NO ABSOLUTES
NO GRAND MASTERS

within interactive media, one could find myriad instances of games that could be best described as wasting one's time. menus and metaprogression for hours, idle selection. story sequences to kick back and soak in. this is a phenomena that is best described as "low gameplay density".

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS is the absolute opposite. from the moment you hear the barely-human "ready, go", you begin to waste each and every millisecond of the game's time (don't worry, it's counting them for you!).

Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS iterates on the desperately needed improvements to the timeless soviet program of pattern recognition made by Arika with 1998's Tetris The Grand Master. quality of life improvements have been made, less for the player and more for the arcade operator, but one should never underestimate the performance of proficient player. emphasizing speed and precision amidst the chaos of fair, high-frequency pseudorandom number generation. movement at instant gravity, managing the shape of the stack as a means of player survival. i tend to consider TGM1 as the transitional entity between the "old" school of tetris, alongside Tetris DX and other proto-SRS games from BPS. (the old school of tetris includes but is not limited to nintendo's 8-bit RSI-inducers, atari's endurance testers and sega's 1988 single button primate neuron activator.) arika iterated on, and subsequently continued to perfect the rotation and piece movement introduced in sega's 1988 release, which is a far cry from the sanitized snoozefest that has manifested as the henk rogers mandated Official Tetris Guideline. 7-bag randomization and the Standard Rotation System are without question the absolute worst thing that has happened to falling block puzzle games, and that culminated in a set of rules that is only conducive to player proficiency within a competitive multiplayer environment (read: oops! all t-spins), which i will never care care for, and i will not be be paying for an online service on the thing that has collected more dust than my wii u just to give arika's return to the four blocks dropping a lot a try. (smash that mf <3 button if you've ever passed out [as in started falling asleep] 3 hours into an endless marathon game, 2 hours past the timer's upper limit, in any post-Tetris Worlds Official Tetris Company Licensee Product Strictly Abiding By The Official Tetris Guideline)

100% Video Game: Complete With Life Ruining Potential!

alongside the third Leader Bee game from world renowned mobile gacha game developer Computer Art Visual Entertainment Interactive Company Limited (the fourth one of those overall, and the third Great [as in prefix] one. Now Avaliable On Nintendo Switch And Sony Playstation 4), Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS was the arcade game i played the most throughout my 20's. for months on end, and pretty much the entirety of 2015, the only video game i could touch was Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, an incredibly efficient use of video game playing time all things considered. it is probably not coincidental that 2015 and the first half of 2016 were the worst years of my adult life, and it would make sense that i spent my video game playing time playing a variant of what is probably the only video game with healing attributes, but even then it's not without detriment...

firm/sonic drop was a mechanic arika added to Tetris With Cardcaptor Sakura Eternal Heart, which is effectively momentary 20g on demand, instantly bringing the piece down WITHOUT locking in place, unlike the hard drop required by The Tetris Guideline. firm drop's effect on the pacing in the first half of a clearing run is monumental, pushing the skill ceiling to heights never duplicated in the realm of four blocks dropping a lot. now, the player is in control of the game's rate for the most part, pushing the game until the game begins to push you, total player agency in making order of pseudorandom chaos. any millisecond spent in a state of uncertainty is a millisecond spent wasting the game's time. a rhythm consisting of any order of rotate, firm drop, shift and lock begins to unfold, and if your performance is on point you will be locking the pieces on your own terms up until the lock delay begins to decrease. every addition to the stack should account for the piece you might get 5 peices from now, despite only being able to know about just one piece ahead. the rotate-shift-drop-lock rhythm sears itself into the subconscious, the tuned bleeps announce the next piece to help you keep your eyes attached to where it matters most. a perfect connection between human and machine. you might forget to blink.

...perhaps some things are best experienced sparingly, too much medicine can lead to destructive behaviors permanently altering ones brain chemistry. during the periods of my life where most of my recreational interactions with machines involved Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, something about my thought processes seemed off. beyond a state of what's been studied as the "Tetris Effect" (not to be confused with Rez Tetris), bordering on full blown Tetris Psychosis. maybe it was just an uncovering of a latent, broader ailment that had been chiseling its way to the forefront of my synapses, maybe it was just an obsession not unlike a dependency. waking moments, in situations far removed from the interaction between human (me) and machine (x86_64 computer pretending to be a hitachi sh-2, with lever and multi-button interface), patterns recognized within Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS would intrude the moments of life removed from it, as my brain would try to make order of the sensory chaos of the world. maybe i will reveal an aspect of the self for the sake of this anecdotal retrospective, but it's more likely that this piece of software revealed that aspect of my self to that very self. i am pretty sure i'm not supposed to be hearing this when i'm out at the grocery store, but i did, and it was at first a bit terrifying, but i've come to live with it and things like it, and accept it as a part of me. heightened pattern recognition amidst the pseudorandom chaos of life is a trait, a trait that can be as overwhelming as it enlightening, as complimentary as it is all-encompassing, as damaging as it is enriching. such is life.

Mastering Mode

a key difference between arcade games (both electromechanical and video) and its far seedier relative is fairness. you master the machine, rather than the other way around. despite sharing bits of language (but not the entire language) with one another, they exist(ed) in disparate realms of machine-human communication. a machine that masters the human is one rooted in cognitive exploitation, a human that masters the machine is emblematic of a state closer to the martial arts rather than the "haha number go up" such programs and machines are far too often misconstrued to be. a skilled player will get the most out of their credit, a rightfully earned state of success. contrast this with the relatives of such machines, ones which do not require skill, which seek get the most credits of their victims "Players", feeding off their anticipation of a probable, yet uncontrolled state of presumed success. "Do Nothing And Win Big!!!" vs "Take Everything You Learned And Perform To The Best Of Your Ability"

before my supple mind was altered by Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, i had spent around 12 alkaline AA's worth of time on Tetris (v1.1) for the Nintendo Game Boy (an unmodified DMG-01, to be exact). that's probably the only version that i have come close to actually being a master of as of this moment (more on this later, well technically simultaneously but Later is how i will roll), alongside Sega Tetris (1999). firm drop, 20g, zangi-moves and even the concept of lock delay were foreign to me, but the sheer speed and seemingly infinite skill ceiling of arika's take on the soviet computer game of pattern recognition would burrow its way into my subconscious, permanently cementing itself into the upper echelon of Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation, or perhaps a part of the lowest unmoving foundation that all Things Humans Made Microprocessors Can Do For Human Recreation sit upon. subtle alterations made by arika may not seem present at first, especially to a novice player (to arika's flavor), but a player is very unlikely to be completely fucked by the (pseudo)randomizer here as it would be in, say, any of the versions preceding Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS's predecessor. it provides a much more engaging and challenging assortment than the malaise of that which is now required by The Official Tetris Guidelines. what's the point in making order of chaos if the order isn't slightly chaotic? chaos will ensue, but it's a chaos that is fair and under control rather than whatever the fuck was going on here.

