You Found a Secret Area!

Author: beverly jane

  • Quake Brutalist Jam III: Quake levels are getting wild, y’all.

    Quake Brutalist Jam III: Quake levels are getting wild, y’all.

    I love Quake. It’s undeniably one of my favorite games of all time. I love it because it’s the textbook definition of a surreal FPS to me: You’re fighting marines, ogres, knights and Lovecraftian horrors with shotguns, nailguns, and a lightning gun through marine bases and castles. If you think about it for more than five seconds, you realize how dumb it all is, that it shouldn’t work.

    Yet somehow, in spite of all the turmoil going on internally at id Software – this would be John Romero’s last game with the studio before jumping ship to form Ion Storm and making the abysmal Daikatana, something I previously wrote about – everything fell into place perfectly and Quake became an absolute classic. There are very few games that I think nail this formula, and Quake nails it in spades. (I wonder if there’s any other surreal/absurdist first-person shooters that fit this example. Rise of the Triad is another example I can think of, but I’d love to hear your suggestions!)

    I’ve written about countless Quake mods and expansions over the years, I still play it every now and then, I check out the mods made for it, and so on. This time around, there’s a new big Quake mod that was getting a lot of attention at the start of 2026, and naturally I had to check it out. Turns out it’s worth the hype.

    An ominous start.

    Quake Brutalist Jam III is a mod for Quake that’s inspired by Brutalist architecture introduced way back in the 1950s. Based on the existing Copper mod, this mod not only introduces a bunch of new textures for mappers to use, but a new rogue’s gallery of monsters and weapons to make it unique from vanilla Quake. Done as a map jam from October-November 2025 where members worked together to make maps for the mod using the aforementioned new weapons and enemies, the final collection was released in early January 2026.

    The Jam is split between three sections: A section for new/inexperienced Quake mappers called “New Faces,” a set of remastered levels from the two previous Quake Brutalist Jams called “QBJ Resurfaced,” and the main set of levels made specifically for this collection.

    Surely this is the only enemy here and more won’t spawn… right?

    The maps are made by veterans and newbies from the Quake mapping community, alongside Twitch streamer/boomer shooter enthusiast DraQu, and Robert Yang, famous for Radiator 2 (NSFW), a series of small games with severe homoerotic overtones. And that’s just the ones I recognize. The rest seem to be a cavalcade of various mappers from the community, all with their own style.

    A bunch of explosives and zombies to kill? It’s just like Christmas! …wait, that was last month.

    Gameplay is similar in nature to classic Quake: kill monsters, hit switches, find keys to open doors, get to the exit. The big changes involve the arsenal and the monsters. A wrench replaces the axe, your starter shotgun is replaced with a Stechkin ApS pistol with infinite ammo (and a reload sequence!), the super shotgun is now the KS-23 Flak which allows the shots to bounce between walls (this became my favorite as I always loved the Flak Cannon in Unreal Tournament for that same ricochet properties), the nailguns are now akimbo, the super nailgun is now a rebar crossbow, the rocket launcher now fires a volley of eight rockets for four shots (wasn’t a big fan of this because it reminded me of Daikatana’s Shotcycler and how wasteful of a weapon that was), and the lightning gun is replaced by the powerful Invoker, which is the BFG-9000 equivalent in that it will kill any enemy in a single hit in a 3×3 grid pattern. Works great when you have to deal with several Shamblers at once.

    Annoying little bastards.

    The bestiary for QBJIII hasn’t been drastically changed. The main Quake rogues gallery is still here, just reskinned and renamed, using the Copper mod’s rebalancing as a base. There’s a few new grunt types like pistol grunts, a rocket launcher grunt who’s basically a glass cannon, often seen alongside the Grenadiers (reskinned Ogres) and Plasma Trenchknights (reskinned Enforcers).

    There’s also more horror monsters, like the annoying Amalgams that drop caltrops that do damage to the player if stepped on, as well as the swarmers and blisters, small enemies that often appear in groups that can overwhelm you. I swear a good chunk of my deaths were because I got swarmed by a bunch of swarmers only to be blown up by a blister not long after.

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  • Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: The Rest of 2025 Edition.

    Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: The Rest of 2025 Edition.

