Doomverse #27 - ID May Be Doomed

Unfortunately, thanks to a lot of terrible crashing in the gaming industry, a very large amount of employees in ID Software have been laid off. The layoffs came as Microsoft are continuing to lose support for the Xbox. Pretty much, after the Revelations DLC was released for Doom The Dark Ages, the ID Software studios are now down to less than half of their former numbers. This was in the wake of new Quake installment rumors floating around, even going so far as to tease a new project in future plans that are now heavily in question. 

Xbox announced that it was going to just keep chugging along with the layoffs, as ID Software is far from the only one affected by all of this. The gaming crash continues to destroy more and more studios. Developers and publishers are now finding out why they need their customer base. This is especially hard, considering ID Software was the one that consistently delivered amazing games. Doom 2016, Doom Eternal and Doom The Dark Ages brought players what they wanted. While TDA didn't perform quite as well as they hoped, they still took out a ton of game developing experience! They threw the baby out with the bath water, seeing has how ID Software was ready to keep going with what they were doing. 

Bethesda also had their big toy, Fallout taken away from them and handed off to Fallout New Vegas team, Obsidian. Judging by how well The Outer Worlds 2 turned out, I'm still not holding out hope. Xbox has been making so many consistent wrong decisions that it's basically too late to save it. To think that they could make a New Vegas sequel or Fallout Spinoff of any kind is rather laughable at this point. 

Sadly, this could also mean it will be a very long time before we get a proper Doom or Quake sequel, if ever. Other gaming franchises have gone ice cold over the decades and it's hard to believe that they would ever put Doom back into the freezer, but that has been the case for a lot of our favorites. The worst thing you can do is panic over this. In the end, it is not worth losing yourself over. Doom is legendary for a reason, as it is ageless. It is one of those fandoms that will always survive because it was made for the fans by true gaming geniuses that loved and respected their base of loyal subjects. However, this is not the time for giving up on it.

The game crash is hitting us where it hurts, but we still have our own libraries full of endless classic Doom levels, Doom 4 levels from the map makers, all of the games we've been collecting over the years are still within our fingertips and we do not need to give them up for anything because they're ours. Remember to keep Deathmatching, playing the single players and keeping the Doomverse alive through pure fandom. It may be a long road for the gaming industry to recover, but now it's time to hunker down and help each other like true gamers should. Either way, keep ripping and tearing, and get some old Doom ports. Then you'll Virtua Shred!!! 

Virtua Fighter 3tb - Punch Your Problems Away

When you come off of such a high point as Virtua Fighter 2 on the Sega Saturn, once you harken in a new console with a new numbered sequel to such a prestigious franchise, you need to bring your absolute A game. You need to batten down the hatches and make sure that this sequel is going to be the next great thing. Did they succeed? In a word, yes. When I said that Virtua Fighter 3tb for the Sega Dreamcast was the worst Virtua Fighter game, that was more of a joke. It was also, believe it or not, an absolute compliment. The truth of the matter is, I disliked Virtua Fighter Remix the worst of any of them. The first Virtua Fighter is objectively worse than VF3tb. 

This game gives you so much fighting, you begin to burst. You put in one mode of the game, whether it be single player or 2nd player mode, you are going to drown in combat. There are more characters, more levels, and more rounds than ever. The combat is still silky smooth and you can find your own character fighting style. Jackie specializes in kicks and has speedy attack style. Jeffry is much more tankish, slow, but he also has hard grappling moves and slams. Now they have brought in some of the newer characters, including the sumo wrestler, Taka-Arashi. 

This is, no joke, a lot of combat to go through just for some arcade modes. Sometimes, five or six matches is all it takes, but no, these matches kept going and going. Great combat, that much is certain, but sometimes, it is better just to give the people a small match roster. This is accentuated in the Team Battle, which this game was titled after. 

However, if this is a full on tournament mode situation when you have a party to go through, Virtua Fighter 3 is your baby. You want enough fighting and bashing skulls to satiate an entire party, you get Smash Brothers and you get VF3tb, and you will make the best experience to come. This will test people to their breaking point and there may be friendships lost as you find either the cheapest or the most effective techniques to beat the snot out of one another. 

If you wanted more fighting and more Virtua Fighter, this is the one you go to, especially if you have a lot of time on your hands. It has the controls, the characters and the awesome looking backgrounds. One place where this version falls short, however, is the uncanny valley happening with their characters in this awkward stage in style. Virtua Fighter 2 is probably where they caught the beautiful classic style the best. Virtua Fighrer 3 should have probably stuck closer to the older graphical settings. 

It's still awesome fighting from an awesome fighting game. If you want fighting and you want nostalgia, you go to Virtua Fighter and you start stomping face. Whoever your favorite character is, they have a great selection here. Even Lyon and Shun return from their introduction in Virtua Fighter 2. Play this game enough and you'll find your rhythm, especially once you find the character that matches your style. It's all here, get ready to Mash Virtua Skulls! 

