been playing hella yugioh and moved back 2 my parents place which might indicate illness & questionable judgment 2 some (🧍‍♂️) but confident in saying this is juiced. played this with a 2016 mod or smthn similar that added in cards up until then & just went absolutely 2 town with some green/white creature spam. just gets that i like being teased a lil with some perfunctory side quests and random encounters until i can go in the shop & get that one absolutely busted card that'll take my deck from celtics shaq at the free throw line brick machine to the most consistent bomb after bomb pile u've seen since the obama administration. late 90s British pc gaming influence all over this tooooooo every piece of armor is grainy as fuck all the sorceresses & enchantress sprites are just recolored elviras every creature from beyond the grave has glowing red eyes. shit just closes itself automatically when u beat the game too no credits no nayfin this is just gaming at its finest man.

very first characters you run into are three dudes listening to an instrumental cloud rap beat talkin about "finding the light" and "money". this was how all you drainers sounded like to me back in 2016. the good (low fidelity, usage of vaporwave/cloud rap/house music, smoke button) works here more than the bad (a bludgeoning of an ending, "loneliness +1", a general briefness). some striking moments like goin on a elliptical bender in a coastal town & getting really nervous eating potato chips around girls. think the ennui ultimately misses the mark for me in a way that other games with similar experiences don't though--the mood feels so particular to a college-adjacent early 20s anxiety & somehow too abstract to strike a real nerve. the ending convo is going for the jugular on a certain type of person but it feels a lil tacky in how subdued the rest of the experience is. VtM:B still clears for climatic conversations with a taxi driver i fear. i liked it enough to be invested in sad3d's other works when they go on sale tho.

its a cliché but there really is smthn special about loading into a lobby in a COD and just immediately hearing a 40 year old OG tellin some kid over the mic to stop flipping weed packs. or finishing a demolition match and hearing two friends say good night to each other and exchange pleasantries. or hearing a dude ask "is the daddy still in the picture?" when his mom gaming buddy talks about her kids (shooters gotta shoot). im glad this series has over anything retained that strand of anonymous, impermanent interaction--everyone joins a lobby with their mic unmuted, and the mute all feature is legitimately bugged i think. there's little to no carryover of players between matches (crossplay is really seamless which adds the exchangeability of teammates & enemies). COD is rlly like living in the city where these other popular battle royale-tinged shooters are like living in the suburbs where everyone is contained in their own little silo's. not that there's anything wrong with fragmentation & keeping the circle small! but sometimes i just want to be with some strangers for the night. u stay crashin bout a nigga we don go on dates😒

as a game its a lil shite tho lol. but not in an unlovable way. the last COD i played was advanced warfare which had the same sorta lootbox/premium system....coupla years and its still rlly bad. reusing maps from the original Black Ops 2 is so funny, and kind of embarrassing that is the state of the FPS multiplayer experience. weapons are really anonymous, which is a problem i've had with treyarch titles and every COD not named MW2. spawn system is as cooked as it was in the old titles. scorestreak rewards feel extremely underwhelming, at least the nuke was funny. having the usual weapon system level on top of the regular level progression system on top of an operator level system on top of a callcard & emblem system on top of a daily/weekly challenge system makes one of the insane end game screens imaginable. smthn is deeply cooked if im skipping through my unlocks at the end of the match like theyre youtube ads. all of the perks feel inconsequential save a select 6 which every experienced player seems to use. only new positives are i think the scorestreak system here is rlly the best killstreak overhaul they've done & i like the addition to CTF the standard game queue. oh and the level of modularity in the attachment system is rlly quite cool, idk if those are unique additions to this entry but they were appreciated.

the appeal here for me is that this the last title that feels like a complete COD from what fans on the internet say, and the least that's like, fucked with ig. and that the simple truth is that ADS hitscan feels as good as it did in 2010, squeezing the trigger and seeing the hitmakers pop up is some real "neuron activated" gaming what can i say. its infrequent but when you load in a match and its already lit in voicechat and you start puttin up SGA numbers with your red dot SMG hittin all the flanks its like perfect videogame junk food.

