I have beaten Streets of Rage 2 a bunch of times since completing Streets of Rage 4 a bunch of times, because Streets of Rage 4 more or less trains you on how to play Streets of Rage 1, 2 & 3 correctly.

Game fans, myself included, often bounce off of old arcade-style beat ‘em ups because they can initially appear impossible to beat without reaching for the save-state. But we often forget Streets of Rage 2 and its contemporaries were designed to be appreciated again and again until you reached some state of mastery. Streets of Rage 2 was designed to be bought by your mum for £50 and played by you every day after school until Mr. X finally ate dirt. Streets of Rage 2 was not designed to be included in a 40-game Mega Drive all-you-can-game buffet that you can buy on Steam for £2.49 right now or enjoy for “free” as part of the Nintendo Switch Online Sega Mega Drive Expansion Package Plus for Nintendo Switch or whatever it’s called. You don’t have time to try Stage 3 of Streets of Rage 2 again - you need to go over there and play ToeJam & Earl 2 in its original Japanese translation, for some reason!

No, I say! Stay here and learn your Streets of Rage, kid. Because mastering a beam ‘em up always feels great! A good beam ‘em up often boils down to something between a fighting game and a puzzle game - figuring out what each enemy’s weakness is, considering the order in which to exploit these weaknesses, and then executing the correct badass moves under pressure from the advancing mob. It’s like Tetris, but the blocks are made out of punches and broken bottles. It’s beautiful.

This time round on Streets of Rage 2, I sleepwalked through the opening few stages without taking a single hit. I didn’t even realise I’d done it until I checked out how many lives I’d accumulated. Apparently I’d just been effortlessly side-stepping Galsias and out-ranging Donovans without even consciously doing it, applying some hybrid martial art that stands somewhere between the so-called “Tetris effect” and that bit in The Matrix Reloaded where Neo is just effortlessly ducking and stepping those Agent Smiths. Pro Gamer Shit.

Just kidding. I don’t consider myself a pro at Streets of Rage 2 by any stretch - but after playing through the game six or seven times with my brain turned on, I realised Streets of Rage 2 had trained me so well that I’d internalised all the natures and patterns of the game’s opening enemies. Folks, that’s some Good Game Design! And we haven’t even talked about the Good Design of the music or the artwork yet!

One thing this play-through of Streets of Rage 2 made me think about was how well Streets of Rage 2 serves as a perfect historical relic of its era and specific place in that era - a pixel-art tableau of early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America. More specifically, early 1990s house/rave/hip hop culture on the east coast of America as viewed by an incredibly talented, classically-trained Japanese designer and composer who could see that computers and video games represented the future. Streets of Rage 2 is how people outside of America saw this side of America in this era, and every era since - through film and music and video games. It’s fascinating to see what essential truths and dreams made it across the ocean to us. I think this game has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Backloggd’s will one day celebrate.

About 8 years after Streets of Rage 2 made its own history, Japan’s Takeshi Kitano made a film called Brother. Brother was Takeshi Kitano’s first film outside of Japan, and was set in Los Angeles with a half-American, half-Japanese cast. As a hands-on director, writer and actor, there’s no doubt that Brother represents Kitano’s vision of Los Angeles and America at large. Check it out! It’s good! Exactly like Streets of Rage 2, Brother serves as a celluloid time capsule of America’s international cultural impact and influence at a specific point in time - and it’s quite striking how much had changed in the space of the 8 years between 1992 and the year 2000. Brother is one of Kitano’s lesser-appreciated films, but I think that film has genuine cultural worth that scholars in halls grander than Letterboxd’s will one day celebrate.

So, there you have it - an arcade beat ‘em up game with beautiful, artistic complexity of beat ‘em up game design, sharing bytes in the same cartridge with one of the most important cultural artefacts of the early 1990s. Still wanna fuck around with Toe Jam & Earl? C’mon man.

by kato’s own admission, radical dreamers is an unfinished bastard child. developed in just three months and released on the ill-fated satellaview, its no grand revelation to say that it made an unremarkable blimp on his career and the general public. the game has yet to see a rerelease in over two decades and it’s a miracle it isn’t lost media entirely. even acknowledging less-than-legal outlets, it’s only perceived as that weird, nonessential, complementary work to its bigger brothers. i’d be posing if i didn’t make it explicitly clear that i came to dreamers for those same, enigmatic qualities - if not for the irrevocable attachment it has to a game many hold close to heart i feel as if the western world may have passed it up entirely.

