I got one of these for my birthday back in 2003!
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Metroid 2 continues. Landmarks aren’t possible except in the occasional odd tileset glob or having two enemies slightly closer together than the usual pattern. I like this kind of mental maze-solving hint which isn’t reliant on the environment theming to get your bearings. But it also means you’re never quite sure of where you are exactly except after scanning your way back and forth through an area thoroughly.
It’s also nice that there are more energy tanks than the maximum you can hold. Feels a bit less judgy than later Metroids which love to tell you how close to 100% you are on multiple counts.
Most of the Metroids can be beaten by getting them stuck above you like so.
Feeling like Arino getting these guys stunlocked in patterns
But then they evolved to beat my strategy! That was a pretty neat moment that stemmed from me just doing exploits.
My playthrough came to a halt at Area 8/9? There are almost no health or missile pickups which requires a huge journey backwards to progress because you essentially have to fight 3 minibosses back to back and I cannot fight them very well without losing half a full set of energy tanks each time. Just a needless and mean backtrack when you get to this section.
I’ve definitely been through more tedious backtracks but I couldn’t hack it given how this game has gone so far. I watched the rest on Youtube and have a lot of respect for the game apart from the gigantic backtrack. It feels odd and unique in the way a lot of early Nintendo sequels do that later games lose once the series ossifies.
My fave track (even though it happens after I quit playing)
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I have completed a.l.t.
it was absolutely incredible. the ending is so good. the final three stages are incredible. it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
it is difficulty and frustrating, the level design is sometimes too cryptic for its own good, and its goes hard with over-the-top, seemingly unwinnable setpiece design in its final levels. it was extremely frustrating, but also very gratifying to devise strategies that allowed me to actually come out on top when it seemed impossible. it is a very difficult game to complete but for what I got out of it it was worth every second. I cannot recommend it enough, as long as you are a true doom murderhead.
I played on ultra violence so I wonder if it’s more reasonable on hurt me plenty – but looking back, I feel like it would have been less impactful if it was easier?
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I’ve started it too.
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I think that last section adds weight to the whole endeavour in a way I admire conceptually, certainly after the fact but yeah I had to break up my attempts at the final boss over multiple sessions, pretty torturous
but then, finally, one of the most cathartic moments I’ve had with a game, hard to quantify/justify just how much of that frustration is actually necessary for the subsequent release tho
EDIT: will use this post to add that beating Prime recently, while I really vibed with its environmental moods, I did not get that sense of catharsis at all from beating the final boss or anything to do with the story, final act left me a little cold
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i generally recommend people new to Doom wads play on Hurt Me Plenty (unless you’re playing the original Doom or whatever). sometimes even easier if it’s a harder new wad (tho HMP should be fine for ALT). i don’t think you really lose that much. ALT is honestly not even close to a hard mapset by modern Doom wad standards outside of a few maps, which is one of many reasons why i recommend it more often. in difficulty it’s not up there with a lot of sets people often recommend (i.e. Going Down or Ancient Aliens or Scythe 2 or Alien Vendetta or whatever). it’s up to what any individual person thinks though.
also if you like ALT, Sacrament (the set made by same group of people immediately before ALT) is worth playing too. it’s much shorter and doesn’t reach the highs of ALT, but there are some extremely memorable maps in it (particularly the second and last map). it’s also less difficult on the whole. the second map, for example, barely contains any monsters and is mostly focused on exploration.
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Yeah I always felt like the artifact hunt made the end of Prime something I’d dread for similar reasons. I toyed with just podcasting it through the end of Metroid 2 since I did really enjoy the game’s whole vibe but I have too much I wanna get too as well. I could see myself doing it if I had the game growing up.