even as a sub <20 player discord fighter the gundam zoo reputation still applies. lol. bitching aside i've kinda cooled off on this from when i first played it....jumping from MBON to this it was rlly apparent how every suit got some kind of upgrade or toolkit adjustment, which is rlly impressive considering they're over 200 suits or smthn like that in this game--even more impressive is that they took some of the clones here and gave them rlly unique movesets. lacus' IJ as IJ's old moveset + permament duel gundam buster gundam assist mode with a fuckhuge gerobi spread. alot of stuff feels good--where i fall off is the balancing, unlike say MBON and FB there's a big gap between suits that are top of the class and middle of the pack, to the point where forcing damage or asserting you're gameplan feels rlly tough against some of the stronger suits in the game. im not even sure it's like a "this suit is too strong" situation either, its more like "i'm not sure the suit im using has tools to handle this situation" type of deal. ever since burst this game has been about forcing damage but its starting to get outrageous lmao. in general this is all expected for every one of these gundam entries but ig after a decade of playing these im just kinda fatigued on the formula. in legacy FGs such as this (most apt comparison point is Tekken and VF maybe) where the selling point is iteration and small-scale overhauls, having kits that feel under/overtuned stands out rlly apparently. because like, what else did they work on?? my dad is an atlanta hawks fan and everytime the hawks reveal their mediocrity he'll point out a role player and be like "you can tell he did not work on anything over the offseason". sometimes when im playing these VS series i wanna pull bandai namco aside and be like "be honest with me. yall didn't do shit in the offseason".

also probably for the best this doesn't have a console port idk if the quality of port that was MBON would fly in this era.

starting ep3 tomorrow but wanna jot some thoughts on the duology as is. like both quite a bit, maybe ep 1 just as equally as this. in particular ep2 is more forthright in its suffering but cloaks what would be naked cries for help really cleverly. like the titular charlotte the text seems at both ends exorcising some necessary catharsis and questioning whether said catharsis is even helping anything, much less being therapeutic--characters abound with taunts and riddles for the audience investing in charlotte's suffering in hopes for some kind of didactic bow to justify the pain, yet same characters take interest in charlotte's suffering for their very own didactic lessons and utility. tries at all three to both ridicule altruism as an ethical doctrine, pathologize it as a psychological motivation, and dismiss it as a political utopianism---yet, also, offers only calming reassurance that your choice was understandable when you go to grave lengths just to relieve someone's else pain. both more of a 'RPGMaker' game in drawing up social interactions as random battles but also not a RPGmaker game in how ambivalent it is about you engaging with this system at all (could be misremembering but im p sure ep 1 at least had health values but in here they were just ??). conflicted conflicted but far from confused, i think the text is confident in its ambiguity, a read bolstered by the very ending coda being yet another dilemma that pricks at the audience's investment in the narrative. like drake said,,,,, its a combination. uniquely invested in the risk of vulnerability in relationships as shown by the drama and that same risk of vulnerability as a creator to audience as shown in the metanarrative, ane's cooking imo

was locked in on elden ring mods for the past few weeks, this is one of the bigger ones and the first one i tried. its good i think. big sell in comparison to other mods rn is the progression changes--you start out with class specific starting locations and a in-game note to where your class-optimal spells & gear is. the class specifics are tied to relevant locations, so if you roll the blood spellsword guy for instance you'll find alot of ur spells around Mohg's area, his two boss locations, and some other blood subbosses and camps scattered through the game. the mod enables waypoint travelling between all erdtrees and unlocks all medallion/key item gates between zones, so its not uncommon and in fact encouraged to take really weird routing like radahan -> lord of blood mohg -> placidusax -> rykard as your first bosses just to hit all your gear then progress through the game normally. because of how quickly you can sequence break you can breeze through and complete the game in about 15-20 hours instead of the 40+ hours a vanilla run would require of you--this does wonders to make the game more replayable and let you hit the highlights of each area in a respectable amount of time for the working boys & girls of the world. idt this is a comparable experience at all to vanilla elden ring and wouldn't recommend it as a substitute, but as a secondary game mode that can serve as a "last-night's highlight reel" of the game its great.