Tetris Affect

once 20g is in full swing, you have no more chances to second guess. that's not to say second guessing won't occur - it will, and you are likely to be punished swiftly if you aren't adept at managing overhangs or the misdrops that come with the act of second guessing (or with careless haste!). i've come to recognize that some problems are best addressed at a later moment, when the mind has achieved some clarity, but not lost focus. but, Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS, unlike it predecessor, continues its trend of actively minimizing downtime once the player has reached 20G (a quality of Not Your life improvement). it leaves them less time to spend ruminate on where the 5th peice from now might go, less time spent removing that which no longer needs to be, less time spent dropping four blocks, more four blocks dropped. it primarily does this through tightening the various delays until it becomes something only the most adept players can manage, but something that can still be overcome with human intervention. in fact, the player never, ever loses control until either a failure state is achieved or until AFTER the credits roll. some inputs (rotate and shift mostly) can be buffered during some delays even as they grow ever tighter, but there is never a moment where a player is not in control of the peices somehow. i didn't quite realize this until about a year into playing any TGM, but initial rotation is a thing, and it rules, an absolute necesity for the back half's instant gravity. it too plays an audio cue as soon as the peice comes into the field and leaves the queue. less time spent rotating four blocks, more four blocks to rotate. an unrelenting pace for all <10 minutes it would theoretically take to see those credits begin to roll. not a single moment wasted in every respect, the sounds give just enough information without being totally drowned out by some of the finest work by aya and megaten, and beneath the playing field and peices lies a constantly moving assortment of machines that never once tend to distract (see: Sega Tetris[1999]).

what you've heard is probably true, but is probably more of a byproduct of human pattern recognition, ritualistic machine interaction and neuron activation, courtesy of said machine. i would continue to just see squares everwhere, as if they were mocking me. sometimes they were beckoning me. i didn't mind and wouldn't have had it any other way. maybe the next time i really start to play this game i will see and hear them again, maybe they miss me. sometimes i do too.

any other iteration of four blocks dropping a lot will never surpass this, certainly not under supervision of henk rogers. i feel like arika themselves didn't quite surpass this with Terror Instinct, which may be mechanically robust, but is a major step back in its presentation, with just rotating .pngs for its backgrounds, lacking the sharp, cold bite present in Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS. a perfect, audio-visiual-interactive experience. arika were The Absolute best to ever do tetris. forum dullards who love to go "if you can't handle Hardcore Games like "Doom eternal" just go and play tetris because that is baby game for people like you (babeys)" should be forced to play Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 PLUS' "The Absolute Death" mode until they can last for 4 minutes in it and nothing else.

bless the fine folks at hamster for making this far more accessible, and maybe there on my Ketsui Deathtiny machine i will one day see it through to that orange line.

but the most i've seen is an S7.

the bush family is playin with that voodoo bad

bogwater oil company crusader propaganda disguised as the closest to an arcade game people born after 2000 will have statistically experienced. i did try to play it with genuine video game enjoying intentions (best moment was a noobtube headshot across the river and into the house on overgrown) but that desire just went away after getting even more depressed every time i looked at my statistics on the leaderboard, friends or global, it didnt matter. pointless statistics in a scheme run by the powers that be.

in order to fight off this game's primary intent (convincing teenagers to go die for an oil company under the guise of education, in its heyday i almost succumbed to an ammosexual autism spearheaded by this very computer program) i would proceed to nearly become another statistic (victim of the opioid crisis), join a hardcore search and destroy lobby (de_ for the cstrike fiends) attach a rubber band to the right analog stick to spin around, and another rubber band to attach a shitty earbud to the 360 headset mic, load up a soundboard on a laptop and wreak havoc upon the Most Serious G*mer's, absolutely convinced there was another human on the end of that mic, as i spun around rapidly in spawn, letting the rounds drag on as i hear the degrading words degrade into sounds no longer resembling words. that was the most fun i had within the metaverse of call of duty 6 lobbies on microsoft direct-x box three hundred and sixty's Direct-X Box Live Gold Connectivity service. i wouldn't be the f[THIS USER CAN SAY IT!]got i am today without the stern encouragement of the average microsoft Direct-X Box Three Hundred And Sixty's direct-x box live gold connectivity service user.

alteriwnet was alright too

Uplink: Hacker Elite was an important game for the script kiddie phase of my childhood. Many hours were spent figuring out Uplink’s systems, finding the secret missions, and learning the game with each game over. Not only was Uplink the first (well-known) hacking simulator, but in my eyes it’s still the best. Even in my adulthood I replay Uplink at least once a year. To express my love for Uplink and its 20th year anniversary, I will now dissect its fetid corpse and show the world the innards that make up this unholy mess.

At its core, Uplink is a loading bar simulator. Hacking is done by opening a hacking tool, pointing it at a security measure of the system you're connected to, and waiting for the tool to finish its task. Until you can buy some better hardware or tools for your virtual gateway to speed things up, you’ll have no choice but to wait, doing nothing but watching bars on the screen fill up for about half a minute. It’d be nice if Uplink allowed you to fast-forward time to skip the wait--which it already does! But only by minutes and hours. Considering hacking into a system triggers an active trace that will catch you in one or two minutes, skipping ahead by several minutes or hours per second is a good way of getting an instant game over. Another solution for preventing the player from doing nothing but waiting is keeping them engaged with minigames to speed up the hacking, which several other hacksims already do. But then you better have a large amount of them like WarioWare, or create considerable depth for the handful of minigames that do exist.

How you go about applying hacking tools in Uplink is shallow. Each can only do one thing and be used in one way, and all security measures that you have to crack are similarly one-note. To get admin access, you point your Password Breaker program at the login screen and wait for it to finish. To break an elliptic-curve cypher, you point your Decypher program at it and wait for it to finish. To get around Proxies, you activate your Proxy Disabler and wait for it to finish. To get around Firewalls, you activate your Firewall Disabler and wait for it to finish. And if you’ve got the money, then you can buy a Firewall/Proxy Bypasser and just skip the wait altogether. The order in which these security measures are cracked usually doesn’t matter, nor do any of them have any kind of synergy where one affects the other. In short, most of the hacking in Uplink is just a shape puzzle in disguise.

In Uplink’s defense, the real puzzle is figuring out how to actually accomplish your objectives and avoid getting caught. This isn’t as simple as it sounds. Past the tutorial mission, Uplink doesn’t hold your hand at all (aside from a Help page which you aren’t told about and have to find on your own), and you’re overwhelmed with all kinds of options available to you from the get go, where you just gotta figure out what options you actually need. Although breaking voice locks is a matter of playing back a recording of the admin’s voice using a Voice Analyser, you’re not told how you can get your hands on such a recording. The missions for destroying a person’s life do not even give you a target system to hack, you need to figure out on your own what system can be used to accomplish the mission. How you can actually destroy and shutdown a system isn’t something you can do with any tool, and requires a more unique solution. All you can do is scour the internet (in Uplink) for clues on what to do next. Basically Uplink’s puzzles take more after those commonly seen in point ‘n click adventure games, where it’s less about discovering new applications for existing mechanics (i.e. Portal, Recursed), and more about figuring out and applying the internal logic of the game world.

There’s only one major problem: Uplink is structured like a roguelite (or to be more accurate since Uplink predates roguelites, it’s structured more like the Elite games). If you consider that getting caught results in a permanent game over (thankfully Uplink will let you get away with only a fine and criminal record if you fail the beginner missions), and that missions are randomly generated based on a set of 16~ mission types where the only random factors are the company name and the reward amount, then that involves redoing these same puzzles over and over. Even without permadeath, you would still be grinding out missions of the same type to get the money you need to buy the necessary tools for the higher-level missions, so repetition is inevitable. Here Uplink should have fully committed to either being a linear game with handcrafted and unique missions with and no permadeath, or to embrace being a roguelite and go hard on adding more randomness and variation to the missions.

The only mission types that seem to break this mold are the LAN missions, but even they are a failure in that regard. They involve having to break into a semi-randomly generated Local Area Network, which are made up of several computers and unique systems blocking your way to the main server. Except the fact that the layouts being semi-random doesn't really matter, because each security system type within a LAN also has effectively one solution that stays the same regardless of the layout. It is, again, just going through the motions. At that point in the game you will probably have a Monitor Bypass, which prevents you from being actively traced until you gain admin access to the main server in the LAN, so there's again next to no time limit pressuring you while you're slithering your way through a LAN.

The only true exceptions to this are the final main story missions for both of the two story branches, which are by far the high points of the game. Both missions are not about figuring out how to break into a system, but more about hacking into as many systems as possible before an invisible timer hits zero. And because you can only do this mission once per run, you don’t have the comfort of fully knowing what to expect, resulting in a very tense situation. Go improvise. At the same time, the final missions don’t ask something out of you that you can only learn through trial ‘n error; they mostly involve applying what you’ve done throughout the entire game, and you’ve already gotten a chance to get familiar with the non-standard mechanics in previous storyline missions. All that remains is whether you got the sleight of hand and nerves of steel to do it. A final mission like this in a permadeath game where you have to redo 1-3 hours of gameplay to get another shot if you fail could have easily become an exercise in frustration, but thankfully Uplink doesn’t throw a last-minute gimmick or a difficulty spike at you to make failure on your first try near-guaranteed.

