derided as 'edgy' became strikingly quaint. For this game is the product of French degenerates for whom Marquis de Sade is tame and normalized - they understand that blood and grit adds authenticity to a setting, provided it is done with a certain level of respect and literary attentiveness.

As a result, the free-form combat system and innovative platforming fade into the background of ultravibe. What one remembers about 'Warrior Within' is a flurry of emotion - loneliness, isolation, anger, melancholy. Everything from the Prince's evolved backstory, to the muted colour palette, and hostile rewilding of Iranian architecture services this cluster of moods. It is a truly unforgettable entry, certain to cement itself in your mind - even if you should be a Marvel Adult who rejects every artistic priority baked into 'Warrior Within.' For a culture spiralling into self-parody with its relentless opposition to sincerity and exuberance, this antipodal game is certain to continuously revitalize itself within that cultural memory. A shadow chasing the sons of plunder, leaving enchantment wherever they demystify and desacralize our darkest dreams.

Devil May Cry is an awkward weebslop series made by auspecial people and for auspecial people. DmC: Devil May Cry, on the other hand, is the feverish dream of a drug addict who has old blueprints of their high school lying around. We can borrow the nomenclature of YouTube's famous verbal blackface actor and call this a Kirkbride-type reboot. The Kirkbride mindset delineates the rarest way to reboot a series. It involves deep study of the source material, making new connections that are best seen through amphetamine-induced hyperconcentration - a phenomenological dance with schizophrenia, giving neuronormies novel ways to access the text of reality. DmC: Devil May Cry is a forbidden experiment with this dark creative impulse and, as a result, legions of straight edge mouth breathers have made their dissatisfaction known.

Having decided that profanity and cigarettes are cool, DmC provides a welcome surrealist punk twist on an aesthetically barren universe. When your frame of reference is shallow due to your sensory processing differences, subtle aesthetic clues like the overuse of expletives may be lost on you - leading to a childish outcry that the Succubus encounter is 'edgy' and 'forced.' While this, of course, describes an intentional characteristic of the stand-offish dialogue, no amount of creative license can justify failing to replicate award-winning performances known to the original series. Did anyone else get goosebumps when sXe-Dante yelled: "I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with light!" Simply epic.

None of that can be found in DmC: Devil May Cry. We instead find a frighteningly bold aesthetic direction - one that can induce symptoms of sensory overload if you have forgotten to take your Abilify. You will spend most of the game interfacing with the real-world by proxy - residing in 'Limbo,' which will bathe the world in orange and teal to maximize that pre-vaporwave vibe. It is admittedly true that every design decision feels carefully considered by an intelligent - and suspiciously neurotypical - mind, but much like a gifted child who screams when the coffee maker has moved to the other side of the countertop, fans of the original series can only notice one thing: nu-Dante is a different character.

This mind-blowing exposition of such a subtle design change aside, many fans of the original series will admit that while, yes, DmC delivers a killer soundtrack, innovative visuals, prescient environmental storytelling, and an impressively cinematic take on moment-to-moment gameplay, it has one unfortunate flaw: the fighting mechanics are simple this time around. While in the grand scheme of things this objection is akin to complaining that Call of Duty 4 fails to sport an Arena FPS weapon arsenal, I have been assured that this is a deal breaker. I suppose one can tolerate the sterile and bland environmental palette of Devil May Cry 3 when the world is but an excuse to achieve your 9-step combos.

DmC: Devil May Cry is ambitious, daring, and incomplete - Ninja Theory would not find their footing until Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. Sparks of their future brilliance can be found in this controversial entry, however, knocking over the rigidly designed sand castles of people who adhere to strict male social roles. If you want to deeply appreciate the fact that gamers despise art and desire only an industry of consumer wish fulfillment, give this game a spin and then speak about your experience online. You have nothing to lose but your sense of kinship with other human-beings.

Lowering the bar.