but i don’t say any of this begrudgingly, it makes it fascinating even, how dreamers takes advantage of our nostalgia for trigger. radical dreamers was drafted hot off the back of trigger’s release, a period where kato was in an emotional slump. thusly, dreamers exists far removed from the juvenile enthusiasm characteristic of his past works. if trigger was a game about how opening up about our personal background and motives to loved ones can allow us to, collectively, strive towards a more brilliant future, radical dreamers is that future. a future where not everybody got to realize their desires and the indifferent thread of time has cursed them with regrets and woes regardless of their achievements. for the better part of its runtime, you’re trudging through rugged corridors after rugged corridors aided by people with baggage too heavy and complicated to plainly clarify, complimented by an ambient to downright melancholic mitsuda score. the manor is an emotionally draining hub, tasking you to backtrack through samey halls and text crawls you’ve seen three times over only to be met with characters wallowing in regret and cynicism once you finally reach your destination. made worse with some only being here to reinforce the notion that there’s no future for kid nor her gang of drifters - a pessimism that she long since deeply internalized.

yet, despite the burden this milieu is actively afflicting on kid’s already vulnerable psyche, she still finds a way to banter with the party every opportunity she gets. never getting a chance to sit down and process her emotions being surrounded in a never static environment, she attempts to make the best of the cards she was dealt and drifts on towards her ultimate objective - not knowing rather it will result in some final emotional catharticism or rather it’s even accomplishable. it’s not sincerity coming from a place of previously reached self-actualization a la trigger, it’s coming from a place of accepting the regrets of yesterday and fears of tomorrow in an earnest pursuit of that final, personal pillar. even surge never quite stops fawning over kid whilst submerged in the bleakness, and while magil never comes around to the two he still holds that fundamental will to live. the aforementioned chrono trigger links don’t ever dare to steal the spotlight from dreamers’ established mood and themes, instead opting to recontextualize what we know of these characters and their tribulations. it’s the only sequel the kato of 96 could have envisioned, a sequel that firmly stands as its own being, sometimes recounting nostalgic yet somber memories of days gone in a yearning to find solace in a future unknown and soon to arrive.

in some parts, it feels like radical dreams was meant to be abandoned, with the narrative being framed as the ramblings of a distant relative, lost and deceased. it’s a dream cast ashore, its vestiges dismantled and lifted to realize aspirations of greater prestige. but, i just can’t help but marvel at what kato perceives as some pebble, a pebble crafted with so much passion, so much emotion, so many dreams only for it to be simply forgotten.

comfy doom and gloom. while its early parts feel small and a little oppressive, i still find it really easy to get into the tempo of king's field 4 and its slow-dance combat. and this one's even sludgier than the first 3 — which, if anything, might be attributed to the dreamlike, harpsichord-laden, sometimes even giallo-esque atmosphere i tend to associate with fromsoft's unique dungeon crawling action rpgs preceding demon's souls. of course, metaphysical dark fantasy mythopoeia remains the soul (forgive me) of their work, but king's field 4 distinguishes itself. being a game with some gnarly ps2 interlacing didn't hurt, if you ask me. if you can get used to the controls, this game is frankly quite refreshingly low-key (and i enjoy revisiting it).

taking inspiration from something "biblical" (book of enoch technically isnt in most judeo-christian canons apparently) may inherently give it a ~serious art~ air, but this game is so sly and playful with it in really fun ways, and never to the point of sacrilege. like lucifel/r is an all black tits-out-in-a-v-neck baddie who relays your progress to god on his cell and at one point implies how long it takes to beat the game and it just works. there's a bit of capcom/clover sense of style at play here, there's a character designer from dmc1 and okami having the same role on AND directing this after all, but i think its smarter about how it employs those sensibilities than any of those games. the protagonist wearing nothing but designer jeans for example has so much to it besides just getting silly w it; a modern signifier as part of an update on an ancient tale, something befitting of a story of angels who see all of time all at once, and genuine veneration of the male form.

el shaddai feels truly mythic too in ways that a lot of mythological fiction in games doesn't, not just for the level of its visual splendor but pretty much because of how cryptic and temporally mixed up its story is. what exactly happens doesn't matter as much as it means to make us feel like we are looking into a series of events greater than our logic can dictate to us--maybe to a fault for making us too distanced from what goes on, but i think its still effective in how novel it all is. also the action and platforming parts are functional n fine but obviously in service to showing itself off, and that's ok. really enjoyed this and feel like not enough credit is given to the smirk it wears so so confidently.

