Lucius Wooding

Nothing neuters a caco cloud like disabling this setting. It's rather sad.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say explosive barrels.

There were castles in the Wolfenstein levels in Doom 2 though. We just don't see them from the outside. But I applaud you for making this thread. Clearly the threads shitting on the new entry from above, below, and both sides aren't enough.

This is a pretty willfully blind take tbh. Because you like it, it must not be capitalism I guess. Admittedly I'm a fan of Nintendo and other Japanese studios and titles. Making quality games is a pretty good deodorant to their less savory practices. But to act like their shit doesn't stink because of some "Japanese Benevolent Corporate Culture" myth is just falling for their carefully cultivated image. You should read up on Nintendo's treatment of third party devs such as Retro Studios, whose main crime was not being Japanese. Or the fact that they crack down on fan projects and emulation in ways no other studio does, and they make you buy the same games multiple times and offer minimal control of your library, and they're draconian about any kind of publicity or events relating to their products, good or bad. Maybe they prefer to be assholes through their lawyers while western companies do it a different way. And all those studios milk sequels like no other; but again, if you like it it's not capitalism. Does "Eastern" also include Chinese developers who have brought us the likes of Genshin Impact, by the way? Or are we just strictly venerating Japan here?

It's classic capitalism. The studios pump out games with lots of hype and get tons of purchases, then the interest wears off quickly in a couple weeks in most cases. It's far better as a business to treat games as a disposable product and never try to give them any polish or staying power. Then as soon as all the streamers and people who follow the latest trend are ready to discard it, the next new thing is ready to come out. It's like shitty bubble gum; the sooner the flavor runs out, the more people will buy. I don't think it's going to change either. The big studios will leverage any means they can to try and keep the profitable model and reduce costs. For example, having a staff of hundreds of specialized developers, often utilizing their proprietary tools. It's impossible for individuals these days to become a John Romero or Miyamoto because the projects have so much less personality and individual vision behind them. And even if you're a solid developer who worked on some well known title, it wouldn't guarantee you any kind of career progression. You can either make the same money writing the left testicle texture shaders for another game with no long term security, or spend years of your own time making a passion project with no income. The devs tend to be hungry and interchangeable. Soon most of those positions will be cut in order to use AI tools and reduce the staff, and this will be hailed as a step forward. In reality it just means the industry will rot even more and I expect the biggest titles to suffer in quality the most. But due to gamers' buying habits and the reduction in costs, they will remain hugely profitable and the CEOs will continue to rake in money. But at least the fans of those franchises will get games regularly that always hit their deadlines. You might even have a certain amount of meme appeal about how hilariously uncanny the AI shit is. Don't engage with this content in any way. Even shitting on it or review bombing is only going to draw more eyeballs. The only thing to do is hold on to the games we enjoy and keep their communities alive with new content and discussion long after they came out. If you think people dickride retro games now, wait until 5 years from now when every AAA title leverages AI content. It will be a choice between AAA titles and half assed remakes of classics with the prices jacked the fuck up (looking at you on the latter, Nintendo). Don't give either of those fuckers your money. Consider boycotting every title unless they earn your money, rather than considering a purchase by default. Consider checking out a book from your local library, or cleaning up litter from the park rather than helping Ubisoft's CEO make another payment on his latest platinum and diamond studded buttplug. In closing, keep your retro consoles and games. Keep backups of your purchases and even old PCs without internet connections if they can still play old installs that have become obsolete. It will save you money later and your little personal game library will get better and better as the new stuff gets shittier, which it's inevitably going to do. Support some indie devs and consider Patreon donations or merch buying if you're inclined. And also, don't feel bad about pirating the tits off some of those games if you're so inclined (just be careful, don't fuck up your family's PC with Limewire).

Now we can port Doom 64 to the Snes at last.

Not a hot start necessarily. But I like the player to find out they're in trouble pretty quickly.