    Welcome to 2026 and the 14th year of You Found a Secret Area. It’s kind of weird to think about for me. Over the past decade or so, I’ve seen a shift more towards video and streaming content, with long-form writing being shoved away. While I had dabbled in such things in the past, there’s been one thing that’s been constant, and that’s me sitting down at least once a month to put down a bunch of words about… stuff.

    I don’t really have any super strong goals for the blog this year, besides to keep writing. Even in the age of AI slop, where cheap fly-by-night blogs scrape the internet to make blogs full of SEO marketing drivel that’s not even correct half the time, I’m not giving up on writing. It’s arguably one of my strengths, I don’t wanna offload my work to the plagiarism machines, the human element is most important thing to me.

    That being said, back in June I said I’d make a “rest of 2025,” and here’s me fulfilling that promise. I know I did a separate post for Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025, but this is the stuff I bought outside the convention. Here’s Some Stuff I Bought through the rest of 2025:

    This first one was a case of a happy accident. In October, I decided to roam around the area and spotted a small resale shop called Village Merchants. Funny enough, a taco truck is also parked right next door to it, and they used the signboard to use “Who Wants a Taco,” which I think is sage advice we can all agree with.

    Village Merchants is a quaint little place, mostly full of clothes, but also knick-knacks and other assorted things like music CDs. And I spotted one that really caught my interest.

    $2 – Bob Miller’s Polkarena

    Okay, I’m gonna be talking about local Portland, Oregon stuff here, so skip on if you’re not interested in knowing about local personalities from my neck of the woods.

    This is a Christmas album made for 1190 KEX, an AM talk radio station that had a handful of local radio personalities, but nowadays is just a place if you wanna hear right-wing talk radio and Coast to Coast AM all day.

    Bob Miller was a longtime personality for the station, starting in 1979 and continuing until 2003, moving on to KPAM until retiring in 2014. 35 years is a hell of a run for any radio personality, honestly. For a good chunk of the late 90s to the early 2000s, KEX would put out these charity CDs for the holidays. According to Discogs, this has a 1998 copyright, something I couldn’t easily find on the disc itself.

    I bought this only because of the concept of a polka version of the famous “Macarena” one-hit wonder sounded appealing. It’s silly, mostly Bob talk-singing about German related things while trying to get Horst Mager, a famous Portland celebrity chef at the time, to sing. It’s not nearly as interesting as I was hoping, but it’s goofy even if they’re massively late to the party.

    The rest of the album is various sketches and songs featured on Bob Miller’s radio show throughout 1998, including adding lyrics to the Olympic Games theme, A blues track about traffic on Interstate 5, and even some other Oregon themed tracks. There’s even a bit where Dennis Nordin, part of the KEX traffic chopper, talks about a tale of a woman stuck in a tree. Guess Portland has always been weird even in the late ‘90s.

    While writing about this, I found out about Wes Cooley, a former Oregon Republican infamously for lying about his military record (not to be confused with the motorcyclist); and Jake O’Donnell, a former NBA referee who seemed to have a massive beef with Clyde Drexler, a basketball player who was a longtime player for the Portland Trailblazers. I’ve been living in Portland, Oregon all my life and I suddenly learned more about my city and state with this album. Thanks, Bob Miller.

    For being a typical radio station charity CD made for the holidays, it’s Perfectly Fine. Nothing to write home about. It’s no Z100 Evil Barney Christmas, that’s for sure.

    Fun fact: The track listing on the back of the CD doesn’t match the actual CD track listing. A performance of Heywood Banks’ “Diddly Squat” had to be yanked at the last minute due to licensing issues, so instead we have a silly little Christmas-themed song by Bob Miller instead.

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  • Santa Rockstar HD: Christmas Hero.

    Santa Rockstar HD: Christmas Hero.

    If you’ve ever played a five-fret guitar rhythm game, you probably have a favorite one of those. Most of us have our most favorite fake plastic guitar rhythm games. But what about the least favorite guitar rhythm games? There’s probably a few well known examples that immediately come to mind: Rock Revolution, PowerGig: Rise of the SixString, PopStar Guitar, a game I previously covered here. Maybe Guitar Hero Live or Rock Band 4 or Fortnite Festival if you’re feeling really spicy. But I propose a new candidate for the worst five-fret rhythm game I played. Which, considering I played and wrote about PopStar Guitar, is an impressive feat.

