NoXion

I would have thought that prefacing my question with a note about my lack of knowledge about programming/game design would have forestalled such an interpretation, but apparently not. My apologies. For all that I knew, it really could have been something that was possible, but just not worth doing for whatever reason. I'm approaching this from the angle that nothing about creating a game is entirely accidental. That is, if a line of code exists, then there must have been some sort of reason or rationale for someone putting it like that, instead of otherwise.

I didn't think I was ascribing anything, I thought I was asking a question?

Interesting. So if there are no secret sectors, you finish the map with 0% Secrets on the tally board? I know next to nothing about programming and game development, but would it really have been that difficult to set it up so that a map with no secrets shows 100% on the final tally?

Maybe even... dead simple?

I've never understood the complaints about Doom Eternal being "cartoony". Did these people never play the first two games? I don't know how goofy it was intended to come across at the time, because back then I was a young child who never played the games in question, but to my adult eyes in the here and now, classic Doom's depiction of Hell feels closer to a kid's plastic Halloween costume, more than anything seriously intended to be frightening, like an actor's makeup in an 18-rated straight-faced horror movie. The classic games have a cool aesthetic don't get me wrong, but it just doesn't come across as genuinely terrifying when viewed through a screen, even though the implications are objectively disturbing and would be harrowing to anyone actually experiencing them. Doom 3 and to a certain extent Doom 2016 are the exceptions, their greater graphical fidelity helps and their aesthetic presentation is no doubt darker and more gritty, but even those games have their moments that are more spoopy than spooky. Doom 3 relies too much on the kind of cheap tricks found in a fairground house of horrors, and in Doom 2016 I think that any horror elements present are seriously undercut by the fact the player character is already established to be the kind of badass who makes demons wet their keks in fear.

Anyone else getting a "Blocked Page" when trying to download the PDF from Google Drive?

Sure, that was a risky gamble that didn't pay off. But developers shying away from taking risks (or being prevented from doing so by the suits) is what gets us endless iterations of the same stale CoD-BLOPS-Modern-Borefare clones. I would rather have Doom be something that developers are willing to take risks with, rather than just playing it safe.

I wonder if those episodes were made before Musk libelled that diver as a "pedo guy". On reflection that incident seems to have been a turning point in his general reputation.

Twitter wasn't great before Musk took over. I stopped visiting Twitter for the sake of my mental health before he bought it and made it his personal fiefdom. I haven't been back since, but from what I've seen second-hand, it is so much much worse now. Originally one of the problems with Twitter is how its very format and design encouraged thoughtless "hot takes" and other forms of bad-faith engagement between users. Even if you avoided interacting with other users, Twitter had a way of getting its hooks into you so that you'd be addicted to doomscrolling. But now imagine all that, *plus* all sorts of nasty assholes having the complete run of the place with no real consequences. You can even post child abuse material and Lord Musk will restore your account if he likes you enough.

Happy to have more Doom as long as it's good, but I was hoping for the next Id shooter to be a single-player focused Lovecraftian take on the Quake series.

I dumped Twitter before Musk took over because like Facebook, I could feel that using that site wasn't great for my mental well-being. Since Musk took over I've been following the decline of Twitter/Xhitter second-hand. I'm hoping that Musk starts charging all users and thus burns up even more of the 44 billion he paid for it. I know there are good arguments for not doing it, but there were also good arguments for not buying a company for at least twice its value, as well as good arguments for not throwing away the Twitter branding. But Musk has done both of things anyway. So I wouldn't rely on "it's a fucking stupid idea" as a reliable indicator that he won't do it.

One of the perks of being an adult is that you get to spend your hard-earned money on whatever the fuck you want. Video games offer a diverse range of experiences in a manner that can be extremely cost-effective. They can be played alone, with friends or total strangers, and that's entirely your choice depending on what game you choose. It's a no-brainer as far as entertainment options go. As far as people I know in real life are concerned, as opposed to people I see on a screen, video games are a completely normal pastime for adults. My mum is in her fifties and still plays video games. My sister, a mother to two children, plays video games. Her partner plays video games. My adult friends play video games. My workplace at a FTSE 500 corporation has a Slack channel for talking about video games. None of this would even be possible if video games were just a childish plaything one inevitably grows out of. Maybe Maher is doing a bit and is just pretending to be some complete fucking Boomer dinosaur, I don't know him too well. Or maybe he's as much of a fucking pillock as he comes across. Either way, opinions like that are not worth taking seriously at all.

I also got the MCC a while back and played through the first game. I honestly forgot about the painful areas where you went backtracking across cut-and-paste interior levels. They weren't so prominent in my memories of the game. But the outside areas are better and the gunplay was fun, after I once again got used to the idea of only carrying two weapons at once. Halo is definitely more fun when played with friends in my experience.

Not just that, but it seems like a lot of effort for little reward. It's not like this is the kind of site where people are going to be chucking around their bank details.

I felt it was time to get into a game I'd never played before, instead of just playing the same old classic Doom and modded Minecraft sessions. So I chose Elite: Dangerous, because I've hardly played any space flight games and it had been sitting on my Steam wishlist for a good while. I even bought an X52 Hand-On-Throttle-And-Stick in order to complete the whole "piloting your own personal spacecraft" experience. Two months and 360 hours later, and I'm now in my massive Type-10 Defender on my way to Beagle Point at the other end of the galaxy, rendered in glorious 1-to-1 scale in all its 400 billion star glory. Yeah, I think this game has got me. o7