Flattened Ears

I recently turned 23 and my younger sibling bought me a Nintendo Labo VR kit for my switch, so I spent most of today putting that together and messing around with it and figured I might as well make a post out of it. First of all, I was surprised by how intensive the building process really is. A lot of these builds are actually really complex, involving multiple folded parts that all nest into each other in particular ways, and the result is often a surprisingly weighty-feeling peripheral for being made out of literally folded cardboard. That's another thing, actually, there's a crazy amount of physical feedback here in comparison to more traditional VR which just uses rumble controllers or what have you. These peripherals feel solid in your hands and have moving buttons and parts that really sell the action being performed. The blaster is a particular standout, which uses loose internal parts and rubber bands to allow the player to actually cock it like a shotgun, placing o

This here's a classic level, and one featuring more nukage than the supposed "Nuclear Plant." As soon as you open the first door, you're greeted with on the most iconic rooms in the entire WAD; a raised walkway bordering a big ol' pool of corrosive sludge, teeming to the brim with pinkies, shotgunners, and zombiemen. Toxin Refinery is a great example of what most people think of when they think DOOM; On Ultraviolence (and especially UV-fast) you really start getting put through your paces here, with crowds of hitscanners that start out across the room while you're stuck dealing with the up-close melee monsters, plus a smattering of imps to harass you as well. It's on this stage where you really start to learn how terrifying pinkies can be when playing with -fast, they'll get right up in your face and stay there in a way that you just really don't have to deal with at normal speed, and of course shotgunners will almost instantly deal damage on sigh

So yesterday I finished 3D Realms' recent Build Engine shooter Ion Fury (previously Ion Maiden, copyright law can eat my ass) and man is it fucking wild that this game exists. We've been living through a bit of a shooter renaissance lately, what with your DOOM and your DUSK and your AMID EVIL and various other games with all-caps titles, and between them we're kind of running the gamut of full 3D, from early low-poly stuff to modern AAA and everything in between. Ion Fury takes a slightly different approach seeing as it's, as mentioned before, built in the Build Engine, by absolute madmen. It's ridiculous, the size and scope of levels that are achieved in this over 20 year old engine, not to mention several standout gimmicks and setpieces that make it behave in ways it was absolutely never meant to. I can't overstate how much of a technical achievement it is to get the build engine to look and act like this, without utterly falling apart in the process. Mind y