I went into Quake thinking it was going to be something of a watershed moment for the journey. It was the first True 3D game, after all. Finally, I could look up and down without my screen doing any bizarre geometry warping, on something that wasn’t a source port. And the enemies I was going to be shooting wouldn’t just be weird, flat, pixelated masses that vanished if I was directly under them. I also thought these innovations in technology would allow the level designers to go above and beyond with verticality, detail, and atmosphere. Something that would be a huge step in the direction of Half-Life. But instead, I got a game that felt great, but fell short of Duke Nukem 3D in almost every other measurable metric. It hurts me to write that. I was really looking forward to Quake. I’d fired it up here and there over the years to play multiplayer, maybe do the first mission or two, and I always loved running around with the different weapons you get initially, and I always thought those early missions were pretty well designed. Then, while I was playing Duke Nukem 3D these past couple weeks I kept thinking, “Man…these weapons and enemies feel awful, I bet Quake blows this game out of the water.” I am now reporting live, after just finishing Quake: it most certainly does not. I was very surprised to learn that Quake came out less than four months after Duke Nukem 3D. They were competing directly in the same year. This fully 3D game about killing an eldritch god, that looked better than anything on a contemporary console, was released alongside a sprite-based FPS with a one-lining lecherous pervert. And now, I’m even more surprised to say, I think I like the game with pervert better! Quake and Duke together represent what could be great about these fast-paced FPS games. Duke Nukem 3D has these interactive levels with interesting set pieces, tons of personality, and great music. While Quake has these static, drab levels that all pretty much look the same, and instead of a real soundtrack, they got Trent Reznor to do a horror movie soundtrack. And while it is a great soundtrack for a Lovecraftian horror movie, it is not a great soundtrack for blasting horrors-beyond-comprehension. I haven’t looked into it, but I think half the team thought they were making Evil Dead and the other half thought they were making Army of Darkness. 3D Realms were all on the same page when they made Duke Nukem. They were thinking, “what if we made Escape from New York into a video game, but it starred Ron Jeremy.” And while I question their vision, there is no doubt they achieved that vision. On the other side, Quake pushed the mechanics and feel of the combat in the genre to never before seen heights. In Quake you can actually jump into rooms that are above and below. Which doesn’t sound impressive today, but in Doom and Duke Nukem 3D it was completely impossible. Duke Nukem 3D let you jump and fly into different levels of verticality, but at no point were you actually in one room that was directly over another room; the Build Engine simply couldn’t do that. In Quake you get this grenade launcher that can launch a fully-rendered, 3D grenade, that can bound off surfaces before colliding with an enemy and exploding. An explosion which can turn that enemy into a dozen red meaty pieces that then—themselves—bounce off of different surfaces. It was mind-blowing to me after spending dozens of hours trapped inside these 2D games. The squishy sounds of their entrails splattering against the stone walls sounded like a symphony promising freedom of movement, dynamic encounters, vertical exploration, and more engaging enemies. The promise was partially delivered upon as I explored the different weapons you were given in Quake. I thought they all blew Duke Nukem 3D out of the water. Duke’s weapons all felt like novelty additions. The designers were saying “look at this cool thing you can do in our engine!” rather than Doom where they said “This is your boomstick. Get to it.” Quake falls squarely into the latter camp for me. Especially the rocket launcher. Which, while not the most powerful, is probably my favorite rocket launcher ever. The perceived velocity of the rockets is magnified by the mostly smaller levels. Enemies can just dodge Duke’s rockets, but the rockets in Quake could chase down even the fastest enemies. And there’s only one enemy I found in Quake that could take more than three rockets. What both games fail at, I think, is enemy design. The enemies in Quake all feel unfair in different ways and can also feel extremely boring to fight. The worst offender is the ogre, who also happens to be the most plentiful enemy in the game. If you get caught in the wrong corridor without the right weapon, you could be popping in and out of cover against a group of ogres for over a minute, whittling them down inch by inch in between their salvos of grenades that you then need to wait for to explode. The other lower tier enemies are just boring melee enemies you back pedal away from and unload shells into. Then the higher tier enemies, while more interesting, are brutally punishing and demand to be taken down as fast as possible. The shambler, in particular, has this bullshit hitscan attack that you have less than a second to react to. But the worst of them all is this awful pile of goo that is somehow faster than the player, it can clear even the largest rooms in Quake in less than a second to attack you, bouncing so quickly to different corners of the room it is nearly impossible to hit unless you see it coming. And, to top it all off, it explodes on death. If you don’t kill it before it can get to you, you’re pretty much dead. And the final episode of Quake has over a hundred of them. Sometimes dozens in the same room. It’s terrible. I thought Duke Nukem 3D had my new least favorite enemy ever with its bullshit suicide robot drones that kamikaze you, but that fucking pile of blue goo in Quake is 100 times worse. I’m looking forward to when I finally play the game that marries these two standards. You might be thinking to yourself, “You'll get there soon! That’s Half-Life!” but no, it’s not. While Half-Life certainly drew a huge amount of inspiration from both games, it is—by design—a cinematic experience. The fights in Half-Life don’t come close to picking up a quad-damage power-up in Quake and churning half the enemies in the level into a red paste. I want Quake with better levels, more interactivity, and set pieces punctuating the blood-pumping encounters. And after going through so many of these shooters, I’m beginning to worry it doesn’t come along until Doom (2016).

