Little known secret about me is that I kind of love the Nintendo switch ever since its release I have bought every cool weird and quirky Nintendo switch thing I have seen at least the cool quirky and weird things that appealed to me I also went a little bit crazy buying as many cool games as I could find And they always sit here behind me in my videos and up and around my game collection And a lot of you have always wanted me to do a switch collection video And I've always put it off because there is so much stuff that I never even wanted to tackle it But you know what? I'm in the mood for some switch bragging Let's go through my entire Nintendo switch collection The focus here is going to be on the really cool Nintendo switch collectible side of it Specifically really cool collector's editions for switch video games or switch games that were really hard to buy Ones that were only released on certain websites at certain times Also, I didn't know how much of a stretch a Nintendo switch collectible was like this really awesome breath of the wild bow I decided things like this. Yeah, probably don't qualify for this video as awesome as it is I still found a way to sneak it into the video though So this is my in my opinion kind of crazy kind of insane Nintendo switch collection and I'll leave links to everything down below in case you see something You like that you might want to pick up I want to start with something that means a lot to me and that's my bayonetta climax edition The reason this means so much to me is because it was gifted to me by a fan of the show It just means so much to me and I love it So the reason this bayonetta climax edition is so cool to me is because for starters I love the bayonetta games are some of my favorite games of all time I love that Nintendo saved the franchise and now they're continuing the franchise by making new games But there was no other way to get the first game on switch physical other than buying it in this pack So yeah, as you can see here, we have both of the games sealed Bayonetta 2 all on its own and bayonetta 1 all on its own There's also a still book in here as well as a bunch of other goodies And I just think this is one of the prettiest items I have in my collection period as you would have seen at the start of the Video we also have this let's go Eevee Pokemon switch now. I don't buy all the special switch editions I would have loved to have got the Smash Brothers switch I would have loved to even have had things like the Diablo switch even though I'm not a huge fan of Diablo But they're hundreds of dollars. I'm not made of money. The reason I have the let's go Eevee version It's because I brought it for my fiance Kim So I happily bought this for her as an early Christmas present I make sure to get the Eevee one because Eevee is my favorite as well as her preferred favorite over Pikachu and Eevee But so that we can trade the Pokemon with each other and complete our bokeh Dexes I also bought a let's go Pikachu separately and I made her play this one But she ended up being happy that she did because she loves her Pikachu Now I want to highlight a few of these standard edition switch games here because these are games that you couldn't just go out and buy in stores At least I don't think so from what I've been told and what I researched anyway I might be wrong and you can let me know down below the first one was the longest five minutes and retro city rampage Both of these were sold exclusively online on websites. I actually found them at too many games A retro video game convention where of course a reseller was selling them But I got them at a good price and both of these are really cool games. I already have them digitally downloaded on my switch So of course they're staying sealed. The Lost Fear is the same. You could only buy it through Square Enix's website I'm not sure if you can still buy it But I know they sold out after I pre-ordered the game and Lost Fear is actually the spiritual successor of I am set sooner Which you could only get a physical of from Japan and it was the exact same situation with Okami HD Which you might realize is missing here I ordered it from Japan over a month ago and I still haven't got it and then broken sword fire I actually ordered this one while I was looking up games for my e-shop video And I saw that I only had a European physical release so I went ahead and grabbed it and it actually came in the mail recently I honestly don't know that much about it other than the fact There's a point and click and I love point and click so I was happy to buy it and one day when I have time I'll play it now here. I'm breaking my rules a little bit But I think these are way too cool not to include and again both of these were from fans So I really wanted to put them in this video This is the breath of the wild Original soundtrack now if you want to find out more about either of these items I'll leave links down below on someone who's done a breakdown someone who actually had time to review it and talk about it Because they're really freaking cool, but this right here has five CDs containing every single song from breath of the wild There's also more goodies inside. So if you want to see that breakdown, I'll leave that below same goes for this bad boy This is creating a champion edition of breath of the wild and it has an actual yes A real working spirit orb inside as well as a map of Hyrule and the huge book Containing everything that went into creating the actual game of breath of the wild So between these two I have how to create the game and the music that was in the game now getting my hands on the Octopath Traveler Wayfarer's edition was a collaborative effort