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re: general re: A.L.T. discussion… i’m glad when i can get other people to play it. because it’s one of those things… i found it when i was searching for new Doom wads to play and it was mostly framed as a weird curiosity. i played a lot of other weird curiosities in that era, too, and some of them were nice to experience… but nothing compared to ALT even remotely in terms of overall execution and ambition. a lot of people in the Doom community were pretty dismissive about it - if they even talked about it at all - and it didn’t get a Cacoward that year (nor did Sacrament, which seemed to get at least slightly more respect). the vastly inferior Whitemare and Whitemare 2, which are Russian speedmapping sets that are neat but not amazing, seemed to even get more attention. the priorities of the Doom community really just baffled me (well, they continue to baffle me tbh). people will blow loads about stuff like Ancient Aliens that just feels like generally a lot of the same level over and over again to me in different permutations that is super deeply beloved because it has a Cool Aesthetic. that’s what got me to do those Doom Mixtape videos as some kind attempt to establish a counter-narrative to the one that community seemed to like to tell about itself. if you dig deep into Doom wads you’ll occasionally find shit no else one really tries. you’ll find shit like the level “The Silos”, MAP27 from the classic 90’s megawad Memento Mori 2 that is one of my favorite Doom maps (and maybe FPS levels) of all time and is just kind of a miracle to me that it was made by an amateur in 1996.
but ever since discovering A.L.T. like 10-11 years ago it really sent me into a spiral of madness. sort of like what you experience in the game itself. with ALT it’s also because of the Russian + Ukranian devs and that random left-field bit of homo/transphobia it made it a little harder to perceive intentions too so that made me more cagey. but it was like, when you’re the only one who thinks something is incredible and everyone else seems to be broadly dismissive or think you’re really weird for being so into this one thing. i experienced that feeling a lot in those years. it was similarly hard to get anyone excited about a lot of the increpare games i was into, for example. that feeling that the indie scene was often elevating people based on a lot of surface stuff that i couldn’t even pretend to care about because a lot of actually much better and more profound work was being left behind really bothered me immensely. a lot of stuff just felt like all show, nothing underneath a lot of the time. and i still haven’t shook that feeling - it definitely remains for most games for me today. that’s why i don’t listen to hype anymore. but anyway, ALT wasn’t that. but it doesn’t announce itself as important, so it makes it easy to dismiss.
there are just things ALT does that i have seen no commercial game do in that particular form/package. i hadn’t seen that happening anywhere else. only the occasional game by an outsider like G-String or Cruelty Squad, or a few DUSK levels, skims upon that to me re: the “boomer shooter” games that are usually way more formulaic and nostalgia-baity. ALT often has this playful sandbox feeling in the way Doom wads normally never are, but in a way that’s directed towards a very cryptic and haunting psychological story. it offers a direction for these kinds of games in the future i don’t really see anyone taking. it’s almost sort of like a weird Nintendo existential horror. like something that was very level designy and had fun combat and puzzles but also felt like it was constantly subverting expectations and messing with you in unsettling ways. but it is also completely understated, somewhat sloppy at times, and doesn’t announce itself as doing that - you have to figure it out yourself. the fact that it was by amateurs in this sub-scene of the Doom modding scene that wasn’t particularly beloved even within that scene really hurt me. it’s just easy to dismiss something that doesn’t look professional enough to you as “unserious” without actually engaging with it. but the future of games as a serious artistic medium could end up looking a lot more like this in the end. i.e. something that balances “fun” engaging stuff with things that really challenge you on a deeper level and make you ask questions on yourself. but in sort of an implicit, rather than explicit, way.
there is so much more profound things to be said about level design in any given level by Azamael (in particular) in ALT than you will find like watching GDC Level Design talks. it’s just not fair in a way, you know? i don’t want to seem like a person who is so singularly obsessed with this one thing but it is perfect lightning rod example of a larger phenomena that really depresses me. especially because Azamael is from Ukraine and hasn’t done anything since. and lord knows where he is. i hope he’s okay.
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I am packing up my apartment for a move and going through my bookshelf with my old game boxes, and I had completely forgotten about this.
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played bangai-o and sin & punishment, feel like to me they exemplify the way in which action games can end up with these pretty abstract narratives (mb in contrast to ‘traditional’ attempts at subversive narrative in eg. rpgs/visual novels that run a lot closer to how a novel would do it, or very slow atmospheric games etc)-- especially in love with how the shots of dialogue happen in bangai-o, this lattice of association and nouns firing on all cylinders, characters playing out this sort of weird quasi metaphoric oedipal pantomime. sin and punishment 2 is a game i played a lot as a kid and was vaguely aware of the first one thru smash bros, so was interesting to see what threads from it got extended into the sequel. very end of evangelion aesthetically /narratively, which might have fallen flat if was in a diff type of game-- the fast shooting like in bangai-o does a lot to break up the already quite loose bits of plot even further.