After bouncing around to these different shooters, working on the site, playing all those Doom (1993) WADs, I finally got to a game that feels like an evolution from Doom II. I jumped ahead in the list as something of a last ditch effort to play something that I thought would be more enjoyable. After I got done with Quake the next item on the list was Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition and thinking about fighting more battle lords or exploding drones made me want to hurl, so I just skipped Duke Nukem and tried out the next item on the list: Powerslave. I spent about 90 minutes or so with the game and actually quite enjoyed it, but like what happened with Strife, I just didn’t think it fit the genre. Is it really a boomer shooter if one gun is objectively better than everything else, has effectively infinite ammo, and it’s obviously drawing more on Super Metroid than it is on *Doom? *I would argue no. Just like I would argue Strife is drawing more on classic fantasy RPGs than it is on Doom. Both certainly sit in a limbo where it could go either way, neither is so different that I would immediately rule them out like System Shock or Thief. But at the end of the day, they just didn’t have the blood pumping action I was looking for. Same reason I took Marathon off the list. Eventually, I want to go back and hit all the PC first-person games that aren’t boomer shooters. Which I have broadly (and inaccurately) dubbed “immersive-sims” because most people would agree that most of them are immersive-sims, and that word barely meant anything in the first place. As I kept looking through the list, I realized I needed a reminder that boomer shooters did eventually get to be more fun. I was beginning to question if my memories of *DOOM (2016)—*which I had replayed less than a year ago—were already just rose-tinted memories and the genre had always been plagued by subpar levels with confusing backtracking and switch-hunting. I considered simply booting up DOOM: Eternal, but I knew if I did that it might be months before I got back to playing these older titles. So instead I reached for what I had heard was the best title on the list: Blood. And finally I got what I had been looking for. Something (other than Doom ) that I thought actually lived up to the hype. Something that aged gracefully where I didn’t need to constantly remind myself, “It’s from 1997, these are just problems games had back then.” A game where (most of) the levels flowed from one encounter to the next, where I (almost) never had to just stop and think, “What the fuck am I supposed to do?” A game where the enemies and balance lived in (relative) harmony and you could approach situations in any number of ways, rather than be forced to onto the same weapon again and again. A game dripping with personality and atmosphere that didn’t have anything to do with misogynistic macho mayhem. After finishing the first four episodes (the shareware plus the initial retail release) I was able to sit back and say that I was looking forward to returning to it as I continue through the list. The game is almost acrobatic in it's movement. Here you can see I jump backwards to avoid the explosion of the TNT I throw here to dispatch a group of zombies: Blood is somehow a game from 1997 that feels as silky smooth as DOOM (2016) and can be nearly as exhilarating an experience*.* There’s a steeper learning curve as you get a feel for the mechanics, and it can feel much more unfair at times, but once you get used to things it gets more and more engaging as you begin to master the mechanics. I enjoyed this game so much I played the first episode three times just to see how the game changed as I got better at it. I started playing the highest difficulty (at least highest for single-player) and thought it was maybe a bit too tough, so after the first three levels I tried the second highest, but the game just felt wrong if death wasn’t waiting around every corner. Part of what makes the game feel so exciting is the knowledge that you’re beating encounters designed to kill you through sheer wits and ability rather than simply being stronger than your enemies. Something I grew to appreciate in Ninja Gaiden, but Blood thankfully doesn’t take it to that extreme. It does feel weird to me that the game I consider most emblematic of the boomer shooter genre since Doom (1993) only has two traditional weapons. You have a sawed-off double-barreled shotgun (naturally) and a drum-fed tommy gun, but apart from that you have a variety of fire-based projectile launchers: a flare gun, a napalm launcher, and an improvised flamethrower to name a few. But the vast majority of my kills came from tossing dynamite, and throwing dynamite in this game feels amazing. Blood makes dynamite a deceptively versatile weapon. You can throw it in two ways: contact explosions, or timed explosions. So you can throw it directly at an enemy and turn them into tomato soup, or you can throw it so it bounces around a corner, potentially spaghettifiying an enemy who doesn’t even realize you exist. While there isn’t much actual “shooting” going on in this boomer shooter, it gives me the exact same feeling as playing one. I run up to a deadly situations full of unique enemies with different abilities and different movesets, and I can let instinct dictate how I should deal with this situation in the way that releases the most endorphins. It’s important to me in these games that I’m not being tasked with the “best” or most “efficient” way of eliminating my targets, but that I can decide what’s the most fun, and be allowed to pursue that path. Which is something that I feel classic Doom fails in. You just don’t have enough options at your disposal to choreograph a proper dance of slaughter. Blood does not hold you back in the same way. There are a few enemies I think demand certain approaches a bit too strongly, but it is easily forgivable considering your vast array of weapons. One of my favorite examples of the freedom you are given in different situations is this tight hallway full of enemies. The zombies don’t spawn until you enter the hallway, so you are forced to at least drop into the corridor, and jump back out. You could fill the hallway with flames from your flare gun or your napalm