Black Mesa is a fan remake-cum-reimagining of Half-Life, and it shows. It’s a very technically impressive game, extracting just about everything it can possibly wring out of the damp towel that is the Source engine. It’s a fairly well-designed game, by virtue of most of its elements being copied over wholesale from the original Half-Life. It’s obviously made by people who are very, very passionate about Valve’s work. But Black Mesa forgets, omits, or changes enough of what worked before that it ultimately commits the mortal and unforgivable sin of making Half-Life kind of boring, a crime for which it must be punished by making it boil upside-down beneath the lake of ice for all eternity.

I like Half-Life a lot. I hardly love playing Half-Life, but it’s a game that I both enjoy and respect, which is a sadly uncommon combination. I’ve never existed in a world without Half-Life, a statement which I’m hoping will make some of you wither into dust, and that makes it a bit difficult to personally gauge the impact it had. Obviously, there are hundreds upon hundreds of reports detailing exactly what made Half-Life so special. There are articles and videos and commentary tracks all recounting all of the little quirks and nuances that later shooters silently adopted because it was what they were expected to do now. I can appreciate it from a sort-of dispassionate, outside perspective; as far as I can tell, shooters before Half-Life were mostly just copying Doom’s homework, for better and for worse. If nothing else, you can absolutely tell that a big shift to a more cinematic style was emerging with Half-Life — again, for better and for worse.

Regardless of the finer details, Half-Life is now a very old game. Twenty-five years old, in fact. And the neat thing about games that get that old is that it inherently primes people for a remake. “The gameplay needs an update”, “the graphics look bad”, “fix Xen”, the masses say. It’s a mentality you have for toys. Make it shiny, make it new, make it talk when you pull the string on its back, make sure you add lens flares and ray tracing. It’s certainly nothing that Half-Life needs. Half-Life is already an incredibly solid game that had a fierce impact on the industry and near single-handedly made Valve the monolith that it is today. To suggest that Half-Life — just about any game, really — needs a remake is to fundamentally assign this toy mentality to art.

But, hell, a remake could still be cool.

I like Half-Life, and Crowbar Collective likes Half-Life, and a lot of other people all really like Half-Life. Besides, the game has already been made for them. If all they’re doing is porting it from GoldSrc to Source, what’s the worst that could happen?

We ultimately don’t know the worst case scenario, because it never came to pass. We do, however, know of a pretty rough scenario, which is Black Mesa releasing in the state that it’s in.

The initial few levels are actually very impressive, largely because of how close they play to the original. The tram ride is there, the resonance cascade is there, the brutal ammo restrictions and tight corridors filled with headcrabs and zombies are still there. Hell, even your first encounters with the aliens are tense and unforgiving, encouraging you to use flares to light enemies on fire in order to conserve your ammo. It’s neat! All the way from the start of Anomalous Materials to the end of Office Complex, Black Mesa feels remarkably like Half-Life fully realized. It’s all shiny and pretty, you’ve got some mechanics to play with that were originally intended but didn’t make it to the final release, and it’s a very enjoyable time. You can even forgive Crowbar Collective for getting rid of the scientist who dives through the window and says “greetings”.

And then We’ve Got Hostiles starts.

The HECU still look like they’re holding MP5s and pistols, but they’re secretly wielding Freeman-seeking laser beams. There’s no longer an ounce of hesitation on their part; if they see a hair on your head poking out from cover, they’re shooting you, and you’re taking damage. They’re like Blood cultists in body armor. Also in keeping with pre-Half-Life design decisions, their AI has been drastically dumbed down. The HECU will still at least try to flank you, but they no longer seem all that interested in the concept of their own survival. They’ll rush you down open corridors with no cover, seemingly only interested in getting as in your face as they possibly can, regardless of whether they’re holding an SMG or a shotgun. Throwing a grenade at their feet will make them loudly announce that there’s a nearby grenade, but they don’t ever seem to actually try getting away from it. They’ll do the little Source Engine shuffle that the Combine like to do — if you’ve played enough Half-Life 2, you know exactly what I’m referring to — and then blow up. This is in obvious and stark contrast to the HECU in Half-Life who, while hardly all the avatars of John Rambo, at least seemed like they weren’t showing up just to die. Combat in Black Mesa against the Marines largely just boils down to you and a grunt sprinting at one another with the fire button held down and you winning the war of attrition by virtue of being the only guy here with power armor. Compared to the earlier, more impactful Black Mesa fights against Vortigaunts and houndeyes, this is a letdown; compared to the HECU in the original, it’s shocking.

