SIGIL Review

SIGIL
Developed/Published by: Romero Games
Sweet-ass shreds by: Buckethead
Date of Release: May 31, 2019
Price: €6.66

In the year 1993, my 9 year old mind was blown by a certain little shareware game. That game was Doom, spawned by the gnarly minds at id Software, chief among them co-founder John Romero. It was received with much fanfare and acclaim, and would go on to spawn a fourth episode, and several sequels. And now John Romero has made his triumphant return with a fifth and final episode for The Ultimate Doom, known as SIGIL. It's a 9-level megawad that adds a fifth episode with an all-new soundtrack, and map designs that are more devious and challenging than anything seen before. You'll need the original retail doom iwad, and a modern source port such as GZDoom or Chocolate Doom. Trying to run SIGIL on the original dos version just won't work due to memory constraints.



The first thing that smacked me upside the head was the shredilicious Buckethead soundtrack that comes with the paid version. The tracks cover a broad spectrum of musical stylings and really set the tone well. The opening track "Romero One Mind Any Weapon" in particular could be the new E1M1 IMO. I don't want to sell the free version's midi soundtrack short however, it's pretty epic as well. The next thing that caught my attention is how freaking dark the levels are. This megawad is definitely best experienced in a dark room with the sound cranked up. It's hard as hell too, I've lost track of how many times I've died (playing on Ultra Violence), but they never felt like cheap deaths, and ask I learned the enemy placement I was able to carve a bloody path of carnage through their ranks.



SIGIL is definitely an experience for the true diehard Doom fan. If a newcomer to the series experienced SIGIL before any of the other episodes, I'm pretty sure they would be scared away by the sheer scale of the challenge. As a veteran of the series though I can say personally that it feels just right. The levels are well built, and offer an amazing feeling of tension as you explore them, and it's good to finally feel challenged again by a Doom game. Recent entries in the franchise have been far too forgiving as far as difficulty goes. Sigil just cranks things up to 11 though, and then rips the dial right off. I don't normally give a numerical score, but SIGIL deserves, nay it DEMANDS one.

John Romero's SIGIL scores a facemelting 666 out of 10

Turok Switch Review

Turok (Switch)
Developed and Published By: Night Dive Studios
Date of Release: March 18, 2019
Price: $19.99


In the year 1997, the Nintendo 64 was just starting to take hold in the market, with a solid library of cartridge based games. The analog stick in the center of the controller afforded a new standard of precision control for consoles. And so the N64 was a perfect place for Acclaim to debut their new FPS title, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter. The first game in the genre on the N64, it was a breakout success for it's lush (at the time) graphics, smooth analog aiming, and sprawling levels. And now 22 years after it's smashing debut, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter has been reborn a full 4 console generations later on the Nintendo Switch.



The original game on Nintendo 64 was released early in the console's life, so it lacked support for the famous Rumble Pak. However the Switch version of Turok has HD rumble support, and has everything from the expected weapon firing effects, all the way down to subtle thumping of dinosaur footsteps that increase in intensity as they get closer. Another welcome addition are the modern dual-stick controls that FPS games have been enjoying for quite some time now on consoles, a far cry from the Nintendo 64's limited, albeit revolutionary at the time single analog. This makes the various precision platforming sections much easier to handle, thanks to having precise control over your movements, as the original game relied on using digital buttons to move around.



The sprawling levels that make up the world of Turok are all connected by a central hub, and to progress between levels you need to collect the keys to open the portals that link the worlds, which can lead to a fair amount of backtracking. it's nothing that gets overly tedious, however. If I had to make one complaint though, it would be the save system, using checkpoints and savepoints. It would have been nice if the option to save anytime, anywhere had been added, but it's certainly not a dealbreaker. This port is extremely faithful to the original game, and it's clear that a lot of time and effort went into replicating the original look and feel on the KEX engine. All in all Turok for the Switch is an excellent port, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who loves retro FPS games. Here's hoping we'll see Turok 2 soon!

Blood: Fresh Supply Review

Blood: Fresh Supply
Developed By: Monolith Software
Published By: NightDive Studios
Date of Release: May 9, 2019
Price: $9.99

The first time I played Blood was way back in the summer of '97. I was 12 at the time, and well versed in the ways of the FPS. I had blasted my way through Wolfenstein 3D, the Dooms, Quake, Heretic, Duke Nukem 3D... I thought I had seen it all. Then along came blood to blow everything out of the water with it's own macabre brand of fun. Sure, it was the same Build Engine that powered Duke Nukem 3D, but gone were the bright comic-book inspired locations and brightly lit urban environments. Gone were the hilarious one-liners and pop culture jokes. Gone were the invading alien bastards and their plans for enslaving earth. Taking their place were dark, dank and decrepit mortuaries, monasteries, and mausoleums, the aliens replaced with zombies and beasts and raving cultists. The morbid ambiance flowed sanguine like the fresh blood that would soon be spilled. It was time to paint the town red!



It only took me a level or two to realize that Blood had just as many snappy one-liners and wink wink, nudge nudge moments as Duke Nukem 3D, they were just a much more subtle and darker brand of humor. The references to classic horror abounded, oozing out of every crevice in the complex and brilliantly designed levels. The main character, Caleb, was decidedly a connoisseur of the arts as well, as he spouts wonderful references to classic films and Shakespearean plays, and if you let him idle for a while he'll start singing some improv showtunes. There's a brilliantly moody midi soundtrack that sets the tone wonderfully, but if you leave the game CD in the drive you'd be treated to a chillingly ambient soundtrack, with haunting choirs and chanting cultists. With Blood, the bar had been raised far over the precedents set by Duke Nukem 3D, and in my humble opinion serves as the epitome of what makes a Build game good.



So here we are 22 years later. Blood has been out for a while on Steam and GoG, but it's just the original DOS version running in a wrapper, and that's all well and good, if slightly underwhelming in terms of presentation. But what if it could be MORE? Well Night Dive Studios certainly took that into consideration, as they had Samuel "Kaiser" Villarreal rework the entire game and port it to his amazing KEX engine, which is the backbone of many other Night Dive re-releases such as Turok 1+2, System Shock Enhanced, Forsaken, and Strife. The result is Blood: Fresh Supply, a smooth amalgamation of the classic DOS gameplay with a host of modern conveniences such as newer graphics API support, high resolutions, and so on. They ripped out the heart of what made Blood so good back in the day and resurrected it in a new body, so to speak.



So how IS Blood: Fresh Supply? To sum it up simply, a breath of fresh death. Sure, there are a couple of other ports for blood like BloodGDX and nBlood, but neither of those come as a preconfigured plug and play package the way Fresh Supply does, not to mention BloodGDX still has some rather glaring frame-pacing issues. Fresh Supply on the other hand runs smooth as butter, supports DX11, OpenGL, and Vulkan rendering, has added ambient occlusion to make the environments THAT much more moody, and also doesn't fall apart when you turn on vsync. It also supports optional true 3D aiming and allows you to also turn off autoaim, which makes wasting cultists that much more satisfying. On top of that the multiplayer has been revamped with new netcode, and splitscreen play. Both the MIDI and CD soundtrack are included, and controller support has been added too so you can kick back on the couch and blast the baddies on the big screen. Night Dive is also working on squashing any bugs that crawl out of the woodwork, with a dedicated channel on their Discord where players can submit reports. When it comes right down to it, the previous no-frills release of Blood packed with DosBox was just a drop in the bucket.

Blood: Fresh Supply is the full transfusion.