roxanneB
155 Reviews liked by roxanneB
Gunstar Heroes
1993
i love Treasure but I wish this game had better checkpoints
Wild Gunman
1984
I love shooting people. I mean, wait, fuck, don't quote tha-
Game #84
Game #84
Ball
1980
STOP LIQUID-ING CRYSTALS
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
I love these funky little handhelds, but Ball is as basic and, frankly, redundant as they ever could have been. It exists purely as a tech & market demo for the concept, which Fire and the aforementioned Octopus effectively iterated on. Memes aside, I hardly have any strong thoughts on this inaugural Game & Watch unit, just sighs when I remember it exists for the sake of what came later.
The old twisted nematic tech for LCD displays is legit cool to read up on. Chemistry is still a lot of black magic to me, but there's a kind of Rube Goldberg-ish complicated engineering behind these monochrome flat panels from the period. Miniaturizing and economizing LCD displays to the level Nintendo needed for Game & Watch in general must have been difficult. They're marvels of consumer design to this day and the necessary stepping stone towards the Famicom's own blend of capability and commodity. So all respect to Ball, its deficiencies aside. We salute those who serve.
•ORGANICS WERE NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ELECTROCUTED
•YEARS OF POLARIZATION yet NO REPLAY VALUE for juggling higher than CALCULATORS
•Wanted to score higher anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: It was called "SPACE INVADERS"
•"Yes please give me SERIES of minigames. Please give me CLOCKS with it"- Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged
LOOK at what Yamauchi has been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the Ultra Hands & other toys Yokoi built for him
(This is REAL handheld gaming, done by REAL Gamers)
judge manhole donkey kong hockey
"Hello I would like virtualized clownery please"
They have played us for absolute fools
Reasons to play The Little Mermaid for NES:
It doesn't even remotely bother to follow the plot of the movie.
You're strapped to a bomb that will explode if you don't beat a video game once every 30 minutes.
It's Capcom. You like those guys, right?
You can tell people it's the true inspiration for Shovel Knight, thus causing them to, at best, stop talking to you for a week.
It doesn't even remotely bother to follow the plot of the movie.
You're strapped to a bomb that will explode if you don't beat a video game once every 30 minutes.
It's Capcom. You like those guys, right?
You can tell people it's the true inspiration for Shovel Knight, thus causing them to, at best, stop talking to you for a week.
Thatcher's Techbase
2021
March 4th, 2020: I start a new job as software developer at a bank.
March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".
March 9th, 2020: Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.
March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins.
March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".
March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time.
March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).
March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.
April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony.
April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993).
April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.
April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.
May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.
May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.
June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.
July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel.
July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.
August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.
August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.
August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.
September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game.
September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.
September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.
September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.
September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map.
September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.
September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day.
October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.
October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.
October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.
October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".
November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.
November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and I can’t get it open.
November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.
November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it.
November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.
December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.
December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.
December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.
January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.
February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.
March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.
March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at.
March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.
March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times.
April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99.
April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP
April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.
April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.
April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.
April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.
April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.
April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.
May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime.
May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.
May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".
June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.
June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.
June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.
June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.
June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.
July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.
July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.
July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.
July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.
July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.
August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.
August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.
August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.
August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.
August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.
September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.
September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.
September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.
September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.
September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.
September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.
September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.
September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.
September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.
At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.
------------------------------------
Still with me? Great. Thank you.
So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.
When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.
A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.
After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)
In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.
Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!
One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.
When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.
I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.
This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.
March 6th, 2020: Boris Johnson, leader of the Conservative Party of Great Britain, reassures the British public that the rise in SARS-CoV-2 cases is "nothing to be concerned about".
March 9th, 2020: Due to the rapid rise in SARS-CoV-2 ("coronavirus") cases in Asia and the European continent, financial markets go into free-fall. Billions of pounds of value are wiped away from companies around the world, in an event later dubbed as "The First Black Friday of 2020". My second-ever meeting at my new bank job is interrupted by financial traders screaming at each other and their phones in the corridor outside the conference room. Boris Johnson once again reassures the people of Britain that coronavirus will not be a problem in the UK.
March 10th, 2020: In the interests of personal and public safety, a number of software teams at my workplace decide to implement a joint 2-week work from home policy. An immediate evacuation of personnel, laptops and coffee mugs begins.
March 16th, 2020: A ban on non-essential travel comes into effect in the United Kingdom and citizens are advised to stay at home to curb the spread of coronavirus. The UK government claims that coronavirus "will be beaten in 12 weeks".
March 20th, 2020: Highly-anticipated video games Animal Crossing and DOOM: Eternal release around the world. Gamers who pre-ordered DOOM Eternal also receive a remastered port of DOOM 64, a 1997 first-person shooter game developed and published by Midway Games for the Nintendo 64. This port of DOOM 64 also goes on general sale at the same time.
March 23rd, 2020: My grandfather dies from complications related to the contraction of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS‑CoV‑2).
March 26th, 2020: Due to UK government health policy that strongly encourages hospitals to release elderly patients who test positive for coronavirus into the care of residential care homes, my 60 year old mother is forced to give up her role as an events co-ordinator and take up full-time nursing duties.
April 1st, 2020: Six people are allowed to attend my grandfather's burial, which is carried out by the local council's hazardous waste department. There is no funeral ceremony.
April 3rd, 2020: Looking for something cheap to distract me, I purchase DOOM 64 for £1.50 on the Nintendo Switch, mistakenly believing it to be a Nintendo 64 port of the original DOOM (1993).
April 6th, 2020: While playing map 16 of DOOM 64 - "Burnt Offerings" - I begin to realise that DOOM 64 (and DOOM in general) is something quite special.
April 30th, 2020: Boris Johnson assures the public that the UK is now "past the peak" of the coronavirus pandemic.
May 2nd, 2020: Gradually beginning to enjoy the newfound freedoms of home-working, I download GZDoom and begin playing through "DOOM", "DOOM II" and their expansions whenever my code is compiling or I'm stuck waiting for a reply to an email.
May 9th, 2020: I celebrate my 30th birthday. Between other housebound festivities, I play a wee bit of DOOM II’s MAP04: The Focus to celebrate. It’s my favourite DOOM map.
June 15th, 2020: My flatmate and I host a Streets of Rage 4 charity stream on Twitch, and attempt to clear the game's Arcade Mode on Mania difficulty in one sitting. After five attempts, we manage to make it two thirds of the way through the game before throwing in the towel. The stream raises £600 for Glasgow asylum seeker funds and social housing charities.
July 23rd, 2020: Noticing my increasingly-obsessional interest in the DOOM series, my flatmate buys me a copy of Masters of DOOM, a book that tells an oral history of John Carmack and John Romero's creation of the original 1993 game and its sequel.