Some enemies create a subconscious space to draw you into. If you suddenly feel faint, be on the alert. It's a sign your soul is under attack. Of course enemies that materialize before you are nothing but phantoms, but the suffering their attacks inflict on your body is real. You must [defeat them all to regain consciousness. ]

Lemme tell you a tale of Lucifer as a Wrangler-jeaned anime shojo with a Save Game flip-phone flipping around doing Devil May Cry (but God Certainly Will) combos that yield Christian frame advantage upon angels and demons from the Abrahamic pseudepigraphy. Exploiting movement tech to wavedash through portraits of the Archangel Gabriel built beautifully with 720p of the Lord's tears; stunlocking key figures from Aramaic and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo scripture until they drop upgrade points: speedrunning an assault on the Kingdom of Heaven, a tower where the Authority and Metatron reign.

You can beat it in 7 hours... if you're good enough.

you will believe an undead serial killer thinks an apartment is his mom!
not really an unfairly maligned or forgotten masterpiece, but probably something more interesting than that, a brilliant and marred text. fully convinced this is one of the smartest games about our responsibilities to each other as people, and how that ties into the nature of urban living where caring about others seems to entail some element of seedy voyeurism and you are faced with the immediate proximity of violence that you are powerless to stop and yet somehow obligated to ameliorate (yet less convinced that the fine-tuning and balance issues that make this a little more abrasive than it had to be wouldn't have benefited from, y'know, not being developed while they were also developing sh3). don't get me wrong, most of the time it's being abrasive for a reason, and, more importantly, for a precise, expressive reason: giving you the womblike comfort of your healing apartment only to strip it away and fill it with inexplicable, damaging horrors (walter's childhood redux, wisdom received), forcing you to backtrack through the settings of your past failure to protect others as their vengeful ghosts try to prevent you from protecting the only one you can save, the deliberately gross and goofy sound design which speaks to the inassimilable strangeness of, for the first time in the series, exploring the oneiric recesses of a psychology wholly unrelated to yours. it's not really -cool- and it's not really scary, it's sad and disgusting and frustrating above all, but it builds confidently off the previous games in fleshing out what we owe kids, as a society around them, and how we displace our pain and fear and anger and need for control onto them. the final boss dies wrapped in umbilical cord and impaled with fragments of his mother, made human again in the inextricable frailty of his lifelong search for a maternal figure in an abusive lie. it's a great sendoff to the series even if what comes before it feels gratingly half-baked at times. rip team silent rip to the REAL silent hill 5 please take a moment to pour one out for the greatest to ever do it

Competitive game aside, this is one of the best representations of martial arts in videogames.
Context and fidelity packaged in the own diegesis.
Diving into it through the ps2 bios
Asphalt and Mist.
Parkings and malls.
Beach, jails , skycrapers.
The new world of technology and globalization.
The setting is the frame of the beginning of the century in Fighting, in which traditional martial arts spread throughout the world and are reconfigured in sports and exercise. contexts coexist with new fighting systems designed for combat itself.
Jin Kazama abandoning his homeland, family and his karate style based on tradition and roots for the Kyokushinkai Karate, more pragmatic and brutal . Learning it in Brisbane (which is famous for the practice of Kyokushinkai), out of its cradle, suggests the expansion of martial arts to various levels that the arrival of a new millennium implies.
in tradition, continuing with the respectful, almost mystical reverential treatment that they once had, or in modernity, redesigned and remixed for the purpose of competition or lethal assault.
No matter the approach, there is room for everything,

In a world where fighting games are remembered for their impact on the medium or for their mechanical quality, Tekken 4 has value as a small Digital portrait of how martial arts have spread and understood throughout the world with the arrival of the new millennium. . Something that can be appreciated through a careful and (mostly) faithful mocap and the reduction of fantastical elements.

