What I Played and Read This Week - '26/01/18

Games

As a lapsed Doomer, I check the Cacowards each year, go 'oh, that looks neat' at a few entries, download one of them, and get a few maps in before remembering I'm pretty sick of Doom maps at this point. This year was slightly better; I saw When Them Demons Cry in the runners-up and couldn't resist checking it out, and while I thought the very Higurashi-y opening and ending sequences (featuring The Junkyard From Higurashi and a very appropriate climax) sandwiched a somewhat generic middle (underground temple, Hell, demons, zzz: not much to do with Higurashi beyond the Japanese aesthetic), it had me hungry for more. A finalist, In the Doghouse, quickly got too hard for me. A previous year's finalist, Doom 2 in City Only, suffered from the usual community project problem of every map being ridiculously huge. (Modern maps in general are too long for my tastes—I prefer shorter 3~10-minute maps in the style of the original duology—but community projects take it to the next level.) But I had a good time with Running Late and the vintage Fava Beans. All this was made more convenient by new wad manager (and Cacowards finalist) Doom Launcher, which lets you download wads straight off of idgames. Very nice!

Other than that, I checked out Desktop Survivors 98, a Vampire Survivors clone with a Windows XP look where your mouse is your character. The big gimmick is that it's an overlay on your desktop, so all the action happens over your background, icons, etc., but my background was a bit too busy for that; I turned on the ingame background on my second run. Otherwise, it seems pretty average.

Books (1/52)

Finally finished Anne of Green Gables. Beautifully written, and it understands how strange and insane children can be. I'm partial to the episode of the Haunted Wood, where Anne and Diane decide to call a roadside copse the Haunted Wood, make up a bunch of stories about ghostly widows chasing little girls and such, and buy into their own stories so much that they think they'll die if they walk there after dark. The author also has a rare mastery of summary and half scene, summarizing or skipping over seemingly climactic scenes (exams, plays, recitations, etc.), sometimes so that Anne can later discuss them, or narrate them aloud in first person, without any repetition. Strongly recommended

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