Just compare Doom 1 and 2 to Doom 3. That's where we've gone in those years since. Dark corridors filled with jump scares instead of twisting, maze-like levels full of demonic and twisted surprises which you can take on at your own pace.

I find it quite sad that the spiritual successor to System Shock is so low-down and simple. System Shock 2 was already trending toward territory, but Bioshock took it further and tried to sell itself on environment and story along with action-filled shooter gameplay.

I remember we used to have a collection of Doom, D2 and Ultimate Doom mods on PC. We only had Doom 2 so we couldn't play a lot of them, but I remember absolutely loving it. I would dig through the big list looking for hidden gems. I wish I could remember the names of some. My favorite ones included custom textures,…

Game Maker is a solid way to learn how to build sprite-based games. It's much easier to pick up on and understand, and it's very well tuned to oldschool style games with limited resolution and such. It's how I learned, myself.

The best way to start is to just do it.

Resogun: Take out the crazy effects and it's definitely doable. The mechanics are not impossible to recreate on older hardware, you just have to tone down the graphical effects.

Correlation does not imply causation, and you know that. Look at the other generations. Do you think the PS2 was the most powerful system? The Xbox had a much higher speed processor and graphics card, double the RAM, and better sound chip. It also had a more similar architecture to PC, which made PC ports very easy to…

I feel like this is something they should work out for themselves. The movie-going experience is simply too expensive for me to afford both a ticket AND the overpriced food. Therefore, I bring in my own candy. They can't afford to have a more "normal" gas station convenience store-level markup on their food, and…

What about the game where you're in a classroom full of dolphins, taking a really hard test and you need to peek around to cheat off the others without getting caught? Or the game where you need to diffuse a ridiculously complex bomb using Hydra motion controllers with the help of a group of people trying to read…

I'm not big on the UT series so I'm not aware of what made those "bad" games in the series actually bad. But by the sound of it, those are the kinds of issues that the game ended up being marred by when transitioning from console to PC. It's not that they couldn't change them (going from 03 to 04 it would seem they…

In that last sentence I meant "them" as in "f2p games", not arcade games. Arcade games were coldly designed to be difficult so that they'd suck up your quarters faster, but they didn't have the benefit of the deep understanding of psychology and operant conditioning marketing teams make use of now to design f2p…

To be fair, microtransactions are often a lot worse.

I'm with you on graphics, but the gameplay is what people care about here. And if you develop on consoles, you tend to need to sacrifice things gameplay-wise, because players are using controllers, not expected to be able to turn around quickly or aim with precision, and so you tune your weapons, movement and other…

-Similar hardware does nothing to guarantee 3rd party support. An even playing field means nothing. BF3, the Crysis series and Witcher 2 were some of the most high-end games pushing the capabilities of super amazing PCs, and they all got ported to consoles that are weaker than the Wii U. It's because those consoles…

I really don't understand the desire for more powerful hardware anyway. Doing that effectively means putting out a new console to replace this one, because games will start to utilize the 'better' system. There would be a split between old and new Wii U and it would cannibalize its own sales. No doubt, the extra…

You're right, we should give up glasses.

They're bringing back the underground base thing, right? That was one of my favorite little elements of the old games...

Honestly not much of a fan. I picked it up to try it last year and it's just... eh. I'm sure it was groundbreaking for its time, but it's basically just a subpar platformer where you need to memorize every section to make sure you get through it without watching a small child get brutally eaten along the way. Some…

It's all about the game design. BF isn't designed to be hard, same as most modern games. They're designed to railroad you through the experience.

It's like I've been saying all along.