Resident Evil The Final Chapter - Alice Ends

It is very sad to say that Resident Evil live action iterations never improved. All of them, up until the writing of this article, have never surpassed the decency of the first Resident Evil film directed by Anderson. The animated movies have a far better track record, but those are considered niche Resident Evil fan viewings. If you have any interest in the games, the animated movie series is far more worth your time. These live action films, even as stand-alone movies, only show the viewer how nonsensical and repetitive they become by the end. 

If you have been paying attention, you'll understand that Alice is the prime example of a Mary Sue. She literally is never seriously injured more than being knocked out, beyond a strategic loss of some fingers. Any screw ups she has are all minimalistic and survived with hardly a scratch. Her stunts are extremely unrealistic as a result. She becomes the cornerstone of this entire story, even when she only played a very tiny part in the beginning. She was in the Hive in order to infiltrate it and prove that they were doing illegal experiments. Beyond living on top of it in a strange undercover marriage story that makes no sense, Alice's role was basically meeting a contact and exchanging data. 

Now, in this story, she is everything and anything that is or ever will be important. They shoe-horn her into this horrific plot like she was everything that matters with whatever is happening. They even go so far as to [SPOILER ALERT] make her out to be the CLONE of a top share-holder of the Umbrella Corporation. She is now, suddenly, the daughter of one of the head scientists who was cloned in order to... live her better life because she has a rapidly aging disease that caused her to become sick and need to freeze hersel--- Okay, seriously, this whole thing just flew directly off of the rails. 

All of the sudden, Wesker's double-cross in the last movie was retconned. Not only was it retconned, but the powers he gave back to Alice are now fake and she's still a "normal human" who can do death defying stunts without fail and kill anyone and everyone. You know, just normal human things. Wesker's part in this is, once again, minimalistic. Why they even bothered to bring him back after he seemingly died in the fourth movie is an answer lost in time. He barely even matters in the entire film after being one of its most continuous villains, only to be killed by a door chopping his leg off. He seriously bleeds to death and that's it. 

They bring back the scientist from the third film who died and say that he was actually a clone. This one is for real, just trust us. He basically takes Wesker's role in this film and still does a very bad job of it. Alice continuously bests him in comically stupid ways and he keeps proving why they should have never cloned him or given him any sort of authority. Dr. Isaacs just has the cure for the T-Virus in his jacket pocket and it somehow can be broken outside and spread across the entire world, curing everyone and killing the zombies or something like that. However, if it's broken inside it will not go anywhere and be useless. The logic behind all of this is so flawed, it really makes the head spin. 

Anderson thought that if we just put a mindless time limit on how long the human race can survive, it would bring up the tension. Somehow, in X amount of hours, the human race is going to be killed by... zombies or the T-Virus or something. Anything to make the plot keep moving to some sort of goal. Then he thought that he could just retcon everything we know about Alice and say she is a clone now. Like, she's also got amnesia because she can't remember anything about her past, guy, just, like, deal with it or something. That's not a joke. Dr. Isaacs literally comes out and tells her that she can't remember anything about her past. This comes out of left field and has never been delved into. In the original movie, she was a double agent working to bring down Umbrella, now she has a super badass action hero past of not knowing who she is or where she came from because she was cloned from blah blah blah. 

For the sake of losing myself in a story, editing is not even something I try to pay attention to when watching movies. The plot and characters normally take the forefront. That is, if there aren't enormous, glaring issues. The editing will give you a headache with how quick and choppy it can get. When getting images for this review, locking onto a single shot was an absolute hair-pulling experience. There are flashing lights in dark spaces, especially if a gun is being fired and it is absolute migraine fuel. The acting has not been good for a few movies now, if it was ever considered good to begin with. However, that is the very least of its problems by this point.

This was a chore to get through. Paul Anderson said that he was going to have Alice die at the end, but ended up not doing it because he... said he did things to make the ending so emotional. Emotional. Paul needs a dictionary or something with very detailed descriptions of vocabulary words. There is literally nothing emotional about any of this. I barely even remembered that Claire Redfield somehow wandered her way aimlessly into this movie. To be honest, I don't even remember if it was Jill or Claire. They're both so superfluous to everything going on because Alice takes up the screen with no room for other characters. Her emotionless journey, coasting through the world on stunt wires, culminates to nothing more than a very long and pointless search for a cure that apparently doesn't work immediately. That's right, she breaks the vial outside so it can travel across the world "but there's still so much to do!" Well, that's nice. I hope it reaches the people before they are savagely ripped apart by undead things or mutations of a horrific nature. 