launcher, drop huge amounts of TNT into it from above, or turn the hallway into no man’s land with your tommy gun. What I chose to do was utilize my movement to jump along on top of the heads of the enemies dropping proximity-activated TNT. The TNT doesn’t arm until a couple seconds after I drop it, by which time I am very far away, while the zombies are just starting to set it off. This all isn’t to say the game is perfect. There’s still a few levels where it isn’t obvious what to do next, but it was only maybe one in every five levels or so. Some of the enemies feel poorly tuned as well. In particular, the gargoyles and the hellhounds. Hellhounds are just too fast and do too much damage to feel fair. Your only option is to annihilate them before they even get close. But the real problem, in my opinion, is how resistant they are to fire damage. More than half your arsenal is fire damage, the fire-resistant enemies need to be used sparingly, and shouldn’t demand to be nuked down so quickly. And as for the gargoyles, I’m not sure if it’s the version I played (Refreshed Supply) or what, but the gargoyles would often bug out, fly around open areas extremely quickly, and stay high enough in the sky that I couldn’t hit them. I’d have to crouch down in a low space to try to get them within range to actually kill them. If you were so inclined, you could just outright ignore them when they get stuck in high areas. There’s also the ghost enemies who I think you can only damage with your shotgun or your machine gun, and even then only once they materialize. They totally destroy the flow of an encounter and I found them to be the worst enemy. Thankfully they aren’t too common, but still frequent enough to be annoying. Once I finished all the content officially released for the game in the 90s, I started thinking about Blood , how it fit into the zeitgeist, and what it means to be a “boomer shooter”. What I find most perplexing about genres is how frequently people use them, but how little thought they actually put into them. I’ve met people who are almost reluctant to even engage in genre discussions, as if they’re scared of them; which I understand to a degree. I hate thinking about music genres as the words are somehow even less meaningful in that context than they are in video games, and thinking about them feels like a waste of time. But unlike music genres, which I have very little use for in my day-to-day life, video game genres actively play a role in how I think about games and how they’ve evolved. Being able to label a group of games as something helps draw parallels between them and capture what I feel when I play a game. Defining genres as how they make me feel makes them useless when using them to communicate with others, but I would argue the broader genre words aren’t that much more useful in the first place. Blood solidified for me what I’m looking for when I think “boomer shooter”. I want something that challenges me on multiple fronts, at varying paces. Something that can go from careful pre-planning, to an all-out struggle where every millisecond matters, to a cooldown phase where I can take time to look around the room and appreciate the design and atmosphere while also finding supplies or hidden items. To me, that sounds like what all these games are all about. Doom (1993) and Doom (2016), while they are undoubtedly radically different games, still accomplish all three of those things for me. Blood also made me realize that DOOM (2016) might not even be a “boomer shooter” by most people’s standards. While quite different from most shooters at the time of release, it still borrowed more from fast-paced character action games of the time than it did from classic 90s shooters. I have a hard time thinking of it as anything else, as it so clearly is closer to Doom (1993) and Quake than it is to Call of Duty or Battlefield, but for a lot of people I think the term is tied more to a game called Dusk that came out a couple years later, which I only heard about a year ago. From that perspective, “boomer shooters” probably need to be more deliberate and less blood-pumping, have more opaque secrets, and have graphics that are designed to look like they’re from the 90s rather than pay homage to the 90s. I might play Dusk next just to compare. Doom (2016) makes me feel the same as Blood, which makes me feel the same as Doom (1993), which makes me feel the same as Quake . They’re all the same genre in my head. Even though Dusk might fit what most people call a boomer shooter better than Doom (2016), I bet it will make me feel the same way. And I bet it will have a lot of similarities on paper. I’m also willing to bet the attributes they have in common are the same things I talked about today in regard to Blood. And what else is a genre other than a collection of attributes that make two pieces of media similar?

After playing Half-Life I wanted to hit something that was much more gameplay focused. An older style shooter that was all about running and gunning. I wanted something that came out between Half-Life and Half-Life 2 so I could get a sense of the scene going into Half-Life 2 if I decided to play that soon to get a picture of the late 90’s/early 00’s shooter scene. I also wanted the old kind of game, before Half-Life in swinging it’s giant cinematic dick around with all it’s pacing and atmosphere; so nothing like Red Faction, System Shock 2, or Deus Ex. The final requirement was that I didn’t want to play anything I was planning on playing Playstation later as I worried having the intended mouse and keyboard experience would ruin the console port for me later on. This meant Halo, and Turok were out. Oh, and like hell I was going to play a game with real guns, so Medal of Honor and Call of Duty were out to. After looking through my steam library, I only had three that fit the bill: Return to Castle Wolfenstein , Serious Sam and Painkiller. Return to Castle Wolfenstein I’m sure is nowhere near the artificial and pandery feel of Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, but I wanted something with absolutely impossible weirdo guns: like the laser in Serious Sam or the stake thrower in Painkiller. I decided to go with Painkiller. Painkiller: Black Edition I decided I should bother to watch the