Wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Halloween! This year I had a get together at my place with some friends and to celebrate this spook season we played co-op of the original Doom. It was fun to play Doom with friends and if you wanted upgrade things a bit you could play one of these Halloween / Horror themed Doom WADS reviewed by The Dean of Doom himself. I'm a sucker for the original Doom campaign but there are some really incredible WADs that in a lot of ways are better than the original campaigns but require you to be a bit of a Doom expert to complete.

☠️👻

Tangerine Nightmare: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/s-u/tn
Wormwood: https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110060-wormwood-2-halloween-maps/?tab=comments#comment-2041472

Steam Deck is the new Valve hardware that will play your Steam library on the go using Linux and a modified version of Wine. Because of that some games don't run perfectly and Valve has a new system to let you know what games work and what games might need some tweaking.

"Introducing Deck Verified: See at a glance how your Steam games run on Deck. "

Happy Halloween everyone! I watched this recent Digitial Foundry breakdown of the recent Diablo II remake and all the various console versions and wanted to share it and kick off a broader public discussion on your thoughts about it. Seems like the general consensus is the game is a great version of the classic game, however, some miss the quality of life improvements present in more modern games such as Diablo III. It's an odd thing to think given folks were trashing Diablo III because it wasn't more like Diablo II.

I've recently been in the process of moving and finally landed into my new apartment so I haven't had as much time to play Diablo II as I would have otherwise, but so far I really love the work they've done with it. I'm curious if Blizzard will do more with Diablo II in terms of expansions or new content or if they will save all of that for Diablo IV? Also wondering how the reception of the Diablo II remaster might effect development of Diablo IV? Also... will we get Diablo IV with all the problems Blizzard is having right now?

RollerCoaster Tycoon is one of the best sim games of all time. As such it has a huge cult following and because of that was the first request fans made of NoClip for their retro documentary series "Greatest Hits." It goes over a lot of the games history all the way to it's modern incarnations and would be perfect except they weren't able to land an interview with the series creator Chris Sawyer.

If you love RollerCoaster Tycoon and are itching to play it there is a great open source project Open RollerCoaster Tycoon that is one of the best ways to play it on PC, Mac or Linux. If you don't have a PC and are mostly on your Smartphone or Tablet, RollerCoaster Tycoon Classic is a great port of RollerCoaster Tycoon and it's sequel including all of the expansions.

https://openrct2.org/

"In our brand new series Greatest Hits, we celebrate the legacy of RollerCoaster Tycoon by exploring its original design and talking to the people holding the torch today. RCT was chosen by a subset of our patrons - to pick the next game, consider joining them."

The MiSTer is an open-source project that emulates consoles and various other retro hardware via FPGA. FPGA means that it's pretty original hardware accurate emulation and it's similar to RetroPIE in that it's open source meaning anyone can create a hardware kit on your own to play or sell. I've heard really good things how well MiSTer runs and as such wanted to share this review by everyones favorite Jesus made entirely of Metal.

Seems like I'm posting a few Digital Foundry videos this morning. With that, has anyone picked up and played Skyward Sword on Switch yet? I've heard the controls are a mixed bag but overall the game is quite good. I didn't get this game on the Wii but am curious if it's worth coming back to on Switch?

I played Super Star Wars on the Super Nintendo a lot. A lot. It's one of the most fun Star Wars video games I've played and it's notoriously "Nintendo hard." I never really thought about it as a youth but when I come back to it now I do. If you practice at it you can beat it start to finish in one life, which I could do, but it takes a lot of effort to develop that. That all said, Super Star Wars and the subsequent two games are an example of fantastic Star Wars video games in a very crowded space. Lately, the quality of Star Wars games has gone up but it wasn't always so.

Now that the NightDive / MachineGames Quake remaster is out I thought it was worth sharing this Digital Foundry retrospective video. This came out earlier in May so it doesn’t cover the recent NightDive / MachineGames version but goes deep on Quake, it’s history and various ports.

During the Flame Fatales 2021 Games Done Quick charity speedruns this year I watched a new run I hadn't heard of for Final Fantasy IV called Paladin%. Basically it's a speedrun all the way to when Cecil becomes a Paladin making a much quicker FFIV speedrun. Not only does this run feature a classic Square RPG but also a runner I hadn't seen before, Spoone who is an absolute delight to watch.

Titanfall 2 dropped in 2016 to a very crowded shooter landscape and such as it was, somewhat under-performed expectations. That said the franchise went on to launch APEX Legends which is one of the biggest free to play Battle Royale games around and as such when I picked up an XBox Series X I decided to give Titanfall 2 a go. I played a bit of APEX Legends and it's a great Battle Royale game but I'm not a huge player of those kinds of games beyond the occasional Fortnite match and after hearing incredible things from one of my friends about Titanfall 2 I picked it up on sale for a handful of bucks digitally.

Titanfall 2 Is Incredible In 120FPS

Titanfall 2 is one of those games that when Microsoft gave developers the ability to take advantage of the XBox Series X hardware Respawn allowed game to run in 4K at 120FPS. I've heard some of my friends say they don't care about graphics and for the most part I agree with the sentiment. When you're into something fun be it a movie or game the graphics aren't always the most important thing. That said, playing a game at 120FPS is really an incredible thing that gives a game a little extra. If you are getting a console or PC soon capable of this, I'd hold out picking up Titanfall 2 until you can experience it as it's quite special.

The Empire VS The Rebels with Robot Suits

It's a battle tested story. Evil Empire wants to destroy it all and you are part of the scrappy rebels that will stop at nothing to save it. (A planet maybe, I don't entirely remember) Titanfall 2 uses these tropes to the max and the way they blend them makes the gameplay seamless. I'll be honest, I'm not sure I followed everything going on with the story but it serves the gameplay and incredibly lush visuals which is all I could really ask for.

Titanfall 2 clocks in at about 6-8 hours for the main campaign which isn't very long and thank Euclid for that. I know lots of gamers are looking for an epic 5,000 hour game but I'm really not anymore. Time is a premium and frankly, I'm not sure what kind of game could really hold my attention that long anyway. Titanfall 2 doesn't feel long winded and by the time I was wondering when the story would wrap up, it did. The final boss fight didn't really feel like a final boss fight which I really appreciated. It wasn't particularly challenging, which again, seemed good to me. The final boss fight here seemed a bit more like the ending to Kill Bill 2, except with Robot Suits and more shooting and yelling. I suppose in retrospect they aren't a lot a like but I liked it wasn't hard.

Titanfall 3 Please

With the success of the infinite money machine of APEX Legends I hope a new Titanfall single player game is coming but it might not be a big priority for EA. It seems that some rumors have surfaced that EA has given Respawn the greenlight for Titanfall 3 but I'm not sure what form this game might take and a huge game in early discussions is a long way from a potential launch.