Although the hacking itself in Uplink is shallow, there is one important element you do need to keep track of: time. When you initiate a hack, the system you’re connected to will start actively tracing you, giving you a limited amount of time to get in, do your business, and get out before your location is traced and your ass is sent to jail. Your Trace Tracker will beep with increasing frequency the active trace is about to complete, which adds a lot to make the hacking feel suspenseful. The game being permadeath also has to do with it. Being given a limited amount of time in turn makes you ask which one of your loading bars you want to prioritize to get in ASAP (although as said before, this usually doesn’t matter), as you can control how much CPU power each program gets to complete their task faster. In a sense you could say it's similar to solving a Rubik's Cube or playing Tetris: if the solution to the puzzle is obvious, then on repeat playthroughs the only fun lies in how quickly and accurately you can apply that solution.

Unfortunately, this whole element of time management is hamstrung by how the bounce paths work. Basically you don't want to directly connect to a target system, because that gets you immediately traced, so instead you want to route your connection through several other computers to make the trace last longer. The problem is that from the very start of the game you can find over 80 systems to bounce through, making traces against you last an enormous amount of time. There is also no downside to having such a long bounce path (other than the initial investment of having to manually click a gajillion indistinguishable boxes on an crowded world map to set up your bounce path, which you can thankfully save and load for future use), like suffering massive lag because you're routing your connection from France to Australia.

Having tons of time to perform a hack in turn also affects the usefulness of hardware upgrades. Buying a better CPU for faster hacking becomes more of a QoL upgrade than an essential upgrade, better modems with better download speeds become redundant, and storage space upgrades for the missions where you need to steal a massive database aren’t as necessary, because with the tons of time at hand you can safely make several trips carrying the loot from the target system to the depot server. And because hardware upgrades are less useful, gateway upgrades also become less useful, since now there’s not as much of a point to upgrade your gateway and get more hardware slots. Software upgrades almost always take priority over hardware upgrades because you simply cannot complete certain mission types without the right software, whereas hardware upgrades are more or less there for quality of life (with the exception of a few storage upgrades so you can fit all software tools on your gateway). If the time you had for hacking into a system was more limited, then there would be more of a reason to consider hardware upgrades, instead of the dominant strategy always being about prioritizing software upgrades.

A bit less FUBAR is the macro-level time management. Every mission you take also comes with an expiration date (usually about 4 days) after which the mission is automatically considered a failure. Failing or abandoning a mission will mean taking a hit to your Uplink Agent level (which prohibits you from taking higher-level missions), and doing so repeatedly will have the Uplink Corporation sack your incompetent ass for an instant game over. Time in Uplink progresses just like in real-life, so at first it seems like you have plenty of time. Then you find out that you accepted a mission for which you don’t have the right tools or the money to buy those tools (a common occurrence when you’re just starting out), so you need to do other missions first. Sometimes there are no available missions (that you can actually accept or have the tools to complete) on the mission board anymore, so you have to fast-forward time and hope the mission generator generates a mission that you can actually take on. Some missions involve having to skip ahead a few hours before news comes out of your hack as confirmation to your mission giver. The hardware and new gateways you buy also aren’t applied instantly, but take about a day to be delivered and applied. What you can also do is accept another mission, but negotiate with the mission giver to get paid fully or half up front in exchange for getting the mission done in one or two days respectively. This allows you to get the money you need to complete the mission you accepted earlier, but if done incorrectly you can sink into a greater time debt, and end up having to fail several missions which you cannot complete in time. As you can see, there are a lot of macro-level time issues that you need to keep in mind if you don’t want to run into a money or time debt.

The only problem here is that to have these deadlines imposed on you and to have macro-level time management be a relevant skill at all, is to accidentally accept missions whose tool requirements you don’t know. But once you know what tools you need to complete a given mission, you can avoid these deadlines altogether, and along with it the interesting decision making that comes with macro-level time management. The only other deadline of note is having to have at least 300 credits in your bank by the end of the month to pay your monthly Uplink subscription fee, but in Uplink 300c is total pocket change. Uplink could make macro-level time management more relevant by pushing you into situations where you want to borrow money, such as by having you rely more on tools you can only rent, or by having the main story push existing debts onto you which have to be cleared before the deadline. This kind of emergent time management layer of strategy comes more naturally in games like Pathologic (2) and Dead Rising 1 where these deadlines are imposed on you from the get go.

Aside from active traces, there are also passive traces. All the actions you perform on a system leave behind logs, and the feds will take an hour or two to follow your bounce path until they find your real IP, so it's essential to delete the logs that you leave behind if you don't want to get caught. The problem is that this is so trivial to do that it becomes nothing more than busywork, and has no interesting choices tied to it at all. How and where you go about deleting your logs doesn't matter--you can have your bounce path always end at the same server and the feds will be none the wiser. It is a chore that you must perform every now and then, where the only danger involved is accidentally forgetting about it. This is especially the case when you learn that the best server to wipe your logs at is the InterNIC server, for it is the only server in the game that doesn’t initiate an active or a passive trace when you try to hack it. This system could have worked better if you couldn’t repeatedly use the same server to cover your tracks with.

As for one thing in Uplink that does grip me, it’s the presentation. The user interface is very minimalistic, which for a 2001 game set in 2010 is surprisingly prescient, given how minimalism for UX design is all the rage at the time of writing. Uplink’s visuals manage to strike that right balance of Hollywood hacking where it’s just flashy enough to look cooler than your own desktop (primarily through the usage of sound effects and rad animations), but restrained and grounded in reality enough so it doesn’t look downright silly and hard to take seriously (like the depictions of hacking in any police procedural ever), while also not being too abstracted to the point where it doesn’t resemble actual hacking in the slightest (cyberspace, baby!).

That said, the usability of the user interface in Uplink is another matter. There is no ability to select or copy-paste text, which means that you need to manually input numbers and IP addresses by hand every time. There are no keyboard shortcuts for most functions, so you need to manually repeat manual tasks using GUI menus and the cursor. You cannot set macros for things like launching all your Bypasser programs either. Mission descriptions and e-mails are all grouped together in a messy horizontal stack at the bottom right of the screen, all of which are depicted by indistinguishable icons that don’t clue you in on what the contents represent, so you’ll be spending some time combing through several missions to find the one you actually need. This gets especially messy when you’ve ordered several hardware upgrades at the same time, and you’re gonna have to manually delete all the useless notification emails if you want things to not be a total mess. The lack of tabs and windows means there’s a lot more menu trawling than necessary for when you need to go back and forth between particular menus, instead of being able to place them side-by-side. Having solutions for UX issues like this doesn’t only make the user interface more pleasant to use, but it also creates a larger skill ceiling. Discovering certain tips and tricks to perform repeat tasks more easily and efficiently is a joy in its own right, and also actually useful when you have to hack a system under a time limit (even if in this case that time limit is borked).

Although I have been very harsh on Uplink, I still love it if only for its uniqueness and untapped potential. Most hacksims since Uplink took the linear puzzle-by-puzzle approach, but none have taken an immersive sim approach of trying to simulate the internet like Uplink tried to. While you mostly interact with the world in Uplink through missions, there are also additional servers like a simple stock market system that’s affected by which companies you benefit/ruin, a news server that reports on hacks performed by you and other NPC hackers, each NPC has its own bank account and academic/criminal record that you can mess with, and there are even a few secret missions that you can trigger on your own if you pay close attention to the world. These are all unfortunately minor which you don’t have much of a reason to bother with outside missions, but it shows that you could certainly expand on this reactive open world concept.