first cutscene, despite the fact that I bet it looked like shit even in 2004, just so I got the full experience. I was in no way surprised by the initial story, or the writing. I remembered that it was a copy/paste of some famous comic, I just couldn’t remember which. Ghost Rider? No, the protagonist just died. The Crow? No, now he’s making a deal with the devil. To bring his wife back? That’s right, this is Spawn. Got it. Then it graciously cuts to a totally new scene: “This is it? This is the last job? Then I get to see her again?” he says, to some obviously untrustworthy servant of Belial/Mephisto/Baal/whatever-the-fuck. I appreciated that the game respected my intelligence enough to skip all the scenes where he’s introduced to the fact that is now dead, and he’s subsequently contracted by some evil for to put an uncountable number of shotgun pellets into an equally uncountable number of demons. I was not ready to sit around listening to 4-5 minutes of exposition about this particular writer’s interpretation of the eternal war between heaven and hell. Then it just drops you into spooky gothic cemetery. Y’know, like you’re playing a shooter. I’m here to shred demon flesh and skip cutscenes. And I’m all out of cutscenes. But perhaps, I was bit too optimistic. I had heard people say this game was a progenitor to Doom: Eternal one of my favorite games of all time. I’d seen people saying it’s the great-grandfather of Doom (2016) and Doom: Eternal. Look, it’s right here: And he isn’t alone. Lots of people in the steam reviews talk about the shared DNA. In my humble opinion, they’re all fucking liars. This game is Serious Sam, but instead of generic action hero fighting aliens, it’s generic action hero caught in a biblical war. I internalized and accepted all of this by the time I’d killed my fifth skeleton, which was about 15 seconds into the game, and subsequently massively lowered my expectations. I’ve been here plenty of times: boot up a game that’s 20 years old that’s touted as being the best game in it’s genre, never to be topped, and it turns out to be innovative genre-piece that has aged better than most. Usually still means I’ll have a good time. And I was primed and ready after playing the Half-Life games for this to be somewhat undercooked compared to what the fanatics had to say. It’s not fair to compare this game from 2004 made by brand new studio that probably had a dozen people working on it to the best game that came out in 2016 made by a storied studio with massive funding. But the people in the Steam reviews did it, and that annoyed me, so I’m going to do it anyway. The shooting feels nothing like Doom (2016) let alone Doom: Eternal; all the enemies slowly walked at me with complete disregard for their personal safety, just begging me to dispossess their souls from their shambling bags of bones; the area is an extremely generic graveyard setting without a hint of originality; and there was enough head bobbing I was feeling some nausea coming on before I found the setting to disable it. Now that that’s out of the way, I read a lot of the reviews more closely and the more nuanced and reasonable people pointed out that the real DNA is that Painkiller was the first FPS to introduce optional objectives that offered permanent upgrades to your character. Or at least the first one to do it in the arcade-style shooters. Which is something I find much easier to swallow. I say “arcade-style” because I think it’s imprecise to call Painkiller or Serious Sam boomer shooters. They are boomer shooters, true, but more specifically they’re horde shooters. Genres are weird and subjective, so take this with a grain of salt, but to me Painkiller and Serious Sam have much more in common with Killing Floor and Left 4 Dead than they do Duke Nukem or Quake. First and foremost, the levels I played in these games were brain dead simple. You don’t get a map because you don’t need one. They’re by-and-large just open arenas for you to kite enemies around in while you pump led (or stakes) into them. I never needed to collect a key to open door. Painkiller doesn’t even have a keybinding to interact with anything. If you can’t blast it open with a shotgun blast, Painkiller doesn’t care about it. And I can respect that. Your options for braindead fun on the PC were a lot more limited in 2004. Diablo, World of Warcraft, and Runescape were the go-tos, but if you weren’t into RPGs, your best bets were online FPS matches in something like Halo, Battlefield, or Quake . So if you didn’t have a reliable internet connection, or--god forbid--were still stuck on dial-up, your only real option was replaying single-player campaigns. And Painkiller was probably a refreshing change of pace where you didn’t need to think at all. Just point and shoot; no keys, no platforming, just lead-laden bliss. But in this modern day, when I can throw a dart at my digital library and hit three boomer shooters with 20 extra years of design lessons and new technology, I found Painkiller to be quite lacking at first. It slowly grew on me as the guns were still fun, and the enemies were just unique enough to keep me engaged. The bosses in the game were comically large. In the last level of the first chapter you’re fighting a Frankenstein-inspired brute the size of a skyscraper, which I don’t think was really popularized until God of War the following year. I slowly got used to the *Quake-*style movement that encourages you to constantly jump to maintain your speed, and even began to appreciate the simplicity of the levels. I still only made it a 4 or 5 hours before I quit the game. I wanted to like it by the end, I really did. I saw the appeal, and I as I got more upgrades for my character I was looking forward to the higher difficulties. I wanted to see how far the game mechanics would hold up as the number of enemies grew and grew. But Painkiller has one fatal flaw that I think will forever relegate it to a cult hit, despite the resurgence of interest in boomer shooters: the secrets. In your traditional *Doom-*inspired FPS there are hidden areas in the vast majority of your maps. Places that contain ammo, medkits, hidden weapons, or any variety of different resources. The thrill of finding one of this without the aid of a guide is half of the reason