between me and Twitter I didn't realize how much I was gonna love octopath travel until I started playing it And I immediately realized my mistake or not picking this up spawn wave actually did a really great video on it He's a good friend of mine that I recommend checking out his channel in general But he broke down the collectors edition and I have an open mind yet So that's where you're gonna have to go and see his since I already had bought the game physically prior to this I didn't feel the need to open it. Yes I can be one of those people sometimes But inside it has a pop-up book which features some of the areas of the game and both the pop-up book and the areas Represent in the game are absolutely gorgeous Of course it also comes with a map and the sound selection CD and this game in my opinion should have won game of the year for best music Because the soundtrack was incredible. Oh, yeah And the collaborative effort I was talking about was I reached out to Twitter and asked anyone if they managed to buy a Cockpit they didn't want and it turned out that someone actually had a spare copy They had bought two to make sure and they sold me theirs for what they had paid plus shipping Oh, and I managed to nab one of these from GameStop when I bought my game It's got a game inspired character card and sticker set inside I don't dare open it because I know once I do it'll just be loose around the house I have that issue with the limited run little cards they send out and we'll talk about limited run next I guess that's a perfect segue But I don't know what to do with these so limited run as I mentioned before with each one of their releases They send you a little trading cards, which are actually really cool and quality But let's talk about the actual releases themselves The only one I have loose here and not in the collector's edition is Saturday morning RPG You'll notice again with all of these everyone is sealed and my reason for that is I buy so many of these games for my eShop videos Digitally, so we have Night Trap in this big old box This is a game that you wouldn't ever think would come to Nintendo like five ten years ago You would not think this would be possible. So it's really cool seeing it on switch Kingdom New Lands I gotta be honest This is the most recent one I was shipped and I still know nothing about this game I at this point I'm just buying everything limited run because every game they've released is one that I've liked and I've played and I've enjoyed And I wanted to get physical so now when this when I got to this I was like well I kind of got to get that slime sand this box looks really cool. I liked this game I didn't love this game. It wasn't one of my eShop videos I wasn't expecting a physical of it at all But it's one that looks really nice the big yellow box definitely stands out on the shelf And then my favorite thimbleweed park I actually bought this one from limited run just loose not the collector's edition just the game and then a couple weeks later I got this in the mail from one of my patreon's Cory So I ended up doing a giveaway for my other copy and I no longer have it and thanks to Cory I have this and of course it's sealed because I played the game to death from the eShop But this is my favorite limited run game back before limited run even announced they were gonna make switch games I made a video about if they did what games what I want and this was number one So they listened thank you Doug, and I could not be happier with my with my thimbleweed park physical It's amazing this game is great But limited run games isn't the only company doing amazing work bringing eShop games to a physical platform Super rare games is another one of my favorites. In fact, I adore super rare games They are such amazing nice generous people I have all eight of their releases so far starting with human full flat the flame in the flood Which is might be my second favorite one. I think from them. I love that game shelter generations Love is in a dangerous space time. This one looks awesome on the shelf. I love the way that game looks Mutant mods another really cool game And then we have worms if you haven't played this worms It's probably the best worms ever snake pass is my number one favorite and adorably charming little Platformer from early in the eShop's lifespan And I was so glad to finally get that physical years later and n plus plus a game that has a huge cult Following my roommate used to play this all the time So make sure to check out both limited run games and super rare games because some of your favorite eShop games might already have physical releases now I got to give a shout out to our game collecting on reddit I was browsing reddit one day and a user posted a picture of their undertale collectors edition and I said oh boy I didn't know this existed and I need to get my hands on that I knew there was a standard physical edition for undertale in Best Buy that you couldn't get anywhere else But I had no idea there was a collectors edition and this thing is freaking awesome But thanks to our game collecting check out the sub reddit because you find some really cool stuff on there Let's go through some smaller, but still awesome switch collectors editions. I actually really enjoy Lego games There was a while where I was trying to collect all of them I kind of fell through but I still pick up the new ones and Lego DC villains is actually really fun And I strolled in the GameStop one day and I saw this big collectors edition which came with a still book case It also has a little Lego Lex Luthor minifigure inside and I just thought it looks really adorable and the colors popped So I wanted to have it in my collection