What’s particularly interesting is that Uplink is completely menu-driven, and therefore expanding the world or gameplay systems like this doesn’t require much in the way of audio/visual assets. The whole game being a simulation of an OS and the internet also provides a convenient narrative excuse to not require complex physics/animations/graphics/what-have-you like your standard open world game. That indie developers (which technically also includes the Uplink devs themselves, who are still trucking to this day!) haven’t really tried to dethrone Uplink yet in this regard is really one of life’s greatest mysteries given the amount of potential present, especially considering how nowadays the Internet is playing an even larger role in our life than 20 years ago (to be fair, I haven’t tried NITE Team 4 yet, I’m hearing interesting things about it).

A lot of stuff in Uplink is simply uncooked, which becomes especially apparent when you replay it. For an experimental game cooked up by bedroom programmers making their first ever commercial game, that’s to be expected. However, Uplink does show that it can serve as a blueprint for at least the presentation, world simulation, and time/money management aspects in a hacksim.

The neat thing about Doom's classic mod scene is how easily you can observe the evolution of game design over time, as well as a community's priorities and preferences; it becomes clear what ideas had lasting power, and which didn't. As Doomsday of UAC approaches its 30th anniversary this summer, this early fan level retains its iconic status despite how unkind time has been to it. The minute I exit a cleverly sculpted wreck of an 18-wheeler, greeted by an industrial park teeming with demons and "realistic" features, that's how I know I'm playing something special.

Doom modding in its nascent days amounted to either (a) poking around in hex editors, trying to create a cogent WAD file through trial and error, or (b) wrangling the initial batch of pre-Windows map editors which loved to crash and/or corrupt your hard work! It's a miracle that something as fun, well-paced, and innovative as this map from Leo Martin Lim came together at all. (The other miracle is that levels this old are still preserved in their original archived form, and we have Ty Halderman and his successors in charge of the /idgames FTP archive to thank for that.) All college kids who played some version of id Software's original Doom in its launch days had many ideas for mods, but so little experience and precedent to build from. Lim wasn't even the first to release anything beyond a series of sketchy boxes with monsters and weapons—Invasion…: Level 1 - Contamination beat it to the punch by about a month, replete with special effects and new assets like music and textures. But Doomsday of UAC proved that you could make a similarly cinematic experience using just the base game and a host of magic tricks exploiting Carmack's engine. It helps that this map has solid combat and exploration in its bones, too.

After crawling from the wreckage, you're pressured from all sides by a trickle of imps, pinkies, and shotgunners ready to pounce before you can assemble an arsenal. This prompts a mad dash through a midnight maze of boxes, trailers, and enemy groups one might want to use against each other. We're far from the clean, abstract but believably efficient spaces that Romero designed for Doom's Episode 1…nor is this anything like the trap-driven dungeon crawling one finds in Sandy Petersen's levels. Doomsday of UAC marked the beginnings of what FPS modding circles call "Doom-cute": heavily kit-bashed replicas of architecture and objects like cars, toilets, etc. using only the original game's resources. The tipped-over truck with a spinning wheel looks impressive already, nothing like what id's crew displayed in the shareware and payware episodes. It gets even more exciting when you realize it took a lot of sector geometry manipulation and a well-placed texture animation effect on certain lines for this to function at all! There's just enough breathing room to admire the scenery while gunning down monsters and collecting the necessary ammo and key cards to proceed.

I shan't spoil the rest of Lim's one and only wonder-mod since it relies on a clever twist or two, but just know there's some trickery afoot, creeping up on players as they head further into this corrupted corporate complex. Hidden usable doors guard access to visible yet seemingly unobtainable power-ups. A conference of powerful baddies lies deeper within the offices, guarded by hapless imitations of the salarypeople who once roamed here. Even the bathrooms and parking garage aren't safe! Considering that Lim and other authors also had to build around the Doom engine's strict limits in this pre-source port era, the level of detail and scope in Doomsday of UAC matches and sometimes outdoes OG Doom maps like Mt. Erebus. I don't know that it exceeds the best parts of id's game, particularly Computer Station or Containment Area, but the ingenuity on display here always brings a smile to my face. Best of all, there's never too much going in the player's favor, nor too little. Weapon and encounter balance feels spot on, the secrets are rewarding to find (nor essential to a fault), and the sequencing of incidental combat into traps and back rarely feels awkward.

Doomsday of UAC is still a 1994 FPS mod, though, warts and all. It's very easy to get through for a modern Doom fan, even those who have only played the official games. Texturing and level of detail is mostly sparse aside from the aforementioned set-pieces. The famous "crystal sector" room can just end up feeling gimmicky or frustrating if you haven't kept a backup save ready. Nor is the original Doom's bestiary and set of player options as ideal for these large open spaces as Doom II's equivalents. I've warmed up to the original's emphasis on cacodemons, rockets, and copious cannon fodder thanks to later WADs like Beginning of the End and Doom the Way id Did, but the general experience for early Doom mods can feel underwhelming if you've played anything much newer. The best moment arguably comes right before the end as you deal with an elaborate cyberdemon trap to nab the red skull key, which involves tangoing with barons of hell and lost souls in the process. This would have been an intimidating puzzle for players of that period, and I get a kick out of it now. But in the back of my mind, all I can think is how much crazier I'd redesign this into, using modern tools like Ultimate Doom Builder and such. At least the transition from "invaded office space" to hellscape remains evocative today.

Overall, I'd say Doomsday of UAC more than deserves its lauded spot in the history of DIY world-crafting and FPS fandom. It features prominently on Doomworld, both in its 10 Years of Doom feature, with its close rival Invasion…: Episode 1 unfortunately absent. [1] Lim's mod was further recognized fifteen years later via the site's Top 100 Most Memorable Maps retrospective, the only map predating Doom II's release to rank in the top 10! [2] And if that's the consensus from community veterans, so often locked in debate over what classic mods and maps truly influenced what, then who am I to downplay the quality and significance of this one? Running through the infested UAC corporate park has become a rite of passage for many players seeking entry into the depths of Doom modding madness. I won't deny it seems quaint and clouded by nostalgia nowadays, yet even Romero himself has highlighted this as an example of the game's impact on future developers, if not id Software themselves. [3] The early success of mods like this and Slaughter Until Death paved the way for id (and competing developers) to hire these amateur designers, or simply license community projects like TNT: Evilution for commercial release as shown with Final Doom. My heart goes out to the unsung pioneers like STONES.WAD; it's simply hard to compete with a milestone like this.

[1] Tropiano, Matthew, and Not Jabba. “Top 100 Memorable Maps 10-1.” Doomworld, December 9, 2018. https://www.doomworld.com/25years/top-100-memorable-maps/page10/.
[2] Watson, Mike, and Andrew Stine. “The Top 100 WADs Of All Time: 1994.” Doomworld, December 10, 2003. https://www.doomworld.com/10years/bestwads/1994.php.
[3] John Romero (20 January 2015). "Devs Play Doom." YouTube. Retrieved 21 January 2015.

you had to be there

when the online wasn't a ghost town it felt like the full experience it quite obviously isn't in any other context. the fashion; the modular create-a-wrestler style movelists; duels. it was delightful, if insanely obtuse in ways it never should've been allowed to be. absolver is a dreamer's game, made with the impractical grandeur of idealists

the dark souls veneer followed by the realization that the single player content was a total wasteland certainly turned some folks off, and it's not tough to figure out why. uncover this shortcut, now fight this boss, now calibrate the north western stance in your cardinal direction combo deck. regular people turned to goop when this shit hit; folks were disintegrated for thinking it's another R1 bonanza. this is a fighting game, baby, or at least the corpse of one

revisiting it now is a bummer. just doesn't hit the same way without player interaction. an extended tutorial devised to usher you toward a wider community that's dead and gone. bones long turned to dust. the fallout 1 death screen where you're slumped in the desert repeating for eternity

ppl talk about when mmos lose their communities, but there's something extra sad about this space + time for me. reaching for the moon, designing a combat system so heavy and nuanced, and then having it relegated to fighting hollows in the undead burg forever. purgatory shit. gustave dore woodcuts depicted this exact scenario and we should've learned from them

true marvel of ungoverned spirit. these kinds of indie games rarely felt so brazen and optimistic as in those ten minutes in time

resident evil is a part of a surprisingly and increasingly marginal tradition of games that realize the intrinsic degeneracy of unlimited saves, especially quicksaves, or at least realize that saving is relevant to how one plays. thus, there are ink ribbons: a scarce resource one must expend to save their game. suddenly saving is an economic decision rather than a mindless amenity one is probably taking advantage of nigh-constantly, trivializing much of the game and removing any tension. now one is incentivized to go up to an hour or two without saving, meaning one is thinking a lot more about their actions -- and is a lot more stressed, perhaps even horrified, by potential failure.