July 31st, 2020: A BAFTA award for investigative journalism is awarded to the BBC for a 2019 television interview with Prince Andrew, son of Queen Elizabeth II, regarding his association with Jeffrey Epstein and alleged involvement in child sex trafficking.
August 2nd, 2020: I order a replica of John Romero's infamous "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest in anticipation of my upcoming summer holiday.
August 11th, 2020: John Romero favs a picture of me wearing my "COOL GUYS AT THE BEACH" vest.
August 21st, 2020: Twitter user @spewlieandrews makes a tweet about how he'd spend his eternity in Hell searching for Margaret Thatcher so that he could kill her again. I laugh at it and retweet it.
September 13th, 2020: Tim Rogers releases ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS DOOM, an exhaustive 3-and-a-half hour review of DOOM (1993). During his review, Tim suggests that no one can honestly claim to be a true fan of DOOM until they have tried designing their own map for the game.
September 22nd, 2020: Some "minor" lockdown restrictions are re-introduced across the United Kingdom in response to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and ICU admisssions. The government stops offering restaurant patrons its financial incentive programme for eating out.
September 24th, 2020: My girlfriend, a few weeks into her first year as a trainee doctor, is re-assigned to a new infectious diseases unit created in response to a severe rise in coronavirus cases across the city of Glasgow.
September 26th, 2020: I receive a stern warning from my employer's infosec administrator for attempting to install WINE and Ultimate Doom Builder on my workplace laptop. I promise not to do it again and remain grateful that he didn't see the GZDoom launcher on my desktop while inspecting the laptop.
September 27th, 2020: After successfully reformatting my old 2007 Lenovo laptop and installing Windows 10 on it, I begin the process of making a DOOM map.
September 29th, 2020: After a few evenings spent learning how to make working doors and windows, I create a file called MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad and decide to make a standard DOOM (1993) techbase to test if I understand what the DOOM experts on YouTube have taught me so far.
September 30th, 2020: To make the learning process funny (which is very important to me), I decide to use @spewlieandrews’s August 21st, 2020 tweet about fighting through Hell to find Thatcher as a model for MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad. Making a techbase map about Margaret Thatcher naturally leads to MY-COOL-MAP-01.wad becoming THATCHERS-TECHBASE.wad later that day.
October 8th, 2020: While in a pub on Islay, my girlfriend and I find out that the Scottish Government is restricting hospitality opening times to 6am-6pm indoors. The sale of alcohol will not be permitted at any time. News of this announcement causes the entire pub to descend into Tennent's-fuelled chaos. After securing my final pint, I go back to drawing DOOM map layouts on my phone.
October 21st, 2020: Construction begins on THATCHER’S BATTLE COLISEUM, one of the game’s main boss arenas. At this point in development, I still don’t know what a Margaret Thatcher-based boss battle in the idTech1 engine would look like.
October 27th, 2020: Struggling with mapper’s block, I decide to recreate the main lobby of Peach’s Castle from Super Mario 64 in DOOM. With a bit of texture-bashing, this later becomes one of the game’s main lobbies. The iconic castle corridor where Peach’s portrait morphs into Bowser’s - one of my most precious gaming memories ever - is easily repurposed into a Thatcher joke.
October 31st, 2020: Submitting to widespread pressure from the media, general public and his own government officials, Boris Johnson finally announces a second coronavirus lockdown in order to prevent "a medical and moral disaster".
November 1st, 2020: I finish playing through Going Down - perhaps the greatest DOOM wad of all time - and am reassured to discover that DOOM is a fantastic vehicle for comedy.
November 4th, 2020: My flatmate buys me a copy of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, a 1995 book about DOOM mapping. The book comes with a CD-ROM that has a few hundred wads on it, but after 26 years on a bookshelf, the glue has fused the CD’s envelope shut and I can’t get it open.
November 5th, 2020: While reading Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus, I come across a chapter that describes “The Best DOOM WADs Ever”. Among mods dedicated to The Simpsons and Beavis & Butthead, I find an entry for a wad called Return to Phobos. The author of Tricks of the DOOM Programming Gurus describes the wad’s E1M4 replacement as “one of the all-time great DOOM maps”. I’ve never heard of it.
November 6th, 2020: Still curious about Return to Phobos and unable to get the glue off my CD-ROM, I spend some time searching the internet for the wad file. After downloading and playing two other DOOM wads called Return to Phobos that aren’t the particular 1995 Return to Phobos wad that I was looking for, I eventually locate the all-time great E1M4 replacement. It’s a giant factory with a balcony at the rear that lets you look out at a stunning 128x128 industrial skybox. I like it. Some of the doors don’t work and the textures are out of alignment, but I like it.
November 7th, 2020: E1M4 of Return to Phobos is resurrected and thoroughly repurposed as a mining facility for THATCHER’S TECHBASE. While retexturing a big slime pit, I find out Joe Biden has been elected president of the United States. I return to retexturing my slime pit.
December 14th, 2020: I submit a fake article to my friend’s zine in the style of a 90s video games magazine article. To fill the page out, I stick some wigs on cyberdemon, imp and pinkie sprites to make them look like infamous politicians. The image of a cyberdemon rocking Thatcher’s iconic blow-dry job really makes me laugh.
December 19th, 2020: Due to a rapid rise in coronavirus infections and critical demand on healthcare services, the British and Scottish governments announce a ban on household mixing over the Christmas period. "Tier four" lockdown restrictions now apply indefinitely.
December 25th, 2020: I have an instant curry with my brother and girlfriend before they head off to work on emergency infectious diseases wards at the local hospital because people are being ventilated in corridors and are having to sleep on beds placed in storage rooms. I watch Home Alone 2 then do a bit of work on THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
January 1st, 2021: Waking up to an empty house again, I decide to spend my first hours of the first day of 2021 fucking about with THATCHER'S TECHBASE again. I am severely hung over and vomit into the bin next to my computer within minutes of trying to play the big lobby fight. Maybe tomorrow.
January 22nd, 2021: With the majority of the map's layout, scripting and enemy placement done, I decide to take a short sabbatical from map-making to do some research on the Margaret Thatcher premiership period, which lasted from 1979 - 1990. I watch a number of documentaries, fiction films andYouTube videos that are related, directly or indirectly, to the Thatcher government and its influence on British society in the 1980s. Examples include Pride, The Fully Monty, Brassed Off, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover and Pink Floyd's The Wall.
February 17th, 2021: After spending a lot of time reading very snobby, snooty and sanctimonious guides on how to do pixel art for DOOM, I begin adding my points of reference to the game as in-game textures and sprites. I find the pipeline of identifying images, tailoring them to the specifications of the DOOM engine and adding my own artistic flourishes to be one of the most satisfying parts of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE design process so far.
March 16th, 2021: Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, is photographed leaving hospital following a heart transplant at age 99. His incredibly sullen features and sickly demeanour prompt a number of internet memes and satirical artworks that I enjoy very much.