fire emblem warriors another gift from a fan if you haven't played this game It's great It's like Hyrule warriors or dynasty warriors where you just hack and slash through hundreds of enemies as your favorite fire emblem characters It might tide you over while you wait for that 2019 fire emblem core title to come out this pack contains a fire emblem warrior card set a fire emblem poster and a set of all the fire emblem warriors music Flashback 25th anniversary. I actually had flashback when I was a kid So it's really cool, but this comes with a super Nintendo cart of flashback. However, it's obviously a fake It doesn't do anything. It's just a metal case, but still this is a really awesome looking little collectors edition Sonic Mania plus this is pretty standard I think you can still get this for like 30 bucks, but I still love it though It comes with an art book and a reversible cover and I just love the game so much shining residents refrain again I have this game downloaded digitally so when I saw it for like 30 bucks on sale I think it was like 2499 on sale. I had to pick it up. It's a really cool looking case. The game's okay It's it's it's not a mate. It's okay. It's pretty good actually I'll bump it up to pretty good axiom verge is fricking sweet and so is this collector's edition and finally Wow guns reloaded again This isn't one that's hard to find initially when I bought it It was it was a GameStop exclusive release and you couldn't find it for weeks after it was released And I don't know if they started re-releasing them or people started trading them back in but now you can find them fairly commonly I just love that this game got a physical re-release. It's such a cool game Look, I'm gonna throw my starlink on this list because I just think it's the coolest thing I almost have a complete collection of all the ships and characters I'm waiting until they go on sale, which I'm expecting they will eventually do it's kind of switch But not switch. I know it's another systems But obviously this pack with Star Fox was exclusive to Nintendo switch if you want to know more about the game I'll leave my review down below. I just I had to include this. Yeah, I don't think we need to really go into labor I mean I have it I don't have the newest labor and the reason why I don't have the newest one is because this is kind of what happened to my Old labor like some of it is in here when my house flooded a lot of it got ruined a lot of it got Trampled when I was trying to scoot things off the game room floor to get away from the flooding Of course a lot of the lighter things got damaged like Mike Nintendo labor It's not a bad product, but I'm definitely not buying any more of it It's really cool in concept and there is a place for it in some people's homes It's not my home Little dragons cafe actually had a collectors edition that I only ever saw on Amazon that has this little Dragony guy and he looks kind of derpy the actual dragon in the game is really cute Whereas this guy is kind of derpy cute, but honestly, I still love him. He's charming He's charmingly derpy and I'll leave my review of the game down below as well It was in a bigger video where I went through a bunch of switch games worth buying because I do think it's a really adorable game Definitely suited for a younger audience But if you liked harvest moon or if you just in for a really chill and calm experience little dragons cafe is a pretty fun And cute game. This was actually one of the first collectors editions I got for this switch and it's by far one of the coolest Obviously is for sonic mania it comes with this really awesome figure of sonic sat on an old school Genesis that doesn't actually work for some reason my rattles It's always done that. Yeah, it's painful and inside They even made a Genesis cart that again doesn't work But you pull out the cartridge in the middle and there's a pretty cool gold ring inside The only thing that bummed me out about this at the time was that it didn't have a physical release inside But then that came later or so ignore the different shirt and weird lights behind me k Thanks if you watch my most recent fan mail unboxing video You would have seen that someone sent me this amazing limited edition our boy collection and I gotta be honest I still don't know what's in it It hasn't been that long since I filmed that video and I haven't had time to look up What's in it and I still don't know if I want to open it because as you'll see I have it physically loose And I've already played that and there's just that part of me that doesn't want to open this But how cool does the box look I'll have up on the screen someone unboxing it or at least what's on the inside But this thing just looks so cool. I love it. They're kind of accessories, but they count right For me with GameCube being one of my favorite systems of all time This is just really cool having this smash badge right here front and center of the GameCube controller and speaking of smash controllers I actually ordered this and I completely forgot kind of why I hate pre-ordering things sometimes But it comes with a steelbook case and a pro controller that is really Freaking cool looking of course. I already have a pro controller and I already have the game So there's no need to open this I will say though that like a day or two ago I looked this up on Amazon and it's going for like 400 now I paid 140 not that that matters, but good thing. I bought it I guess and the final kind of big switch collectors item I have was actually got this on Black Friday It wasn't any cheaper I was just in Best Buy and I saw it on the shelf and I had no idea this existed. It's Hollow Knight for switch