Wahrnehmungskrieg

That game knows its pacing; it knows horror is ultimately smoke and mirrors and uses that to its strength. The initial oppression you experience is cleansed by the near-immaculate atmosphere of the Back Hall... then you enter Storage with its strange darkness -- and I stopped playing for an entire year

Never played Ultra-Violence until mid-adolescence because I thought all the game's text would be in Nadsat on that difficulty

I used to play abominable amounts of NetHack. Still play it once in a while. My recent goto is Infra Arcana. Outside of, say, Cataclysm, Cogmind (maybe X@COM as well), or DRL, a couple others, its gun combat is amongst the best you'll find in a roguelike. Then on top of that you have a Call of Cthulhu style sanity system in play and you get a game where combat is so consistently discouraged (you're quickly driven insane if you fight the game's monstrosities head on, and you gain no experience for killing them) you're constantly doing a balancing act between getting the resources you need from the level and getting to the next level safely before you go mad. Also, there are Blood-style cultists and they're just as dangerous as they were in that game.

It's a glass skyscraper reflecting the sky, à la the Shard etc. I mean, look how its image reflects off the sky appearing at the right of the picture, from where we can assume the Sun is

Actual fucking genius name for an arcade game. There are many many (relatively obscure) falling-block-esque puzzle games triyng to evade the purity of the Tetris mould better than Pajitnov's attempts after his divine inspiration; I think the most interesting I've seen have been Soldam and Sen-Know (the multiplayer strategies being developed in the latter are amazing and almost parallel the unrelenting aesthetic of the game itself).

I used to use freeindiegam.es to find interesting stuff and that site is still up and still worth perusing. One thing I found from there I play still and I've never seen anyone really talk about (even in puzzle communities) is a game called Panic Mission (https://hsp.tv/contest/hspcontest407.zip). Maybe to the modern puzzle scene there's a lot of cruft but it's a real gem. Lots of other games I loved too, but most far too sexually explicit to talk about here. One of the people who ran that site, Stephen Lavelle/increpare, who you may be acquainted with from his commercial releases like Stephen's Sausage Roll, has a lot of interesting gubbins on his site to explore. Every puzzle game of his is worth a look-see but games like Missing, Universal History of Light, Opera Omnia, 2plus3, a story about a cat, In Heaven, untitled flickgame 3, Kristallnacht, Worst Guest, amongst many many others, I thought were very interesting.

Thoughts on IQ: An IQ test could never capture the ability to see the benzene ring in the ouroboros that Kekulé managed, which is the only important thing to study. IQ tests can never quantitate insight or creativity because, like a photographic flash, it's instant and that power vanishes equally as instantly. And on-topic, I'm currently focusing on (all rereads except for PoS): Kershaw - Hitler Hegel - Phenomenology of Spirit; Lectures on Aesthetics Kandinsky - The Art of Spiritual Harmony Will recommend the first to you all, reads like air and the final chapter feels like Downfall as a novella. Worth reading for far more than that last fact though

There's a Will Self novel exploring the religion that would arise from a mentally ill cab driver's rants when rediscovered in the far future. Imagine if we could do the same for a crap Marathon level pack when the whatever-we-copy-it-to's get read in the year 6000. It would be the biggest and most belated April Fools' joke one could ever pull on humanity

I've started to wonder recently, after thinking about esselfortium's test map hacking Boom's TRANMAP lump, if you couldn't use transparent textures in pure Boom to at least partially emulate SMMU's ability to apply COLORMAPs to sectors you're not in. Given you know the TRANMAP will be only used to *translate* the colours you've put in your line's texture (any that aren't in, say, Doom's projectiles) against the ones beyond it, you'll have the outer sides of the linedefs that enclose the 'coloured-light sector' have a transparent texture of a colour you've hacked with the TRANMAP to translate the original colours to that of the COLORMAP you please. If this has already been done let me know. (The reverse case, where you're inside the coloured sector itself, is a more difficult challenge, but even if it's not possible the one case is fine enough tbh.) Given I've only wondered it, no doubt I'll test such a thing and it won't work right, you would probably have to have the TRANMAP edited such that it accounts for all the degradations in colour of the transparent texture due to distance, but given how infrequently transparent lines are used in Boom maps how much of a sacrifice would it be? At some point this year I'll make some time to test this, but if it's possible coloured lighting would be nearly as accessible to Boom mappers as it is to those of more advanced ports.