March 19th, 2021: While watching a decino video about the inner workings of the DOOM engine, I learn that Commander Keen objects (as seen in DOOM II’s MAP32) have a special property that causes them to open doors tagged “666” on a map when they are shot at.
March 21st, 2021: While doing a biweekly watch of my favourite One Piece scenes, I realise that the Commander Keen object in DOOM could be repurposed to resemble a shootable flag. I animate a burning Union Jack sprite and replace the Keen frames with it.
March 24th, 2021: New guidance mandates that all government buildings in the United Kingdom will fly the Union flag at all times.
April 4th, 2021: Buckingham Palace announces that Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99.
April 6th, 2021: After a number of unsuccessful attempts to convincingly put a Thatcher wig on a Cyberdemon, I decide to ask someone with actual talent to do it for me and commission a pixel artist from Brazil. When he asks me to do a sketch explaining what the hell I’m talking about, I realise it would also be pretty funny to give her a ripped jacket and handbag. https://ibb.co/HpLpkFP
April 7th, 2021: After a nervous 24 hour wait spent wondering if I am certifiably insane, I receive an enthusiastic reply from the artist, who agrees to create the necessary sprites for a Cyberdemon sprite replacement. The enemy has now been creatively dubbed “CyberThatcher”.
April 10th, 2021: CyberThatcher’s handbag is dropped due to logistical issues.
April 12th, 2021: Non-essential retail reopens in England and Wales.
April 17th, 2021: The CyberThatcher sprite sheet is completed and inserted into the game.
April 20th, 2021: I get a haircut for the first time in over a year.
April 26th, 2021: A leaked recording from inside 10 Downing Street reveals that in the autumn of 2020, Boris Johnson said that he would rather "let bodies pile high in their thousands" than take the country into another coronavirus lockdown. Once again, I feel regret that I don't have the time or resources available to put a Boris Johnson wig on that pinkie sprite.
May 12th, 2021: After four months spent playing my wad while listening to a MIDI version of LMAO’s Party Rock Anthem on repeat, I decide that the main map of THATCHER’S TECHBASE probably deserves a more fitting soundtrack. I contact my friend Barry Topping with a tongue-in-cheek job offer, suggesting he compose a “man on a mission”-styled metal track in the vein of the original DOOM games. As an avowed metalhead, he graciously accepts the offer of a lifetime.
May 13th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher1.mp3”, an awesome minute-long sample of the song he’s written. Much to Barry’s dismay, I inform him that the map takes between 40 minutes and an hour to beat in its present state. I have inadvertently tasked him with the horrendous job of coming up with a tune that someone would be happy to listen to upwards of 60 times in a row.
May 16th, 2021: Barry sends me “thatcher2.mp3”, an incredible six-minute long sample of the song he’s written. Much to my delight, the song is now 6 minutes long and could comfortably be listened to on repeat upwards of 120 times in a row. In honour of our new-found creative partnership and a long-standing ironic catchphrase related to the failures of the 2014 Scottish Referendum on Independence, the track is dubbed "L2VN" - "Love 2 Vote No".
June 16th, 2021: After seeing more of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, Barry very kindly offers to compose more music for the game.
June 18th, 2021: Barry produces the opening theme of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, to be used with the main menu.
June 21st, 2021: All coronavirus restrictions are lifted across the United Kingdom.
June 25th, 2021: I build a quick test area in THATCHER'S TECHBASE in order to work on some new Doomcute objects. While bashing together a few chairs, cigarettes and cans of Tennent's Lager, I realise that the test area is actually pretty fun to hang out in and decide to keep it in.
June 26th, 2021: After a few hours spent quickly map-bashing some assets from iconic 90s DOOM wad STAR WARS DOOM 2, I turn my quick test area into a UAC headquarters building and move everything out into a new MAP01 slot in the wad. This map becomes The Beginning of THATCHER'S TECHBASE.
June 28th, 2021: THATCHER’S TECHBASE is awarded an E3 best of THIS 2021 Award by MechaGamezilla.
July 8th, 2021: I share a pre-release build of THATCHER'S TECHBASE with some DOOM wad enthusiasts.
July 9th, 2021: A DOOM player and wadding/modding enthusiast with 25 years of experience laments that I didn't share THATCHER'S TECHBASE sooner - not because it's amazing, but because it's gotten wildly out of hand and he thinks it needs to get under control. He shares some very harsh but fair advice with me.
July 10th, 2021: I cut a number of sections from THATCHER'S TECHBASE in the interests of not making players go mad with confusion/stress/boredom. Approximately 2,500 sectors are deleted in one hour. With far less map to maintain, I feel much better about the project.
July 11th, 2021: An amateur DOOM player struggles to realise that a wall in front of them at the start of MAP02 is a door. I start to feel much worse about the project and wonder if anyone will be able to understand me. I begin to fear that if THATCHER'S TECHBASE was a £60 game you could buy in a shop, people would be looking for their receipts in the first ten minutes.
July 22nd, 2021: While watching footage of The Beginning, Barry notices similarities between the wad's Express Elevator to Hell and the opening of Paradise Killer. WHITEHELL, MAP01's track, is extended to include one of his signature funky interludes.
August 4th, 2021: In the middle of a rare Scottish heatwave, I play through some of Flower, Sun and Rain's most infamously obtuse and player-adversarial chapters and begin to understand the value in placing priority on my own game world over the game world that a player might expect.
August 20th, 2021: I play through the infamous toilet maze puzzle in Grasshopper Manufacture’s The 25th Ward: The Silver Case. After months of feeling guilty about forcing potential THATCHER’S TECHBASE players through harshly indistinct mazes, I suddenly feel much better about myself and the game and begin to see the humour in making gamers suffer.
August 23rd, 2021: Realising that I could probably spend months (if not years) refining the map to no end, I decide to do the one thing I never wanted to do since the moment the project began - I set myself an arbitrary deadline of September 24th, 2021 for the release of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and decide to get the wad into a playable state by that date.
August 25th, 2021: Realising that the content of THATCHER'S TECHBASE makes it an unlikely candidate for inclusion in the idgames wad archive, I make a website to host the wad instead. Inspired by my prior success raising money for charity with Streets of Rage 4, I include a donations link for organisations suggested by Hope Not Hate, a group set up in the wake of Margaret Thatcher's death to encourage people to support communities affected by the decisions of her government.
August 28th, 2021: Hoping I can find a way for the game to played by more people than just by immediate friends and appreciator's of Barry "Epoch" Topping's music, I enlist my friend Richie Morgan to make a tongue-in-cheek trailer for the game to help get the word out.
September 1st, 2021: The trailer for THATCHER'S TECHBASE is completed, but I feel like it's missing something - namely, the voice of Margaret Thatcher herself. I approach a guy on Twitter who is really good at imitating Duke Nukem and Dr. Kleiner from Half-Life and ask him if he knows anyone who could do a good Thatcher impersonation.
