Visiting the Nintendo eshop is dangerous. Especially when they have stuff on sale to tempt you.

The latest temptation for me was something that I own or have owned on several other gaming platforms over the years.

And yet I found myself buying the game again on the Switch!

That game is…

I’ve been playing Doom since it came out in the early 90’s as shareware on the PC.

I owned an Amstrad clamshell 16Mhz 386sx laptop back then. Which had I want to say a 40MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM. I seem to remember that I did upgrade the RAM at some point as well.

At the time I was playing Doom for the very first time I was working in Byfleet for a credit card manufacturer, writing PC software to control desktop credit card embossing machines and cheque printers.

We were a young team, all of us in our twenties. Obviously one ore two were more mature than the rest. But the majority of us were not. Practical jokes were often played. Several times that involved strippers! Like the time I was told I was needed to give a demo of my new software and the hardware it controlled to a client. They let me do the demo for over 20 minutes before giving the signal to the stripper to start her act!

It was a different age. Times were a changing, but they hadn’t reached our office. You couldn’t do that sort of stuff now days and I’m glad. I was a different person then to the one I am now. I’m embarrassed and ashamed of who I was back then.

That was were I was when Doom came out.

I had played and completed Wolfenstein 3D, so Doom was a no brainier for me.

Where I got the game from initially I’m not sure. I think the shareware version was on the cover of a PC magazine.

But wow I was hooked, as were one or two in the office as well. I think we had more than one lunch hour that saw the definition of what a lunch hour was stretched a bit.

I think it would be fair that the competition between those of us playing the game drove us onwards. It was especially fuelled by the end of level stats that told you how many of the secret rooms you had found, and items collected.

The strange thing is we never networked up our PCs and played multiplayer. We played it solo at our desks or at home. Networking PCs together then was a bit of a hassle, which probably put us off the idea.

By the time I had completed Doom I think I was the only one in the office still playing it.

During the years after if Doom was released for hardware I owned then I got it. I had Doom on my HP ipaq pda, and on the gba. I rebought it on the PC. I have it on the 360 and PS3. It’s on a raspberry pi I own. You get the picture.

So it was no surprise that with the game and it sequels (Doom 2 and 3) on sale on the Nintendo eshop it seemed the right time to grab them all.

I like playing original classic Doom. Now days it is almost a comfort thing and like getting to know an old friend again. With the gap between plays being several years there is a haziness to what I remember, it is familiar and yet new!

Anyway I will look more into Doom and how it plays on the Switch in a future post. But first I have Bioshock and the underwater world of Rapture to finish exploring.

If you are a fan of Doom you really must read “Masters Of Doom: How two guys created an empire and transformed pop culture” by David Kushner, and “DOOM Scarydarkfast” by Dan Pinchbeck. The later is a more academic look at the game. There is a Game Engine book about Doom that I haven’t read and don’t own (it’s expensive).

An early Christmas present from Mum (she had some Argos vouchers) meant I was getting Diablo III Eternal Collection for the Switch about 6 – 8 months early. If it wasn’t a present I’d have waited until Nintendo (eventually) put it on sale.

For me Diablo has always been Blizzards take on a roguelike. Whether it is an actual roguelike I’ll leave to all those online forums to discuss in great detail, and go round in every decreasing circles arguing over the most irrelevant points.

I’m pretty sure they use procedural generation in the code used in its design. As Darren Grey in his chapter of the book Procedural Generation in Game Design wrote:

“…quilted-content PCG using premade blocks of content, meshed together on the fly for a varied experience. This is how the Diablo games make their levels. But it often produces the least varied experience, as the player gets to recognize the content blocks and the patterns produced by the generator. Over repeated plays, it can produce repetitive and stale gameplay.” (Darren Grey, 2017)

I think Darren might be referring to the original Diablo. But I’d be real surprised if this quote isn’t true to some extent in Diablo III also. Why change a winning formula?

Now some will say this is unforgivable but my Switch has never been connected to a tv. I’m using it like a glorified handheld. It means I can game and have something on the tv at the same time, like Cheers on Netflix acting as background noise!

The nice thing about the Switch is I can take photos easily in game to show you how beautiful Diablo III looks, not only prerendered cut scenes, but the in game stuff as well. Sadly it’s not able to stream, so you are spared that.

The cut scene stuff has a couple of interesting styles, and differ completely. There is the hand drawn on parchment brown/tea hue style that is used to progress the story between Acts. Which is effective, and has a charm to it. But the prerendered stuff that is used during the Acts is stunning, well rendered, and I love it.

I love the isometric view of the world you get when playing. It really works well with this style of game. The mini map is a god send for navigating round the dungeons. And so far there is a nice mixture of above and below ground level design.

I love dungeon crawls, roguelikes, and on this front Diablo III doesn’t disappoint. Naturally I go to type and play a wizard. So my character is wondering around casting lightning bolts, or rays of pure energy. And yes casting spells has an energy cost. The more powerful the spell, the more energy it uses up, limiting its use. Which early on his a hinderance. Currently at level 34 it is much less so.

There is the opportunity to do a lot of personalisation within the game. As you can see above my character has wings, and a banner at the moment. Not very practical, but looks awesome (well to me). And it’s nice to see however you kit your character out that this is reflected within not only the screen you see above, but the character on screen as you play.

You also get to personalise, weapons used, spells using, armour etc. There is also a fair bit I haven’t explored yet on this side, like crafting.

The story so far is all about stopping a couple of remaining lords of hell (I’ve stopped one, and currently on way to stopping the second). But I’m expecting one or two plot twists and an even bigger big bad to emerge.

For me the story is almost secondary, and it’s about running around killing everything in sight, and collecting treasure.

The story naturally influences the objectives/quests that you go on, and give you a reason for having to go into a dungeon.

So far the variety in objectives/quests isn’t amazing. But then that is a limitation of this style of game.

I’ve still to try out the multiplayer aspect of the game. Which will be interesting to see how that goes.

But so far the game is really living up to my expectations, and delivering big time on what I am looking for in this style of game.

Right I’m off to hack and slay, well fire some fireballs at the poor minions of whoever I’m trying to defeat at the moment. Oh and get loot.

The only Black Friday/Cyber Monday thing that tempted me in all that consumerism feeding frenzy that has spread from the US to the rest of the world was a Nintendo eshop offer on Super Mario Odyssey.

I’ve only played a couple of levels. I should get back to one of the other games I’ve started but not finished.

But like Mario and Rabbids: Kingdom Battle, or Mario Kart 8, this game is a delight. You can’t help but play it with a smile on your face.

There is just something about Nintendo’s own titles that (most of the time) pay attention to the little things. Those little details that delight and surprise.

Odyssey continues that expectation and delivers in spades. The level design (so far in my very limited play) has been sublime. The game looks gorgeous. The hat as the new mechanic is great fun. Throwing it to attack, break stuff is fun. But even cooler, allows you to take over creatures like a frickin’ T-Rex on the second level. That was so much fun, and handled just like you’d expect the T-Rex to handle. It was slow(ish) and lumbering.

I’m looking forward to exploring and discovering the worlds Nintendo have created in Odyssey.