Unfortunately, it's just a digital code I don't know why you go through this much effort and not throw a physical in but the bright side was it was only like 30 I think which is still cheap for the game digitally in my opinion because the game is so great But it also comes with this awesome plushie that correct me if I'm wrong looks really nice in this box behind its plastic No, but really this box is really cool and for 30 bucks. I mean I just had to I don't even plan on opening it up And using the code because I don't need to provided on receipt at point of sale Okay. Well, I threw away the game apparently okay We're about a week in the future right now because I didn't expect to get this much more cool switch stuff for Christmas First up just moments ago. I filmed an unboxing video of all the fan mail I got for Christmas you'll see that video in a couple of days and a fan of the show sent me this the Smash Brothers Ultimate pack which again comes with the GameCube controller and the GameCube port for switch and the game So I'm going to be giving away again for the second time a copy of Smash Brothers Check those links down below so in that first part which you just saw I actually missed ocean horn out of my limited run Collection and since then my mercenaries king and flint hook double pack finally came both of these games are great And I love that they're both on the same pack and also I finally got my oxen free the cover up for this is Holographic and just I mean tell me you don't love it finally. This is how you know She's a keeper. I got all of this from Kiv for more loose switch games I didn't already have Sultan sanctuary Yomawari, which I actually have never heard of before But she said she loved the artwork on the back So she grabbed it for me monster boy one that I really wanted to have physical and flipping death And then two collectors things that she found me deathmark limited edition a game I actually have my eye on this comes with a CD soundtrack temporary tattoos Which are gonna make me look oh so cool I've actually heard a lot of really great things about deathmark and then she found me a toky Retro collector edition. I had no idea this existed. I had never seen this before it actually comes with an arcade cabinet That you can build yourself. I love the artwork of this game both in the game and then just the box itself Oh also if you weren't already wishing that you had my fiancee She also bought me a turbo man doll. This has nothing to do with the switch video I just had to show this off somewhere one of our favorite Christmas movies, and I mean come on Okay, now I'm gonna cut back to the old me and I'm gonna go through all of my loose switch games Okay, knowing me I have switch games scattered around the house in the spare room in the bathroom in the lounge room in the bedroom Who knows I've done my best to walk around my house and see if I have any missing and now I think about it Now I've said bedroom moonlight is in the bedroom So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show you all of these games on camera as I'm talking But I'm just gonna highlight a few that I either really enjoy or I think are underrated I'm gonna skip over the obvious ones like your Mario's and your zelties. So this is every single switch game. I have I think It's most of them. All right, let's go dead cell is one of my favorite switch games Obviously, I made a whole video about how I was addicted to it my riding stables The catamari actually I played that on my second channel recently I'm hoping I get to review it pretty soon But if you want to check out my gameplay of it make sure to go to those gamer guys on YouTube There's so much content on that channel right now, but yeah catamari was really fun Perfect addition to the switch library cameras a little bit wonky, but I'll forgive it my heroes ones justice This game actually works really well on the switch and is a ton of fun loading screens are a little crazy But I was pleasantly surprised by how fun this fighter is oh bendy and the ink machine probably worth noting That's a game stop exclusive and a little bit hard to find now games like Rocket League and fortnight. Okay So fortnight I bought just to have it in the collection. I do enjoy me some fortnight Although I've been having said that I haven't played it in a long time I'm I'm kind of I'm kind of over the craze just like most people are and Rocket League I bought purely because it was cheap on Black Friday, but I do have that one digitally as well Lego City undercover I actually bought this one of craze stop in Canada And I had to go all the way to downtown Vancouver took me 40 minutes And I met a random guy in a Starbucks because he was selling it so cheap at the time It was like 15 bucks when it was retailing for like 40 and I was like, why don't you want it?  I was like, okay, that's fair I like it though moonlighter is one. I want to review soon absolutely fantastic having so much fun with it sleep tight Is actually an empty case the developers of that game. We are fuzzy. They just mocked up this case Which is really nice of them yonder is a really neat game. It reminds me a breath of the wild But there's no fighting. There's no battling mechanics. It's more about just exploring It's just a really charming a beautiful game and I do recommend it. Well guys as my switch installs an update You have now seen everything in my physical Nintendo switch collection now that I think about it I actually have a ton more games on my switch that I don't have physical yet as well as games that didn't even get physical releases So maybe if you enjoyed this video and you'd like to see what I have actually on my switch and what I've been playing recently Then let me know down below you'd want to see that and while you're heading down there anyway Make sure you have full up all over that subscribe button click a tap on this video right here because it also features some of the games I talked about today. Let me go and open some of these collectors editions. Yeah, not really who am I kidding?


