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Video game thread
What are you playing this week, and what games are you looking forward to in the remainder of 2026?
I played a bit of Moomintroll - Winter's Warmth lately. It's very wholesome.
Thinking of starting a playthrough of either a solid CRPG or a first person RPG like the Gothic 1 Remake.
Edit: Wait, Gothic 1 has no first person mode. Only 3rd person camera. :o
I replayed Doom 1 with the Unseen Evil mod, which makes it look like Doom 64. It added an impressive psychological depth to the techbase levels of E1, but I felt that the slow descent into Hell in the other episodes was marred by the subdued colours. You can't really tell that the pool of blood is a pool of blood, nor can you tell the flesh textures apart from rock. It did give E2 a somewhat interesting gothic feel, but you never felt the slowly increasing spiritual fear that it invoked in me the first time I beat it. For E3, only Mt. Erebus was creepy.
In the original, the high point (or the low, depending on how you look at it) was House of Pain, with the tortured humans which may have been a Mussolini reference- effective, because up till that point the tortured sprites made one fear that it would be your fate too, but now one sees it from the outside, as witnessing someone who might have deserved his fate. In the mod, it was quite dull.
They also altered the end text, which meant that the theme of apparently eternal suffering was lost. Though I consider the end of Doom 1 to be in a strange way a good ending; once you reach Earth, it poses a question: has your soul been tormented enough that you give up just when the proof that you're not dead (ie. your continued existence on Earth, rather than the afterlife) is right in front of to you? The entire game was about wondering what you did to deserve this. If you're alive, you still have a chance to turn back...
Great mod nevertheless. It might make Doom 2 interesting, if I ever get through it.
You clearly appreciate Doom at much deeper level than me. Playing old doom with obscure new mods. What is it about doom that is so evergreen? I only played the old dooms briefly as a kid. Never really played them to death or mastery. What’s the pitch?
I'm not into Doom enough to play mods or player-made levels in general, but Doom has definitely followed me around. Unseen Evil was a lucky find, because Doom 64 certainly has an interesting style.
As for the pitch, I think that in the old days people made a lot out of a little. Doom's aesthetic is exquisitely made once you look past the fast paced, gung-ho exterior, and ponder the mysteries of the UAC and the terror they discovered. Even the simple title screen music, paired with the cover art, has always brought to mind a feeling of moral horror.
But you have to be in the mood to look for things to appreciate. The first time that I really started paying attention was in E2. In the Deimos Lab, near the end after you step on a teleporter, you're confronted with a moving wall which shows faces of the damned. A little further, you see a pool of blood flowing from a gothic face in the wall. The implication, or so it seemed to me, was that Hell was as a place which converts souls into mere blood.
There's an underlying intensity that gets obscured by the now household nature of the name Doom, and probably the old moral panic that surrounded it has made people less attuned to the genuinely strange and frightening themes which saturate it. The Doom experience, at least of the original 3 episodes, is a slowly unfolding, prismatic vision of what Hell really means. Add to this the generally high quality of all its aspects (though the level design never gets as good as E1 again, and the last level was aptly named Dis[appointment]) and you have a game that matters.
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