The Nerd Next Door

   Retro Shooters seem to be on the rise lately haven't they? Retro Shooters being fast paced shooters where if you either don't kill everything in the room or blaze out of there at 420mph you failed your ancestors. Six years ago the Retro Shooter was dead and buried; consigned to the dustbin of the 90's along with Jnco's and Vanilla Ice's career. But unlike those things Retro Shooters are back with a steel barreled vengeance. So what changed? Well to understand how the Retro Shooters came back, we have to understand their rise and fall. In 1992 id software released Wolfenstien 3D , the first mass market First Person Shooter; here the objective was to shoot your way out of a Nazi lair because fuck Nazi's. This however was less shooter and more maze game, you had about three types of enemy who did the same thing at varying speeds and your real concern was escaping their lairs, all 60 of them. This would change with id's follow up, Wolfenstien Spear of Desti- ...

Id software, the beloved pioneers of blowing shit up while rocking out to heavy metal. For decades they've been a leader in the first person shooter market and have become a household icon of the industry. From their attempt to port Super Mario Bros. 3 to DOS to the heavy metal album that is DOOM Eternal; Id has always been pushing gaming forwards in some way whether through technology, gameplay, or artistry. But from 1993 to 1997 Id was at their A game; churning out monster hit after monster hit. So after finally getting through the original Quake duology I decided to rank my favorites from this era that I consider their Golden Age. Some of it may be a hot take and some of it may not, but either way none of these games are bad, so keep that in mind. Oh, and no Wolfenstein or the expansions for Doom and Quake. Wolfenstein is more of a maze game than what Doom and Quake are and it feels too different to properly rate. Also I feel adding the expansions takes away from the pacing of t...

 When I was 12 in 2008, I played Portal for the first time, specifically the Still Alive XBLA Port. I loved the game but at the end of it I thought, how cool would it be for someone to mod a game to allow portal guns. It's something i never looked into, a mere idle curiosity if anything, I was more obsessed with going "The cake was a lie." until everyone got sick of it. It would be 11 years before anything came of it with Splitgate: Arena Warfare, a new First Person shooter from indie studio 1047 Games that borrows from Portal and combines it with Halo. So if you play on PC and want a Halo fix, this is it unless you wanna try that awful PC port of 1 and 2 or try the unoffical Halo Online, well at least until Microsoft drops Halo the Master Chief Collection on PC. But is Splitgate good enough to stand with the big boys, or is it doomed to obscurity? On a graphical level, this game looks about on par with most games of this generation, nothing fantastic, but it's n...