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As a lot of people these days, I enjoy playing video games. Here's a list of games I have enjoyed a lot over the past few... *insert time measurement here*
In other words, this is a little list of games that I have enjoyed greatly at one point or another.
> "A story in a game is like a story in a porn movie; it's expected to be there, but not that important."
> - John Carmack
If there's a common theme on this list, it's that all of the items are quite fast paced and lacking in story.
The original Doom is still my favorite game of all time. It is amazing how well Dooms simplicity is still holds up nowadays. There's just something magical about it. I should mention that my love of Doom isn't nostalgic in nature, or rather, it didn't start for nostalgic reasons as Doom is around 10 years older then me.
What can I say that hasn't already been said about the original Doom games?
My favorite officially licensed Doom mappack is No Rest For The Living.
Getting it to run on modern hardware is a piece of cake. Just grab a source port and an IWAD and you're good to go (you could in theory also come across an IWAD because it hits you in the face due to the direction of the wind that day in that specific site).
My source port of choice is GZDoom due to its mod support.
Popular source ports include PrBoom+, Chocolate Doom, Odamex, ZDaemon, 3DGE and the Doomsday Engine (the guy behind Doomsday is also on gemini).
Devil May Quake.
The best of the NewBlood Interactive games so far and I don't think that I will go back on that statement any time soon.
This is the best way to sum up this game. Possibly one of the most accurate taglines used in marketing. This has to be my favorite game that has appeared during the last five years.
This game is really fast paced, as in, it is way faster than Doom Eternal. After having played Ultrakill for a little while I decided to start up Doom Eternal on nightmare again, which was a bit of mistake as it felt quite slow.
The first 3D game with polygons.
Good shooter with great accidental movement on top of that.
Getting this thing to run is also very easy as the engine falls under the GLPv2 license.
The source port I use is Quakespasm.
My favorite game made with the Doom engine.
Has some light RPG elements. Design is king in this game. Has a rather high combat difficulty. But that is still nothing compared to the convoluted level design. You will get lost the first 5 times playing this game. Hell, I still get lost every now and then even though I must be around the 20th playthrough by now. Though on the other hand that could also have to do with me being quite scatter-brained.
Hands down the best game made with Ken Silverman's Build Engine.
Really high difficulty.
To give you an idea on how Bloods difficulties work, the "easy" mode is comparable to what most games would have as their "normal" mode. Then Blood's "normal" is "hard", Blood's "hard" is "fuck-you hard" and Blood's "fuck-you hard" is "tough luck mate, watch out for your blood pressure". Pretty sure this is the most brutal game on the default difficulty.
Is a bit difficult to get running on modern hardware because Atari are a bunch of arseholes and just sit on the Blood license, generally not doing anything with it. If you use Micro$oft's game launching and spyware platform, using the Fresh Supply re-release (thank you to Atari for having a good mood and giving Nightdive the rights to make the damn thing) is the easiest way. The catch is that Fresh Supply isn't entirely accurate compared to the original DOS game. If you want accuracy, get NBlood. If you use an actual OS, NBlood is also the way to go. There also still is the BloodGDX port, which is written in Java and is a bit less accurate then NBlood.
If you really want, you can always try messing around with the DOSBox configuration to make the original port somewhat playable.
The second best game made with Ken Silverman's Build Engine.
You know, I think I have more criticisms of Doom Eternal than any of the other games on this list... But that might just be my contrarian instincts acting up since it got a lot of praise, well deserved praise mind you. My main problem with it is that it is kind of a one-and-done game for me. I got two playthroughs in at around 30 hours, one at I believe 100%, the other being bugged due to the IDKFA bug which is also exploited in the speedrun. For some reason it just isn't capable of getting it's hooks in me like it seems to have with most people who played it. Mind you, I only completed it on Ultraviolence twice. Nightmare just didn't interest me enough.
Thing I find funny is that the campaign is apparently intended to be a 20 hour campaign. Meanwhile my first playthrouhg was about 10 hours, including replaying a few levels for the sake of it.
10 hours later and I had my second playthrough in, add 8 hours on top of that and I managed to get all the collectibles and then 2 hours of randomly fucking around in the hub area while in a Discord (still need to purge it from my life...) call and playing the multiplayer tutorials (I sure as shit am never actually gonna touch the multiplayer unless I can convince a few friends to by this game and hop into a multiplayer match).
I've always quite liked racing games. I blame the first game I ever played: Motorstorm: Pacific Rift on the PS3 back when I was 8 or 9 years old. A few years later the huge Sony PSN hack happened. As a "we're sorry your credit card information may have been leaked and our service was down for several weeks" they gave their customers the option to get two games for free from a certain list (not entirely sure about the details). One of the two I got was WipeOut HD. I barely knew what I was doing at the time, but I thought it was a really cool concept. What didn't help that my English was -- compared to what it is now -- practically non-existent. All in all, I tried to play it every now and then for a few years, but never really got into it.
One day BallisticNG popped up on my Steam homepage because one of the curators I follow reviewed it. Recently having gotten RedOut, which I had been playing a lot, I couldn't resist also getting BallisticNG. I'm glad I got it.
If you know anything about Steam, you know that they have a refund policy that allows you to refund a game within two weeks of it being bought and when you have under two hours of playtime on said game. My first session with BallisticNG was five hours long... After that it quickly shot to somewhere in my top 10 most played games on Steam.
The best thing I can say about BallisticNG is that it's a WipeOut 3 clone. It sets out to copy the mechanics and feel of WipeOut 3 with just enough change to avoid lawsuits. For those who have no idea what WipeOut is besides apparently also a TV show (which I've never seen); the WipeOut series is an anti-gravity racing game series where you fly half a dozen meters above the track at speeds averaging 400 km/h on the slowest speed class. On the highest speed class you double that. Another thing that makes the WipeOut series stand out is its unique control scheme. You have the traditional gas/throttle, steering, (and in case of Mario Kart and it's many clones) the use-powerup affair. But things get interesting when it comes to the brakes. Instead of having a normal brake and possible a hand brake, your craft is equipped with two air brakes. As apposed to slowing down, these air brakes are mainly used to make tighter turns at high speeds. This adds a huge layer of depth and complexity to navigating the twists and turns of the tracks. Because of this complexity, properly navigating a track is already quite a challenge. But, simply navigating it without bumping into absolutely everything still won't really win you any races. Flying perfectly is where it's at. I got about halfway through the campaign until the difficulty ramped up too much. That doesn't matter too much though, as simply getting better and better at navigating tracks in the time trial mode is already really satisfying.
BallisticNG has gotten me hooked on this combination of high speed-high difficulty style of racing game to the point where I've been messing around with emulators in order to be able to play some of the original WipeOut games. Other than that, I've been hunting down Steam for every AG racer I could find but still haven't found anything that really manages to match BallisticNG in it's majestic execution of AG racing.
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