Reviews - chromium24

Doom is a fantastic game, perhaps one of the best FPSes ever made (even nineteen years after its release). It's difficult to improve on Doom in a way that keeps the same instant-gratification, kill-em-all feel that Doom had AND preserve balance in the game, but Brutal Doom does just that.

The new weapons, especially the assault rifle, all feel powerful and satisfying; the enemies are smarter and, with buckets of gore on hand for each kill, satisfying as hell to defeat. The sounds are excellent, the gameplay feels modern but still original, and overall the quality of the experience is outstanding.

If this was a commercial game, released now for $20, I'd unhesitatingly buy it. As it is, available as a free mod for a game that can be easily had for a few bucks, it's an unbeatable deal.

(For extra fun, get Zandronum and a couple friends and rip and tear together. It's ******* great.)

Reader, let us cut through some ********.

I don't want to say something cliche. I don't want to say "Dwarf Fortress is the future of gaming", or talk about the complexity of the game as if raw complexity is a good thing. I quite simply want to say that Dwarf Fortress is fun.

Now, it's not thrilling -- not most of the time. Most of the time you're figuring out how to build a cistern to hold water for your well, or managing the crop rotation for your farms, or possibly designing a secure entrance for your fortress. Most of the time, this game is a game of building and construction, of labor management and alcohol. (Don't forget about the alcohol.) No, this game isn't a game that generates its fun from action-packed combat -- though it has some -- or from cinematic cutscenes.

This game is a game of a million stories.

In this game, you will witness a humble cheesemaker pick up an axe in a time of dire crisis, dying at the entrance to the fortress -- his fortress -- to save the girl he has fallen desperately in love with. You will witness a gemcrafter, struck blind by a goblin's spear when he was just a child, be possessed by spirits from beyond this world and craft an artifact as beautiful as any that has ever existed. You will witness a battle-scarred veteran whose emotions have long since died snap like a twig and reap a dozen of his fellow dwarves as if they were wheat before a scythe.

You will see more stories than you will ever realize unfold in front of your eyes, more lives and events than you could possibly know. You will play a game that seems less like a game than it is a world of its own -- a world of dwarves and goblins, of monsters and gold, of stone and pick and mountain.

And alcohol.

(LOTS of alcohol.)

Basically, this is what I wish Vegas always was.