    The title is a bit confusing. Is it Santa Rockstar HD, Metal Xmas Santa Rockstar HD or just Santa Rockstar? Make up your minds, y’all!

    Santa Rockstar HD is a five-fret rhythm game for PC made by Bekho Team, a studio based out of Santiago, Chile. Outside of a few games of theirs that are knockoffs of existing games, this is probably the most standout product the company has made. This is the sixth installment in the Santa Rockstar franchise, a series that initially started out as a series of Flash games released from 2008 to 2012, during the first boom and bust of the rhythm game genre. Santa Rockstar HD is the first one to not use Flash, instead opting to use Unity to make the game.

    I was made aware of this game back in 2023 when Twitch streamer and overall guitar game god Acai covered it on a stream during the holiday season. He was absolutely floored at how bad it all was. Since I am a trash connoisseur and rhythm game nut, I bought this on a whim not long after. Since it’s the holiday season, it seems like a perfect time to talk about Santa Rockstar HD.

    There really isn’t much of a story to Santa Rockstar HD. A rock and roll dude, who goes unnamed here, notices Santa Claus has been hurt. Being reminded of the memories of getting a guitar from Santa for Christmas, decides to wield Santa’s axe, of which he suddenly becomes a buff Santa himself. So now our buff Santa Claus must save Christmas with the power of rock. It’s like if The Santa Clause had a baby with Brutal Legend. I wasn’t expecting an outstanding story out of a rhythm game here, but it’s a good enough premise to keep things going.

    We’re off to a bad start if I’m seeing typos here….

    The main story quest involves you playing notes to the tune of various Christmas songs of note, with a more metal flare. Silent Night, Come All Ye Faithful, Jingle Bells, all the iconic Christmas songs, plus a few original songs and arrangements of symphony classics like Rondo alla turca. Charlie Parra, the game’s composer, did a pretty darn good soundtrack here. I’m usually not big on metal covers of songs – I think they’re a bit cliched and overdone sometimes – but I totally would throw these in a Christmas songs playlist. (There is a soundtrack of this available on Steam, but it seems to come from playing the songs in-game rather than the raw audio files, so save your money.)

    These gems almost look like candy. I wonder if you can eat the gems…

    If you’ve played a Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, you’re gonna be easily familiar with the game’s mechanics: Tap a note, get points, hit a string of white notes to get Rockpower – this game’s equivalent to Guitar Hero’s Star Power – and try not to miss too many notes or you’ll fail. One of the more interesting changes through the quest mode is that your multiplier, rockpower and note streak carry over from song to song in the setlist. It’s a bit unconventional than standard rhythm game setlists, which usually reset everything upon playing a new song, but I guess it can be useful if you’re trying to get the high score.

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  • Soldier of Fortune: Payback – the low budget finale.

    Soldier of Fortune: Payback – the low budget finale.

    CONTENT WARNING: Blood, gore and violence.

    Longtime readers of this site know that I am a trash connoisseur. I will watch terrible shows and bad movies, and of course I’ll play bad video games. I chalk it up to just absorbing a lot of critically panned media in my youth, but I also look at it as a learning experience: Just why did they make it like this? Engaging with media known for its negative reception is important to critiquing media, in my opinion. Gives you a better understanding of what’s actually good or bad.

    I’ve written about several bargain bin games over the years. Often made by small teams on shoestring budgets and quick development time frames, these are fascinating to play for me. Many times they’re not very good, and I can finish them in just a couple hours. Though, sometimes you can see what they wanted to do, but couldn’t for whatever reason. In some rare cases, a budget label will decide to release a new installment in a long-dormant franchise in an attempt to get a few extra sales from longtime fans. Much like today’s entry.

    Confirmed: That’s a gun firing, alright!

    Soldier of Fortune: Payback is the oft-maligned third and final installment of the Soldier of Fortune franchise, loosely based on the magazine of the same name. Released in 2007, a mere two weeks after the massively popular Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, this game came and went to negative reviews, and is mostly forgotten outside of ragebait Youtubers or trash connoisseurs like me.