and elden ring does have really strong highlights!! even if the challenge is lowered because of all the new tools available i think that has made the spectacle of the major bosses & setpieces really apparent--i was worried after coming back to elden ring after 2 years away stuff like Astel wouldn't hit as hard, but like nah its still rlly cool. the newly added spells and gear also honestly look quite good for a mod this early in development, you can create some imaginary schoolyard wizard looking battles its awesome. for the person who really likes vanilla elden ring mechanically but doesn't care to bother with rerolling/larval tears this might be the ideal mod

(sidebar: its not explicit at all but i also do like how the different starting locations & vocations you pick up tie in with the base game's narrative--similar to how ER poises the player tarnished as an almost self-sparking catalyst to sever the military v. bloodline succession war that grounds the game, your PC in this mod could just be as self-directed: a disillusioned knight looking to pick off legendary warriors & beasts while the lands are in chaos on some Hunt Showdown shit, an overambitious mage whose primary purpose is to fell Radahan and explore the sunken cities, a dragon priest looking to call rank on the wandering dragons in the game, etc...if you got an overactive imagination and RP a little it can add a lot to the experience here imo,,,)

for me tho i kinda fell off like 1.5 playthroughs in lol. its rlly because in the process of playing this one I got geeked on the reforged mod, and having experience what this mod could be doing with the base game's combat i was left wanting more rlly quickly. let me preface this by saying i think sekiro is kinda like the Terra from Teen Titans for the souls community, it was a nice time but we really should let that bitch die and move on with our lives--but also, playing a modded ER game without having a sekiro-stlye deflect feels so awkward. im sorry im sorry i know, but it really is true that adding in more action-y elements via changing the equip load mechanics, dodging, a poise bar, deflecting, parrying, regening FP, etc. do alooooot more for this game on a replay than just a content expansion and a secondary game mode. the start of a run in this mod is rlly great where you're remixing and reworking elden ring like a DJ to build your class out, but once your build is complete it rlly feels like just playing the base game with an overleveled character. and its like ok.......i have a cheat engine for that. reforged has its numerous problems but i lasted longer doing that than i did with this if im gonna keep it a band. ideal modded ER experience would prob be smthn akin to this with like total warhammer ii mortal empires victory conditions + reforged's combat + vanilla's narrative expanded or smthn.

looking back at the 2018 hype for this shit i think marvel 3 might be the most misunderstood fighting game of all time. in comparison to the literal screen tearing positional tug of war of marvel 3, where dashing to take your assist out of the screen is a fundamental offense strategy, movement in this game feels like a weird mix of kof hyper-hopping, melty blood's importance of constricting your opponent's aerial movement, and maybe like any given 2D fighter franchise weird entry where they added assists (i.e. kof 99/2000 or now MK1 I guess). i've been playing this game on and off for closer to 5 years now and been exercising mid 30s salarymen dedication to watching stray replays during lunch hours/work down time and the neutral
movement here has never looked slick tbh. the reliance on super jumping and holding 2/8 to control momentum and fall speed means that say, hopping over a beam to punish the recovery feels genuinely awkward on a pad. in a way that saying magneto holding up hitting a dash micro and pressing S doesn't. absconding to pockets of the safety on the screen feels way harder than it should for a game based off flying aliens. dead horse but i wish they took more from arcana heart than blazblue.

speaking of, as a fighting game designed for beginners i actually think this might be the most frustrating game to play for beginners/intermediates, on par if not worse than tekken 7 (tekken 7 having a higher playerbase and somewhat more reliable netcode offsets the knowledge gap i think. also a far worse matchmaking/lobby system. look i get it playing an arcsys game past 2004 and going "ooooo the lobbies suck not the lobbies 🤓🤓" is low hanging fruit, but like, its still true). i think the autocombos suck because the grounded versions do not lead to a knockdown like most other fighting games autocombos, i would not show this game to someone to demonstrate the get a hit -> knockdown -> run some oki flowchart of anime 2D fighters. superdash as a whole mechanic is more tilting for new players to counter than any superarmor/invincible reversal super/comeback system possible. granted inputs and learning any given character is easier, but if im at a function and somebody was like "matt bring one of dem fighters around" i'm still reaching for soulcalibur, tekken, or kyanta first u kno.

