this is my review of doom 2016 on the switch in 2023

have you never played doom 2016 on the switch and you want to know should you buy doom 2016 on the switch in 2023 read this review to find out! 

if youre a switch person,  theres not a lot of options for your first person shooters, and even outside the switch nobody makes singleplayer campaign shooties anymore because its all fortnites and call of duties these days. the last new campaign shooter was titanfall 2 and it was just ok. but you cant play that on the switch! i tried bethesda wolfenstein 2 but the wheelchair level did not get me and i didnt stick with it. so really ive only been able to play borderlands on there. this is pretty dire state for that genre to never really get a foothold on such a longlived system.  if you like doom and quake, you can play ports of every version of doom and quake. me i dont like doom very much but its ok. i wanted to try this doom, the old new one, for a while, and it was on sale so why not

you might be better off getting it in a box, if you can find that for cheap. if you get it on the online store youre gonna need a 64gig sd card to download it! me, i bricked my raspberry pi so i could play doom. so you cannot say im not a hardcore because you know im willing to make these sacrifices and hard choices for gameing. 

which difficulty setting did i play it on? well i tried “hurt me plenty” which means “medium”. remember doom? but you have to shoot the guys too many times and its really annoying and boring to do it! so i put it on “im too young to die daddy” or whatever. which is “easy”. remember doom! maybe ill put it up higher when i unlock more abilities but i dont really like shooting the guys so many times! 

i changed the gun in the settings so it would be in the middle. like in doom!

so youre going to notice some things right away. firstly everythings going to be orange and its going to be hard to see the guys because its like, orange on orange. so look out. secondly all the player movements gonna be a bit floaty and marshmallowy. the ‘mantle’ thing where you jump and climb on platforms feels bad! but maybe youll get the hang of it later. theyll probably give you a double jump or a jetpack or something later. 

on loading screens theres no big tell that its done loading, you have to pay attention and push the button when the tiny prompt comes up. thats doom baby. i think in general the menus couldve used more love. they have a map (like in doom!) but i dont like to look at it!

when you shoot guys you have to punch them as well. when you punch them they glow blue and glowing blue enemies drop health when they die, so you want that. if you punch them to death it does a long animated execution kill. youre supposed to be excited to do this but its pretty annoying. youre gonna have to watch a lot of these. thats just how it is. the punching i dont love it, its a little jarring and its not super clear if youve hit the guy or how effective it was. you often punch past the guy, and youll then have to find them again, if you want to shoot or punch them again.

the pistol you start with, well….. its the start pistol and maybe you can mod it later, its not supposed to be the most effective weapon. but my review of it is that its bad and it feels bad to shoot guys with. pretty soon after that you’ll pick up a shotgun. sadly, again, the starter shotgun isnt super effective, youre going to have to shotgun each guy several times to put them down. youre gonna have to mod it to be good. thats just how it is. you pick up the first weapon mod halfway through the first level. do you want your shotgun to be triple or exploding? youll have to get both of these, it doesnt really matter which you choose first. if you aim down sights you can do it. if you wait a few seconds you can do it again. if you have both mods you can switch between them at will. its a pretty good.

the doomguy character that you inhabit is a mute irreverent vagabond meathead, who communicates mostly through just punch animations and being a destructive force. the animations will be lovingly rendered and casually brutal in a way that feels a bit samey and mealy after a lil while. the game has a story but youre playing as a character whos not really excited about their story and just wants to wreck stuff. theres tilda swinton who wants the demons to win. theres the other guy who doesnt want the demons to win. its hard for you to care about the story when the character does not care. like you can try i guess. youre on your own team which is just you, killing the stuff, and going forwards. you will move from one scene to the next, collecting everything and killing everything else.

ok so this is the fresh new take on doom circa 2016 (i think its the current fresh new take but i havent played doom eternal which i suspect is at least a little bit different. i expect there will be a even newer fresh new take on doom announced soon, and im not sure what thats going to be yet. but this one, the 2016 one, i believe is a well regarded fresh new take on doom by players of dooms and by the gameing press in general) - in this one, you are supposed to feel big and strong and powerful, but also kind of skilly clever, but most important, youre a brawly kinda shooter guy who runs in and fights in the thick of it, you dont  just hide behind stuff and snipe or whatever.  its brawly. you punch guys. you drop into little locked off arenas and shoot and punch guys until there are no more guys. i think this is ok. its at least not the same as every other game, it has its own lean and it works when you lean into it. its not a stealthy snipey and it does not reward that mode of play.

it being a doom means they can do a fresh take on the old shooter gameplay that you dont see so much these days. so it has access keys, and levels with discrete ends, and secrets. so thats kind of fun. it being a fresh new take means they can put in the new shooter gameplay that you do see so much these days. so you have upgrading and checkpoints and achievos. i think its cobbled together pretty good. looking for secrets kinda feels weird and archaic and at odds with the keep-moving-forward pace of its gameplay. but finding secrets is still a fun thing to do in a video game. i found one of the two secrets in the first level. i do not know if i ever intend to play that level again. it does not feel like it contains multitudes or will reward further exploration. 

the second level is the first puzzley level, which is to say, youll have to figure out what to do next to advance. youll need to find keys that are not right in front of you, and youll have to pay attention to environmental hazards that instantly kill you if youre not paying attention. (youll have to reload, and youll have to wait for it to load, and youll reload from a checkpoint, so youll have to kill back up to where you were so you can try the puzzle again). this shows willing, right? we do have more than just a punchy gunshoot, theres this other searchy mode as well.  so um, the searchy bit how do i like it? honestly i dont like it much. so unlike sneaky snipeys, the game requires and rewards this mode of play. it breaks up the arena shooting. it paces the levels a little. but it doesnt offer a lot of choice. youre doing the things or not doing them. youre being killed by the things or not. youre either taking the main route through, or the b route which is largely the same. id like to feel sometimes like ive cleverly gone a better way, but theres not much of that. i think if you did it just right you could use the hazardous environment to kill dudes, but thats really just a different way to kill dudes and not really a transformative different mode of play.