    Payback was not developed by Raven Software, makers of the previous Soldier of Fortune games. Instead, it was developed by Slovakian development studio Cauldron, who was one of a few studios Activision Value relied on for developing their bargain bin games. According to The Cutting Room Floor, the game was tentatively titled “Mercenaries Wanted,” and likely got the Soldier of Fortune branding due to similarities between it and the previous games.

    While it may seem weird for Activision to publish this game right after the biggest video game to probably come out in 2007, it actually isn’t. You see, for a while, there were two Activisions.

    From 2000 to 2016, Activision Value was a publishing arm of Activision based out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. This was created from a merger of several budget publishers, including Expert Software – known for publishing a good chunk of Sega’s PC output, like Sonic & Knuckles Collection, which I’ve written about – and Head Games, makers of such infamous games like Extreme Boards & Blades and Juggernaut: The New Story for Quake II, which I’ve also written about. If you’re familiar with the oodles of video games based on the Cabela’s brand of sporting good stores, that’s almost entirely Activision Value.

    Unless you looked closely, there wasn’t much of a noticeable difference between the Activision based out of California that was putting out Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, Guitar Hero and Call of Duty; and the Activision based out of Minnesota that was putting out stuff like Secret Service or the oodles of History Channel video games. They both had the Activision logo on the box, after all. I find this late 2000s era of Activision fascinating for that reason. They not only wanted be the big AAA publisher, but they also wanted to put out average schlock for $40 a pop. Guess they wanted to eat their cake and have it too.

    Just another day at the office.

    In Soldier of Fortune: Payback, you don’t play as the bushy mustachioed protagonist John Mullins from the previous games, but instead a generic faceless soldier by the name of Thomas Mason. (No relation to Alex Mason, I assume.) Mason gets double-crossed by another Shop mercenary named Miller, and with the help from Casandra “Casey” Decker back at The Shop, Mason goes through middle eastern towns, South American jungles and Ukranian hotels to figure out who is bribing mercenaries to defect. It’s a fairly basic story pretty much meant to move the player along various locales while shooting bad guys in generic environments.

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  • Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025 edition.

    Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: Portland Retro Gaming Expo 2025 edition.

    Another year, another Portland Retro Gaming Expo is in the books. I’ve been going to these things since at least 2011, and the vibes this year felt a bit lower than usual. A friend of mine said the overall feel of the show is “exhaustion,” and I honestly agree. Definitely felt a bit underwhelming compared to last year.

    Mostly because I didn’t see as many folks as I wanted to see there, as costs made things unattainable for some of my friends to attend. Even the $90 price for a weekend pass was a sticker shock for me, after usually seeing that be about $60 or so in previous years.

    There was also a bit of issues I had with the con as a whole, but I’ll save that for after the roundup of stuff I bought. I did walk away with a few interesting things, but mostly cruft and stuff that I could afford without spending oodles of cash I don’t really have.

    With that out of the way, let’s get started.

    So Saturday only netted me two purchases, at the same booth for $5. It was in the same booth as Pat Contri’s, so I assume they shared it. I didn’t catch the name of the person who was running it, but they seemed really nice and friendly. Those were the only purchases I made that day, as seeing common games go for more than they’re worth caused me to lose interest in looking after a bit. My partner, however, was more accepting of what was on offer, as she netted a good chunk of gaming stuff.

    Def Jam Rapstar (Xbox 360)

    Ah yes, another rhythm game that requires singing. I keep running into those.

    I remember an old, old Giant Bomb video where Brad Shoemaker and Jeff Gerstmann rapped to Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” which was pretty god damn hilarious. While I probably won’t hit the highs of that performance, I’m definitely curious to see what songs are on the base setlist. This game also had a feature where if you had an Xbox Live Vision Camera or a PlayStation Eye, you could post your performance online to be graded by the community. Sadly, those online services shut down a few years after release, so you won’t get to see hilarious videos of people rapping to Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice.”

    Over the past few years, I’ve gotten Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2, Get on da Mic, and now this game. All games that require me to sing. I still have an old Rock Band USB microphone around, but I get extremely self-conscious whenever I sing in these games. Maybe one day I’ll play these and not feel immense guilt for singing into a microphone like a dingus.