September 2nd, 2021: Gianni, the Duke in question, responds quickly and recommends Laila Berzins - the voice of Demeter in Hades and a bunch of anime boys in Sword Art Online. Despite my reservations about how much a professional voice actor would cost, Gianni strongly recommends that I ask her anyway. In the space of an hour, Laila sends me six voice lines and waives the majority of her fee upon learning that it's a free game about killing Margaret Thatcher that intends to raise money for charity.
September 13th, 2021: I get a cat.
September 14th, 2021: After being condemned by the UK's chief medical officer for spreading coronavirus misinformation, Nicki Minaj releases a Twitter voice note that claims she was an Oxford classmate of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher.
September 15th, 2021: The THATCHER’S TECHBASE trailer launches. In its first day on Twitter, it somehow gets 3000 retweets and 8000 favourites. A lot of gaming websites turn the tweet thread about the trailer into low-effort content for their blogs. People with small brains send me a fair few messages with insinuations of sacrilege, treason and other acts of digital terrorism. I am generally shitting myself.
September 16th, 2021: Articles about THATCHER’S TECHBASE are published in The Independent and NME. A pal from 15 years ago phones me up to tell me how excited he is to play the game. John Romero retweets a Rock Paper Shotgun article about the game and declares that he's going to play the wad. I am now really shitting myself.
September 19th, 2021: Gillian Anderson wins an Emmy Award for her portrayal of the late British prime minister Margaret Thatcher. After the awards show, Anderson is asked if she consulted the Iron Lady about the role. She claims she has not spoken to Margaret Thatcher recently.
September 20th, 2021: UK bottling plants and farm suppliers report that there is only enough C02 supply to last the nation "one or two more weeks" - this prompts mass panic buying of Coca-Cola, Irn Bru and other carbonated drinks. The price of Irn Bru immediately rises by £1.50, and multipacks are auctioned on eBay.
September 23rd, 2021: Shortages of diesel and petrol are reported across the United Kingdom, prompting a wave of panic buying nation-wide. Ambulances at the hospital my girlfriend works at are forced to suspend service, as local petrol stations have been selling their emergency reserve supplies to desperate bidders.
September 24th, 2021: About an hour before I am due to publish THATCHER'S TECHBASE on the web, my daily post arrives. A firm of lawyers representing Tennent's Lager order me to remove any copyrighted branding and images related to Tennent's Lager from THATCHER'S TECHBASE - in exchange, Tennent's Lager will make charitable donations to the organisations suggested by 3D: Doom Daddy Digital's website. I comply, replacing the T cans with legally-distinct F cans with only 30 minutes to spare.
At 12pm BST, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is released to the public.
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Still with me? Great. Thank you.
So - that's how I got here. As you can see above, THATCHER'S TECHBASE is a piss-take the just kept gaining more and more piss-taking momentum until it reached a critical mass of taken piss. A silly distraction in a hopeless situation that was ultimately powered by the twin engines of my love of a good joke and my hatred for the Conservative and Unionist Party of the United Kingdom, birthed to a Global Britain that is imploding ever-inward.
When I first opened Ultimate Doom Builder on September 27th, 2020, I never intended for my finished product to become something that would have me taking interviews from magazines and newspapers. I never imagined that folk from Brazil and Argentina would message me about how much they loved the design of The Icon of Thatcher. I couldn't possibly conceive of Scotland's most beloved lager company giving their money to social justice causes so that they didn't have to be associated with my work. I just wanted to have a good time making a game and let others have a good time playing a game. Fortunately, I think I still managed to achieve that too.
A week out from release, it does feel like THATCHER'S TECHBASE was yet another victim of the classic video game hype pathology that we've all known about since the first time Nintendo Official Magazine promised us Dinosaur Planet was going to revolutionise the games industry as we knew it forever. When the trailer dropped, people were proclaiming it Game of the Year, Game of the Decade, Game of the Century - and in a way, it kinda hurt to see people pin their Thatcher-bashing hopes on something that only I seemed to know was an amateur production. I knew people were probably joking, but I also knew people were probably going to be let down by THATCHER'S TECHBASE - and there was no realistic means of telling them that without sounding like a moron or a fraud.
After a chaotic launch day filled with technical hitches and streamers angrily messaging me with disapproval over the game's more "extreme" content, I've shied away from reading too much opinion on the wad. Some people get it; some people really don't. While Barry, Richie and my other friends did their best to elevate THATCHER'S TECHBASE into something spectacular, it is still ultimately a quick and dirty little amateur DOOM wad with some Margaret Thatcher paint coating its non-orthogonal walls. Is that sort of thing really worth writing about in a newspaper? Is that sort of thing really worth streaming to your audience of thousands? Is that sort of thing really worth five stars on Backloggd? Or even four stars? Debatable! But it's my work, and I'm proud of it. If I don't give it five stars, how could I expect anyone else to? THATCHER'S TECHBASE is what it is, and aside from a few more minor tweaks and improvements I plan to make in the near future, I guess people will just have to deal with that. (Lemme tell ya - I never imagined someone would DM me to complain that the Thatcher's Grave section wasn't "optimised for co-op play" lmao)
In many ways, I'm relieved that my criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE are other people's criticisms of THATCHER'S TECHBASE, too. I haven't yet been blindsided by any huge oversights in design or presentation, which was a perpetual worry while creating the wad. Aside from occasional DOOM-building tutorials and design guides, I tried to make as much of THATCHER'S TECHBASE as I could by myself - pretentious or not, I wanted it to be my work, my ideas, my thoughts, my feelings, untainted by outsiders as much as possible - something inside me just told me that this had to be my vision of Hell. Arguably a very naive decision, but I was worried that opening the game up to too much of the internet's collective-constructive consciousness early on in the process would derail me from the goals that were formed in my mind from day one. I wanted THATCHER'S TECHBASE to be fun to play and nice to look at, but ultimately the project was a therapeutic outlet for me in an era where everything outside of DOOM's space brought so much pain and anger... Something about Margaret Thatcher and DOOM just felt like such a natural fit in every single way. The overlap in time period, the rage, the pain, the suffering, the helplessness, the despair, the manic, desperate energy of it all - at no point in the process did I doubt that Thatcher deserved to be the subject of her own DOOM wad. It's more that the technical process of creating said wad was a huge hurdle for a first-time wadder to clear.