infamously brutal in the first hour or so but unless one is filtered they quickly adapt. that brutality is, in no small part, because of how awkward and unintuitive the combat is. a part of that is the despised-by-many tank controls of course, but those are quick to learn even if there's some lingering unwieldiness that never goes away. elsewise, camera angels are often not in your favor, and even when they are it can be hard to tell if you're actually aiming at what you're trying to. combine that with scarce ammunition, healing items, and saving as aforementioned, and combat becomes both very deliberate and, when things go wrong, a desperate scramble to both avoid death and save resources, when you decide to engage in it at all. some of the threat is eventually undercut by the sheer abundance of ammunition and especially healing items later on, but it never fully goes away.

when you aren't killing dudes, you'll be exploring and navigating, and you'll be doing a lot of it. it is generally pretty difficult to make mere traversal all that interesting, but here it is pretty enjoyable. the looming threat of combat and therefore potentially death being around the corner is ever-present, and even absent any threat the world is very tightly designed. every room feels very distinct and identifiable -- to the point where, even though one is provided, you barely ever need to use your map. puzzles and similar challenges are interspersed, making it just complex enough that often enough you are not merely going from point A to point B but instead thinking a little more about what you're doing.

dialogue writing? voice acting? what do you mean? i have no idea what you are talking about.

Humanity sleeps in the machine. It gurgles for breath, suffocating beneath smoke and gunfire within the netherworld. I grip the joystick with hands like claws; the sweat feels wrong, like oil on water. Heads-up display signals flare all around my vision as I wrench the exoskeletal warrior through warehouses, space stations, and forlorn caverns. When the foes aren't robots, they're pilots just as feckless and desperate as I. The job is king—morals are optional. Captains of industry march us inexorably towards doom, and I'm just trying to keep my head down, chin up against the rising tide. The harder I fight, the deeper I explore, the more I sense the great chain of being start to fray.

Armored Core…that pit of vitality lying within the most veteran of mercenaries, and an apt title for the series to follow King's Field. From Software staff would tell us they bungled their way into developing this game to begin with, but it's appropriate they'd shift from one dark fantasy to another. Both series deal in obscure, arcane worlds, just with divergent approaches to non-linearity and game complexity. They started life as 3D tech demos before unfolding into realms of mystery and danger hitherto unseen on consoles—the kind of innovative experience Sony hoped would set their PlayStation apart from the competition. And for all the nitpicks and missed potential I can (and will) bring up, it's impressive how effectively this studio captured the one-man-army appeal of mecha media versus other developers' outings at the time. From a simple animation test to one of the studio's core franchises, it's a hell of a leap. [1]

| From this point on, you are…a Raven… |

Mecha action games on the PlayStation weren't in short supply before Armored Core (AC) arrived, though I'd forgive you for believing that. The earliest examples—Metal Jacket, Robo Pit, and Extreme Power—all featured some amount of mech customization and variety in scenarios, but always with caveats. None of them had the storytelling emphasis that From Soft's game introduced. At most, Extreme Power let players choose which missions to attempt first, acquiring points to buy new parts if successful. But that still lacked elements like e-mail chains and running a deficit after overusing ammo and/or failing missions. Robo Pit introduced the extensive parts system within a 3D versus fighter context, and Metal Jacket focused on simpler open-field battles a la MechWarrior. (Though the latter remains maybe the biggest influence on so many mecha games to come, it didn't receive a PS1 port until the same year as Armored Core.)

If anything, I see a lot of commonality between the first AC and Front Mission: Gun Hazard, the latter releasing in 1996 with some notability. Combining the series' heavy geopolitical tone and intrigue with a game loop and structure akin to Assault Suit Valken, Squaresoft's game reviewed well and prefigured the genre hybrids they'd produce for Sony's machine. Critically, they also reworked the parts-as-equipment framework from Front Mission, balancing it with arcade-style pacing and more wiggle room for players wanting to test drive multiple builds. The trouble with mecha xRPGs, then and now, is motivating constant character creation (aka editing your mecha) in order to complete stages, ideally while avoiding damage and long-term costs that could ruin a playthrough. I have no way of knowing if the original AC devs were familiar with Gun Hazard and how it elegantly solves these issues via its mix of complex story, set-pieces, and missions designed to reward creativity.

It's hard enough to make a sci-future this dreadful so enchanting and replayable. Armored Core's semi-linear plot and trickle feed of environmental worldbuilding go far in reifying the player's ascension to ace pilot, a new hero of chaos. People are right to point out the jarring, confrontational "initiation" battle, a middle finger to trends of tutorialization beginning in the mid-'90s. Surviving this teaches one to never fully trust the world they're thrust into, be it the obtuse mecha controls or the machinations of agents, corporations, and other Ravens contracting and challenging you. The fun comes from accepting these additive layers of masochism, a reflection of the decaying worldview which From Soft presents without irony or pomp and circumstance. It's on the player to investigate and understand their predicament. Future series entries add fleeting moments of cooperation and optimism to mitigate the grim bits, but the tone here's consistently muted and adverse. Absent are the triumphant flourishes of Gundam or even VOTOMS, replaced by an engaging but ever-present indifference to the erasure of people and elevation of proxy warfare.

| You have the right…the duty to find out. |

Opening missions in this game settle into a formula of scout, destroy, rinse and repeat, followed by a shopping spree. It's never quite as comfortable as you'd hope; browsing for a new radar attachment after gunning down protesters feels ever so morbid. Nor are you interacting with fellow Ravens during the majority of a playthrough, instead fighting or helping a select few through happenstance. Armored Core keeps players at arm's length from the consequences they wreak upon the world, often chiding them through AI monologues and tetchy e-mail chains. This odd pacing and story presentation lets From Soft transition between unusual missions and plot beats without breaking a sweat. The further you work for Chrome or Murakumo to the other's downfall, the murkier the mystery gets, with ulterior motives of anonymous agents pressuring you into service.

Thankfully there's a decently balanced in-game economy to support the amount of experiments and risk-taking the campaign requires, though not without problems. Buying and selling are 1-to-1 on cash return; you'll never enter the red just through shopping. Instead, the way most players wreck their run is by abusing ammo-based weapons and continuing after failing missions with mech damage. Save scumming isn't a thing Armored Core looks down on, but it will go out of its way to promote ammo-less tactics with energy swords and simply dodging past optional foes. Around halfway through the game, it arguably becomes more important to scour levels for hidden parts instead of relying on the diminishing returns from Raven's Nest inventory. I wish this first entry had done better at keeping the market relevant, but it wasn't to be.

My go-to build throughout the story was an agile, energy-focused quadrupedal range specialist dressed to the nines with secret parts. (If the game let me use the Karasawa with these legs, oh boy would I have been unstoppable!) Sure, there's a lot of fun one can have with beefy machine guns and missile options, but getting the most cash out of missions requires plasma rifles and mastery of lightsaber stabbing to play efficiently. While Project Phantasma struggled to balance the economy back towards non-energy offense, it wouldn't be until Master of Arena that the series largely evened out the trade-offs between common mecha archetypes. For instance, tank-tread mecha in this first game are actually damn powerful due to a lack of movement tricks for the bipeds, but it all falls apart when it's time for platforming or quickly escaping. Bipeds often get the class-favorite treatment in this genre, yet struggle to wield a variety of parts and weapons to handle most challenges this game throws at you later on. That leaves quad-legs builds as the most flexible and resilient option at higher levels of play, a flawed but interesting subversion of what's usually seen in mecha anime and manga. (Ed: Yes, I'm aware reverse joint legs exist. No, I don't use them in a game that punishes jumping all the time. Later AC games handle it better.)

