CodexArcanum

Imagine creating one of the best, most important pieces of media of your generation. Being a rock star of a new medium, defining genres, shaping history and the world.

Then imagine struggling to keep a job, find work, and create more works in your medium. And now imagine that you were barely in your 20s when you broke out, so that the rest of your life is always in the shadow of your first masterpieces.

Romero seems like way too nice a person, too good of a being, to be treated with such indignity. In a lot of ways Bill Gates and his company have been fucking over Romero for like 30 years now.

Preservation, while perhaps idealistic, is about keeping every version that we can. Doom is a great example. Because Carmac released the source code, source ports have proliferated. That means anyone can play the original Doom on just about any machine. Varying degrees of accuracy to the original DOS release exist thanks to ports like Chocolate Doom, GZDoom, Eternity Engine, et al. As do varying degrees of accuracy to Doom 95, the Windows 95 rerelease. Or to the version running on Xbox packed in with Doom 3.

Ports cover the engine, but we also have an archive of all the doom.wad files, the contents. We have demo and prototype versions. The dos release. Officially patched versions. The win95 release. The Xbox release.

But a preservationist also wants the original Bethesda Unity release, wad and engine. The Kex release with the new engine and new episodes. Neither of those Bethesda engines needs to exist but why not keep them too? They’re a part of the Doom legacy, an ongoing chapter in the endless story of Doom.

Its good that in this community we’ve gotten to preserve so much. It keeps the history of one of the most important video games alive and relevant. It keeps the game itself relevant. Without the original source release, there’s no GZDoom and there’s probably no Bethesda rereleases. The impact that source release had on the gaming community, gaming as an industry, modding and indie gaming, is incalculable.

That Crysis–also a landmark game in its own time–deserves any less is laughable. The original release of the game should always be present and available: as an artifact of its time, as a fine game in its own right, and as a piece of living history that can be stood up against its remakes, sequels, and the games it inspired.

Ah man, I’d been holding off on setting up another TES game on my PC since going to Linux. Now I’m going to have to go pre-emptive mod shopping for the essentials, and do it for so many games!

It’s a real shame that between crypto currencies, federated servers, and bittorrent we still haven’t come up with a fair and robust system for hosting large content archives.

The need for corporate-funded servers is killing video sites, mod sites, emulators, streaming, libraries, and so much more. Even the “self-hosted” crowd is like 90% dependent on cloud-hosting companies.

Reminds me a bit of the old default Gtk look. Or maybe early Java Swing… The flat look, primary colors, and some other elements to me; it’s very nostalgic. Not sure of any themes that fit it though, sorry, haha

“The addition of Polygon not only strengthens our editorial muscle but also amplifies our ability to deliver unmatched value to both audiences and advertisers,” said Valnet CEO Hassan Youssef in a statement.

That seems like it really won’t be true when you’ve laid off all the writers and editors who were doing that.

I don’t see any comments on PC Gamer about it?

Yeah, I’m excited for this to be documented. I got burned on Wrath: Aeon of Ruin by this. Fun game but it only has checkpoint saves. You can make checkpoints (from a limited pool) when you want, but only to respawn from if you die. If you turn the game off, it’s back to the beginning of the zone. And each zone (which is basically a boomer shooter mission) can be multiple hours long.

Its basically unplayable for me because I have to clear out an afternoon to beat the whole level in one sitting.