With the constraints of Doom 1, and under the influence of Doom 2 and an influx of community blood: they are the tightest and most brilliantly charged maps under the id aegis (discounting Final Doom here). You feel the mind who made them perpetually; they burn as phryctoriae. Also, don't know how intentional this was (given SKY4 is obviously a reference to the sky seen in Doom's ending); but the juxtaposition of that infernal cloud-layer with the wood etc. base you traipse through gives the impression that you're literally inside a funeral pyre as it's incinerated. It's like id are saying farewell to their own creation and are definitively handing over the baton of creation to the community

Will echo the suggestion of MSCP: it plays almost like a tutorial wrt slaughter to those uninitiated, and to those more initiated it works as a pleasant drilldown. Late Scythe/Scythe 2; Rush; Combat Shock 2; early-mid Slaughterfest 2011+2012: that was (partially) how I cut my teeth on slaughter and its adjacencies, in that order. Don't think any of them are too taxing with the right mindset going in. I've recommended Speed of Doom elsewhere also: I played it after I'd played the aforementioned so it doesn't fit into my own progression, but that one is also worth getting into.

Emily Short's Counterfeit Monkey is famous for a reason -- one of the few games where the game's being text is so integral to its puzzle design. More generally, genres wholly in text have made massive innovations in interactive dialogue that are too numerous to put here given their variety (ranging from being able to interrogate someone about all they know about the world; to the moment in a conversation when you make a certain dialogue choice impacting the conversation the same way it would in reality) -- and given almost no non-text games implement them these innovations will remain under the aegis of text-based games for ages to come. (In fact, the common theme in modern games is to *simplify* their dialogue system, whether due to budgetary/time/console constraints, design mistake, or because it is simply better to excise half-baked cruft from the game -- when playing Fallout 1 the Tell Me About system seemed more like a way in which you could break the immersion by typing in a noun referenced in dialogue and getting a 'never heard of it' more than anything else. Dialogue is really an all-or-nothing deal.)

In Twin Peaks it happens sometimes. Back on topic I've really liked the visuals that spectres (and you under invis) possess; that shimmering is a real contrast to anything else in the game. One fight with spectres I've liked quite is SoD's map14 bfg secret, which is full of spectres in a room that's pitch black excepting a single wall of white lights. Facing the wall the spectres are plainly visible, but in every other direction the spectres are only sensed through touch, giving them the effects that Xaser mentioned earlier. It's not a difficult fight at all, but as a secret it contrasts very nicely with the rest of the level.

To be charitable about your post, which is unforgivably crass in parts, I've whittled it down to the quote. Doom 3's lore has nothing to say about the original Doom; the Site 3 tablets etc. (among with the other innumerable references to the first 2) are purely a metatextual reference to Doom (because the game was in its past in the real world) rather than a literal one (the saviour of the Praeleanthor was plainly not the Doomguy of the original games). Edward850's ninja states it even more plainly.

I don't think it's overblown, there's certainly some political war being fought between various groups, mostly American, some non-American, which has led to fentanyl and its ilk being introduced into the otherwise slightly-more-benign drug circus. And no doubt some of these groups are more clandestine ones noticing the blame shifting to the more 'visible ones' (China, certain American oligarchs, various drug gangs & cartels, whatever their intent and actual impact on this might be) to disguise their own presence in it all. Once the dust is all cleared, when most everyone who sees this post will be dead, the facts will be revealed, and nobody will do anything about it; it will instead achieve some latent apotheosis in some New Yorker literary swill using the mass of suffering experienced in our present time to achieve new 'effects' in whatever will be left of prose then. This is the truest statement of the thread, unless you're one of those hardcore sXe folk who would prohibit caffeine: my Doom skills (which are most important, right?) are highest, completely sober, in the morning, after my first coffee and cigarette (feel free to omit the latter) of the day. Until I'm shown a record-breaking UV-max recorded under the influence of the devil's lettuce etc., I'll never change my mind