I play these games. There’s an art to making a secret that’s just difficult enough to find to be rewarding, but not so difficult the player feels cheated when they give up and look it up online. Some games go as far as to take the approach that you have to abuse game mechanics to find their secrets. You have to do some crazy skill-oriented manipulation of the physics engine, or movement mechanics to reach a place a new player might think impossible. I detest these kinds of secrets. I saw several of them in some of the community made Doom (1993) content that came bundled with the latest release. I found maybe 10% of them myself, and the rest were just looking them up online and getting pissed off that some sadistic fuck hid something like that. Painkiller takes it a step farther with several of its secrets and makes them not only overly well hidden, but then proceeds to force you to try to maneuver an object into the exact position that you can jump onto it, and then do another exploit dubbed “quick-jumping” by the community to reach some ledge you have NO business being on. I uninstalled the game when I looked up a secret and saw I needed to balance a wagon on it’s handlebar, leap on top of it, then magically climb a shear wall by spamming the space bar so fast I’d get carpal tunnel. If it was 2004, and my options were sparse, and this was a game I was replaying on and off over years, I’d probably love it. But it’s 2026, and I have over one thousand other games I want to play. I then reinstalled it the next day thinking, “I’ll just only do the secrets that aren’t fucking stupid.” But then I uninstalled it again that same level because I was wrong, I can’t do that. So the second secret that was fucking bullshit made me uninstall it again. Serious Sam: The First Encounter I wasn’t planning on playing both Serious Sam and Painkiller for this post, but I spent so little time with Painkiller (about 6 hours) and I thought it was an interesting coincidence the two games I had decided to choose from or so strikingly similar through no planning on my own, that I figured I could give Serious Sam a go and see if I had the same hang ups. I had played maybe 3 hours of Serious Sam games going into this. I remembered there being this huge open fields that you would kite enemies around in, and that by the end of the game you had this ridiculous arsenal of weapons, but that was about it. The first thing I do when I start any game is turn around and try to go the opposite direction that the developers faced me. A lot of times, especially in older games, there’s an extra secret tucked away somewhere. In The First Encounter you start in this ancient egyptian temple in the middle a massive fucking desert. So when I turned around, my heart immediately sank, because off in the distance I saw a teeny tiny little oasis amid the countless sand dunes, “Oh no…” I thought, “They’re gonna make me walk all the fucking way over there…” Not a great start. I let out an already-exhausted sigh, and began my THREE MINUTE trek across the desert. At least they had the courtesy of spawning some enemies for me to shoot as I spent MORE THAN FIVE MINUTES walking back and forth across the desert. When I got back it was a much more standard affair of looking for hidden ledges to jump onto, discolored walls to rub up against, or cracked architecture to blast open. Found all the secrets with the right amount elbow grease and was enjoying how powerful Sam’s arsenal felt. The maps were suspiciously large, even the parts that weren’t half of the goddamn Sahara. Presumably because on harder difficulties you need all that extra room to kite enemies around, but I found myself desperately wishing for a sprint key to try and find all these secrets. I understand that the devs couldn’t give you a sprint function as that would fundamentally destroy the combat of the game, which is carefully balanced around how quickly Sam can backpedal while unloading a metric ton of ammunition into a small army, but hunting for secrets is painfully slow in Serious Sam. Even if you have a guide, which I was eventually obligated to pull up because I couldn’t be bothered to leisurely stroll through Egyptian desert for minutes at a time. Just like Painkiller, by the end of my time with Serious Sam , I desperately wanted to like the game. I get it. I get why this franchise is still going, I get how people have hundreds of hours in these relatively small games, and I get why the fanbase is pining for content. At the higher difficulties (which I briefly tried) you are partaking in this carefully choreographed dance that requires skill, reflexes, and--most of all--careful memorization. Each enemy type in the game presents a unique challenge (something I can’t say for Painkiller ) that forces the player to react in a different way and have constant awareness of not only where all the enemies are surrounding the player, but also which type of enemy they are. The game might start off as simply as “run backwards; pull trigger” but as you progress you need to know the best way to handle the more immediate threat of the charging pulls while still keeping in my behavior of the long-range missiles of the bipedal cyborg mechs. I imagine once you put in the time to internalize the enemy patterns and behaviors it can feel immensely rewarding, and is still a unique experience 20 years later. You’ll remember I said that I wanted to like this game, not that I actually did. Even as I write this I feel an urge bubbling up to download it one more time and try it again, this time on a higher difficulty. But I am stopped by the knowledge that a higher difficulty means a fresh playthrough, and a fresh playthrough means spending another SIX GODDAMN MINUTES running across the desert to get that first secret. Perhaps one day I’ll see someone upload a video essay on YouTube exposing their cherished childhood memories of a late night pushing through the highest difficulty in The Second Encounter and I’ll feel the pull of the game again, and I’ll have forgotten how fucking stupid that oasis secret is, and I’ll be able to click with this game. But I know that it will be many years before I forget the bad actors in the Steam reviews that tried to convince me Painkiller (2004) was comparable to Doom: Eternal.