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Super Game Boy (SNES)
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The Messenger (PS4) - i’m really trying to give this a chance, but something about it really rubs me the wrong way. the music is… almost good? it isn’t bad…
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It didn’t work for me either. I liked the similar Cyber Shadow much more, it’s got very considered level and encounter design under a similar player moveset.
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yeah I mean I don’t play a ton of doom wads so that might be coloring my experience. but also, most of the maps are totally fine in terms of difficulty, it’s just maybe five or six that come off as brutally unfair on a naive playthrough. but even then it’s kind of in this gimmicky way (like the endgame setpiece that has you face off against like 12 cyber demons in a pit of lava with nothing but three invincibility spheres and effectively infinite BFG ammo), and these setpieces felt more like resource management puzzles than tests of outright skill. you just have to go in prepared to do a lot more lateral thinking than your average doom map expects of you. learning how to exploit monster in-fighting is a big part of it – there’s one setpiece that as best as I can tell requires you to make very creative use of this to survive, though I’m sure there are other more straightforward strategies that work too.
interesting that you should put it this way, because the last several maps of a.l.t. reminded me of death mountain in NES zelda in ways that I still find hard to put into words. just this general sense of unpredictable cryptic sprawl, I guess. and the way that a.l.t. consistently guts your expectations throughout the entire experience so that by the final stretch you’re left with this very pure, almost violent sense of boundless possibility that I strongly associate with the primitive void of 8 bit games. except it also has the strong vision and conceptual approach that most games of that era lack.
it definitely feels in the same world as stuff like g string, but I honestly think a.l.t. is a bolder piece of work. g string is wild in a lot of ways but it generally plays it safe design-wise. it sticks to the half life 2 playbook except it digs into more 90’s style level design where you can have branching paths and overly dense level layouts, which is something I adore about it. but the main appeal of g string to me is its completely unique aesthetic and the kind of rare intimacy you get with such a longform, asset-heavy experience created almost entirely by a single person. but a.l.t. feels like it’s making much more of a focused statement about game design, even if it’s deeply couched in the anachronistic, niche terms of classic doom modding. having some familiarity with those tropes are likely a prerequisite to fully appreciate what it’s doing, but I also feel that its vision is so strongly executed for it to be transcendent. it’s just alive with creativity. feels remarkably vital for its age, but honestly is probably more relevant today than ever given how turgid game design has become in both AAA and indie spaces.
also I remember playing memento mori way way back in the day… I didn’t realize they made a second one! I should play it.
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It’s time for some Misadventures.
Really bold choice of Capcom to make a spinoff prequel game starring characters from Mega Man Legends, probably speaks to the creative choices they took.
Thoughtfully the first tutorial level is entertaining to play through. You control not just a huge mech, but you can launch a projectile to make the Servbots go into structures, attack enemies, whatever. They retrieve treasure they find. They can’t die either, so it’s just cute. The control scheme from the previous Mega Man Legends is here, but with some of the rougher parts filed off.
There’s much less minimal ancient technology existential dread and much more saturday morning anime. Tiesel forgot to pay back his loan and gets kidnapped.
It’s up to Tron get the million dollars to save Tiesel. She has a ship full of servbots and a mech suit. Each Servbot has it’s own unique skill that it has to learn via leveling up and getting an item! They have stats too! Oh my god!!!
There’s different areas of the ship where the Servbots hang out, there’s a cafe, a gym full of minigames…
But enough of that it’s time to go on a mission, let’s rob a fucking bank why not.
The bank is actually…an animal hospital!
So in lieu of a bank to rob Tron decides to rob the surrounding houses. You do this by aiming the guidance munition at a house, which knocks down the front door, and then the servbots ransack it. The first time you do this it plays a very cute cutscene of servbots stealing everything from a house.
Then the cops show up! and you can blow them up and get money! this game has it all!!
But then the boss shows up, and it’s a traffic cop?
Anyway after all that, it’s back to the mothership.