Also, fuck the E.V.O .

mizuguchi's work fascinates me because it often incorporates musical elements without being explicitly rhythmic. the player within his games becomes an equal contributor to the creative tapestry of the soundscape rather than reciting canned phrases or demanding precision. as you move, rotate, place, and destroy blocks throughout this game, your actions directly accent the soundtrack and create new polyrhythmic layers over top of it, leading to a temporally fluid pacing that ebbs and flows with the eye-catching and psychedelic backdrops that each "skin" (or stage) brings. the effect is subtle; auspiciously off-beat inputs will not result in any added sonics, and with enough play this absence becomes noticeable. you unconsciously begin to follow the tempo and create your own grooves over top of the gameplay, and in this way the game manages to gently control your input timing to match up with the moving cursor that destroys your grouped blocks. this cursor slides along in perfect sync with the backing track... and here we come full circle. our button presses, twitches, and excited exhalations form their own accompaniment to the game, and lumines codifies these subliminal impulses to alter the player's behavior without letting them know explicitly. terrific design.

thankfully lumines would be an addictive puzzle game even without the audiovisual spectacle. the goal here is to clear 2x2 single-color block squares made up from two-tone squares you drop to keep them from stacking up to the top of the play area. while it draws heavily from the tetris-esque block puzzler genre, it twists the expected elements in ways that will fascinate and challenge even those who excel at other games of its ilk. the play area is much wider than it is tall, owing to the four-beat phrase that the cursor moves on sweeping the field of finished squares each measure. gravity is also in complete effect at all times, allowing you to easily chunk squares on uneven terrain in order to transform the structure by controlling where the blocks fall. once the idioms become apparent it becomes a classic game of optimization and risk evaluation: should I try to set up this complicated chain that's dependent on good block RNG? do I have a free spot open for this or will I have to set it down and hope for the best? that one column is getting a little high, do I have anything that could potentially break it down? etc. back when I initially played it it was an essential part of my podcast-listening routine, and one that I wouldn't mind pulling out today to kill a little time or occupy my hands.

I originally played the remaster though, and admittedly this version pales a bit in comparison to the content offered in that package. for a less serious player like myself, shuffle mode was an essential way to keep things fresh with a mix of skins from all modes rather than repeating the basic challenge playlist over and over. sadly it's not available here, as you can only choose between an endlessly looping of the basic playlist and single-skin play, the latter of which loses some of the charm of the skin variety. puzzles and the CPU versus mode seem basically identical between the two releases, and neither of which are particularly revelatory in comparison to the primary gameplay, but I do miss the often-perplexing missions within the remaster. in terms of mechanics, only one major difference exists: chain blocks which can wipe all attached blocks of a matching color whether within a square or not must be activated within a square in this original release, while in the remaster they fire off instantaneously upon touching another colored block. as for its ramifications on the design, I find both to be valid expressions of the quick-clear concept, with the original variation favoring more strategic play but only insofar as you care about score. the remaster has a bit of an 8th-gen mobile-esque sheen that will make fans of the starker, more lo-fi original blanch, but at the same time these updates have made the UI more consistent (a debatable positive) and made confusing layouts such as "Please return my CD" much more legible. ymmv on whether the remaster compromises the experience or not, but for me I will likely keep the remaster in my occasional rotation as much as I enjoy the novelty of playing it on a psp.

in the early days of the pandemic I dedicated at least an hour a day to playing the remaster, and replaying through everything now has brought a lot of those memories back to the forefront. while the game is second nature to me now, I still have those glimpses of utter confusion from when I first encountered it and attempted to make sense of its unorthodox characteristics. with a little time and effort, I think anyone can become comfortable with the concepts here and fall in love with the gorgeous and varied soundtrack. a must-play for puzzle fans of all stripes.

"After Y2K, the End of the World had become a cliché. But who was I to talk? A brooding underdog avenger alone against an empire of evil, out to right a grave injustice? Everything was subjective. There were no personal apocalypses. Nothing is a cliché when it's happening to you."

In Max Payne, New York City comes first. We have a few moments just with the city, and the chatter of police scanners cutting through the howling snowstorm, before Max hits us with one of his characteristic delightfully purple parodic noir metaphor.