I've grown cynical enough that I now rarely look forward to big releases and I basically never pre-order. And on the rare occasion when I have pre-ordered, I am generally pretty disappointed. Destiny 2 was the first game I had pre-ordered in like 3 years and it basically made me start a YouTube channel. Still, I pre-ordered Doom Eternal because over the last 4 years I've grown to consider Doom 2016 one of the very best games ever made.  Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Borderlands 3's second DLC after the Great Moxies Heist, Control's first DLC, Resident Evil, Neo 2, Half-Life Alyx, Code Vein had DLC, and while I've at least started playing all of those things, I've only finished Ori because instead I am finishing up my 4th time through Doom Eternal's campaign, this time doing the Extra Lives mode. After having beaten it on Nightmare 3 times, having found every secret, done every upgrade, read every lore entry, I'm ready to talk about why it is without a doubt the finest FPS ever designed, and comes a couple little decisions and one enemy type away from being a perfect video game. And I intend to argue it's the best implementation of difficulty I have ever seen in a game. I'm gonna go over everything I love and why, the things I didn't and why, and then I'll respond to a few critiques I saw in mainstream reviews or on Reddit and talk about why I think they're either wrong or don't actually matter all that much. After the logo. 2016 and beyond. As good as Doom 2016 is, and it is very, very, very, very good, the results of a long and troubled development are on display in several places. The early levels are significantly more intricate and complex than the latter ones. A lack of diversity in the locations, and crucially, the game kinda runs out of things to test you with by about three quarters of the way through. Doom 2016, as we all know, went through a series of difficulties in its years in development hell. Originally designed as a linear narrative shooter and a modern FPS sense, it languished along until finally being scrapped and redesigned with an emphasis put upon making a modern Doom that felt like playing the original Doom. It all seems so obvious and retrospect, but it's really not all that obvious at all. What if it had decided Doom 3 was the place to take inspiration from rather than Doom 1 and focus on making a Metro Last Light type experience? That actually might have been awesome, but anyway, when you really boil it down, what does 2016 really have in common with the original? Fast movement? Titanfall and Titanfall 2 as well as all of the Half-Life games have ridiculously fast movement too. Blood and gore? I mean, blood and gore has been in every shooter from Doom and, um, blood through Call of Duty. I think far too much has been made of Doom's reverence to the original game, and far too little has been made of the fact that Doom 2016 is simply an innovative, one-of-a-kind, meticulously designed shooter unlike anything that came before it. I've said this before, but Doom and Destiny have several things in common with a focus on movement, enemies without hitscan weapons, and a disdain for cover.  No holding F to open boxes. No pressing buttons to pick up ammo. No hiding behind cover. No boots on the ground, gritty realism. The full success of 2016 can best be described as a validation of gaminess, of an unapologetic commitment to gameplay over immersion and mechanics over realism. With the disappointing sales of Rage One, the departure of John Carmack, and a financial situation that necessitated the end of the studio's independence, it was in a very bad spot as they began making Doom 4. And rather than submit to modern conventional wisdom and market research about what the consumer wanted, it ended up making the game they wanted to make. And it worked. I have played 2016 through a minimum of 10 times. I consider it a modern masterpiece and I think crediting 2016's greatness to some supposed callback to a game it has almost nothing in common with doesn't give the people at it enough credit. The last Doom isn't a new chapter in the long and storied history, so much as it is a totally original piece of work that stands completely on its own. If it was called a vampire hunt and the demons were vampires and werewolves, it would be just as good because its design is unbelievably tight and coherent. It's so damn good, in fact, that I actually remained very skeptical of Doom Eternal, though it was still pretty hopeful. I had a really hard time imagining it being able to strike lightning twice and I kind of figured that much of the last game's power laid in how incredibly fresh and original it was. So it was with hope, but resigned to being disappointed, as I always am, that I booted up Doom Eternal. Let's start with what Doom Eternal does as well as any shooter ever made, probably as well as any game ever made.  