    Medal of Honor: Warfighter Limited Edition (Xbox 360)

    The second attempt to revive the Medal of Honor franchise. I’ve already said my words about the 2010 reboot, so my expectations are really low. Funny enough, since this is a late-era Xbox 360 game, the multiplayer and single player are on separate discs, though this time the entire game uses Frostbite 2 and not the weird two-engine hybrid system the previous Medal of Honor did.

    All I know about the campaign for Warfighter was a door-breaching mechanic where, similar to Modern Warfare 2 (classic), you’d breach a door and unlock unique breaching methods for getting headshots. I know this thanks to Miracle of Sound’s music video for the game, affectionately called “Medal of Honor Doorfighter.” Can’t wait to kick down doors and take out generic middle-eastern soldiers.

    Oh, this also has digital unlockables and a beta key for Battlefield 4 that no longer works. Our Digital Future™, baby!

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  • Cold Fear: French-ident Evil.

    Cold Fear: French-ident Evil.

    I don’t write much about survival horror games. It’s not a genre I love with any sort of passion, but it is definitely one I find intriguing, especially when it comes to developers finding new ways to make things creepy and unsettling to players.

    My experiences with survival horror begin with the most famous survival horror franchise of them all, Resident Evil. But not the original titles on PS1 – though I remember being at a friend’s house when I was younger where he played Resident Evil 2 trying to unlock The Tofu Survivor. No, I’m talking about the early 2000s doldrums period of the franchise, when the series was struggling where exactly the series should go from those PS1 games. Games like the 2002 Resident Evil remake, Resident Evil 0, Code Veronica X, that kind of stuff. Before Resident Evil 4 came out and suddenly changed everything.

    With Resident Evil taking the fairly niche survival horror genre into the mainstream, various developers from around the world would release their own spins on the genre. Some, like Konami’s Silent Hill franchise, leaned a lot more into the psychological Japanese horror. Others would opt to take a few pages from Capcom’s playbook and make their own spin on it. Today, we’re talking about a bunch of folks based in France taking that playbook and running with it. That game was Cold Fear.

    I just realized the A and R are fused together in this logo and it’s mildly unsettling. Good job, guys.

    Released in late 2005 for the PC, PlayStation 2 and Microsoft Xbox, Cold Fear was basically a more “western” take on the survival horror genre popularized by Resident Evil. This was developed by Darkworks, a French game development studio best known for Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, the fourth installment of the progenitor to the survival horror genre.

    Before playing Cold Fear on the recommendation of a few friends, all I knew about this game was Mega64 doing a few promotional videos for the game, featuring Rocco Botte portraying a games journalist asking developer Gunther Galipot – fake dubbed in a bad French accent by Botte – about the message of the game, while the rest of the Mega64 crew film themselves doing jumpscares at random folks in a Costco. In hindsight, It’s kinda surreal how much Mega64 made videos that made fun of the games they were hired to promote. Wonder if they ever got in trouble over that.

    Spoilers for Cold Fear within.

    So the story goes like this: You play as Tom Hansen, a member of the United States Coast Guard. You and a squad of soldiers are sent onto a Russian fishing boat going wildly off-course during a massive storm to investigate what’s going on. Suddenly, the rest of your squad gets killed off by weird parasitic monsters. Armed with only a 1911 pistol, Hansen must figure out what’s going on and stop this whole mess.

    Don’t need to be aiming your gun at him, Hansen, he’s not really a threat.
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  • Desert Crisis: A Half-Life mod with a soundtrack straight out of 2004.

    Desert Crisis: A Half-Life mod with a soundtrack straight out of 2004.

    Every once in a while I get a bit nostalgic for that early-to-mid 2000s era of computer gaming. Though less for major games like Unreal Tournament, and instead for those who have existing games but want to expand beyond what the vanilla multiplayer for Half-Life was.

    For me, that was absolutely the norm around this time, playing the notable multiplayer mods like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress Classic alongside classics like The Specialists, Sven Co-op and Natural Selection. Of course, I was reminded of another multiplayer mod I was into, but has mostly fallen into obscurity in recent years.

    An action-packed romp. (Source: ModDB.)

    This is Desert Crisis, a modification for Half-Life released around 2003-04. Done by a handful of amateur modders/mappers from the Half-Life mod scene, it’s a multiplayer mod that is very much “everything including the kitchen sink” in terms of design.