Given how frequently you enter skirmishes with the Marines, it's something you really can't ever get away from for the overwhelming majority of the game. Crowbar Collective mentioned that their goal was to "make combat more intense", and it seems as though they've tried to do that simply by flooding rooms with significantly more enemies. By my count, Half-Life's We've Got Hostiles pits you against 21 HECU; Black Mesa sends out 32. It doesn't sound like much, and it isn't at first, but it starts to add up fast. Someone on Reddit actually went through and counted every single on-screen HECU kill, and it comes out to over 550 in Black Mesa compared to Half-Life's 250. When you also take into consideration the fact that pre-Xen levels are condensed compared to the original (with On A Rail being noticeably cut way down), the enemy density is completely out of control.

It's not just that there are more of them now, either. The HECU take roughly the same amount of bullets to put down (about 60 health in Black Mesa relative to the original 80), and your ammo is even tighter than it used to be. Being able to carry 250 SMG bullets with ten grenade rounds on the alt-fire was a bit too freeing and a bit too fun, so now you're hard-capped at 150 SMG bullets and three grenade rounds. The pistol now only holds 150 rounds, instead of 250. The shotgun now holds 64 shells instead of 125. The enemy AI is somehow stupider than the one from twenty-five years ago, so it's not like the game has been made any more difficult now that Gordon's got the HEV suit without pockets; holding the MP5 at head height and clicking from a distance seems to do most of the work for you, and the HECU drop about as much SMG ammo as it takes to kill them. The optimal strategy, it seems, is to just hang back and fish for damage multiplier headshots with the MP5 and then go to the next slaughtermap room to continue the process for the next seven hours until Xen.

While Half-Life's Xen was the end product of tightening deadlines and dwindling budgets, Black Mesa's Xen exists almost as a complete refutation of the original's design circumstances; it very obviously got an overwhelming amount of development time and assets and takes up nearly a third of the new game, whereas the previous Xen was over and done with in about twenty minutes. I think Xen is where Black Mesa most obviously becomes a fan game, because it's clear that nobody in charge ever felt the need to say "no" to anything. It's incredibly long, packed to the gills with scripted setpieces and references to later Half-Life titles, and it keeps using the same wire connecting puzzles and conveyor belt rides over and over again in the hopes that making Xen longer will make Xen better. There's a section here in Interloper where you have to bounce off of one of three spring platforms to kill a Controller, and then that opens a path for you to destroy a fleshy glob maintaining a force field. You would think that the fact that this is split into three very distinct paths would mean that you would thus have three very distinct encounters, but they all play almost identically to one another. All three of them are circular rooms with a Controller floating around, and you break his crystals in order to make him vulnerable to your attacks. It isn't a difficult fight, and it isn't a complicated puzzle, and ultimately just winds up being the exact same thing three times in a row. This happens constantly throughout Interloper, which mostly consists of you sprinting down long conveyor belts and then jumping off of them onto other conveyor belts for about two straight hours.

