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MyHouse.wad is not another gimmicky Doom map with ingenious level design
MyHouse is not another gimmicky Doom map with ingenious level design. It’s an art piece with a strong and effectively delivered message. The message of the importance and complexity of personal exploration, however frightening, dangerous, and challenging it can be. I see it as especially powerful due to its medium of choice—not just a videogame,…
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UNRECORD: This is why we can’t have the nice things
Wasting opportunities is one thing, but doing so in a destructive, immoral, and irresponsible way is another. My thoughts on Unrecord’s gameplay trailer.
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Mad Max
Mad Max: Fury Road and Mad Max, the videogame, were released the same year, in 2015. Nevertheless, it is said that George Miller wasn’t involved in the videogame production, and there is no direct connection between the projects. Does it matter? No. The game has all the essential things that elevate Mad Max into a…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Wolfenstein 3D
Shareware versions of both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were pre-installed on my first PC machine back in 1995. When friends came over, we played Doom «Nightmare hotseat»—we sucked, rarely beating E1M1, but it was pure fun. Personally, though, when remaining one-on-one with my best pal Volkov Commander (also pre-installed by patriotic Russian hardware sellers), I…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] The Mass Effect Trilogy
No matter how much you love the game, some of the magic wears off when you replay it so many times. I no longer feel the dramatic tension during the Suicide Mission, I’m no longer impressed by the scope of Reaper invasion, and I don’t even shed a tear when Mordin dies. But when Mass…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] A Plague Tale: Innocence
A Plague Tale: Innocence is an excellent example of the schematic simplicity of decent storytelling in a videogame. You need a central theme enforced by plot and mechanics and an overall focus on this theme. The rest is a technical matter. Of course, the devil lies in the details, and additional layers are necessary to…
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[Cleaning the Backlog] Alien: Isolation
It’s entirely possible that I like Alien: Isolation for the wrong reasons—I like this game in its more action-filled and dynamic moments. But it made me eventually appreciate the moments of hiding, and crawling, and holding my breath—sometimes just before bursting into laughter, but still! I remember that right after I finished it, I decided…
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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Souls
It took years for Dark Souls trilogy to finally click with me. I have been enamored with its setting and aesthetic since the very release of Prepare to Die Edition on PC. The port was poor, though, and it scared me away. By the time when modders fixed it, the ‘difficulty discourse’ caught up on…
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Battleborn: Speaking Ill of the Dead
In the light of the latest news about Battleborn shutting its servers in January 2021, I just had to look back at it. For it is not only for successful games to be remembered: flops also deserve their place in history.
Baking Potatoes On the Ashes of Society