Obviously, my introverted development process backfired in many ways - as we read in the July 9th, 2021 entry of the THATCHER'S TECHBASE: OFFICIAL TIMELINE, I found out way too late in the development process that I'd made something over-complex and under-designed, a map drawn on a pub napkin that was crushing itself under technical and practical weights that I didn't even know existed for a long time because I was only talking to myself about it. I let my mind run wild while my body was stuck in the same physical space for months on end, and it didn't always lead to great things. Would people enjoy THATCHER'S TECHBASE more if it was shorter, more direct? If the puzzles weren't so fucking esoteric? If I'd leaned the dial of difficulty closer to the original DOOM than The Plutonia Experiment? Probably! The wad's Hurt Me Plenty difficulty was designed to be enjoyed by people who've played their fair share of classic DOOM, but I don't think I ever considered that a) the wad would find a fanbase beyond hardcore gamers or b) that most DOOM source ports automatically drop their cursor on that pseudo-Hard difficulty at load time. I've seen more than one streamer ram their head against the first two sections of THATCHER'S TECHBASE and then throw in the towel when they really didn't need to - I'm Too Young To Die and Not Too Rough difficulty are probably the right difficulty levels for most people - but given the technical limitations of the original DOOM, it's nigh-on impossible to communicate that to people that not all hope is lost; that they can still make it to the juicy CyberThatcher MK1/MK2 content if they just dial back difficulty a little. But by the same token - shouldn't a game about otherthrowing Margaret Thatcher and the systems of decaying power she represents be difficult? Like, really fucking difficult? Did you really think you could waltz into a British Hell and sort things out in an afternoon? C'mon now. The longer THATCHER'S TECHBASE exists in the ether, the less of an issue the challenges of the game should become, hopefully. I've yet to hear about anyone beating it on AUSTERITY difficulty, though, and in a weird, perverse way, that kinda makes me happy. It's not remotely fair!
One thing that has been validating about the game, in a weird way, is that the two "puzzles" I put the most time into - the "Three Thatchers" lobby and the desecration of Union Jack flag - are the two things that have provoked the most remarks, questions and frustrations. While I'm not going to wash my hands of any criticisms those parts of the game have provoked, they really were meant to tease and terrorise you until you arrived at the same conclusions I did while making the wad - that images of Margaret Thatcher and the United Kingdom have to be destroyed with a double-barrelled shotgun if you want to break free and move forward.
When you make a point of intentionally creating something in a vacuum, there can be an overbearing sense of dread regarding everyone else who's standing inside the airlock - will this silly little puzzle make sense to them? Is this fight too hard if you don't know where the health packs are? Is this bit of artwork going too far into a realm that should stay inside me? Will people be annoyed by this? All of this? That was probably the scariest thing about making something like THATCHER'S TECHBASE. Every time I approached an outsider about a sprite, a sound effect or a voice line, I expected nothing but disgust, despair or abject laughter. Maybe even a referral to a psychiatric unit. But not once did I receive anything but the greatest of care from others. Every request was met with kindness - much more kind than it deserved. People seemed more than willing to help me. And that felt fucking great.
I made THATCHER'S TECHBASE more or less by myself in a physical and mental isolation, but THATCHER'S TECHBASE wouldn't exist without everyone else. Everyone who suffered directly as a consequence of Margret Thatcher's decisions as a politician, everyone who stood up and was counted by her, everyone who tried to take count of her in kind; everyone who worked on the original DOOM games, everyone who contributed to DOOM's legacy in some way, everyone who played DOOM at some point in their life; everyone who said that the wad was a good idea, everyone who gave me a stupid idea to throw into the game, everyone who wrote a song for it, everyone who recorded a voice line for it, everyone who drew a picture of a Cyberdemon in a pearl necklace; every single person helped create this stupid little DOOM wad in their own way - and I'm really glad that they did. Because it wouldn't be anything without them.
This game is dedicated to everyone Margaret Thatcher and everyone who hated Margaret Thatcher.
Hatoful Boyfriend
2011
EU VOU PASSAR O RESTO DA MINHA VIDA MISERÁVEL TENTANDO EXPLICAR PRA TODOS OS MEUS AMIGOS QUE NÃO, NÃO É APENAS O JOGO ENGRAÇADO DO POMBO. DESESPERO VISCERAL TRAIÇÃO GENOCÍDIO CANIBALISMO GUERRA POLITICA E EU SONHO COM ESSA MERDA FREQUENTEMENTE E PASSO O RESTO DO DIA PENSANDO SOBRE. já tentei comprar um dakimakura do nageki mas o frete pro brasil era 4 corações humanos. só não dou 5 estrelas porque antes de chegar na parte interessante, é bem repetitivo e seco. uma boa armadilha de subestimação, claro, mas talvez tenha dado um perdido em algumas pessoas. de resto, PUTA QUE PARIU
Liberation Maiden
2012
Ashley from Resident Evil 4 blows up Skyscrapers, Tanks and Factories by piloting a giant mech in an effort to stop an evil legion of radio towers. This game was a collaboration between a company which makes anime kids games and the auteur who makes gritty absurdist Tarantino games, and the result is something you can no longer play on any console, but it's fun for what it's worth.
perspective shot of the house
peter is sitting on the couch, typing on his laptop
Brian: "Hey Peter what are you doing"
Peter: "Oh hey Bri, I'm reviewing our video game on this neat website, it's so freakin' awesome"
Brian: "Sure, but don't you think writing about your own work would come off as a bit narcissistic"
Peter: "No way, internet celebrities do this all the time. Just like my distant cousin and soulslike v-tuber, Ashley Griffin"
cutaway to Ashley Griffin
Ashley Griffin: "Rap isn't real music"
perspective shot of the house
peter is again typing on his laptop, but is now laying stomach-down on the couch and swinging his legs back and forth while twirling his hair through his finger
stewie walks in
Stewie, chuckling: "Well well well, somebody must be making breakfast 'cause I see an egg cracking!"
long pause
the camera gets a close-up of Stewie
Stewie, looking at the camera with a straight face: "That was a gay joke."
another long pause
the doorbell rings
Peter, yelling towards kitchen: "Hey Meg, make yourself useful and get the door"
Meg: audibly makes this noise
Peter: "Shut up, Meg"
meg falls over and remains there for the duration of the scene
lois answers the front door
Lois: "Well, you must be Cyndi Lauper!"
Cyndi Lauper: "Hello, Lois. It is I, Cyndi Lauper, from 'that one music video your parents won't stop streaming to the tv while guests are over' "
peter walks on-screen
Peter: "What's goin' on""
Cyndi Lauper, hands on hips: "Peter, I'm here as a representative of the Lotta Paragraph Games Committee, and we've been receiving some very unhappy messages about your so-called 'review'. Many of our group chat members say it's in poor taste"
Peter: .
Lois, laughing nervously: "Ohhh, I'm sure it can't be that bad,"
Lois, now with a straight face: "Trust me, I know Peter and poor taste"
cutaway to peter sitting in a high chair wearing a bib. Lois is angrily feeding him peas on a spoon
Peter, crying: "I don't wanna! it doesn't even have any Styrofoam marshmallows shaped like my morning cartoons!"