Difficulty. Doom 2016 is a fairly challenging game on nightmare difficulty. Like in Eternal, constant movement and target prioritization is crucial, but where 2016 is hard, Doom Eternal is ridiculously challenging. It's so challenging that in my first playthrough, there were several spots I needed to turn it down to ultra-violence. That pissed me off and had me thinking the game was simply going too far in spots. It also meant that an immediate second playthrough was now guaranteed because I wasn't going to let the game beat me no matter how angry I got. After having to turn it down to ultra-violence in the final level and beating the final boss, I immediately, and I mean immediately, started the second save slot and resigned to beating it on nightmare all the way through. Here's the thing about Eternal that was not true about 2016. Doom Eternal adds a few wrinkles to the combat and these mechanics are not optional. Remember those fun little portals and jump pads that were occasionally in arenas in 2016? Well, they are here too, and if you don't use them, you will die. Remember how you had a choice of one grenade type in 2016, but you could kind of forget to use it every so often and it really wasn't all that big a deal. Well aside from on nightmare you used a light health siphon grenade? Well, now you have two and if you don't use them in the right way, at the right time, you will die. Remember the armor pickups in 2016? Well, now you have a flamethrower and super shotgun that drops armor from enemies and if you don't use them consistently and correctly, you will die. I love this. One of the odd things about many games is that as you turn the difficulty up, you end up using less of the mechanics. I talked about this with Titanfall 2 in one of my older videos because I think it's one of the best examples. Titanfall 2 is one of the very best shooters ever made, but when you turn it to master difficulty, you quickly realize it. You can't use the mobility tools the same way anymore. You suddenly get punished for using the game's most interesting mechanics. Instead of flying all over the map, you gotta play it like Call of Duty or you fail. A proper master difficulty in Titanfall 2 would have been to make the enemies less accurate the faster the player is moving. Instead, it just amped up their damage and aim. So rather than success coming through using the game's most lauded mechanics, you became punished for using those mechanics. Destiny 2 actually does difficulty fairly well and even there, in more difficult modes, the mechanics change. Movement and close quarters combat, the game's strengths in many ways become too risky and a slower, more methodical type of combat using cover becomes required. 2016, for all of its mechanical brilliance, had this same problem. Playing on Nightmare, the resource management the game revolved around on the other difficulties like using the glory kills and the chainsaw for ammo and health, they became at best pointless and at worst counterproductive. On Nightmare, glory kills only dropped like 5 health while still locking you in an animation and enemies kept moving while you were locked in that animation. So it rewarded basically no health and allowed enemies to swarm and surround you as well as screwing around with your ability to track them, which is the most important skill in 2016 on Nightmare difficulty. So although the highest difficulty still required constant movement and weapon switching, it made certain mechanics less important. And remember, these mechanics were the most interesting and innovative systems in the game. Id's core design imperative for 2016 was push forward combat and everything in the design was predicated on pushing the player into aggressive forward momentum. The glory kill was so successful as a system because it tied refunding health to killing enemies rather than hiding from them. Try to imagine Doom 2016 with regenerating health. The game almost falls apart with that system. Resource management and glory kills are a major component of the game's innovative feel. The glory kill was more than a fun gruesome animation. It fed directly into the entire thrust of the combat. Doom Eternal is an example of difficulty done basically perfectly. It's like a direct answer to many of my complaints about game difficulty implementation. In fact, I honestly think it is the most perfectly tuned difficulty I have ever seen in a game. In many games, as you turn the difficulty up, the most common change is you take more damage and enemies take less. And the majority of games basically leave it there. In fact, very few do anything other than that. Destiny, which changes enemy destiny and quality while moderately improving their AI, is an example of one of the better systems. Anthem at launch literally did nothing but give enemies 300% more health and damage and changed nothing else. Eternal is so impressive because it carefully and thoughtfully makes a suite of changes that indeed make the game punishingly hard by more forcefully demanding the use of all of the game's mechanics. Difficulty raises enemy health and damage. It also greatly improves their aim when you are stationary, but seems to leave it about when you're moving. And it seems to change how much damage enemies take from different weapons.  