What burns me most about Black Mesa's Xen, however, is that the entire borderworld has had the personality sucked straight out of it. Xen used to be a Giger-esque hellscape, all bone and speckled carapace. A lot of the level geometry textures were taken straight from reference photos of insects, and it did a great job selling Xen as something of a hive; lots of gross, fleshy, chitinous pockets carved into the walls, pale white and red moving parts that are clearly both artificial and organic. It makes sense, contextually, because the Nihilanth is itself a hybrid of flesh and metal, and the home that it's made of Xen is reflected in its design. Black Mesa's Xen, in its deepest parts, is way more heavy on the machinery angle than the organic one. Through the thick, red haze, it's hard to tell what you're even looking at. The glowing blue lights leading you by the nose sit next to what are very clearly just steel girders and pistons, which is immensely boring when you compare it to the almost-living Xen from two and a half decades ago.

Old Xen's inspirations were obvious, but it still managed to carve an identity out of them. Black Mesa's Xen, on the other hand, looks like fucking everything else.

I want you to look at these two pictures and tell me that they don't look like they were from the same game. I want you to look at this screenshot and tell me that you can't picture the SSV Normandy flying straight through it. I want you to look at this image and tell me that it doesn't look like a Destiny raid map. Whatever identity Xen once had is gone, stripped bare to make it completely indistinct from any photobashed ArtStation "outer space" drawing to be used for padding out a portfolio and nothing else. Originality is both overrated and unimportant, but when you throw out something neat in favor of something bland, I'm going to be hard on it. Gordon Freeman crawls grunting to his feet after going through the Lambda Core teleporter and walks through blue bio-luminescent plants until he sees the Eye of Sauron looking down on him and a woman starts singing over baby's first synthwave.

On that note, Black Mesa has entered itself into the club of Media that Needs to Shut the Fuck Up, given how it starts playing some pretty mediocre tunes from the word go and never ever stops. Music is playing constantly throughout the game, never giving you a single quiet moment or a chance to drink in the layered soundscapes, and it hardly even has the decency to be good most of the time. For every decent pull that fits the action, there are two tracks that clash so hard that they spoil the scene they're in. Blast Pit 3 plays during the sequence in Blast Pit where you have to sneak past the tentacles back up through the missile silo. The incredibly loud, chugging guitars that lead into the How to Compose Dramatic Music For Film tinkling piano keys don't fit the sequence at all. Again and again, these amateurish tracks keep leaching into the game like pesticides into groundwater. The intro to Lambda Core where you uneventfully ride a freight elevator for two minutes is punctuated by steel drums and pounding synths in a moment that should be quiet and introspective; Blast Pit 1 legitimately sounds like a recording of somebody warming up before their actual performance; every single track on Xen inevitably leads into the exact same fucking ethereal female vocals "ooh"ing and "aah"ing over the instrumentation. It wasn't enough for Xen to look like everything else on the market, so all of its songs sound identical to one another, too. It's rough. It's so clearly a collection of just about every thought the composer has ever had in the past two decades, all strung together end to end without much of any consideration as to when it ought to be playing or what ought to even make it into the final game. I can't remember the last time that a game's music annoyed me this much.

Peel away the layers and poke your fingers through the flesh, and Half-Life is still at the core of Black Mesa. Enough of it is still present that playing Black Mesa isn't a completely miserable experience. All it managed to make me feel, however, was that I'd rather just be playing the original instead. Black Mesa can't manage to be anything more than a slipshod imitation of Half-Life, and the moments that it does well are the moments that Valve already did better twenty-five years ago.

Xen was never bad.

Introvert: A Teenager Simulator (2021) is almost a monument to the wasted potential of the Euphoric Brothers. While it was, by no means a good game, it shows genuine drive and passion not seen by their later, shittier mascot horror titles. It's a window into what could have been, had the dev continued on this track instead of selling out for brightly-colored horror games for sticky iPad toddlers, we could have had some modern-day cult classics steeped in gen-z cynicism. Oh, well. At least we have this bullshit. My hope is that after Garten of BanBan finally dies, the Euphoric Brothers will return to this style of game with a less edgy perspective, a higher budget, and more technical skill and make something actually worth playing. I have a feeling that if they do, they'll create a game that's truly spectacular, as opposed to being either pure teenage angst or the videogame equivalent of popcorn.