With all these incentives combined, the pressure to learn the classic Armored Core control scheme and physics becomes bearable, if still overbearing. I've come from other tank-y mecha games like Gungriffon, so the adjustment period wasn't too bad for me, but I get why many newcomers stick with analog-patched versions of the earlier entries. Memorizing the timings for boosting before landing to minimize lag, or how to effectively pitch the lock-on reticule and snap back to center, matters more than anything in the first couple of hours. Then add on tricks for circle strafing back away from enemies, often while firing guns or launching missiles, and the combat evolves from awkward plodding into a dance of destruction. And there's no arena mode here to let you practice these techniques in a consistent, scaling environment. A veteran Raven or horse of robots can descend upon you in any of the mid-game/late-game missions, requiring quick reactions and establishing a zone of control (or retreat). It's sink or swim in the truest sense. Past the teething phase, it's easy to return to this control scheme and feel one with the AC, even after years have passed. I won't doubt that full dual-stick analog controls will work even better and enable a longer skill progression, but I adapted to the famous claw-grip style quicker than expected.

| "Pledge allegiance to no one!" |

Any problems significant enough to keep Armored Core below a 4-out-of-5 rating or higher must be deep-rooted in the game's loop and structure; that's sadly true for the level and encounter design here. I'm far from opposed to dungeon crawling in my semi-linear mecha action-RPGs, at least when there's room enough to blast around duels (plus verticality to reduce the claustrophobia). Still, a few too many stages in this debut feel like holdover concepts from King's Field II instead of properly scaled settings to wrangle a mech through. The difference between enjoying "Kill 'Struggle' Leader" and dreading "Destroy Base Computer" boils down to whether or not the story framing is compelling enough to justify zooming through non-descript (though nicely textured) hallways for most of their runtime. Occasionally the designers get clever with metal-corroding gas, inconveniently placed explosives, and other traps to keep the spelunking varied; I had a hoot tearing through the insectoid lairs like I was playing an antique musou game! But later series installments improved these confined missions with more arena-like rooms and affordances to players who make it far in and then can't win due to a sub-optimal build.

If I had to speculate, wide open-ended maps are less common here simply due to hardware constraints, be it rendering ACs and other actors in any abundance (regardless of level-of-detail scaling) or the enemy AI struggling with pathfinding in combat on a broader scale. It's a shame regardless since bombarding installations across water ("Reclaim Oil Facility"), going en guarde with a berserker atop a skyscraper ("Destroy Plus Escapee"), and rampaging down public avenues ("Attack Urban Center") offer some of the best thrills in Armored Core. Objective variety and complexity never reaches especially high regardless of mission category, so just getting to rip up groups of MTs, droids, and ACs goes a long way. Defending a cargo train in the desert starts off humble, then escalates to defeating a full-bore Human Plus combatant interceding on the situation. A series of undersea tunnels and chambers, well-defended and secretly primed to implode, threaten to bury you while avenues of escape close off. A select few dungeon crawls also open up in unexpected ways, particularly those set on space stations where vertical engagements come into play. I didn't think mecha and sewer levels could work, but here I am grinning as I pursue Struggle operatives down waterways or methodically undo their bombs within a rat's maze of air treatment tunnels.

Armored Core rarely has bad missions so much as disappointing or overachieving ones, which makes the finale so uniquely odd. By this point, the entropic cycle ensnaring Chrome, Murakumo, Struggle, and adjacent organizations has caused untold devastation across the earth. Now even the Raven's Nest falls, revealed as the illusory sham of governance it always was. Even bit players in the narrative pitch in, waxing over e-mail about the futility of these conflicts and what's really driving it all behind the scenes. So, with all this build-up and conspiracy baiting, I had high hopes for the last hour, wishing for an epic battle and world-shattering revelations to boot. Sure, I got the latter (if in a minimal, trope-adherent form), but instead of satisfying gladiatorial action, I had to ascend the fucking cubes. Everyone's got a horror story about "Destroy Floating Mines", it seems, and I'm just glad to have survived this much awkward, drawn-out platforming using my quad-leg AC. Squaring off against Nine-Ball afterward isn't quite enough to compensate either, not unless you can have an even pitched fight against this iconic rival and win the first couple of attempts. (The penultimate chambers also reflect poorly on the camera's ability to track fast-moving combatants, even if it makes for an exciting sequence.) I can still appreciate how From Soft didn't explicate too much at the end, instead trying to confound players with interesting questions and non sequiturs in the level design itself. It's all a big joke and we get to grimace through it.

| Shape Memory Alloys |

In conclusion, it's a good thing From Soft nailed all their game loop, distinctive mechanics, and interweaving systems here. The original Armored Core is unfortunately limited with how it challenges players, both in level design and mission pacing. Not having an arena to lean on makes completing the missions with maximum efficiency more of a priority, which can lead to excess retries and scrimping on investments in hopes of affording something better later vs. smoother upgrades in the short term. (I do appreciate how only fighting other ranked ACs within missions makes the Ravens' dynamic more hostile and contradictory, but the game does so little to expand on that angle.) These problems sting less knowing that, as a prototype of adventures to come, this game still accomplishes so much with so little.

Not many series strive to reach a profile this high while teasing players with details out of reach and mysteries about its development unanswered. Anyone invested in the wider world Armored Core hints at, from the shadowy groups running these underground beehive cities to the horrors hiding behind Human Plus, has to read through "data books" (artbooks) and track down magazine previews for scraps. We're only now getting English translations of the artbooks and related articles, all of which are coloring the fringes of the AC universe while only letting trace amounts of humanity through the barrier [2]. And as far as these games are concerned, pilots' backstories and white papers on neural augmentation procedures amount to nothing. Heroes and villains drop in and out of history like mayflies—only shocks to the system register on the scale From Soft's using. We're just along for the ride.

It feels like there's still so much else to analyze here: how the studio crowbar-ed their King's Field engine into handling these pyrotechnics, the peculiarities of Human Plus endings as difficulty modifiers, let alone the timely yet appropriate electronica soundtrack. A lot of PS1 releases from this period struggle to make the best use of their developers' skills, assets, and remaining CD space. I wouldn't say Armored Core succeeds at the latter, using only a few FMV sequences at key points in the story, but it's a remarkably lean and appealing game relative to its own premise. Replays come naturally thanks to multiple Human Plus tiers and the freedom to play all missions upon completing the story (plus making new saves to transfer into Project Phantasma). The controls here, though lacking in finesse, carry forward into a good chunk of the later games, with concepts like boost canceling staying relevant even after the switch to analog. Contrast this maturity with all the pratfalls From Soft made during their King's Field days. They'd learned how to not just lead in with a better start, but retain their creative momentum on budgets larger and smaller with each sequel.

