magicsofa

Um, I think we're all wasting enough electricity on this pursuit as it is

Depends where you are working. When I worked on farms a pizza was a really nice gesture. At a company that makes well over ten million a year... with not many employees... and salary is mediocre... it is insulting. I mean, I don't mean to complain about my pay too much because it's more than I ever made before... but even with half as much I could still afford to buy myself a damn pizza.

Why is the lever order all weird

Other than Easy -> Hard, no, absolutely nothing meaningful is contained in the names. They might as well be named Skill 1, Skill 2, Skill 3 and you would have the same amount of information.

Yeah, this is an issue... but to be fair, the terms Rogue-like and Rogue-LITE are way too similar in both speech and text, and I think people literally confuse them just based on that alone. I mean, one of my gamer friends asked me if there's a difference, as she wasn't even sure that they were separate terms. I'm a bit of a purist and I think some of those games just meant to say lite instead of like. A "true" roguelike should have the key elements of Rogue - and the most important one in my eyes is Permadeath. Hopefully it will also include real character building and open ended combat where you can do things like throw random items at monsters (was that in the original though?) But at the end of the day, permadeath (and of course, real threats to go with it) is what changes the entire experience. It forces your decision making into a different plane of existence, one where you might actually run away from the treasure for fear of losing your character. One where you might engage in a long battle, throwing everything you have, until at the last moment you realize it is fruitless and start desperately trying to escape. Where you can go limping back to town with 1hp, literally trying to avoid getting stung by a bee or else that's it for your high level character. If it doesn't have any of that, it's LITE

Fairly often, but as a critic I would say that the map is incomplete. The only changes to gameplay occur on ITYTD (double ammo, half damage taken) and NM (double ammo, fast monsters). If you don't implement difficulty flags then HNTR, HMP, and UV are all exactly the same experience. Your vision is not going to suffer from adding a few health packs or removing a few token monsters. Of course, what you do is completely up to you, and if you're not interested in making a complete map then that's your call. But from a critical standpoint, a map without difficulty settings shouldn't pass QC

No, not really, and it still doesn't. I'm a little surprised you are picking on Gotcha, a fairly straightforward map IMO. Most people complain about the more sprawling maps like The Chasm or Industrial Zone. The par times add up to 94 minutes (quick tally, could be off). So a fast player should be able to get through the entire game in 1.5 hours. If you are a beginner and playing on UV, you simply can't expect to beat it that fast. One thing that might skew people's perspective is that back in the 90s, we actually chose the difficulty setting that seemed right for us. We also played with our friends and helped each other and read strategy guides and walkthroughs. If really stuck we might have even used a cheat code here and there because we weren't always obsessive about completion. So, no, it wasn't a slog at all. It was a lot of maps to play and that was a good thing. If you were a beginner you could pick beginner difficulty and enjoy the game as a beginner should. If you were a veteran you could challenge yourself. If you were a speedrunner you could beat the game in under 30 minutes. You want slog? Go play through all six episodes of Wolfenstein 3D. Or try Hexen without a walkthrough. You'll be crawling back to mommy Doom2 within an hour.

Hellamander

A lot of people do feel this way... but at the same time, the more rotten the big machine gets, the more opportunities open up for developers at small companies to provide a refreshing alternative (and for consumers to actually appreciate it). An interesting point... but are they really that much better? My last experience with a new J title was Tekken 7, which to me was a massive disappointment. Season passes, shitty DLC, you have to pay to play Tekken Bowl, literally don't even unlock characters like a normal fighting game (all unlocks are DLC), and the most awful story mode. And the arcade mode is awful too. Honestly I have nothing good to say about the game that wasn't already part of the previous installments.

It isn't just about the surface-level quality of each title. (In fact I would argue that there are many, MANY more crappy indie games just due to the fact that they get created faster, and are more likely to still be released even if they miss all sorts of their targets). It's also about good studios (read: the actual developers) being shut down by ruthless execs, and just hard money squeezing in general. Making ridiculous promises and doing release now, patch later (maybe). Requiring online connection, then later killing the game that you paid for by simply shutting off the server.

That part really hit me as well. I think supporting these giants will be counter-productive in the end. The id Software that produced the best FPS ever was still a very small company, staffed primarily by people who actually wanted to make cool games. It is a completely different company today and there is no reason to believe it will put out anything worthwhile. Their main accomplishment was creating a modern FPS with a few scraps of oldschool gameplay. When you give money to the employees executives of these companies, you're basically saying "thank you Sir and may I please have another." Sometimes you really have to take two steps back in order to take one step forward. In my opinion the best way to proceed as a player is to spend more time on finding games you like from smaller companies. (I'm starting to dislike the "indie" title because pretty much anything that isn't a manybilliondollar corporation is now "indie" simply because they don't have those hundreds of unnecessary employees). Once found, buy them, share them, talk about them in blog posts or review sites rather than transient YT videos that will never resurface. I spend a lot of time on itch.io but one thing I don't like about it is the lack of a "center." We need websites that support the Good Companies with real articles and meaningful social interaction. Probably they are out there (still) but Google doesn't want to tell me. You see, the video games industry is just one facet of a greater problem, which is that all internetting is becoming more and more streamlined. Or rather just Streamed. And most people are just kinda going along with it, which is understandable since many people aren't techy enough to even see what is happening. Hell, I AM techy enough and still I'm dragging my feet... I've been planning to completely de-google/de-microsoft my virtual life, yet I continue with the same habits. It takes effort to break out of the stream, no effort to just float along with it. But the good news is that we DO have a choice and we can act in a constructive way by supporting the companies whose philosophy matches with ours.

The vanilla door actions are marked as either D1/DR, or S1/SR to denote "door" or "switch." The D1/DR don't use a tag... if I remember correctly, even if you do use a tag it won't work as the action only operates on the local sector... could be wrong about that though. The S1/SR require a tag (if 0, it tries to open all sectors with 0 tag :P) However with generalized door actions I'm pretty sure you just use a tag if you want remote activation, or no tag if you want regular door behavior. Hence why it isn't marked as "D1" or "S1" (or W for walkover... you can do all that with the flags instead)

OH, lol, in fact I did laugh...

Oh, someone else has a much more extreme opinion than I do. Your point?

Edgy is a term I would apply to games like Duke 3D and shadow warrior. Doom was offensive to some for being gory and having depictions of hell, but it never seemed to me like it was trying extra hard to be offensive. The gore is not gore porn if that makes sense. The main character keeps his mouth shut. There are no sexy demons. Those are the kind of additions that would make me want to call it edgy.