    Two factions, the USA and the “United Peace-Keeping Organization,” an enemy faction built from various other countries after a decades-long global conflict, go and fight against each other with realistic firearms, melee weapons and space lasers. Think something like Action Half-Life or The Specialists with a bit of Unreal Tournament’s Assault mode mixed in.

    It was pretty damn ambitious for what it was trying to do in 2003-04, especially with games like Half-Life 2 around the corner. There aren’t very many gameplay videos of it, since it was around before YouTube was really a thing, so have this action-packed low quality trailer uploaded from 2006 to get kind of a feel of what the mod was aiming for:

    YouTube player

    But I’m not really here to talk about the mod itself, though it could be an interesting topic on its own. No, I want to talk about the music of the mod.

    In something you don’t really see often for a game mod, this mod does have an official “theme song” that plays in the menus when picking your team and loadout. Theme 1 is for the “USA” faction: A fairly simple chugging rock tune with fairly basic riffs and your go-to guitar solos. Theme 2 is for that rival “UP-KO” faction that’s a bit more Rammstein-esque in terms of style, with those chugging guitars.

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  • Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Heretic + Hexen: Raven Software’s classics get the Nightdive makeover.

    Updated 8/21/2025 with clarification and some new information.

    Last year, Bethesda surprised us with Yet Another Remaster of Doom. Titled DOOM + DOOM II, this one replaced the 2019 remaster done by Nerve Software with a from-the-ground-up approach by Nightdive Studios, which have become the go-to developers for FPS remasters these days. It even came with a brand new Doom episode made by members of id, Nightdive, and MachineGames called Legacy of Rust, which I wrote about last year. I jokingly asked when they’re gonna tackle Raven Software’s Heretic and Hexen next. Well, I got my wish.

    Back to back badassery.

    Heretic + Hexen – keeping the naming convention from DOOM + DOOM II – is a complete overhaul of Raven’s two medieval action games from 1995-96, pushing the Doom engine to its limits at the time. New levels, new art, a vault of concept art from the previous games, and of course, a newly arranged soundtrack by Andrew Hulshult. (there’s the option to revert to Kevin Schilder’s original soundtracks if you wish, but I like Hulshult’s work when he’s not doing generic metal covers of game music, this remaster included.) This also marks the first time in over 25 years that you can play Heretic and Hexen on modern platforms with all the niceties that come with it.

    This also means Nightdive has officially remastered every major commercial Doom engine game from the 90s: Doom, Doom II, Heretic, Hexen, and Strife. Congratulations, y’all. Now if you wanna count stuff like Chex Quest and HacX, you’re more than welcome to, but I’m excluding those here, as Chex Quest was a free* product and HacX has been made freeware by the developers for a while now. I can’t see a remaster of either of these, though I wouldn’t mind one for Chex Quest, just for laughs.

    When DOOM + DOOM II came out,I said that they “didn’t need to do this,” that the Nerve Software remaster was perfectly fine for what it set out to do: Make it so you could play Doom on modern devices, without the need for DOSbox wizardry. Anyone who’s diehard into Doom know they can just drag DOOM2.WAD into a source port of choice – GZDoom, dsda-doom, Doomsday, you name it – and play.

    A screenshot I took earlier this year while playing Hexen through dsda-doom, which was the ideal Hexen experience until now.

    Heretic and Hexen, however, are different. Heretic never left its DOS origins, and the last time Hexen got home ports was the mid 90s, on the PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and Nintendo 64. (From what I’ve heard, the PS1 port is the worst, while the N64 port was the best.) While Doom had been ported to every platform under the sun, these two games haven’t. So this is the chance for a new audience of folks dealing with annoying Iron Liches spitting tornadoes, or get annoyed at trying to find the hidden switches in Winnowing Hall.

    Enhanced, but these guys are still as obnoxious as ever.

    If you’re familiar with Nightdive’s remaster work – They’ve remastered System Shock 2, Turok: Dinosaur Hunter, Blood, Quake and Quake II, Powerslave, Killing Time, Rise of the Triad, among countless others – you know what to expect here. Polishing up the original game assets, updating levels for clarity and fun factor, and, especially in more recent remasters, a new set of levels often made by Nightdive themselves. Heretic + Hexen have all of those in spades, with a bunch of enhanced features.

