Aaron Blain

Mars Attacks! Hadn't seen it in at least 15 years. Still great.

Any videogames from before the era of VGA, or even better from before EGA. My two favorites are DOS brown/green CGA and anything on the ZX Spectrum.

It's pretty easy to think of a videogame that is impossible either with currently available technology, or even beyond what the laws of physics will ever allow computers to do given the constraints of how we currently understand them to work. The classic example -- give me a game of chess with an ai opponent that plays absolutely perfectly. It's theoretically possible but computationally intractable. Oh, I thought of another way that a game would be unable to exist: if it uses real-world data that would be impermissible for some reason such as infringing on privacy. We could probably think of some Pokemon Go type games that wouldn't work for privacy reasons. The folks at Bethesda or whatever aren't genetically superior, they just put in a lot of hours. Personally, what I want in a videogame is not millions of labor-hours'-worth of knickknacks and background junk and unlockable outfits painstakingly modeled by armies of artists. I'd much rather play any wonky but creative stuff any of you guys might cobble together in Unity or Godot.

That's part of what I mean by production values. A handful of people can make something of the right scope very easily nowadays, however.

We can talk about the dictatorship of capital or the difference between marxism and blanquism if you want, but for the moment I'll try to take off my marxist hat -- it sounds like this is a specific plan for organizing a mutual aid society, part of which is the use of modern telecommunications. Do I understand you correctly? Because that's inarguably a very valuable thing to do, regardless of where we stand on other questions. I do have a little bit of personal experience with intentional community, and I'm in the planning stage of starting a co-op, so I might be able to offer some insight.

Sorry to be the finger-wagging dad in the room, but go code. Anybody can do it. You just have to DO it. Do we have a good thread on DW for people who are curious about getting into programming? Resources, tips, etc? The real limits, as I see them are: - IP - Production Values - Player Base - Technology The first two I don't care about at all, though there are difficult situations that can crop up like with the royalties on Vice City's soundtrack (what a tragedy!) But if I could magically create playerbase and technology, I'd want some kind of massive Total War type game where battles play out at true historical scale, where every individual soldier has a complex psychological and physical simulation and this gives rise to emergent crowd dynamics, and you can have any number of players acting as officers at all levels or individual soldiers, trying to coordinate strategies in spite of realistic fog-of-war conditions. You could also wish for something really wacky like wanting the windows of a high-rise building to be the pixels for the world's largest Tetris match.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to bring this to Doomworld. It might be better to have this discussion on Reddit, or, ideally, in a face-to-face group in your community. But then Doomworld is unusually healthy and maybe it can handle a bit of this, if we all promise to stay civil and constructive. We are certainly in a time when everyone needs to get more politically conscious in a hurry. I'd be more than happy to give you constructive discussion from a Marxist-Leninist perspective. I've also read the basic canon of classical/neo-liberal theory and have been starting in on anarchism recently. I'm almost finished with Proudhon's What is Property? and am planning to move on to Kropotkin and Bakunin soon. My first question -- whose arguments are you looking at and what should I read to understand where you're coming from?

Cool World is decent. John Carter is decent. Adventures of Baron Munchausen is one of my favorite movies. 13th Warrior somehow was a box office flop. It's a good movie.

Wachowski everything ftw

Defender Archon: The Light and the Dark on Atari 800, though I prefer the NES remake.

Zelda 2 is excellent. Viewed on its own merits, it's one of the better action platformers on the NES.

Downloaded the shareware from a BBS. You have to start the download right before bed so it won't get interrupted if someone calls. My friends and I had been playing Wolf3d religiously for months and were awestruck by Doom, even though we thought it was a little silly they gave the nazis green hair.

For some reason, I had always assumed that Darkman is a bad movie, but I recently saw it for the first time and it's great. It's an excellent comic book/noir style story with a good protagonist played by Liam Neeson and some fun Sam Raimi directorial touches.

I'm playing D2 for the first time, and I'm astonished at how bored I am. None of the enemies pose a threat and there's no reason for me to spend or collect any gold. I played a decent amount of Diablo 1, and I liked the slower positional gameplay. Diablo 2 so far is just monsters appearing, sprinting toward me, and dying in roughly two seconds or less. I've had more fun playing Progress Quest.