but having said all that, this game can be rlly cool on occasion. the attention to detail is rlly outstanding, and seeing any of the lvl 3 closeups or intros looks rlly good when u haven't seen it in a while. there's also some characters who diverge from the boring fundamentals here: zamasu, ginyu, krillin, nappa, gotenks, & baby are beacons of light, possessing the creativity and uniqueness of something more in line with p4a than p much what every other character is doing. they can actually like, run oki, besides guessing a tech direction and going for a meaty. crazy. in spite of how simple the building blocks are it's wonderful the type of synergy in blockstring/combos you can explore. i just wish this game had a more even experience & design, the xenoverse 2 level dedication to updating this shit without planned DLC down the line is rare, it's doing justice to a property that hasn't seen a W in like 7 years, it's in conversation with a pretty vaulted subgenre of 3v3 fighters, it's just too frustrating and awkward to deal with long periods of time...this was always gonna be true and technically has been true for a while but budokai tenkaichi 4 will truly be better

another romhack W kinda unfortunately. playing this i had an epiphany about competitive pokemon but before that lemme say that doin this three innates + one selectable ability on every mon shit is crazyyyy cool and smthn that i'd like to see carried forward for romhacks, kinda like how day/night cycles are the complimentary bread you get with a romhack meal. three innates keep the core identity of most mons in tact and the selectable ability lets you splash between some gimmick, offensive, or defensive niches, meaning that you can pop out with the offensive v-create trick room solrock one gym then have him on some shiesty sand support rocker type beat the next gym. never been one to really hankerdown on one set of mons but with how quickly you can switch EVs and abilities, and thus team niches for each mon, it makes homie loyalty an actual incentive...rather a nostalgia prison of how watching venusaur clicking giga drain for 23 hours of the 40 hour experience was secretly fun because it distracted you from that overdue LabCorp bill you got last time you got burned and had to go to the clinic. similarly the minimal grinding shit this does along with level caps feels essential for the similar smogon simulator breed of romhacks that have been cropping up tryna ride radical red's high. this fares sooooo much better than radical red just on account of how quickly it is to drop and build teams back up, you can run a full new set of six after every gym if you wanted and that kinda easy team variety is something i think this genre has been missing for a long ass time now.

course as you can imagine here the power scaling is pushing prosperous amounts of P when niggas have four abilities--the recent 1.5v build has brought things back into the realm of sanity (weather teams were gettin the goob nut off on everything) but still keeps cool balance changes like feraligtr being a superbeast or dewong being an unkillable support god who comes up and sets up six turns of aurora veil for free for the whole gang. i think this has finally fulfilled the true promise of every mon is viable here that every romhack hitherto has claimed but never really succeeded. like, no lil baby, but if ur rlly 4PF you can build a team to have beautifly 6-0 super sweep about half of the elite four without requiring much more than some hazard support to be honest. not every change is perfect,,, (i beat this on 1.0 where weather abilities weren't as nerfed, and lets just say sharpedo with strong jaw + swift swim is first ballot hoenn HOF--conversely; parasect my friend....welcome to the guangdong tigers) but there's more than enough boosts here to justify a toe tip for even the most experienced romhackers. some personal favorites:

-- steelix getting shore up + some shiest defensive abilites lets him be an actual top tier wall, capitalizing on how good steel/ground is as a defensive typing whilst also minimizing how quickly he falls over to special attackers (still weak to them and other breakers but not in a crippling way as in before).
-- LOVE dhelmise here, some innates give you triple types and dhelmise is a grass/steel/ghost combo. AND has an ability that makes him only neutral fire and deal neutral damage back to fire types with grass STABs, AND has fucking water absorb for some reason. which means blud is like a super ferrothorn that can maintain excellent hazard control with spin but still put on that presh with a poltergeist + STAB anchor shot combo.
-- hitmonchan gets priority on all punching moves, letting him pop out with priority boltbeam coverage and a priority CC for funsies.
-- Typholsion having a priority eruption is fucking hilarious + he can splash on sand teams cause he's a ground type for some reason
-- greninja is so insanely cracked they give him wicked blow and skill link for water shuriken, like why.
-- Slaking can opt for truant or an ability that lets him act every turn but just move last, which is still p great
-- Lots of mons like sirfetch'd have this ability called Rampage which lets them avoid recharge if they get a KO, meaning you can run goofy shit like scarf giga impact tauros as a cleaner or even something more unserious like aerilate rampage giga impact dragonite as a cleaner. fun for the whole family.
-- giving tangrowth a neutrality to fire + an ability that gives him free lefties is so nice, genuinely kinda heartwarming that after decades of stall ballcrushing a romhacker is willing to toss the more patient amongst us a bone. stall players are truly feasting on the low tho between sheninja buffs + blissy regenerator + new intimidate for special attackers + more access to recovery and roost and auto-healing abilites across the board. if ur struggling early-mid game just get a quag and wall everybody, trust

now onto the epiphany: could be burn out since competitive singles dominates about 30% of my life in between youtube recommendations, me & my friends' draft league, spare showdown sessions, and occasional romhack runs like this but i think the appeal of mons to me will never be fully unlocked. about the 7th gym here i kinda got bored of all the shocking new changes and really just kinda wanted to be done with the whole endeavor lmao. as cool as the new changes are the game never feels like it can catchup to player ingenuity in a way that another player would, resulting in either some self-imposed limitations to even the scales or AI just using legendaries out the gate to even the odds. its cool that drake has a mega rayquaza, i guess? but if u got to pull out that shit just to make the game difficult i feel like there's some other considerations in terms of AI and trainer team building to be had here. likewise i look forward to when this gets some kinda movepool or ability expansion, not to undercut the sails of the aforementioned changes because they all are genuinely fun but like the shit boils down to the same archetypes for mons we've had since like gen 3: hits hard but slow, hits hard but fast, walls physical, walls special, gets up hazards, removes hazards, etc etc etc. the fact that any given mon can fulfill at least one of these roles viably is great, but without any change to the way these niches interact with each other or the kind of core teambuilding considerations to competitive pokemon as a whole its very whatever. maybe playing the whole game in doubles woulda fixed that (doubt it) but about 30 hours in it felt like i was swapping variables for the same formula rather than experiencing some transmutive. and look i get it, romhack, can only expect so much, and the scope achieved here is already crazy impressive, BUT i would be lying to u reader if i didnt walk away wanting more & more....for once i see gamefreak's vision in how they've tried to shake up battling for a decade now with z-moves, dynamax, terra, etc. z-moves were the best out of those IMO but like we need a gamefreak version of drive gauge or some shit--this is in many ways a lot of pokefiends' dream romhack, but the dream has made it clearer than ever that we've been smokin mids.

bitch youuuuuuu are a stranger. this broader aesthetic sense of making art thats like an overtly long talk therapy session with some two faced white woman is becoming maddening to me. i dont think its appropriate to belabor this because the "quiz" here is such a harmless & secondary example of it, and maybe is more self-aware than im pinning it, but also i had a pretty stark realization in here that i've heard this exact voice, story, talk, expression, diction, & conclusion more times than i ever thought possible. u kno both folks here probably said "power differential" 1 too many times in the relationship. forgive me but i gotta talk my shit for a minute: yall's own self-admitted lack of agency & disproptional reactivity dont bother yall?????? self-pitying shit is as much of a power play as anything else u woulda known that if you were up on ur nietzsche by now. might as well let ur fucking nuts hang & make art and say shit about what you would do if you had things your way instead of what would you woulda done were you the perfect lil tweebell them PhDs is tryna get you to be. like the final conclusion here is an overtly self-conscious epigraph about how being too self-conscious is bad. you bitches need an intervention!!! i may be a broke ass bitch ass nigga but trust that rapping along with pap when he goes "hunnid on me...these bitch ass broke ass niggas better not say nothing to me" prepares me to tackle life's problems more than anything coming from this lane. maybe im a sociopath and got a impaired sense of empathy & dont get it but also ian seen nary a post or analysis or even a interpretative lens that would reward deeper investigation of smthn that got this "autoethnography" or whatever stench on it. another big whiff from itch.io 4 me.