I finally got around to playing the original mostly original Half-Life immediately after finishing Black Mesa . I say ‘mostly’ because I played the source port of the game that valve released alongside Half-Life 2. What spurred me to finally take the plunge and play Half-Life was Black Mesa. Specifically, how much I hated Black Mesa. I needed to know if I hated Half-Life itself, or I hated Crowbar Collective’s interpretation of Half-Life. Turns out, now that I have the perspective of early to mid 90’s shooters, I actually quite like Half-Life, and I do indeed, simply hate Black Mesa. The first I noticed in Half-Life was how immediately readable the environments were compared to Black Mesa. In Black Mesa there’s so much detail. So much detritus and so many hi-res textures to make titular Black Mesa facility feel like a real place, inhabited by real people. But this has (what I have to assume is) the unforeseen consequence that I can’t just glance around a room and see what I’m supposed to. Instead I’m frantically searching around, spamming the use key on every surface, desperately trying to guess what exactly it is I’m supposed to do. I get the feeling the devs assumed I had already played Half-Life at least half a dozen times, and the design intention was less, “let’s lead the player here,” and more, “let’s put a spin on the classic level that fans will love.” Thus, as a new player, you’re left scratching your head time and time again. The next thing that struck me, was how insanely well paced the original Half-Life was, while also being one of the first cinematic games ever. But Crowbar Collective seemed to think they knew better. They thought it would be just as well paced if you padded out every single segment by 20-50%. It’s an experience similar to reading The Hobbit and then going to watch The Hobbit. And if you haven’t seen The Hobbit movies, I envy you, but imagine if someone took your favorite book or movie, and tripled it in length by just randomly shoving in scenes of the main character quietly eating a full meal, brushing his teeth for five minutes, or struggling to take a particularly large shit. That’s kind of what Black Mesa feels like now that I’ve played the original Half-Life. Except for Xen. “Except for Xen,” is a phrase I could end up saying a lot. For how great Half-Life is, none of that applies to Xen. None of it. The last 3 chapters of Half-Life take place on an alien planet called Xen. And they’re all garbage. Honest to god: some of the worst levels I’ve played in any game ever. I was constantly confused and frustrated, and the only saving grace was how short it was compared to Black Mesa’s interpretation of Xen. They were so bafflingly ill-conceived. The kind of stuff I except to find in a $5 indie title made by one developer. Putting your worst stuff at the end of your game was common-place back then. I would even say most of the best games from back then seemed to be designing and implementing in tandem, and working on their games from start to finish. Psychonauts, System Shock 2, and God of War (2005) are the worst offenders, where it seems like they didn’t even have time to playtest the final stretch of their game, let alone polish it. I don’t think it’s until 2007 or so that I feel like I started consistently seeing strong endings. So going forward just bear in mind that every compliment I pay Half-Life is followed by a mandatory “except for Xen.” Having put some time into early shooters like Doom, Duke Nukem, and Rise of the Triad has made it much easier to see the magnitude of the impact that Half-Life had. Before Half-Life, you didn’t really reload in FPS games. Think about how fundamental of a shift that is. You go from having hundreds of units of ammunition that you can just unload at will, to suddenly needing to worry about times when you’re not shooting. Going from the super bad-ass, to a regular guy, with a real gun. While today we might look at Gordon Freeman as something of a crowbar wielding murder machine when compared to Joel Miller from Last of Us or Arthur Morgan in Red Dead Redemption 2 , but compared to Doom Guy and Duke Nukem Gordon Freeman is a milquetoast nerd who probably likes reading and has a pocket protector. I mean who does this guy think he is? He has to reload for Christ’s sake. What I think is even more impactful is that suddenly you go from all these FPS games where it’s about finding secret, killing enemies, and doing it as fast and efficiently as possible. They’re all arcade games, to now engaging with a (paperthin) plot. You want to escape, to survive, and eventually to stop the alien menace. I’ve seen people say that Half-Life is the first game to have a story, which is laughably false, but it might be the first FPS to care more about it’s story than it does killing shit, which is still a huge leap from where the genre was. And to top it all of, everything happens in one cohesive, unbroken sequence. There are no “Level Exits” in Half-Life. It all flows from one scene to the next, leaving the player completely immersed in the Resonance Cascade. When I first played Half-Life 2 back in 2007 I was initially struck by how how jarring the sudden pause and “Loading” text thrown up on my screen were. Why had they not done the standard gaming trope of hiding your loading screen being a difficult to open door, or slowly navigating a tunnel or vent? What I didn’t realize is that this was one of the first times there wasn’t a real “loading screen” in a game. It didn’t kick you out to a black screen with a spinning wheel, it just briefly paused, and then resumed. That cohesive experience Half-Life could give to players went miles subconsciously immersing it’s players in it’s world. Even more so in 1998, to a demographic that were used to level end music accompanied by a score screen. But I would still add one qualifier to the statement, “ Half-Life changed the industry”. What people really mean when they say that is, “Half-Life changed the PC gaming industry.” I still contend Metal Gear Solid is what brought that cinematic aspiration to the medium more so than Half-Life. Sure, in Half-Life you have NPCs that can (barely) move their mouths where in MGS you’re just looking at blocks move and words come out. And in Half-Life you have these dramatic setpieces that are just as hard-hitting without any cutscenes while in MGS anything that happens of note is accompanied by the game abruptly seizing control from the player. But Half-Life doesn’t really have a story, where I think MGS’ script is on par with real spy movies of the time. Half-Life is one elaborate linear corridor Gordon Freeman is forced down with no free will, and congratulated for doing so. Metal Gear Solid is a high-concept espionage thriller with cyborg ninjas, double-agents, clones, torture, the list goes on. What I find truly remarkable is that these two games, both of which had a gargantuan impact on the industry, came out exactly 30 days apart (if you take the NA release date for MGS). Which I think is evidence that Valve wasn’t this once-in-a-lifetime team of geniuses that were years ahead of their time. They were an extremely talented group of developers who were the first ones to take a huge swing at the next inevitable step in gaming on PC, while Hideo Kojima was the first one to do it on console. If you’re a weirdo, you could also make the case Resident Evil was the first real trailblazer into cinematic games two years earlier, but that would be quite challenge with how god awful the cutscenes are in the original Resident Evil . If you’re even weirder, you could maybe mention Alone in the Dark (1992) as the original 3D cinematic game, but then most of the room would just look blankly at you, and the only person in the room who’d even heard of that game (me) would just laugh at you. So at the end of all of this I have learned what turned me off of Half-Life wasn’t how dated it was, or how overhyped it was, but a lack of perspective. Now that I’ve seen what came before, it became easy to appreciate all the innovative ideas Half-Life brought to the genre. I still think it’s overhyped. It’s not the G.O.A.T. I wouldn’t even say I like it more than Doom or Duke Nukem. But it is seminal, with some of longest reaching influence in the medium. And Black Mesa completely lost sight of what made it special.