There was nothing about this movie that even came close to entertainment. You are far too transfixed by the nonsensical plot, eye-gouging editing, Mila's lifeless portrayal of a wooden Mary Sue, hordes of easily avoided zombies and pointless plot devices showing up on the screen before being discarded for more wackiness. This isn't a chore to get through, it's downright brain torture. This entire series lost the plot and just decided it was cool with that, because it did it again and again and again. It's really no wonder that both Mila Jovovich and Paul W.S. Anderson fell far out of favor in the film industry after this travesty of a series. Monster Hunter did not turn out any better because Anderson decided to put his wife front and center, again, and ignore everything he didn't like about the games, which was everything, apparently. We may have gotten one good film in the beginning, but this whole decade of trash movies and storytelling was not really worth it. Thankfully, the series is Virtua Dead. 

And Then it Crashed...

Well, we should have seen this coming for a while, which we did, but it still isn't fun news. Playstation and Xbox have both decided to stop selling physical copies of games, basically destroying the market for used games, which is half of the market. What this means is a lot of suffering customers and suffering sales. The worst part about it is what it will do to physical outlets like Gamestop and Game XChange, along with many other stores that rely on used games for most of their profit margin. 

It's time like this that I hate when I'm right. I've pushed hard to physical copies and this is the very reason. Without physical discs, that leaves customers vulnerable with their collections being 100% digital from here on. This means that there will be no used games or new games for outlets even like Walmart or Target. All of it will be on their home stores and that is basically putting all of their eggs in one basket. Not only can they inflate prices however they want, they can also delete the games from digital accounts if they so wanted to, which they have made abundantly clear. 

Keeping used games in circulation is more important now than ever before. There's really no telling how long this whole scorched Earth tactic will go on. It could be done and done for, or there is always the chance that backlash and falling sales could change their minds. Either way, this means very bad things for the gaming industry. 

The article I released today was supposed to be released later this month, but instead I released it today because what I was writing about came very true. Again, this is a time to vote with your wallets and make sure that if you want physical media to come back, it's time to stop buying the digital stuff or at least cut down on the spending as a whole. If you're down with physical media going the way of the beeper, that's your little red wagon, but I am all for them stopping this horrible posturing like now they have all of the cards and are ready to deal them on the buying customer whenever they so please. Without the need to create discs and cases, they'll save millions within the first few months alone on game costs. Will we be seeing a duck in prices as well? Oh, I wouldn't hold my breath on that one just yet, Virtua Bro. 

Judging by the discourse against this blatant anti-consumerism that we've been seeing for years, it has reached a boiling point, and a lot of people are waking up to the fact that gaming industries really don't have their best interests or fun factor in mind. All they really have been after was your wallets and purses from the very start. While this was obvious, they at least went to some lengths to fulfill the customer's order. At this point, the industry is basically expressing nothing but contempt for their own audience, convinced that they are overly hard to please simply for having an opinion that their games shouldn't be glitching so bad as to make you fall through the Earth pixels every time you press right on the joystick.

Hopefully, you have some good games to fall back on in what will be coming. This dry spell is going to suck, but that's just the order of things at this point. Much like the crash of the 80's, this one is going to run its course for as long as it takes. Be friendly and be productive. If you don't play your old machines, sell them to a good home or sell them to someone who will give them one. Be thankful for what we are given but reject the things you don't want. As always, they need to earn their paychecks if they want to see their games stop flopping and until then, enjoy some old games. Looks like it's time to make a Virtua Return to the consoles that birthed this site. Keeping it mixed up, but mixing in some classics, as always. Help each other and we'll be fine. Virtua Peace. 

AAA vs Indie #1 - The State of the Gaming Industry Today

Well, it's looking kinda dark for the video game industry, but it's also nothing we haven't seen before. Obviously, priorities got crossed somewhere along the way and now the big AAA industry has proven that it has lost its way. Indie games, on the other hand, have continuously given us surprises and challenges that we are enjoying. Not only are they more fun and inventive than the corporate garbage being pumped into the silo, but they are cheaper and more care has been given in considering the customer. How the industry has taken such a nosedive isn't really a huge mystery. Now that social media is more readily available and individuals have more access to communications with the general public, it has become something of a first grader's view on how to handle that freedom. 

The point of Public Relations is to hype up the game and sell it to the player. That's it! There should be no other reason to talk to the buying audience than to show off what the game can do and what their experience will be like playing it. It is not a platform to berate and chastise the public for not wanting to buy your game. Once the buyer has decided that they don't want to spend the money, you have lost. Rubbing salt in your own wound and blaming the customer should never be on the agenda. Why do they allow these devs and publishers to speak on their behalf, with their name in their profiles as a constributor to that business? They are literally calling the public names and preaching at them like children, and it is only driving their own name into the ground.