This might not seem worth noting, given what a tiny slice of the game it is, but I think it's important in the context of how the rest of the game's narrative is portrayed (mostly from Max's narration) and from the rest of Remedy's games that followed in Max Payne's lineage. Control, Quantum Break, and Alan Wake all open with their protagonists and their narration before the world, giving the player no time to form an impression of it outside the lens of our central character. Alan Wake offers the greatest window of time for this at a whopping two seconds before he starts banging on about Stephen King. So Max Payne giving us about a minute of time in snow-covered New York feels almost luxurious in comparison. And then Max Payne barges in, bringing Helheim with him.

I spend so much time pointing this out because any attempt to talk about what Max Payne is doing on any level below the surface makes one sound like a particularly unhinged conspiracy theorist, something that Remedy are explicitly aware of and has playfully prodded at in their future game Control in particular. Part of this is the conscious silliness of the surface-level: comic-sans narration boxes filled with prose so purple it can make fine wine, and, of course, the way the entire story is told through delightful school-play images made from the developers and their friends and family putting on ill-fitting outfits and making silly faces. There is a pervasive charm to all of this that invites luxuriating in it, but I think a common mistake one can make when reading any work is to simply assume that something is thoughtless because it's a bit silly. Remedy was not somehow unaware of the fact that they were a bunch of nerds and their relations playing dress-up, and indeed, lean into it.

The archness, the artifice, and the absolute over-the-top-ness of it all, evokes the tropes and styles it is pulling from so bluntly that it becomes solid in the mind, manifesting into a brick thrown at your face that then falls into your lap, remaining there and weighing on you, never letting you forget what it's doing. From the comic panels, to the tvs throughout the levels playing broad parodies of soap operas, Twin Peaks, and, uh, The News, to Max Payne himself, as he intrudes upon the serenity of New York at the beginning, a noir cliche diving in through the door from one of the better issues of Frank Miller's Sin City (the comic panels and narration and image of a city in white bearing greater similarity to those comics than anything starring Philip Marlowe) and leaving reality covered with bullet holes in his wake.

But here's the thing. He doesn't close the door behind him. And slowly, other things start to creep in.

A superhero with a baseball bat climbs out of a comic strip and into the head of a mob torturer who is a fan of the comic. The apocalyptic snowstorm that blankets the city of New York, and the pervasive Norse Mythology references that litter the game, crawl out of a book about Ragnarok being read by someone in the club Ragna Rock. Max's actions are fed into a news cycle that makes entertainment out of it. The game's genre references become recursive and circular, wrapping in on themselves over and over. Max becomes aware of his own status as a loose cannon cop out for revenge. Mobsters make themselves into occult monstrosities in order to survive. People write fiction. Fiction crawls into peoples' heads, influences them, and through them, the world. And then people carry those ideas back into fiction. People imposing on fiction, fiction imposing on the world. On and on it goes.

It is an imposition the player performs as well. I can't bring too much to the table in terms of the mechanical construction of Max Payne's fantastic moment-to-moment gunplay, as in many ways, the sheer joy of diving in slow-motion through a doorway and riddling an entire room of goons yelling "PAYNE!" full of holes simply speaks for itself with more wit than I could ever manage. However, one thing I do want to mention is something has, to a certain extent, been obscured by successive ports to consoles and phones and back to the PC. Max Payne was a PC game first and, I think, foremost, and understanding this is key to understanding how the game handles checkpoints, or, to be more accurate, how the game doesn't. Autosave points are extremely few and far between, and most deaths will take you back to the start of the level, and these deaths come quickly and mercilessly, with only a single mistake standing between Max and the grave eagerly awaiting him.

Of course, the game does not actually expect you to restart from the beginning of each level every single time. The game expects - an assumption that was reasonable given that this behavior was ubiquitous across Max Payne's contemporaries on the platform - for you to manually save the game and create your own checkpoints from which Max can resume his story after his next future full stop. This seemingly innocuous feature might be the game's cleverest ludic move, as together with fast deaths and often-scarce painkillers demanding a certain degree of trial-and-error perfectionism, the player is put into the role of director, cutting the action when they are satisfied with the scene as it played out. It is a system that imposes storytelling structure onto every aspect of play, including even the act of entering the pause screen to save and reload into its all-consuming storyboard.