If you want something chill, that kind of goes against the idea of slaughter in a lot of ways. The entire genre is about killing lots of things fast and also usually moving fast. Personally I'm not a fan of like 75% of the ones I play and I wouldn't go out of my way to play most slaughter stuff. But I usually want a bit of a challenge when I do. I like to meet it where it's at, or just skip it. That said, I'd go Sunder (For People Who Don't Have Time to Play Sunder). Definitely a lot more accessible and more tolerable to play casually than the original, even though it will generally still force you to come up with good strategies. I decided to give this a chance because I consider the original to be massively bloated, and I ended up enjoying most of it pretty well. I'd probably also recommend Vanguard, it's a good slightly older WAD that has a few good slaughter maps and a mix of others. It's pretty great all around, but maps 5 and 10 come to mind as slaughtery fun. In general though, maybe just play all the heavily acclaimed megawads out there. Most of the time they have at least a handful of slaughter maps thrown in at the end, and are worth playing to begin with. Or consider playing slaughter stuff with weapon mods as a way of making it a lot more forgiving.

It's gotta be Wolfenstein. I mean, cmon.

Swift Death. If you think Scythe 1 is too mean, SD puts it to shame. I might not really replay the maps I beat, but I had a lot of fun trying desperately to carve a way through. Most of them are fairly short and really feel satisfying to finally beat. Also Speed of Doom is generally considered this towering masterpiece but I find most of the maps super annoying and not fun to play. I think a large part of it is probably that I don't like playing with saves and it's also incredibly unfriendly to playing it blind. A decent amount of the maps are reasonable but there are difficulty spikes scattered throughout IMO. I associate it with Alien Vendetta and I think Scythe 1+2 as well as Plutonia 2 all hold up a lot better. I had more fun with Sunlust even though I struggled through it and had to work at it. Perhaps I'd enjoy SoD better at a later time when my skills are well beyond its challenge, turning it into a light and fluffy experience by comparison.

See, now this is exactly the kind of topic that can make for interesting discussion. It's open ended and lets people talk about lots of different WADs, and it gets into the intricacies of combat in a way that's easy to understand. Kudos for having an original thought. I think it can be difficult to enforce a single set pattern unless you make a very large scale fight, since that takes a lot of the RNG and unpredictability out of play. Some setups inarguably do it though. Pretty often it's more a matter of figuring out how to survive long enough before you're finally able to manage a circle strafe or other pattern to make the fight completely consistent. Personally I like constricting movement in creative ways, whether by limiting space available or using hurtfloors or some other way to penalize the player. Forcing precise and well timed dodging can really make pretty small threats very concerning. You can make a pair of hell knights scarier than 100 hell knights in a big arena. I guess one slightly dumb example is in E3M3 where that first pinky can trap you at the start. If you're pistol starting it forces you to keep baiting out its melee to buy time for your peashooter to kill it. It's not an elaborate example but it's quite possible for casual players to die in that scenario, especially with fast monsters or no weapons. Of course if you have played the level before, you can "Just Leave". I really like when fights use the property that revenants have where they never fire projectiles if you're at close range. Sometimes you can immobilize the revenant (such as putting it on a platform) and it lets the player keep their back to it safely while dealing with another group of monsters, as long as you stay within a limited range of them yet outside of melee. I've had big rooms of monsters where the sniping revenants actually make a little safe space rather than being the priority target. If you go for them first, the rocket splash damage, retaliatory missiles, and lots of projectiles in your back that you can't see are your punishment. Another good one is in Sunlust Map 14, in the final fight. It's essentially a large figure 8 shaped room. 2 pillars contain a group of hell knights each on your sides, and a larger group of revenants comes out of the center. There isn't really room to rocket them in a straightforward way without exposing yourself to the HKs, it's easy to get cornered from behind, and doing the fight without the BFG is very tricky at times. One strat I found was to lure the revenants out; you hug them and slowly back up so they don't shoot or retaliate at you (and also you don't make noise). They'll tend to infight the hell knights to each side and the HKs won't spill out and block everything if you're slightly more patient. Then once you reach a corner you can use rockets and soon circlestrafe, and the crowd control is a ton better than if you try to just kill things quickly. It's pretty counterintuitive when usually we're taught to kill revenants on sight but doing the lure buys you a decent bit of extra space and compacts the mob of monsters just enough.

I'm just going to leave a funny copypasta from a Gamefaqs guide from 2000 to lighten the mood. It was written by an accomplished speedrunner and content creator who many of you surely know. If it bears any similarity to anyone in this thread or elsewhere, that's pure coincidence. I'm not trying to make any kind of point, I swear. I'm pretty sure he was only about 10-13 years old at this time. Take from that what you will. But the important lesson is, things you put on the internet don't go away and may be embarrassing 24 years later.