On Nightmare, he is very hard to kill with most weapons, but it's killed really fast with the full auto combat shotgun. And finally, AI is drastically changed across the board and not just aggressiveness, although that is the most obvious. Enemies are much more likely to evade you on Nightmare. The best example of this is the Marauder, which don't worry, we'll get to him. But on Hurt Me Plenty, he can be staggered enough to hit him like three or four times with your super shotgun. On Nightmare, he recovers from that same stagger after one shot. And the only way to hit him twice is to immediately switch to the Ballista for a follow up, which is trickier to get right than it sounds. So rather than taking mechanics away on the hardest difficulty, Eternal insists you use all of them. It straight up demands that you use every mechanic perfectly at all times. The game speeds everything up. It pushes you to more strategic use of your tools and faster reactions. Juggling the chainsaw, two grenades, the flamethrower, the blood punch, the double jump, the meat hook, the swing bars, jump pads, dash dodge, seven weapons and mods, and the several super weapons is a lot to deal with. But the game demands you use all of those tools. You have to cycle through them over and over every few seconds. When I played for a few minutes and Hurt Me Plenty, I found I could get away without even using the grenades and I could use any weapon I wanted. On Ultra Violence, you pretty much need to use everything. And on Nightmare, you need everything and you need to use the right thing at the right time while using all of the movement mechanics without panicking or you'll die. I have a little anecdote that perfectly explains the difference between the Last Doom and this one. In 2016, even on Nightmare, I simply never used the BFG.  Every time I used it, I felt like I was cheating. I took that bias into Doom Eternal and was brutally punished for it. If you come into an arena, on Nightmare and Doom Eternal and you see two BFG pickups and three crucible ammo rounds on the ground, that means you will need to use two BFG and three crucible rounds in that arena.  A Titan? Four Mancubuses? Two Barons? Two Hell Knights? Two Revenants? Two Pain Elementals? And an Archvile?  It was only in my second playthrough that this actually hit me and things were less infuriating thereafter. The BFG is not a cheat button in Doom Eternal. It is a critical tool that must be used correctly or you will die over and over and over. And I mean correctly. Doom Eternal arenas on Nightmare start out very hard and get ridiculous as it goes forward. You can't use the BFG to take out 12 imps and two arachnotrons because when they are dead, the game is going to spawn an impossible group of heavies next. If an arena has a BFG round, you can be sure you'll know when it's needed.  That will be the time to use it. And the full genius of the difficulty here is reinforced even more strongly through small changes that make tremendous differences. The glory kill now freezes time and always drops health even on Nightmare. So now glory kills and chainsaws don't just remain mechanically important, they serve as tiny moments to safely catch your breath and plan ahead. The amount of enemies on screen in Eternal has been increased to almost ridiculous degrees. The sheer amount of AI on screen is like nothing I've ever seen in another game. Eternal really is combat chess.  The order you defeat enemies is as important as how you defeat them. And rather than using your best weapon until you run out of ammunition, like in 2016, Eternal makes you use different weapons on different enemies because they're simply more effective against them. And refusing to learn that lesson means 8 deaths in a row until you figure out what you're doing wrong. I saw a few complaints on Reddit about the rock, paper, scissors nature of Eternal's combat and how some didn't like it. I can't refute that point. It is indeed very insistent that you use the proper tool for the job. But I want to briefly mention just how well Idd managed to reinforce these mechanics.  The ping sound that you get from knocking off a turret or a mancubus' flamethrower is immensely gratifying and immediately gives positive reinforcement through sound design alone. Staggering an enemy with a chain gun feels good. Every time you use the right tool or strategy, you are instantly rewarded with clear and entertaining feedback. For such a mechanically deep game, Eternal does a simply masterful job teaching you how to play. One of my only complaints is that I think you should be immune from self-damage with the rocket launcher unless it's like right in your face. This move ridiculously fast in this game. Including you. You thought you were fast in 2016? Look at this dude. Again, aside from 15 minutes or so just to test things out, I never got below ultra violence for a few tough arenas in my first playthrough so I can't speak to the balance in those difficulties.  You have precisely what you need to complete each encounter. Success and failure depends upon using those things correctly. It is exquisitely unforgiving. This goes down even to that weakspots thing. You really do need to destroy those weakspots. It's not a suggestion, it is a necessity.  You must destroy the arachnotron's turret.  I've never played a game so utterly committed to using every mechanic. I mean I hate to do this but it really is very much like a souls born game in that way. There are mechanics and you must use them correctly or you will fail. Unlike souls however, Eternal is remarkably freeform because you're given a daunting amount of tools and the most powerful tool in the game is movement. The dash is the game's most effective weapon and the jump and speed of the player character is empowering and awesome. My son was watching me play the second time through and in one encounter he said, you're so freaking good at this. Now that's less a compliment for me than it is a compliment to Id. When you've fully absorbed what this game teaches you and have become totally comfortable with the mechanics, fights look amazing. A never ending string of dashes, jumps, grenades, chainsaws, glory kills, it's non stop. Like you cannot stop moving and stringing together the correct actions is less acting out a plan than one long freeform jazz improv piece. It's the most mechanically deep and satisfying game I've played in ages because on Nightmare nothing is overpowered and nothing is underpowered. It's the rare game where the vast majority of deaths, even the really frustrating ones are truly your fault.   