its hard to place this game in a larger schema of sort of scifi horror themed shooters. its doing its own thing by being doom, which is novel in 2016 when most of the shooters arent being doom. its environments would look at home in deus ex or half life or dead space or something, but this game is secure in its lane, as a doom, and doesnt explore the whole space of scifi horror shooting, and there isnt really anything wrong with that, but the space it explores is nevertheless limited. i think if you compare it to a n64 game like goldeneye or perfect dark, it is a pleasant fellow in that company.  it is sometimes a vent crawler but it is not a role playing game, and doesnt want to entertain that sensibility.

anyway im only pretending to be a game journalist and im not sure if youre supposed to write like product reviews or critical analysis or what in these guys. i think if you have a switch and youve not played this game and you want to, you might as well get it while its cheap and the switch is still  a viable platform. i like it better than the wolfenstein but not as much as i’d like to.

dogmestein 95

in this liz ryerson blog post theres mention of 'dogme 95 but for video games' sort of in the style “sometimes people propose a dogme 95 for videogames and that's a little silly, for these reasons” and it got me thinking that it would be fun to do a sort of dogme 95 for videogames, bit of a cheeky dogme 95

so im making a bit of a wolfenstein, at least, i'm telling people im making a wolfenstein, and i kinda like the idea of having a club that makes wolfensteins, like a little wolfenstein makers club.

anyway if youd like to contribute, well, i don't have an explicit list of which videogame things not to do like in vanilla dogme 95, but basically we'd pretend that theres a list of ten-ish explicit rules for things that you must not do in the execution of your video game, in order to be able to claim that it was made to the dogmestein 95 spec (because, when i read the actual dogme 95 list im like, oh this is a nice idea but i dont want to not do these specific things because it seems hard, so you get to maintain your own list of things, but we don't mention the rules explicitly so we can pretend that we are all doing the same things. )

oh and because, game jams theres like a billion of them all the time, this one it starts whenever you read this or whenever you commit to creating your wolfenstein, and you have.... 20 years to do it, you can release at any point in those 20 years, release as early and as often as you like, but once those 20 years are up, that's it. and then... you don't have to tell me that you're doing dogmestein and in fact if you do tell me its frowned upon. but i will assume that any game that comes out in the future that seems to fit these restrictions is actually a dogmestein 95 game. even if you tell me its not. i'll be yeah, sure, wink.

anyway thats a lot of rules for i told you i wasnt going to tell you what the rules are, so you dont have to actually do any of the things i said, but that's the framework. it doesn't have to even really be a wolfenstein. but there are rules and we all secretly agree what they are, and not to discuss them, but they're real.

#also i propose that we pretend that#whatever year it is#actually its 1995

suppose that the matrix is not trans enough

i understand that thats a contentious opinion, but suppose that they werent under any clear restriction from the studio to make an apparently straight movie and they could put… like the thing where switch is a lady in the matrix but a man outside the matrix, like they wanted to, suppose they were allowed to make it like 10% transer, what kind of things could you do?

im kind of dithering back and forth on this because i think somehow its still good if theres a disenfranchised male libertarian read on the film, but there are more clues. so its more, but you still have to read into it a bit. it would be the kind of movie that could enchant a male dipshit and confuse them into becoming trans - like that doesnt have to be the only point to the film but its a window left open

one thing is cast a woman as morpheus. seems really obvious. im not sure why they didnt do this when they recast morpheus for revolutions. why its trans, i think it clearly posits morpheus as a trans elder, in a way that lawrence fishbourne sadly is not (i think its a good performance but very straight) - so you could cast like angela basset or expand the role of the oracle or something and i think that would be transer

color grading. do that bisexual lighting but in pink and blue. i dont think that trans flag was around at the time of the original matrix, but its very matrix and i think its a good subtle clue. honestly were expected to read a bit of retcon into it like with the pills, were supposed to retroactively accept stuff thats not explicit in the film but still intended, think itd be cool if someone did this lighting at the time unknowing, and it was understood now as a sort of delirious oracular trans theme encoded preactively by a canny editor

obviously to make it transer you could just put a little more trans-adjacent subculture shit in. put some lesbian stuff. put some furry stuff - and it has to still read as the matrix but you’d do a lil bit, like maybe neos name is neko. i think that gets you a lot of the way there. 

i think in general make neo more of a failson. like hes too competently living as a man. i think its good move to have smith be a fbi man in the original matrix, but it would be much transer if smith was more of a father figure, even like a stepdad or a gym coach or something

the previous wachowski movie ‘bound’ has all this very aesthetic lesbian shit in it, i think the matrix would read more trans if in the first act there was more of a lesbian vibe to the world that neo feels like an outsider in. like in the fish out of water club chasing trinity bit. i think trinity has a very gay look and this is kind of in there, but, idk what if two girls kissed or something. a bit gayer.

make the body horror stuff hornier. i wont say why.

anyway this is kind of a cursed argument, people will say the matrix is obviously trans or obviously not and noone will prefer this discussion. but i think its a useful conversation. like if you had to make either a movie in the mode of the matrix but more explicitly trans, or if you were making the matrix, how would you make it transer