It's not like we want to dunk on good threads, we leave those alone to develop decent conversation. But if that's all anyone wants to do on your topic, then that tells you it's probably shit. Heaping scorn on poor threads, from a wide group of people, is a lot more entertaining and has more finality than just downvoting them (which some platforms attempt to utilize to combat poor content) and gives a much clearer signal to the OP to do better. Usually somebody will be fairly specific as to why the thread is bad in the hopes of OP improving, but very often certain posters just don't want to make any kind of effort (and often start tons of threads). It's rarely just one or two haters going against the majority who respond positively to a thread, and in those cases the negative posts get steamrolled anyway. Usually if one of those threads gets locked or hidden with few responses, the OP will think it's a personal attack by the mods and they're being muzzled. If there's a consensus from 2-3 pages of dismissal by everybody, the mod can put it out of its misery and seem merciful instead. It's like all of us are being the bad cop so the mods get to be the good cop. It's fine for the forums to be slow and lacking topics. It doesn't help just to fill them with poor content, it stirs up the wrong kind of activity. It's better to just let there be silence sometimes. And if you must get instant gratification and faster interaction, just use one of the many discord servers. They're literally built around that posting style and nobody cares if you post dumb memes or flippant stream of consciousness shit. But you are allowed to legally think in the US, or any country at any age. In case you need a reminder.

I should point out that stupid threads have always existed. But I think the problem is that a lot of new posters don't really grasp how forums work and expect to be rewarded somehow, possibly with valuable prizes, for content that does little more than bump the forum. The types of posts that would be inoffensive and pass like a fart in the wind in a busy Discord channel or something tend to linger in a slower forum. We have threads that are a decade old and get responses daily because they are relevant. Even the ones that burn out after a couple days can still be worthwhile to engage with, or informative. Stupid questions that don't have an answer, titles that don't have any follow up in the actual post, or threads where the OP doesn't contribute anything and just expects to crowdsource all the opinions and discussion are all fucking annoying. There are plenty of posts by new people with a good amount of thought put into them, or an actual question with an answer, or that provoke an interesting discussion. There are discernible characteristics that make a thread good or bad, it's not random or personal or generational bullying when OP gets backlash over things like this. To use the example of the red cacodemon thread, it lacked any content aside from the title and there is no real answer to that question. It could have been a joke thread but OP didn't make an attempt to frame it or offer one themselves. There's a not so low chance it was intentional rage bait but it wasn't exactly well crafted either. It could have been more of a general "What was the inspiration/lore behind cacodemons" thread that had more diverse topics to go into, or one that talked about custom monsters based on the cacodemon, or speculated on various aspects of them with some kind of basis in canon. The only saving grace is that the thread has (so far) lacked any mention of cacodemon buttholes. Yes, it's a boomer forum for a 30 year old game. It's going to be a lot more dead than reddit or other more widely exposed platforms, and that's okay. And yes, almost everything has been made and discussed before at some point. But if you make a post that makes you seem like a thoughtful or interesting person, someone might actually have a discussion.

Maps 1, 2, and 6 are pretty tough compared to the rest of them. Overall it's definitely worth playing, you just need to deal with the hitscan and lack of health in map 1. And I'd recommend using saves in the later maps if you're having trouble, due to possibly getting lost or rocketed to pieces. The difficulty curve and map placement are totally off though. Map 1 is probably the second or third hardest, especially to max; it only got put first probably because it's very short. Map 2 is probably one of the best Doom 1 maps but the start is brutal on continuous. Apart from 1, 2, and 6 the others are mostly tepid and forgettable by comparison. Sometimes if you get bad damage rolls and unlucky rng you can lose a bunch of health from those damn shotgunners. Then you're basically one mistake from death. It has some ammo and health issues for sure. But the rest of the episode is very generous by comparison, especially if you find secrets. Map 6 is a bit sadistic though if you don't understand how the progression works. Some of the combat in Romero's E4 maps is pretty well ahead of its time, even including Doom 2 stuff. And E4 is also great to prepare you for eventually playing Final Doom.