Armored Core represents a coming-of-age for the PlayStation as it entered the midpoint of its lifespan, setting a bar other mid-sized studios could aspire to. Its rough edges hardly mar what I'd call one of my favorite experiences in the system's library so far. Maybe I'm going easier on this one due to my enthusiasm for the genre and the myriad themes this game explores, from cyberpunk dystopia to the malleability of history in the post-modern. It could just be that the core game's so, uh, solid after all this time. I chose not to rely on Human Plus for my first playthrough and that might have helped. No matter how you approach the series today, it's awesome to see it debut this confidently, and plenty of players must have thought so too. The Armored Core series became From Soft's backbone for a decade before the Souls-likes came to replace it, and what AC achieved for mecha games (and ARPGs in general) can't be overstated.

| Bibliography |

[1] Alex “blackoak,” trans. “Armored Core – 1997 Developer Interview - Shmuplations.Com.” PlayStation Magazine. 1997. Shmuplations. https://shmuplations.com/armoredcore/.
[2] Reddit. “Translations of Pages 103 to 105 from the Book Armored Core Official Data Book.” Accessed January 14, 2024. https://www.reddit.com/r/armoredcore/comments/x940dj/translations_of_pages_103_to_105_from_the_book/.

there's a divine sickness here

kaleidostepping thru wormholes and slipgates as glass contortionist. future ghosts looming in red silhouettes. shapeless forms ticking down toward birth. a remote viewer orbiting above a shrinking planet. a killing field itinerary. liquid gold warping into sinister geometries as you try to claw sand back into a broken hourglass

so thoroughly enveloping as to be transportive; the exit back to common sensation being as disorienting as the ominous entrance. delayed anxiety and nausea upon release from cruel hypnosis. rewriting neural pathways with everything you don't want in your brain

long live the new flesh

ENTRYWAY
thirty second par
but how could anybody
want to leave so soon

initially my plan was to write a series of 32 haikus, one for each level, with the intention of succinctly boiling things down into a heartfelt gesture. the problem there's that doom II's anything but succinct; it's a towering, monolithic game that bears down on you at all times. breathless formatting, increased enemy numbers, more byzantine, avant garde mapping, chaotic texturing, new enemies, and a one-of-a-kind fan community that's opened up an endless limitless world of More Doom and turned it into something you could spend a lifetime emerged in without seeing everything worthwhile or learning all its finest details. to try to sum things up poetically is a fool's errand; doom II can't be boiled down into 544 syllables, least of all by me

REFUELING BASE
this from the man who
put 95 spawns into
quake episode 4

a narrative has developed that suggests doom II's second half is something irredeemable — not just underwhelming, but outright bad — and it's a load of shit. if you don't like TENEMENTS or COURTYARD that's an indictment of your taste, not the quality of the mapping present here. the way sandy in particular maps with such expressive, inventive, and experimental brushstrokes is something we should relish and appreciate; doom and quake wouldn't be what they are without his contributions, and he's one of the genre's most important level designers hands down

that the game feels like a fever dream is largely a result of his 17(!!!!) maps and their wild refusal to adhere to conventional logic or standard. people out here begging and crying for euclidian techbases when my man barfed textures in a pile and turned it into something as good as TRICKS AND TRAPS. "SUBURBS ISNT REALISTIC" you scream into your pillow while I smile big with my cute dimples showing cos I'm enjoying a really fun map. "CHASM IS BAD" you shriek so loud you get evicted while I enjoy some first person platforming and reminisce about turok dinosaur hunter being the best game on the N64. no one, and I mean No One advanced the space for creation here more substantially. fuck verisimilitude, let's dance

SUBURBS
welcome all neighbors
to our annual cookout
bring your own bodies

they could've called it perfect doom: an evolutionary step that marked its final form and near-complete status as a standardized toolset. they could've dropped the number and signaled it as just being a big ass messy sloppy cuhrazy megawad and called it a day and 99% of the shit talk would be stopped in its erroneous tracks. really, I don't even think there's a good argument that doom's better unless you're looking at it as some hermetically pure retail project rather than a couplet of frameworks or stepping stones to greater ideas. hindsight is 50/50, but we're graced with enough distance now to know that any assessment of the material should be done while understanding what it wrought; that none of this exists in that Big Box Vacuum and never really did — shareware being the first and last exposure many, many people had in the first place, and doom always being a game that's chopped n screwed in as many ways as possible. doom is ragged and raw; it's tendrils, it's wild kudzu and overgrowth and every idea every middle schooler ever jotted in a notebook. to appraise this in a sanitized quarantine is geek shit I simply can't abide by. this is an immaculate vessel that had the good grace to show up with 32 mostly sick maps

THE FACTORY
fifty indie games
that look exactly like this
steam early access

if any game exists as some kind of broad communal accomplishment, it's probably doom. opening with an open source branch to the community, and closing long after we're buried in our technograves. ads for lotions interrupt our epitaphs while someone named grizzlyguzzler releases the cacoward winning "scronky bonky II" and sets neo doomworld ablaze with passionate discussion. Did You See The Part Where. I Can't Believe That. How Did They Even...

billionaires in bad suits pump sicko dollars into metaverses and games-within-games-within-games; some eternal platform-slash-cenotaph is conjured by the world's most killable humans; disfigured 3D models waggle and wave in cyberspace trying desperately to create something as remotely meaningful, intravenously sucking on your wallet to please money perverts before being sent to the scrap heap

good fuckin luck

DEAD SIMPLE
perfect little map
the homages will go on
past our life and death

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.

the greatest Doom wad of all-time - more than a Doom wad, really. one of the great games of the 2010's in general. a confoundingly multi-faceted piece of art, with some questionable bits that only enhance the mystery. a poetic statement about the nature of memory and death presented in the context of a Doom fan wad. more fun than you think it's going to be from what i just said in the previous sentence. weirdly coherent for a set with so many different authors. has more creativity in a lone fingernail than many commercial games have in their entire body. i know games don't have bodies, i'm just speaking metaphorically here.

i wrote TWO articles about this wad, so you know i have a healthy relationship with it. see my article in Vice from several years ago about it: https://www.vice.com/en/article/paq5bz/alt-doom-mod-stalker
and my older post on Unwinnable about it: https://unwinnable.com/2013/10/24/lost-worlds-a-l-t/

Inclement weather on the horizon: bullet rain, blood runoff in the streets, industrial parks desecrated by their own designs. No glorious anthems play in the background, just stings of death, the musique concrete of battle. A Wellsian steam-plane leads the charge, swerving and shooting past all that approach it. The pilot smirks, then grins in morbid delight. "Let 'em wail, like any of them can stop me!", he cries. Like a flying shark, the well-dressed dilletante in his top hat and goggles then gores the seas, cities, and alien motherships of his time. It's just the flight man's burden.

"Earth, 1999. But the Earth [is] of a different timeline. There are no microwave ovens and TV is still in black and white." Banshee's manual tells a simple premise: as Sven Svardensvart, steampunk viking he is, you must defeat the imposing Styx Empire, first by liberating a thinly-disguised United States from the aliens before hijacking their technology to escape Earth and face the Styxians on their own planet. It's a humans vs. invaders plot in a vertical arcade shooter, what more does one need? In the peanut gallery, I hear five words: "Anything but an Amiga shmup!" And make no mistake, I did a lot of research before settling on my first Western STG from the microcomputer glory days. There's a wide range in quality between, say, Tyrian and Xenon 2: Megablast (it's okay, Bitmap Brothers, you made up with The Chaos Engine later). American and European PC shooters tend to suffer in key ways which reflect either (a) developers' crippling isolation from Japanese arcades and fan communities around which major innovations could foment, and/or (b) a focus on presentation and pushing technology at the expense of fun, skillful play, and optimized controls. Extra negative points if the game in question targets a genuinely obscure or difficult-to-obtain platform like the 3DO or, in this case, the ill-fated Amiga CD32. With so many CD32-first games bombing commercially and critically, how well could this one hope to do?!

I'm happy to say that Banshee mostly avoids those pitfalls. This ended up less like a poor Scandinavian take on Toaplan, Capcom, and Konami STGs than I feared; at times I felt like I was instead playing the best parts of Flying Shark or 1943, now without the fuss or bumps in difficulty (at least until the end). Though hardly without flaws, or any ambition beyond a polished take on WWII-adjacent STGs, I was impressed by the first impression this title gave me, and those new expectations held up for the most part.

| Fly with me and the daring Swedes |

Banshee wouldn't exist without the rakish vision of Søren "Hannibal" Hansen and Jacob Anderson, who brought their game to Core Design and got the publishing greenlight for a cross-Europe release. To their credit, Core also provided Martin Iveson, their veteran in-house musician, to help score the small but groovy EDM soundtrack introducing and ending each playthrough. But beyond manufacturing, distributing, and paying royalty checks, Core left this program to its contract creators. There aren't any differences between the Amiga 1200 (floppy) and CD32 (uh, CD) versions, apart from loading times for the latter. Emulating the latter was actually more consistent on my end when playing in WinUAE, but I'll chalk that up to misconfiguration.

