Games

Not in the Face

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I’ve been knock-kneed certain that I was about to die on exactly two occasions. The first time, I was on my back, in full football gear, ready for the Oklahoma Drill to start. The drill has many variants, but all of them involve hitting. Two players line up opposite one another, perhaps five yards apart – enough to start a charge but not enough for even the fastest players to really get up to speed. Our version of the drill had the coach holding a football at about stomach level in between the two players. At his whistle, we’d scramble

Lost Worlds: A.L.T.

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Somewhere lost in a subworld of a subworld, a strange little bastard child of a game exists called A.L.T., a Doom II mod released in 2012 by a group of Russian modders known as Clan [B0S]. A.L.T. begins with the peculiar sight of a bloodied Doom marine in front of a door, frozen in the middle of a dying animation. A whole 30 maps later it ends with the player coming back out the other side of that door as that marine and dying. But here, in our pre-awakened state, moving causes you to abruptly take damage, and turning around

Rookie of the Year: A Fine Line Between Success And Failure

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The following is the latest in a series of journal entries chronicling the author’s descent into next-gen gaming degeneracy and assorted geekery — from getting his first television in years to trying to figure out why the @$@$&@@ you need two goddamn directional pads just to walk down an effing hallway. I’m writing to you today as a simple gamer, with a simple dilemma: What happens when you’ve achieved everything you can in a game, save for its one final challenge – and that challenge is so tedious, so time-sucking, that achieving it actually makes you feel bad about yourself?