Let me start by saying, I am in no way trying to say this game is anything short of an achievment. I really didn’t like this game, but it’s due to my own personal opinions and my very subjective point-of-view. I feel bad for shitting on something that was made exclusively by talented and passionate people with the kind of determination that can stick with something for over a decade. This is not a AAA company making a paint-by-the-numbers product to be churned out and monetized. This is a product of love for a beloved title from days gone. Black Mesa originally started as community project to port the original Half-Life to one of the newer versions in 2004. I imagine the team got done playing Half-Life 2, looked at all the modding tools they had, and thought, “Yeah. We can make Half-Life look like Half-Life 2.” By 2012 they had all but the nearly-universally panned Xen levels completed. This was the point where I first played Black Mesa : before it was a commercial product, and was just a mod you could download for free. I found it immensely more approachable than the original Half-Life . But despite the graphical update, the better controls, and more fluid gunplay, I still didn’t feel like there was anything special going on. At the time, I remember thinking there was marginally more story than the original Doom. Which is something that might incense some people, but just because your game has a cinematic opening, and several interesting set pieces, doesn’t mean you have a story. And while I agree that any amount of opening is more story than what Doom got, once you actually step back and look at the plot of Half-Life, there’s just not that much there. Gordon Freeman goes to work, his bosses have him open a portal to allow alien invaders, the government comes in and tries to contain it by killing everyone, then it’s revealed it was all orchestrated by some mysterious cabal of other people, who are also—presumably—aliens. And I didn’t even get that last part in my first run-through of Black Mesa mod because they didn’t have the final levels in yet. That’s what stuck with me about that first playthrough of Black Mesa: how utterly inferior the story was to Half-Life 2. I loved the story in Half-Life 2 . Valve did a remarkable job at establishing this world that’s under the boot heel of some mysterious alien force. They left so much room for interpretation of what exactly the aliens were doing, and what they wanted the human populace for. As well as opening the door for exploring more of what these secret scientific mega-corporations, Black Mesa and Aperture, were doing and their role in the downfall of humanity. Not to mention how effectively they kept the player on the edge of their seat with absolutely brutal cliffhangers. Which ended up working against them, but we’ll get to that when I talk about Half-Life 2 . But then I got to Black Mesa, and it was more like a sci-fi B movie. It felt like a barebones script that was only there to tie-together mediocre set pieces. I will certainly grant the game that the set pieces were anything but mediocre in 1998, but by 2012 I’d played Uncharted 2 where you’re on a train racing through the Himalayas and you destroy a helicopter with a tank turret that is being transported on said train. I’d played God of War 3 where that opens with Kratos ascending Olympus on the back of a titan that is actively fighting Poseidon. The set pieces in Black Mesa felt like they’d been made in MS Paint by a grade-schooler by comparison. I deleted it from my steam library, thinking I’d give it another shot when it finally got a full release, not realizing that wouldn’t be for another 8 years . Black Mesas journey is actually quite an interesting one. It was one of the original items that received approval to the store page via Steam’s “Greenlight” feature back in 2013. I also found it quite interesting how it was blessed by the Valve team. Where any other publisher would be suing such a successful project, or sending DMCA takedown requests so they could make their own much shittier remake, Valve encouraged Crowbar Collective to turn it into a full commercial so they could utilize the best options available to them. After what I have to assume was an arduous and exhausting development process, Crowbar Collective finally released the final version of Black Mesa in 2020. I’ve tried to play it probably once a year since then. Each time I would make it about halfway through before I got bored and shut it off. At this in my life, shooters, whether they be first-person or third, fall into two camps: narrative or action-focused. On one side of the spectrum you have Uncharted, which has what I would call middling gunplay and fist-fighting, but is paced around these jaw-dropping setpieces and beautiful climbing sections. On the other side of the spectrum, you have Doom (2016) and Doom: Eternal which has this blissful combat balanced on a knife’s edge at the higher difficulties. Black Mesa falls closer to the Uncharted side of the spectrum, but still conforms to the same gameplay principles of classic 90’s FPS titles that Doom (2016) does. To my modern sensibilities this leads to some cognitive dissonance where I’m never really sure what kind of game I’m playing. I’ll go from being mildly entertained that I just used a giant tesla coil to gib a giant, deadly alien, that an MIT grad has no business confronting, to feeling light excitement at taking down a squad of military soldiers with my experimental energy weapon. But at no point am I marveling at a AAA set piece like Uncharted, or bathing in endorphins after killing a Cyberdemon like in Doom. And every time the flow of the game is broken for even an instant—which happens a lot —I’m thinking, “ This is the greatest game of the 90’s…? This is what everyone won’t shut up about?” And what must have been my fifth or sixth attempt at finishing this game, I finally gritted down and forced myself through, no matter how bored I got, to see the credits. And it