this noreason fellow is an interesting character. in comparison to his more crafted and measured works like death in excess or disparate realities, nosp3 is an effigy of slaughter & megaWAD motifs with scribbled Crayola crayon marks and protruding nails. here lies 32 1000+ monster count maps where the bestiaries of valiant, eviternity, scythe 2, and probably some other shit all mix together with some of the most excess combat you can design while being boom-compatible. 'fuck it, we gotta fuse now' is the siren's call: not only is the bestiary getting an exponential increase but so are your ammo limits (200 rockets and 440 energy cells that double with a backpack, can i get a hell yea), your health totals (megasphere brings you to 400% health and 400% armor, 100 dollars on the chain n its not no game), and your weaponry (Plasma Rifle + RL + BFG are often your first 3 pickups, and occasionally an infinite ammo RL with cave's auto fire enabled...i see the opps outside less go catch em 🏃‍♂️🏃‍♂️). ion think a doom wad has felt like this much of a bootleg since the original chillax, so that noreason is able to craft something mostly coherent out of the 100 different cogs at work? very impressive sir very impressive. i say mostly coherent though because the core combat here is actually being sprite-to-sprite in a monster horde with BFG in tow n holding onto mouse 1 for dear life, until you hit the next megasphere or energy cell pack, then skirting around the edges of the crowd to hit the next objective point. i have and will make a lot of hyperboles bout slaughter but this is the most salmon-swimming-upstream, Ys-bump-combat, kusoge-idea-kamige-execution headass game i played this year, even as i write this 7 months out of my completion. prime example of what im talking bout is map 23, you don't even gotta fight a whole lot in this one the finale is just to light the infighting dynamite and hope you don't die when the hordes start self-combusting. made me feel like riley with the steel chair effect. map pack is low down n dirty but ingenious; i didn't even mention the fact that there's cacodmeon variant here that shoots cyber rockets, but the only visual difference is that its a slightly brighter sprite than the regular one. like what is blud even cooking up in this wad 😭😭😭. crusty & rusty ass game get a tetanus shot after every play session.

and so the long arduous process of adding shit to IGDB begins 🧍‍♂️. haste is a kind of a flashpoint entry in slaughter's "new canon"--it's a revived collaborative project spearheaded by slaughter's own revived pharaoh in insane_gazebo, and features the '92 dream team of guest mappers you'd want for this new era of the genre: the wizard ribbiks delves into his esoterics for two maps, nirvana gets in his monochromatic bag and delivers a really hellish slice of combat for a map, they even plugged benjogami here to craft this really striking, almost Pythagorean challenge map centering 90s slaughter's love of fireblu and obtuse geometry that ends up being a map pack highlight. the "newest" member of this all-star roster is bemused, who also punches in a decent map that shows off his student-like devotion to the genre's grandeur and antagonistic style of crowd control. the rest of the maps are composed mainly by insane_gazebo and former project head scotty: particularly interesting fit for scotty, who i'd deem has become kind of like the p.j. tucker of the genre (or the clefable if you dont follow hoops) in his versatility as a "glue guy" for these map projects, the rare talent in the scene who's able to mesh with the more subtle, congressional slaughter WADs like Fractured Worlds as well as get turnt with the excesses of WADs like Abandon. I'm not the biggest fan of his map output thus far, overall feeling uneven: his usage of hitscanners is more frustrating than provocative but his understanding of finales and how to squeeze multiple cyberdemons in small spaces is really good, maybe the best of the out the group. his maps here didn't necessarily move the needle either way for me, but i think his status as the most agreeable mapper in this scene should be noted for posterity, and its cool that this project of his came to fruition, even if it was by proxy.