Lois, fuming: "You'll eat it and like it!"
cut back to scene
Cyndi Lauper: "Now, it's perfectly reasonable to be defensive about it, but that's the group consensus going around"
Cyndi Lauper, whispering to Peter: "I even hear them calling it pick-me behavior"
Peter, gasping: "What??? Pick-me behavior??? That's ridiculous! I haven't done anything of the sort! Well, not since high school, anyway"
cut to joe, cleveland, peter and quagmire, in high school, sitting at, each holding a glass of milk
Joe: "My glass is half-full"
Cleveland: "My glass is half-empty"
Peter, doing pensive emoji face: "My glass feels like everyone treats them like a ghost and wishes they would invite them to parties and give them free affection but it's ok it's not really bothered by it it's just venting :("
Quagmire: "My glass is still warm! Giggity giggity giggity giggity!!!"
cut back to scene
Cyndi Lauper: "Well I'm sorry, but if you want to give a better impression to those people, you'll have to put up a new review expressing how you really feel"
shot of the clam
peter, joe, and quagmire are sitting at their booth
Peter, looking at the camera, unimpressed: "Cleveland isn't here with us today so I'm going to say something racially insensitive. Seth will not comment about this for the next 20 years, then reply to a callout tweet about it with the 'clenched teeth oooooh' reaction gif"
Quagmire, looking at Peter: "So Peter, you're saying these guys are upset at your review"
Peter: "Yeah, they say it's not a real review and it's just me bragging about me having my own game"
Joe: "Well Beter, if I were you, I'd update it to include a lengthy manifesto about the idiosyncrasies between our show's cutaway format and the sequential structure of game
Quagmire: "Or you could be like me and name all the characters you wanna bang!"
Peter, excited: "Hey, that's a great idea!"
Joe: "Which idea, the uhh, my idea or the other one"
Peter, now straight-faced: "The other one"
Joe, looking downwards: .
sweeping shot of guadelahara
cut to stewie and brian eating granola and sitting on a rock
Stewie, chewing: "This is the B-plot where we try to make you forget we don't have any other gags about gamer culture"
Brian, also chewing: "I read yaoi during the cutaways"
Two more plot-threads occur over the next 15 minutes, entirely unrelated to the first.
peter is sitting on the couch, typing on his laptop
Brian: "Hey Peter what are you doing"
Peter: "Oh hey Bri, I'm reviewing our video game on this neat website, it's so freakin' awesome"
Brian: "Sure, but don't you think writing about your own work would come off as a bit narcissistic"
Peter: "No way, internet celebrities do this all the time. Just like my distant cousin and soulslike v-tuber, Ashley Griffin"
cutaway to Ashley Griffin
Ashley Griffin: "Rap isn't real music"
perspective shot of the house
peter is again typing on his laptop, but is now laying stomach-down on the couch and swinging his legs back and forth while twirling his hair through his finger
stewie walks in
Stewie, chuckling: "Well well well, somebody must be making breakfast 'cause I see an egg cracking!"
long pause
the camera gets a close-up of Stewie
Stewie, looking at the camera with a straight face: "That was a gay joke."
another long pause
the doorbell rings
Peter, yelling towards kitchen: "Hey Meg, make yourself useful and get the door"
Meg: audibly makes this noise
Peter: "Shut up, Meg"
meg falls over and remains there for the duration of the scene
lois answers the front door
Lois: "Well, you must be Cyndi Lauper!"
Cyndi Lauper: "Hello, Lois. It is I, Cyndi Lauper, from 'that one music video your parents won't stop streaming to the tv while guests are over' "
peter walks on-screen
Peter: "What's goin' on""
Cyndi Lauper, hands on hips: "Peter, I'm here as a representative of the Lotta Paragraph Games Committee, and we've been receiving some very unhappy messages about your so-called 'review'. Many of our group chat members say it's in poor taste"
Peter: .
Lois, laughing nervously: "Ohhh, I'm sure it can't be that bad,"
Lois, now with a straight face: "Trust me, I know Peter and poor taste"
cutaway to peter sitting in a high chair wearing a bib. Lois is angrily feeding him peas on a spoon
Peter, crying: "I don't wanna! it doesn't even have any Styrofoam marshmallows shaped like my morning cartoons!"
Lois, fuming: "You'll eat it and like it!"
cut back to scene
Cyndi Lauper: "Now, it's perfectly reasonable to be defensive about it, but that's the group consensus going around"
Cyndi Lauper, whispering to Peter: "I even hear them calling it pick-me behavior"
Peter, gasping: "What??? Pick-me behavior??? That's ridiculous! I haven't done anything of the sort! Well, not since high school, anyway"
cut to joe, cleveland, peter and quagmire, in high school, sitting at, each holding a glass of milk
Joe: "My glass is half-full"
Cleveland: "My glass is half-empty"
Peter, doing pensive emoji face: "My glass feels like everyone treats them like a ghost and wishes they would invite them to parties and give them free affection but it's ok it's not really bothered by it it's just venting :("
Quagmire: "My glass is still warm! Giggity giggity giggity giggity!!!"
cut back to scene
Cyndi Lauper: "Well I'm sorry, but if you want to give a better impression to those people, you'll have to put up a new review expressing how you really feel"
shot of the clam
peter, joe, and quagmire are sitting at their booth
Peter, looking at the camera, unimpressed: "Cleveland isn't here with us today so I'm going to say something racially insensitive. Seth will not comment about this for the next 20 years, then reply to a callout tweet about it with the 'clenched teeth oooooh' reaction gif"
Quagmire, looking at Peter: "So Peter, you're saying these guys are upset at your review"
Peter: "Yeah, they say it's not a real review and it's just me bragging about me having my own game"
Joe: "Well Beter, if I were you, I'd update it to include a lengthy manifesto about the idiosyncrasies between our show's cutaway format and the sequential structure of game
Quagmire: "Or you could be like me and name all the characters you wanna bang!"
Peter, excited: "Hey, that's a great idea!"
Joe: "Which idea, the uhh, my idea or the other one"
Peter, now straight-faced: "The other one"
Joe, looking downwards: .
sweeping shot of guadelahara
cut to stewie and brian eating granola and sitting on a rock
Stewie, chewing: "This is the B-plot where we try to make you forget we don't have any other gags about gamer culture"
Brian, also chewing: "I read yaoi during the cutaways"
Two more plot-threads occur over the next 15 minutes, entirely unrelated to the first.
There’s an outrageous amount of character to Fire Emblem Dark Dragon and the Sword of Light. It’s easy to forget what 8-bit consoles were really capable of, I think. The internet so inundates us with images of like the cheapest and most rushed out shovelware of the era and there was SO much of that that, and there are so few games LIKE Dahk Dragon n Da Sword o Light that it can be hard to conceptualize stuff that doesn’t look like a side scroller or a final fantasy-like. I know I talk about this kind of shit every time I write about a game this old please forgive me.