    Speaking of enhanced features, let’s talk about the updates the port brings. Nightdive updated all the maps from both games to be a bit nicer looking, moving them a bit more closer to “modern” custom Doom map sensibilities. This surprised me to find out during Heretic, as I was trying to find the secret levels in episode 2 (Hell’s Maw) and episode 5 (The Stagnant Demesne), only to realize that the regular way you’d discover them in the original game wouldn’t work here. That’s when I discovered they updated the maps as well.

    I liked whoever at Raven thought that Episode 3’s theme should be “backdrop of a seafood restaurant.”

    The last time I played Heretic in its entirety – the three episodes plus the two bonus episodes from the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion – was 2016, so I just figured the levels just looked like that. I should’ve expected this, as that seems to be their MO with every remaster. Well, barring DOOM + DOOM II, they treat all 68 levels of those two games as sacred and don’t touch a thing on them besides maybe fixing a bug or two.

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  • The Last of Us: Cinematic blockbuster, terrible game.

    The Last of Us: Cinematic blockbuster, terrible game.

    I never keep up with the zeitgeist when it comes to anything in media. TV shows, movies, video games, you name it. I’ve come to accept that I will always be behind, looking at stuff years past the point of their popularity. Anyone who’s been reading my stuff for so long have probably noticed me covering things long past their prime.

    And that’s okay! There’s no need to keep up with what’s current and popular unless you’re on the entertainment beat, or your friends won’t stop talking about it. Hell, the last time I tried keeping up with current gaming was with the recent Call of Duty games, and even I gave up by the time Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) came out.

    But this time around, I am part of the zeitgeist, albeit indirectly. A currently popular TV show that in itself is an adaptation of a popular video game franchise. But rather than watching the TV show on a service I don’t have, I’ll just play the game it’s based on. After all, if people say “the book was better” whenever a novel gets a film adaptation, I assume the same rule applies for video games that eventually became TV shows, right?

    I remember reading about how they were initially hesitant to put Ellie on the cover for… dumb marketing reasons. Glad they didn’t back down on that, at least.

    The Last of Us is the game I’m referring to. Released in 2013 for the PlayStation 3 to critical acclaim, it spawned a new franchise for Sony to capitalize on, with books, comics, and of course, that TV show that’s airing on HBO Max and recently finished its second season as this writing, which covers part of the game’s sequel, The Last of Us Part II.

    I had briefly played The Last of Us before back around 2016, futzing around with it through PlayStation Now, a cloud streaming service where you could play PlayStation 3 games on a PC through cloud streaming. I didn’t get very far in it due to the visible lag I was having with inputs, so I stopped playing it on there.

    Several years later, I grabbed a copy and mentioned it on a Some Stuff I Bought post back at the end of 2022 because I had heard many positive things about this game, being a critical darling, and a favorite for many. One of many games given the coveted “Game of the Year” award by numerous publications. Obviously, if something is given that much praise, it has to be just that good, right?

    Folks, what you’re about to read is the journey of a woman wanting to enjoy a popular video game from 12 years ago and being absolutely frustrated with it. With gameplay being so aggravating to the point of controller-throwing anger. A miserable story that left me feeling cold and disappointed at the end. A game that left me wondering if Roger Ebert was right about games not being art.

    Light spoilers for The Last of Us within.

    Mild-mannered dad Joel (Troy Baker) returns home to his daughter Sarah after a long day. Cut to a few hours later where Sarah suddenly gets a call from Joel’s brother Tommy (Jeffrey Pierce) about the news that there’s a massive pandemic, the two make their hasty escape to safety. After the absolute chaos of escaping the city with Tommy, Joel and Sarah are confronted by military soldiers who shoot at the pair, wounding Joel and killing Sarah.

    Hell of a first day, huh?

    Cut to several years later. Joel, now an older man suffering from PTSD, eventually meets Ellie (Ashley Johnson), a young girl who is meant to be dropped off by Joel’s friend Tess (Annie Wersching), before complications occur and Joel has to take care of Ellie through the continental United States full of psychopaths, enemy factions, and the mutated cordyceps virus to take her to the Fireflies, a military faction with specialized equipment to help her.