was so much worse than I thought it would be. It’s become tradition for me that everytime I fire up an attempt to play Half-Life I hit “New Game” and get up and make a cup of coffee. I hate the opening tram section, and if I sit through it my patience is whittled down to a nub before I’ve even picked up my crowbar. So my Half-Life playthroughs open with the game waiting for me to get off the tram. After which I sprint through to my HEV suit and into the test chamber, completely ignoring all the little odds and ends you can fuck with that I’m sure a lot of people spent entire days of their lives making. And this playthrough was the first time it really sank just how dated the design of this game had become. You are given no direction on where to go or what to do. You are just plopped inside this little underground office space and left to your own devices. It’s not unheard of that a game will just put a player in an unknown space and encourage them to explore and experiment. I would even go as far as to say those are normally my favorite kinds of games. No hand-holding. No sitting around waiting for someone to explain to me that I should stick the enemies with the pointy-end. But in Black Mesa , you are shown this dull, drab, underground office space that is just big enough to be annoying to navigate. And what are your rewards for taking the time to poke in every room? You get to destroy someone’s lunch in the microwave, get a security guard in trouble by pushing the alert button, and hand someone toilet paper. This is the limbo Black Mesa is stuck in. The game looks great. They put so much care into environments and textures. There is an astonishing amount of detail, and it’s made even more astonishing when you realize it’s in something that was originally a mod. It fits in perfectly with it’s AA shooter contemporaries, even looks better than a lot of them. But then once it comes time to actually play I’m instantly transported more than 20 years in the past, and suddenly I’m playing something from 2004. Not 1998, mind you—they did update the gameplay enough to at least be on par with Half-Life 2. This temporal whiplash happens over and over and over again. And I found it to be positively exhausting. “Wow…look at how pretty this area is! I don’t even see any repeating textures! This must have taken so much work… man, bigger studios today would have just used AI to make all this…wait…where am I supposed to go?” and then 5 minutes later I’m thinking, “FUCK! Where the hell in this mess of a level am I supposed to go?! What tiny fucking vent did I miss that I’m supposed to crawl into! Wait…am I supposed to stack these fucking barrels to get up there?! This wasn’t even fun when it was when Half-Life 2 did it!! There’s a reason no one has fucking physics puzzles any more!” Rinse and repeat about 100 times, then you have… the Xen levels …, then it’s done. By the end I just kept saying to myself, “It just keeps going… why does it just keep GOING?! ” It started to dawn on me that the Crowbar Collective probably didn’t just redesign the final few chapters of Half-Life. They probably padded the living shit out of them. It seemed like every door I needed open, every path I needed to traverse, every every shaft I needed to climb was accompanied with a set piece. And not always good set pieces. By my reckoning, there’s 2 kinds of set pieces in Black Mesa: boring ones, and annoying ones. The boring ones didn’t really bother me. They were interesting enough they were able to keep my from quitting the game most of the time, but the annoying ones really got under my skin. And the longer the games goes on, you find less and less boring ones, but more and more annoying ones. And Xen was when the game hit PEAK annoying set pieces. I couldn’t kill more than a few enemies before I was blocked by the need to crawl some more fucking vents to find a cable to plug in, or a button to push. And what really got under my skin about all this was how damn good these levels looked. Crowbar Collective had been killing it visually through out the levels that they were staying faithful in, but once they were let off their leash to just go wild it got even better. So my eyes were saying “modern game, modern design” but the amount of stalling progress and sloppy pacing kept pulling me back to the early 2000s shooter. That cognitive dissonance I mentioned early had reached a fever pitch. It felt like such a shame, because you’d think once they were no longer beholden to levels that were 20 years old they could up the ante and start making something I really enjoyed. But instead it was just more of the same, which I suppose could have been by choice. The Xen levels, for better or worse, do feel like Half-Life levels. It’s fairly remarkable that these levels were made decades later by a completely different team, but still feel so consistent with the rest of the game. By the end of the game, I felt so off and confused I felt compelled to go back to the first game, to see exactly what were Crowbar Collectives decisions in the 2010s and what were Valve’s decisions in the 90s. And after doing so I’m left wondering: what exactly was Crowbar Collective trying to achieve? The remake is faithful to a fault in some places, but is rebuilt from the ground up in others. If you’re going to redesign it entirely, shouldn’t you add a real goal for the player? The original Half-Life got away with not having a real goal or drive for the player by being so new and fresh and having some of the best pacing in the genre up to that point. Black Mesa smashes that pacing on the ground and spits on it, then proceeds to tread water in terms of game design for its entire runtime. Without a mystery, an emotional stake, or some kind of gameplay progression there’s just force other than my own need to see the game through to get me through the shitty parts of the game. Half-Life was made to innovate and to impress. But why was Black Mesa made? It accomplishes so much, but to what end?