Right away the game launches into stage 1, a vast expanse of ocean spanning multiple screens' worth of playfield. Enemies only respawn within the player's view frustum, as is typical, and astute players will quickly notice the health-bar on left. Banshee only commits one of the supposed cardinal sins of Euro-shooters by letting your plane take multiple hits before meeting its violent end. Here, though, the developers have very good reason to give players some leeway: this game has no continues. Yep, you just read that. It's 1994 and some devs somewhere still had the courage to prevent quarter-feeding entirely. Just learning the first stage, then, becomes a priority simply to gain ground and attune to Hansen & Jacobsen's rhythm of design.

Of the more classic influences here, 1942 and Twinbee stick out the most, with loop-de-loop attacks and shootable power-ups in play. The former allows you to temporarily escape fire, damaging anything under your path in the process, while the latter gives players the chance to switch power-up types so long as they can keep the item on-screen. That 'ol juggling act's back, in steampunk form, with a need to both defend against enemy waves, evade tricky patterns, and keep the ship in tip-top shape for what's to come. I found myself using loops as infrequently as expected, while I took my time on each run flipping pickups until I got just what I needed. Need to wreck some large but ponderous aircraft? Cycle to the missiles and get ready to dodge more fire than normal. Scared of incessant UFOs and boulders on the horizon? Like most shooters, there's a perfectly usable spread-shot ability worth nabbing. Best of all is the "build-up" system. Upon collecting three of the eponymous upgrades, your best weapon status gets saved for your next life. This reduces the frustration of accidentally dying to a boss and only having a pea-shooter upon revival, or when forgetting to pick up shield upgrades partway through a level. Overall, there's solid meat-and-potatoes STG design happening here—nothing revelatory, but more considerate than its Amiga peers by and large.

| "Blardax Maldrear, uglier than a Phreenian Foot-toad" |

Making one's way to Planet Veenix, the throne-world of this story's antagonist, won't be easy even with the aforementioned abilities and lifelines. Banshee's true sin is not pacing itself better, featuring four very long levels which, while diverse in environs, tend to drag like in weaker Compile STGs. Couple this format with no way to continue and we've got ourselves an often frustrating adventure. Hitting 1-up thresholds and keeping the build-up meter at max becomes its own game, one you'd be foolish not to master. Hannibal & Jacobsen are perfectly happy to take their time, slowly iterating on enemy groups and shot patterns with breathing room to spare. This feels great when the run's going according to plan (or, in the learning stages, at least feels manageable), but one bad turn and the urge to restart grows. This urge comes upon me something fierce in stricter genre examples, like Raiden or Hishousame, so to sense it here saps some of my enjoyment. Many patterns and mini-bosses felt a bit underbaked, too, though not enough to ruin the experience. While this program could stand to run at a faster framerate, it's decently smooth as is, and the keyboards controls are as intuitive as the glossy brass UI.

Something this game never falters with is its B-movie sense of humor, both in visuals and sound design. I've seen a couple reviewers compare the art-style in Banshee to a mix of Cannon Fodder and Metal Slug (maybe some Boogie Wings as well), with deep earthy colors and attention to detail in the unlikeliest places. Pseudo-World War vehicles and soldiers all scramble to swat you down from the skies, yet their own deaths range from grisly to gallows humor. Burnt lackeys wither to bone and dust; city-goers mind their own business while a 1 vs. 1000 war rages across avenues; lighthouses, factories, and hulking ships all go up in brilliant flame and debris once the titular craft has its way. I'm not sure what's more sad, the fate of these brainwashed Gis or the thought of having one less unexpectedly hilarious STG to play. Canned PCM-audio cries of agony and constructs shredding into chaos make great use of the Amiga's Paula sound chip. And let's not sleep on Iveson's moody electronica during loading screens, a helpful reminder of just how '90s this game is.

The latter half of Banshee takes off the kid gloves, moving us from seaside bases and an Edwardian metropolis to icy, arid wastes before taking a climactic journey into the stars that'll make Metal Slug 3 blush. It's here where the no-continues, no-checkpoints structure can either heighten tension for the better or spoil a good run. The key factor which Hansen & Jacobsen nailed was balance; rarely did I ever feel unfairly outgunned or juked by the game. It's honestly designed from start to finish, even in the final half-hour's worth of intertwining projectiles and kamikaze attacks. Don't go in expecting a swerve towards danmaku leanings, or any overabundance of stage hazards (though some sequences dabble in them to great effect). Think Jamestown but with a more conventional arcade-y template and a comparatively refined minute-to-minute game loop. For lack of a true Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow shoot-em-up, this can fill in the blank for the foreseeable future.

| Stir in an Alternative Dimension |

Core Design had a talent in the early '90s for featuring the best works of just anyone they could find off the proverbial Amiga street. Sure, most of their releases were self-developed projects, but they had a frequent collaborator in The 8th Day (Heimdall [2], Premiere) and adopted other outside teams' works a few times, always to great results. I think it's telling that something like Banshee arrived in time to herald the CD32's push for games that could directly compete with better offerings on NEC, Nintendo, and SEGA platforms. Don't get me wrong—these efforts weren't successful, and the CD32 was stillborn despite the occasional bright spot like this game. But there's a fascinating "what if?" to consider where Core, Team17, Psygnosis, Rainbow Arts, Ubi-Soft, Cryo, etc. put their all into accessible yet unique games that could have buoyed the ailing Amiga marketplace.

Banshee in particular feels like the kind of throwback arcade shooter which rarely happens today. Its level of sincerity, genre awareness, and muted presentation is a hard sell to those browsing digital stores now, expecting more "bang for your buck" features and runtime. But back in 1994, this could still pass for a full-price release; some groans about just four levels aside, there's plenty to engage with here when playing for score. I haven't yet tried Hard difficulty yet, but Normal feels, well, the way a normal and engaging STG of the time should. Press outlets all had loads of praise for the title, with many proclaiming it the new standard in Amiga shooters against a slate of competing games. Most of those accolades are hard to take for granted, given the dearth of strong original STGs on any Western PC by then, but reviewers and fan letters were on to something, however quaint their opinions have become.

The transition to 3D and multimedia-driven consoles, along with dwindling outlooks on the arcade industry and its game design trends, meant there'd be little room for something like Banshee to take root and thrive. If Japanese shooters were starting to have trouble staying relevant to all but a niche audience, then what more could those dubious Euroshooters hope for? Banshee could handily showcase some of the finest AGA-accelerated Amiga graphics around, but the pursuit of 2D excellence largely became the task of versus fighters and xRPGs. Hansen & Jacobsen must have seen these changes coming, soon joining Scavenger Inc. to work on their technically-outstanding games A.M.O.K. and Scorcher for PC and Sega Saturn. The coder eventually worked his way up into Shiny Entertainment and then Microsoft, while the artist found footing later at IO and now Unity. I hope this game, among other formative Amiga-era works, hasn't just become a footnote to overlook, but a case study in how to nail design fundamentals and make something more than the sum of its parts.

All my waffling aside, Banshee is worth one's time when looking for a solid mid-'90s PC shooter. Worst case, you could even play through this for the "I beat a Euroshmup!" credo without feeling robbed of that hypothetical better game. It's a bit janky in spots, but only noticeably so due to the game otherwise working as well as it does. There's enemy variety for days, a lonely but fitting soundscape, and four rounds of generally well-paced action to dig into. I doubt it sold any CD32 units back in the day, but that's no longer a concern when WinUAE makes this easy to boot up and enjoy with a controller of one's choice. Now, if only *I* could get my hands on an impossibly well-equipped biplane for my own battles…