    I will say off the bat that Joel seemed like a very nice guy at the start, and I could relate to losing a family member, which can be a traumatizing experience and change any person. Troy Baker gives a wonderful performance in that regard. But as I went through the campaign, Joel always seemed to be cynical and distant to everybody at all times. Many other characters, including Ellie, and later, Tommy, try to ground him a bit more to reality, or at least to get him to lighten up, which he does a bit towards the end of the game. There’s a lot of moments where the story boils down to “Joel does not want to deal with caring for Ellie, so he wants to dump her off to somebody else so he can go back to handling things by himself, but Something Happens that forces the pair to stick together for a little longer.”

    For a good chunk of the game, I genuinely did not like Joel as a character. Until the latter third of the game where he starts putting himself in extreme danger, just to save Ellie from unfortunate circumstances the pair got into, Joel just felt like a boring white dude protagonist in a sea of games that already had that market covered. Joel’s overall pessimism just sucks the air out of the room, in contrast with others like Tess, who I really took a liking to. Made me wish I was playing as her, because she was at least caring and optimistic in spite of the hellscape they were forced into.

    After playing this, I know who I would’ve preferred to play as, and it’s certainly not the guy on the left.

    Nothing against Troy Baker’s performance, this is the game that got him noticed by the mainstream gaming audience, but much like Ellie, I really wish Joel did lighten up more.

    “But it’s a video game,” you may ask. “How does it play?” Well, The Last of Us has probably the most clunkiest gameplay I’ve played out of the 360/PS3 era. And I’ve played some janky games on that platform in my time, believe me.

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  • Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: All of 2024 (and half of 2025) edition.

    Here’s Some Stuff I Bought: All of 2024 (and half of 2025) edition.

    So back in October 2024, after covering the stuff I got at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo, I had teased I was gonna write a “Some Stuff I Bought” at the end of the year to cover the stuff I got outside of that con. But then I forgot to. With good reason, though.

    Since it is the middle of 2025, and I have bought more things since. So let’s do a bit of catch-up, shall we?

    For the uninitiated: I check thrift stores and other shops of interest for things I think that are neat: Music CDs, video games, DVDs/Blu-rays of movies, that kind of thing. Inspired by places like LGR Thrifts, Oddity Archive’s Archive Thrifting and other similar online content creators, I often do this type of article 2-3 times a year: One around June-July, One in December, and then any separate ones for any conventions I go to – which has been only the Portland Retro Gaming Expo so far, but I won’t rule out opportunities to check out other cons in the future if time and budget allows for it.

    I will be honest with you. My mental health wasn’t in the best of places last year. Current events notwithstanding, it was just really really tough for me to get the motivation to go places and do things that I find enjoyment in doing. I was able to get a bit of thrifting done, just with very, very wide gaps between each thrifting.

    Such as my first trip in March 2024. A small pilgrimage to one of the local Goodwill stores got me these small, yet still interesting grabs.

    Chicago XVII on audiocassette (99 cents)

    Ah yes, the 80s soft-rock gloop classic that brought us “You’re the Inspiration.” The last major album featuring Peter Cetera on lead vocals before he decided to branch off into a solo career that was even more cheesier than when he was with Chicago. I’m more partial to their hard rock stuff like “25 or 6 to 4,” but I don’t hate their more lighter work – “If You Leave Me Now” is cheesy but I have a soft spot for it. This was my first cassette purchase in a while, and at a store that was slowly phasing out stuff like cassettes and 8 tracks.

    You might also know “You’re the Inspiration” from being featured in Elite Beat Agents, with a really touching level attached to it and a damn touching cover to boot. (Hey Nintendo, put out the studio masters of the songs from the Ouendan series and Elite Beat Agents on your Nintendo Music service already!! I know they’re all licensed tracks, but I wanna hear these in their original quality and not through a tinny Nintendo DS speaker.)

    Karaoke Revolution Vol. 2 – PlayStation 2 ($3.99)

    For the longest time I didn’t know Harmonix did music games besides Frequency, Amplitude, Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Turns out Karaoke Revolution was also one of their big successes, and it’s probably why vocals in Rock Band games were so darn good.

    I basically got this to complete my Harmonix game collection, but also to hear how they handled the songs, which are all covers much like the early Guitar Hero and Rock Band games were, even produced by the same company as those games, Wavegroup Sound.

    Now I just need to get over my fear of singing in games like these…

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