I've tried to get into Turrican and Laser Squad a couple times on my RetroPie but between the key bindings and the BIOS/hardware configs it's such a PITA. The music is soooo good though . . . I finally got Doom 2016 on sale for the Switch. I won't knock it, but I'll just say that I think it's fine but it's not really for me. I like the platforming, and I like how adeptly the baddies can traverse the environment. I've been watching my wife play Metroid Dread, and she usually passes me the controller to beat the bosses for her. It's an excellent game in so many ways.

I stand by the recommendations I made here, and there's a lot more in this thread. Also +1 to the C programming language. I've been getting the hang of SDL lately and once you're in the thick of it it's extremely fun and not that hard. Look up Derek Banas on YT for a sort of coding "ice bucket challenge". OneLoneCoder and Red Blob Games cover a ton of basic concepts for once you get past Hello World! PyGame is also good for instant gratification.

I do a lot of my gaming on a Pi3B+. I have no experience with Odamex but I'd also be curious about your experiences or what you learn. I generally default to Chocolate/PrBoom+ and they run great on my pi. I got mine from CanaKit, just with the standard heatsink. I've been quite happy with it, though I haven't really tried to push it too far. I should add that I did eventually spend a hundred bucks or so on an x86 stick pc that fills a similar niche, so I can conveniently play Samurai Gunn on the TV or whatever.

My dog rolled in and ate some cat shit in the park, and when we got home she barfed it on the rug and I had to scrub out the catshitdogbarf. I like citing this instance of my dog's instinct in action as an illustration of the argumentum ad naturam fallacy. Just because something is 'natural' doesn't mean it's correct, healthy or good.

I have a related question -- what if the evolution of mapping didn't start with DOOM.WAD? What if you came from another planet where principles like transition textures, height and space variations, horseshoe layouts, etc., weren't even an unconscious basis for your mapping? Look at the weird boxy nonsense level design in other games before id raised the standard.

I've learned a ton from Derek Banas on YouTube. I can't recommend him highly enough. +1 to K&R Can anyone recommend more advanced reading, or codebases available online that are good to study?

Less Perfect DOS VGA

I would give myself a 10, but I'll occasionally spend time with some gzdoom stuff. I don't tend to stick with it, though. I use Chocolate if at all possible. When I have to use something more powerful, I always tweak it to get it as close to Vanilla as I can. Low resolution, no interpolation, etc. That said -- who else gasped the first time they watched a John Romero video and he was playing jDoom? I figure if HE's not such a purist, I can chill out a little.

I was hoping this was about a wad based on the movie with the poorly-drawn boobs.

Myst creator Rand Miller's comments on the failure of Myst Online are quite telling: "Miller appeared shocked by Uru Live's ultimate failure, as reflected in his letter to the Uru Live community, which he wrote to explain why the game had to be shut down for an indefinite amount of time. In a previous interview, Miller had stated that finance from outside investment, not technology, was the reason for the failed project: "I think the biggest failure was running out of money, and thus running out of time, and thus losing control of our own destiny. No matter what promises are made or common goals are agreed upon, whoever pays the bills has the final say." " Valiant more than anything else made me realize that the products of the Doom community interest me more than commercial action games, and I think this is why. We're starting to see more cooperatively-owned tech companies, so maybe this will spread to videogames at some point. Until then, it's going to be hobbyists and small indie devs who can genuinely own their work instead of being forced to maximize shareholder value.

I got the shareware version of Depth Dwellers and played it eagerly, but I remember being slightly mystified at how primitive it was. PC Gamer devoted an issue to a rundown of Doom clones, including good ones like Heretic and Dark Forces, but also Dr Radiaki and CyClones. And of course there's Island Peril. I agree that Doom's visual design is weak. Heretic is more cohesive but the assets are rudimentary overall. Hexen is beautiful. And as for gameplay, forget about it. Most of that era is bandwagon junk not worth revisiting.