It feels like a pretty maximalist contrast to Mega Man Legends, which feels downright minimalist next to Misadventures. They don’t have the talking cutscenes like in Mega Man Legends, so I wonder if that was just simply a huge production pain in the ass to do for a spinoff and they did the logical shortcut of talking animated heads with word bubbles. It’s fun. It’s got a lot of systems in place I’m probably not going to be able to grok. I’d like to finish this before going to Mega Man Legends 2 (going in order of release)
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i’m glad you say that, because yeah. it almost feels like a bit a manifesto in a way. from the pirate imagery to the fact that the game is literally called “ALT” (as in, an alternative… in addition to obviously standing for Absolute Life Transformation), it’s like the game is framing itself as an alternate universe version of games in general. or the fact that like the turning point towards the end of the set is a level called “God Is Dead”. but yeah i talk more about that in the article i wrote for Waypoint about ALT that a lot of people probably read.
i don’t want to read into when it also just has level names borrowed from Evangelion and the random homo/transphobic (i think??) stuff, lol, but still. there’s clearly an attempt to tackle larger concepts and ideas going on there that just happens to be presented in the form of a Doom wad, for whatever reason. it’s like, i dunno. a lot going on there!! by any means not just a weird curiosity or an occupation of one person’s fevered headspace but like… an actual focused, sharp statement about something. it’s almost jarring to experience that in that particular form, because you just… would never expect that!
i dunno, playing ALT for the first time exploded a lot of my expectations for a lot of things in general.
yeah i mean, it still feels like it came from a different (maybe alternative??? eh???) universe to me. like i can’t attribute the design sensibility to one era in particular. i can’t associate really with a particular time and place. it just feels, uh, of itself. maybe some of the detailing is way less extensive than other modern Doom wads. but it was already obviously a retro thing that at times kinda looked ugly or weird when it was made.
like the Doom community has had some wackier and more radical experiments in the last decade i.e. stuff like The Given which is a full, no-combat puzzle map. but nothing with the degree of scope or ambition of ALT that holds it together like that. and also ALT and Sacrament have a better reputation among a lot of people now. and given what i know about the pretty troubled development of ALT (i.e. it was going to be a solo project by Azamael that he semi-abandoned and BeeWen had to cobble together into a community project) it’s kind of amazing it all happened like that.
BeeWen’s work in progress set “Voyager” is amazing in its own way by the way, but isn’t fully released yet (seems like it might still be tho) and is… one of the most cryptic things i’ve ever played through. like, way more frustrating and brutal of an experience. and without the range and variety of something like ALT (given that it’s just one person who likes to make cryptic maps). but it is just insanely ambitious. i play one or two of the maps in my Doom Mixtape videos tho if you wanna get a taste. it’s not sharply focused like ALT tho.
also, it’s funny. i was looking at some video of Psychonauts 2 because i’m watching that new Double Fine documentary. and some of the stuff there i saw made me think of weirder and wackier moments in Doom wads. like obviously Psychonauts is an on the surface wacky game and not cryptic like something like ALT but it still made me think of the fact that if there’s anything in the mainstream space that would take inspiration from something like ALT, it would be that particular game. and like a few of the people who designed on that game follow me online (well - i’m good friends with JP who is one of them). and it makes me realize that at least one of those people (i.e. JP) played ALT because of me, lol. so i wonder if there’s any influence in there. i wonder if he talked to his level design comrades about ALT or whatever and they were inspired by that. the secret lineage of ALT to Psychonauts 2 lol. i haven’t asked him about it because i don’t want to come off too weird, and that game’s development is a sensitive topic i think. but anyway yeah… not to diminish what ALT does on its own though.
memento mori 2 is better imo though they’re both solid to very good. they’re def of their time, but in a good way. and 2 has a handful of levels that are very memorable to me. i think 2 is def better than the TNT episode of Final Doom overall (tho TNT has some good moments). more of an imaginative variety and less bullshitty. honestly probably the best version of that sort of set that i’ve played, tho Requiem is good too (and Requiem features future Valve designer Iikka Keranen). but yeah it’s still Doom in the mold of a 90’s shooter before people started doing weird maximalist experiments they started to do with it more circa the mid 00’s or whatever.
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Finally sat down and played Roundguard. I beat a run on my second attempt so I guess I am done now and can uninstall! I mean, I say that rhetorically. I have already uninstalled it
I didn’t like it very much, obviously. I am not really sure what I expected as I was never a big Peggle freak or anything but I definitely used to sit around in an exhaustion haze in college and watch my friends play peggle on their laptop in the living room at 2 AM. Maybe I was seeking those days again… well, I did not find them
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I say this every time it comes around but think the later half platforming is some of the best in video games. Everything else is varying levels of fine/eyerolling.
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i just liked this as a quote i don’t have anything to add
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