On every level of it's construction, Max Payne is a game about stories insinuating themselves, loudly and quietly, into the real, and it's surprising to find the DNA that runs through Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and Control already fully-formed in (Death Rally aside) the studio's debut title, arguably more deftly and charismatically than any of those later works would manage. The strength of Max Payne is that unlike, say, Alan Wake, all of this is left to crawl around the periphery, only bubbling up very occasionally, allowing the player to put together the disparate images in their head, like a detective attempting to solve a mystery by staring at connected pins on a bulletin board. Indeed, I don't know if I would have the confidence to make this read if not for Remedy's future work pulling on all this stuff much more explicitly. Max comments on some stuff, but not all, and one of the most compelling images the game has to offer eludes his notice completely.

Late in the game, Max is recruited by a shadowy illuminati-like organization known as the Inner Circle, and learns that pretty much everything in the plot stems from their influence, and in particular, from one of their number who manufactured the US Military super-soldier drug that drives the game's plot: Valkyr. In his own piece on the game, critic Noah Gervais explains Valkyr, the hilariously cartoonish green goop drug that has it's origins in a military super-soldier project, as a kind of uniquely video-game pulp that bleeds in from what was typical for video games in that moment, and I would say that is fairly accurate. Where I deviate from Gervais is that he finds Valkyr to be a kind of ancillary element, something that emerges out of the video game milieu of the time rather than an intentional element, and that is where I disagree. Valkyr is a consciously artificial video game trope that begins this video game, in the same way that Max's dead family is a consciously Noir trope that begins this Noir story, created by a US military project run by a member of a secret organization who's headquarters is draped in conspicuous US historical ephemera, from the room looking like the briefing room of the White House, to the Washington Monument replica at the center of it all.

There was something disturbingly familiar about the letter before me, the handwriting was all pretty curves.

"You are in an American world, Max."

The truth was a burning green crack through my brain. The film noir aesthetic, the American comic influence, even the bullet-time mechanics derived from a filmmaker who, contemporaneously, was being consumed by the Hollywood machine making strange twists on the Hong Kong action films he so excelled at.

I was in a cultural world shaped by the hegemonic influence of American fiction. Funny as hell, it was the most horrible thing I could think of.

Everything after this point, after this moment, is perfunctory. The point is made, the statement is said. As Max would put it, the final gunshot is merely the exclamation mark to everything that led to this point. He fulfills his duties to the game and the genre strangely quietly, defeats the villain, and is taken away in the back of the car, knowing exactly what has, what is, and what will happen.

He releases his finger from the trigger, and then it is over.

Until you start again.

Try Hard Boiled mode or New York Minute mode for the next challenge!

A rehabilitation of DOOM Eternal that does away with the stupid "the demons ask you respect their pronouns" jokes, demolishes the castle of funko pops, wipes away the allusions to your little brother's collection of nazi viking black metal records and instead chooses to go full Plutonia by making almost every room into a maximal Video Game combat encounter with little requirement for coherence in-between. Amps up the self-aware dumb and the feckless fun in so many ways, best exemplified in stuff like the Marauder getting silly little tweety birds above his head and a new enemy type that makes you do some Ghostbusters shit. It's cute!

Reluctantly played on Ultra-Violence, and I think calling the gameplay here "sweaty" would be an understatement - I literally had to plan scratching my nose and blinking around the iframes of certain animations... And I kinda loved it? Game-cocaine in its purest uncut form, a brilliant realisation of oldDOOM's slaughtermaps for the modern age that makes me wish this thing had the support of proper modding tools. One of only a handful of modern era video games I can think of that is capable of inducing the oft-coveted "flow state" that Pro Gamers aspire to, a game of DDR where you're stamping on necks.

My only real problem with the game is the things it does when you're coming down from the combat high. We've known since the days of Super Mario Sunshine that platforming puzzles that require a fly-by introduction of their layout are doomed to frustration and failure, and TAG1 throws in a lot of them to pad for time and exposition. Nothing that'll rip and tear your hair out, but has anyone ever seriously wanted to do timed parkour in a DOOM game?? C'mon... Stick to diagonal running please Doomguy. Anyway, it's just kinda funny to think that Satan (seriously id please just use Christian names for your bad guys, it's badass that you get codec calls from God in this one) designed the inner sanctums of Hell with a 1990s assumption that Doomguy can't jump, only for him to rock up in 2020 with two airdashes and a booster lol

The story is the usual "whatever" bullshit that we've come to expect from the nuDoom franchise, but I did kinda appreciate that they finally got rid of that robot fella and replaced him with a dweeby keyboard warrior who insists on calling the Slayer "Doomguy". Representation matters!