But IMMEDIATELY it’s shocking how fully formed Fire Emblem is. Pretty much everything you expect to be here is here. You got all your little dudes, they all have their cute little idle animations on the map screen, units don’t have unique sprites but classes have bespoke animations for crits and the battle screen is a full on Fire Emblem ass battle screen. There’s so much text in this game! And while a lot of it is using characters to tutorialize stuff for you, or to tip you off about which guys you might be able to recruit, those dialogues and the ensuing recruitment ones are full of personality. They’re thoughtful too – rarely do you just have Marth walk up to a guy to make them join, a lot of the time there’s more specificity to their wants or needs. And sure, more often than not that’s Sheeda instead of Marth lol but because of this you get a very full sketch of Sheeda as this guile princess who knows how to play people but is compassionate enough to use that skill for their good instead of just callously using them for more manpower, SOMETIMES. Other times she is just kind of playing dudes in a very funny way, she’s a great character. Riff is a crusty old man and he sucks ass and guess what his weapon skill sucks shit and he’s the worst healer in the game, they’re interlinking systems and character immediately, it’s a well-designed game!
I found so much here and so much that was familiar that I didn’t even REALLY mind that I had to count out every unit’s individual movements because those aren’t mapped for you here, or that the AI, impressive as it is for the platform, can be gamed somewhat easily, or that without even a weapon triangle the actual strategy is somewhat more shallow, if a little more exactly weighted towards stats.
It’s simply a good time. It’s a little slow, a little meandering, and a little long. IDK that this is a game I would go around RECOMMENDING to people sight unseen, but I wouldn’t recommend fuckin, Path of Radiance or Three Houses to anybody off the street either. It’s a worthwhile bit of history if you’re already inclined.
But IMMEDIATELY it’s shocking how fully formed Fire Emblem is. Pretty much everything you expect to be here is here. You got all your little dudes, they all have their cute little idle animations on the map screen, units don’t have unique sprites but classes have bespoke animations for crits and the battle screen is a full on Fire Emblem ass battle screen. There’s so much text in this game! And while a lot of it is using characters to tutorialize stuff for you, or to tip you off about which guys you might be able to recruit, those dialogues and the ensuing recruitment ones are full of personality. They’re thoughtful too – rarely do you just have Marth walk up to a guy to make them join, a lot of the time there’s more specificity to their wants or needs. And sure, more often than not that’s Sheeda instead of Marth lol but because of this you get a very full sketch of Sheeda as this guile princess who knows how to play people but is compassionate enough to use that skill for their good instead of just callously using them for more manpower, SOMETIMES. Other times she is just kind of playing dudes in a very funny way, she’s a great character. Riff is a crusty old man and he sucks ass and guess what his weapon skill sucks shit and he’s the worst healer in the game, they’re interlinking systems and character immediately, it’s a well-designed game!
I found so much here and so much that was familiar that I didn’t even REALLY mind that I had to count out every unit’s individual movements because those aren’t mapped for you here, or that the AI, impressive as it is for the platform, can be gamed somewhat easily, or that without even a weapon triangle the actual strategy is somewhat more shallow, if a little more exactly weighted towards stats.
It’s simply a good time. It’s a little slow, a little meandering, and a little long. IDK that this is a game I would go around RECOMMENDING to people sight unseen, but I wouldn’t recommend fuckin, Path of Radiance or Three Houses to anybody off the street either. It’s a worthwhile bit of history if you’re already inclined.
Super Mario Bros. 3
1988
The best part of SMB3 is throwing a hammer at Boom-Boom and having it make a million damage noises as it hits him, making it sound like you've harmed him so badly that you've retroactively deleted his entire lineage from history.
Breath of Fire II
1994
There’s a gettin place I usually go to find old games, and the admin for that place basically said the patched version of this game is too complicated and he’s straight up just not going to update it anymore on his websight. I’m mostly interested in this series for the later psx titles, but I figure if I’m going to play it I might as well play the best version, and it can’t be that complex, right? How bad could it really be?
Folks, I’m so glad you asked. Let me tell you how bad it could really be.
First of all, there’s a heavily reworked script that fixes the apparently poor translation from the nineties. It’s the twenty first century now so there’s no reason to play this game with a script localized by Japanese technical writers for electrical appliances that capcom found on whatever the nineties equivalent of fiverr was. We have the technology to make it better stronger faster. But in order to do that, the game has to do this annoying checksum procedure first. You also have to generate a special .srm file first or the patch won’t work. The odds of that working properly are about 50:50 and you have to sit through about a two minute screen for each attempt. I’ve played a lot of retranslated SNES patches and I’ve never in my life heard of any other game that requires this bizarre step. It’s a pain in the ass but ultimately worth getting through if that were the only thing you had to worry about. It’s not though, not even close.
The rebalancing patch is completely separate from the retranslation and offers various quality of life improvements for characters, adjusted exp and gold, among others. There are, however, an absurd amount of different features and options for this patch as well. Where do I start?
Do you want the encounter rate reduced and the exp and gold and item drop rates boosted to compensate, or do you hate yourself? Pick one or the other. Did you maybe want the main character to have his dragon form completely neutered, you know, the main thing the series is known for, and replaced with a bland magic user build? What’s that, no, you never asked for that even once? Well, the patch creator took it upon himself to make that anyway so you can pick one or the other. Did you want the standard opening screen, or did you want one custom made with one of the worst anime opening theme songs you ever heard in your life? Or maybe “through the fire and flames” by dragonforce (really!)? Well, he went ahead and did it anyway, so go ahead and pick one. How about one where the shaman fusing power gets a little bit unfucked? Oh, that’s a different patch, but go ahead and put that in if you want to.
Oh wait, I almost forgot to ask. Did you want any of these patches… with the retranslation patch? I mean, of course you do, why the hell wouldn’t you, the vanilla version is on switch online anyway. Then guess what, I hope you liked that checksum screen, cause you have to sit through that fucker again, and again, and again, for each individual patch you want.
I know exactly what the admin means now. To host this, you have to to first pick retranslated or not, then dragon or caster ryu, then normal or reduced encounters, then fusing fixed or not, then the lame anime opening screen or the one from planet earth. That’s 32 different permutations for this stupid ass patch, and each one could set you up for failure and time wasted by that damn checksum screen. There’s no way a children’s toy from over thirty years ago could be worth all this trouble, is there? Should I even bother playing Breath of Fire II if it really needs so many skin grafts to be playable? Does it really make that much of a difference?
…yeah, it kind of does. It’s actually pretty good now. I give Breath of Fire II for the SNES, the “1. retranslated 2. standard ryu 3. less encounter rate 4. unfusing less patch 5. non anime-ass opening screen“ version three and a half stars out of five
Folks, I’m so glad you asked. Let me tell you how bad it could really be.