Reputation is not just "who can look the coolest?" It is the way your viewing public perceives you. If you use your business to try and scam your players into purchasing your game, you are showing that you do not have our best interests in mind. You can have the most amazing game with every feature under the sun, but if you start throwing in microtransactions, modern politics and extremely horrific characters both in design and personality, it really should come as no mystery why no one bought the game. If no one cares about the game or likes how it looks, doubling down and speaking against the audience  is not going to make anything better. 

Well, it has already reached a boiling point. Customers are looking at indie games and buying them by the truck loads. When you have a game that is only 20 or 30 spacebucks, you're more apt to open up. When a more graphically appealing but mediocre looking game comes at 70 or 80 virtua clams, it's going to be a much harder sell. Their wallets speak for themselves and nothing will change that. 

The indie developers comment very little on a personal level, besides taking jabs at the industry. They are getting lukewarm reviews by so-called "gaming journalists" but it's obviously because they don't have bribe money. Oh, don't think it's not obvious that gaming websites have been dealing under the table with their reviews. They will obviously prop up the most atrocious trash because they lined their pockets, while games that stand on their own get 5's and 6's. 

Gaming Awards are some of the biggest jokes still left from the old days. They actually meant something at one point, but now someone can just plant a game that agrees with their political views and they're the ones in the running. They continuously snub games that don't go along with their narrative, but the joke is that those are the games that are actually selling. Numbers do not lie and neither does Steam when it comes to the player counts and overall sales of a game. The mere fact that this angers the AAA industry goes to show how trustworthy they are. This whole "Oh, it sold gangbusters, trust me bro" got old and outdated years ago. 

Honesty is in short supply with the gaming industry. So, now if a developer or publisher shows some humility in both pricing and game development, they are drawing the crowd. Not all indie games are even real indie games and the public is snooping out their lies as they comes. It really goes to show how insulting the public's intelligence does not bear fruit. With games taking 5 to 8 years to come out, they are missing extremely glaring problems in their development as the companies rarely keep an eye on public interest. So, when the game comes out and the hundreds of millions of dollars are already spent, the game will often not meet any sales figures and the development team usually goes with it. 

With this very puzzling industry standard, it's obvious that they will start weeding out the teams that are not meeting sales. The development teams will go under and the team will split into more development teams. At some point, this should get the less productive team members to find other types of work, but that is a much longer process than it really should be. Still, the more money they spend on flops, the more we will begin to see the tides changing. How hard will it crash in the meantime? That's really hard to tell, but it's going to come down one way or the other. Everything has a natural order and these dry periods are only going to get worse before they get better. The great thing about indie developers is that they don't quite play by the same schedule, so we may see some games from them sooner rather than later as the AAA corporations either die or wake up to reality. Only time will tell.

So we don't end on a downer note, though, I am happy to announce an idea that came back to the surface. I had an idea for a series a long time ago called AAA vs Indie and I made three articles about it. These articles ended up becoming their own singular entities when I loaded them to this website, but the Sonic Spectrum article, Survival Horror article, and Mighty Number Nein were all part of this series. It's going to pit interesting tidbits and events of the industry fighting between the two ends of the spectrum and see who comes out on top. It's not really a level playing field, but that's never stopped some developers from dominating as the underdog. So, let's take a nice little journey as I introduce yet another series because I feel like it. Virtua Boss.

Doomverse #26 - Music En Memorium

Sadly, on June 16th, 2026, we said goodbye to one of the front runners of Doom history. The man they came to for rocking tunes for their games has passed on. Bobby Prince was to thank for an entire laundrey list of original game soundtracks, especially in the 80's and 90's. They came to him when they were at a loss of what to do with both music and sound effects. Bobby showed them techniques that they continuously used from then on. He allowed them to use his equipment and experiment with his computer programs to distort their voices and make beautiful sound effects that we still remember and love today. 

Thanks to Bobby, we have the rocking metal knockoffs of Doom. Was he supposed to basically copy their melodies almost 1 for 1? No, honestly, they could have gotten into legal trouble. Still, it seems they were cool with it because Doom is awesome. Bobby represented game soundtracks through both ID and Apogee, as he also worked closely on the Rise of the Triad and Duke Nukem II & 3D. His fingerprints can be heard throughout the gaming world as people still play all of these games to this day. These games are timeless, and Bobby Prince helped make that happen. 

Commander Keen was one of his earliest works in the industry and he stuck with it throughout the series. This led to his companionship with ID Software through Apogee's founder, Scott Miller. While it may seem like he has a bit of a light library of work, what work he did made an impression on PC gaming as a whole. If anyone deserves a mantle spot in the creation of Doom and Doom II, Bobby Prince deserves a spot of real respect right beside John Romero, John Carmack, Sandy Petersen and Adrian Carmack. 

To Bobby's family and friends, our hearts go out to you. We will remember Bobby for all of his great achievements, but he is also a life lost to the real world. May he rest in power and bring more music to the heavens. Goodbye, Friend.