so in sum, the shit shoulda been popping, shoulda served as like THE entry point for what this doomworld micro-scene has been cooking up these past three years...but its just straight mids 😑. which is honestly kinda rare for me. my main disappointment was that in spite of the visionaries on board this is a really muted aesthetic overall--there are some maps like the aforementioned nirvana and benjogami maps that break with the style, as well as an insane_gazebo tune that is concordant with late sunder's striking aesthetic (can someone with architectural knowledge spot check me and see if it would be accurate to describe this as Neo-brutalism), but everything else here is just bland. in no small part i think its because the color palette and architecture here are a more revisit of the aesthetic established by the 90's and early 00's WAD canon than the really grandiose OTEX texture wizardry contemporary slaughter is known for. it perhaps draws out a sense of familiarity for folks who haven't been tapped into the Doom scene outside the existing WAD canon, but it in turn made this feel more like a map-pack than the emotionally evocative experience the mapper list had me pumped for. when i play the other hits of these mappers i feel the precariousness, the sense that the shaky alliance of infighting i've generated might explode into uncontrollable hostility at any given moment; i feel the sense of alienation, illuminating a social truth about the dance of coalitions being built not on personal affinity but mutual, dynamic priorities; i feel that perseverance, the 'no easy answers' kind of problem-making that demands arcane knowledge and foresight and yet a sense of play in devising solutions. all of these feelings are latent in these mappers' gameplay motifs sure, and present in this map pack, but it was their individual aesthetics, the mythology of gazebo or the claustrophobia of benjogami, that accented these chords to the forefront. that boldness makes engaging with this micro-scene a really gripping experience in ways other mod scenes have yet to hit, and so to have all these personal styles blend into sights & sounds that already have been so thoroughly replicated is like, damn,,, what a disappointment. should serve as a sharp example that it has been the attention to visual spirit that has made this micro-scene one of the most popular doom things of the past few years as much as it has been the combat revolutions. shit's isn't really all that without it. slaughter's 1train p much.

shit goes crazy why nobody said nothin? important reclamation fiction of what shoulda happened after the #8 seed franks upset the #1 seed umayyads at the battle of tours: the legacy of the caliphates, mythologized into a assassin quasi-prophet who kicks really hard and fast, spinnin back to hit a vicious stain on the now globalized "West" and "Neoliberalism" across 5 side-scroller stages. look i know "the west & neoliberalism" mean absolutely nothing beyond "uh america & profits" in the current critical landscape but the opps here are the Federal Government (proper noun) and an Attorney General who double crosses you after using you to put down a religious cult in the Persian Gulf. shits like a silver bullet made for the Bush family's headtop and a very personal short call of the Dollar System as far as political specificity in video games go. contra strider, osman asks you to put the weapon down and beat ass with two hands and feet--you'll be sliding n gliding n crouching through the mud like any side scroller but the greatest mechanic here is the afterimage system. each powerup you get gives you an brief stationary clone that'll stay in your last attack spot and synchronize with your attack inputs for the next few seconds. seems strong enough right, but the real trick is to plant like 8 of these clones right in somebody's hurtbox, run away, then start whiffing like a ken player to trigger all 8 of those attack clones at once and deal unconscious amounts of damage in quick succession. nomiss runs of this are like 15 minutes because of how much burst damage you can put out in addition to the bombs--bosses here can go out sad in like 20 seconds if you've been on it in keeping your powerups & bombs available. was this intended? maybe, but it made avoiding any death to keep my resources really critical, and some sense of tension along with unhinged ingenuity is all i ask from the MAME experience these days n i got it in spades. there's also some metatext here but honestly just taking this shit at face value was a joy. prescient in recognizing the global south is where the revolution at and we're just kinda pussy.