First of all, there’s a heavily reworked script that fixes the apparently poor translation from the nineties. It’s the twenty first century now so there’s no reason to play this game with a script localized by Japanese technical writers for electrical appliances that capcom found on whatever the nineties equivalent of fiverr was. We have the technology to make it better stronger faster. But in order to do that, the game has to do this annoying checksum procedure first. You also have to generate a special .srm file first or the patch won’t work. The odds of that working properly are about 50:50 and you have to sit through about a two minute screen for each attempt. I’ve played a lot of retranslated SNES patches and I’ve never in my life heard of any other game that requires this bizarre step. It’s a pain in the ass but ultimately worth getting through if that were the only thing you had to worry about. It’s not though, not even close.
The rebalancing patch is completely separate from the retranslation and offers various quality of life improvements for characters, adjusted exp and gold, among others. There are, however, an absurd amount of different features and options for this patch as well. Where do I start?
Do you want the encounter rate reduced and the exp and gold and item drop rates boosted to compensate, or do you hate yourself? Pick one or the other. Did you maybe want the main character to have his dragon form completely neutered, you know, the main thing the series is known for, and replaced with a bland magic user build? What’s that, no, you never asked for that even once? Well, the patch creator took it upon himself to make that anyway so you can pick one or the other. Did you want the standard opening screen, or did you want one custom made with one of the worst anime opening theme songs you ever heard in your life? Or maybe “through the fire and flames” by dragonforce (really!)? Well, he went ahead and did it anyway, so go ahead and pick one. How about one where the shaman fusing power gets a little bit unfucked? Oh, that’s a different patch, but go ahead and put that in if you want to.
Oh wait, I almost forgot to ask. Did you want any of these patches… with the retranslation patch? I mean, of course you do, why the hell wouldn’t you, the vanilla version is on switch online anyway. Then guess what, I hope you liked that checksum screen, cause you have to sit through that fucker again, and again, and again, for each individual patch you want.
I know exactly what the admin means now. To host this, you have to to first pick retranslated or not, then dragon or caster ryu, then normal or reduced encounters, then fusing fixed or not, then the lame anime opening screen or the one from planet earth. That’s 32 different permutations for this stupid ass patch, and each one could set you up for failure and time wasted by that damn checksum screen. There’s no way a children’s toy from over thirty years ago could be worth all this trouble, is there? Should I even bother playing Breath of Fire II if it really needs so many skin grafts to be playable? Does it really make that much of a difference?
…yeah, it kind of does. It’s actually pretty good now. I give Breath of Fire II for the SNES, the “1. retranslated 2. standard ryu 3. less encounter rate 4. unfusing less patch 5. non anime-ass opening screen“ version three and a half stars out of five
Y’all dating men who haven't played the entirety of the Katamari series?
Imagine bringing him to ur family cookout and ur pops, uncles and cousins try to bond asking him “So you think THE PRINCE will roll up a good KATAMARI this time?” and he be like “ha man ion keep up with th
Imagine bringing him to ur family cookout and ur pops, uncles and cousins try to bond asking him “So you think THE PRINCE will roll up a good KATAMARI this time?” and he be like “ha man ion keep up with th
Minecraft
2011
This game is kind of like tetris, except instead of the blocks falling, they are already all on the ground.
This is Kirby Super Star with a different art style and a bunch of extra modes. I don't like the new art style as much as the original and don't care for the new modes.
24 Killers
2023
HEY do you like MOON?! do you like CHULIP or CHIBI-ROBO?! Do you like QUIRKY and WEIRD and HEARTFELT?! Play 24 Killers!
It's super easy to look at 24K and just call it "indie 2023 Moon Rpg" and write it off. However, I think this game uses this very obvious love-de-lic inspiration and creates something new that can stand on it's own legs.
Everything in 24 Killers feels dreamlike. From the music, to the art, the dialogue, and even the dream-logic of the world and puzzles. But 24k never feels "lul random xD" because the game has a very stable internal logic.
The very opening moments of the game are bizarre but setup consistent world-building and character moments. We learn about Johnny Puzzle (the puzzle and contraption-loving dog), Mole (a giant friendly mole), Moon (some sort of extraterrestrial being calling the shots), and finally the player character Home.
Home is an echo. You don't really know what an echo is at the start, but you know it's a hand with an eyeball on it and a little wiggly tail. And you dive right into the corpse of a soldier. Home doesn't like this and wants to get away from all these annoying monsters ("mons" in the game's lingo) and starts to fight off all of them before Moon knocks them out.
Usually in love-de-lic games and other "cozy" games like this, the player character is nice, but Home is kind of a jerk! And that's what makes this game so nice to play. Seeing how Home reacts to the shenanigans, seeing how they grow and learn. Helping uncover this mystery. Diving into the bizarre dream-logic world and trying to genuinely help these people. When the sentient spider-mocha pot tells you that it's depressed and lost in life because the coffee plant outside is dried up and dead, it's not a random joke but a problem that you want to solve.
24 Killers isn't a very long game. That's a plus for me, I'm an adult with little time. I completed the game in about 8 hours and there is some.... very interesting replay incentives, but I can see that being a turn-off for some folks.
I adore this game and I want more like it. Games like this inspire me. To be more creative, to be more honest, to be more genuine, to be more weird, to love myself and others more. It's a beautiful game.
It's super easy to look at 24K and just call it "indie 2023 Moon Rpg" and write it off. However, I think this game uses this very obvious love-de-lic inspiration and creates something new that can stand on it's own legs.
Everything in 24 Killers feels dreamlike. From the music, to the art, the dialogue, and even the dream-logic of the world and puzzles. But 24k never feels "lul random xD" because the game has a very stable internal logic.
The very opening moments of the game are bizarre but setup consistent world-building and character moments. We learn about Johnny Puzzle (the puzzle and contraption-loving dog), Mole (a giant friendly mole), Moon (some sort of extraterrestrial being calling the shots), and finally the player character Home.
Home is an echo. You don't really know what an echo is at the start, but you know it's a hand with an eyeball on it and a little wiggly tail. And you dive right into the corpse of a soldier. Home doesn't like this and wants to get away from all these annoying monsters ("mons" in the game's lingo) and starts to fight off all of them before Moon knocks them out.
Usually in love-de-lic games and other "cozy" games like this, the player character is nice, but Home is kind of a jerk! And that's what makes this game so nice to play. Seeing how Home reacts to the shenanigans, seeing how they grow and learn. Helping uncover this mystery. Diving into the bizarre dream-logic world and trying to genuinely help these people. When the sentient spider-mocha pot tells you that it's depressed and lost in life because the coffee plant outside is dried up and dead, it's not a random joke but a problem that you want to solve.
24 Killers isn't a very long game. That's a plus for me, I'm an adult with little time. I completed the game in about 8 hours and there is some.... very interesting replay incentives, but I can see that being a turn-off for some folks.
I adore this game and I want more like it. Games like this inspire me. To be more creative, to be more honest, to be more genuine, to be more weird, to love myself and others more. It's a beautiful game.