I'd be remiss if I didn't comment on the game's performance and visual design. Doing maternal not only looks amazing, it runs impossibly well. No other game I own consistently runs at 144 FPS but Eternal at 1440p on ultra settings stays between 136 and 144 except in menus when it's 360. And one of the striking things about Eternal's visual design which probably ties into that performance is how restrained it is. Art design is really great with scenes and skyboxes that make you stop and look. That's frequent. Players are amazing with gorgeous details on all sorts of items including the weapons and enemies. I mean, look at the guns. Just look at these. And as I played, I noticed something else. Each area feels like a real place, but the game is never showing off or pushing graphics far enough to slow down the performance. I'm sure it could have found all sorts of places to go nuts with lighting and volumetric god rays and high resolution shadows or to go overboard on textures. And all of those things are here and they look great. But it feels like there was a deliberate effort made to figure out exactly how many visual bells and whistles were needed for the job and it seems like they resisted going even further at the risk of slowing down performance. I appreciate that. I don't care what people say about the human eye man, I can tell the difference between 144 FPS and 60. I can. I prefer beautiful and fast to ridiculously beautiful but slower. As far as art direction, Doom Eternal's visual presentation goes in a different, less grounded direction than the last game. There is an absolute difference in focus between Eternal and 2016. Colors are brighter. Creatures and effects are way over the top metal. And areas are far less dark. And issues the Doom 3 Reminiscent Industrial Horror vibe of the last game for something much closer to a fantasy setting. And this, like almost everything else in the game, is a neat bit of design cohesion because 2016 was a game about industrial horror and Eternal is a game about fantasy. 2016's visual design and art direction had a remarkable internal consistency. But that consistency, and no doubt developmental problems, also resulted in a distinct lack of variety and that is simply not the case here. Every level feels unique. Every level feels like it's needed, and a consistent artistic look doesn't prevent the game from having a great variety of locations and art assets. And level design is just simply great. But as gorgeous as Eternal is, and it really, really is a beautiful game, the fact is graphical beauty isn't really what you're there for, and it feels like the developers know exactly how far they needed to push it to do what they wanted to do. It was a smart decision to make the game look as good as they could while still running at ridiculous frame rates. I have a nice, but not beastly PC. I've got an i7-8700K, an RTX 2070 Super, and 32GB of RAM. And I experienced very few bugs, and like no frame rate drops, none. The only bugs you'll encounter is that same thing that happens in 2016 where a glory kill will warp you into the geometry. Now in the last game, that kills you, or drops you through the map. Here it just looks weird for a second. The final delay was obviously used to polish this game to a mirror shine, and it shows. One of 2016's other notable achievements was its excellent pacing. The combat was more intense than other shooters, and it was seemingly too high octane to be constant. The game needed to slow it down on occasion, and games generally accomplished this in one of three ways. Story, puzzles, or exploration. Now I just wanted a mini rant about how 2016 was less like the originals and people imply, but one place the game does mimic the original Doom is in its general pacing. The original Doom, like all shooters until Half-Life, was incredibly light on story. Those early games featured some very light puzzles and complex levels that needed to be thoroughly explored, and 2016, at least for the first 2 thirds of the game, stuck to that formula by pacing it with exploration and secret hunting. As such, the game has a great ebb and flow, with combat arenas followed by long stretches of quiet, often actually kind of spooky level exploration, and it really works because many of 2016's levels are like textbook examples of classic old school shooter level design. Doom Eternal is no less well paced, but its methods are a drastic departure from the last game. It's paced well, not because it has tons of quiet time, but rather because it intersperses platforming challenges and side combat challenges in between its almost unrelenting action. It is an immense credit to the quality and depth of the mechanics here that 14 hours of combat work so well, and that the game can be so well paced even with far less time devoted to slowing down and smelling the roses. The secrets and exploration here are more tightly constrained, and its levels are less sprawling and more linear, but just as satisfying as the last games. The Foundry in 2016 was probably the most interesting level with lots of backtracking and exploration puzzles. Eternal's secrets are less about exploring the map, and more about solving platforming puzzles or puzzle puzzles, or keenly observing dead ends in broken walls. It was far less quiet time, and the secret hunting exploration are more firmly rooted in the mechanics of the gameplay. Even the game's most impressive and foundry-like level, the Super Gordest, is far more linear in the way you move through it. There has been a significant change to pace and level structure. It's different in design and just as good, if not better, an execution. I'll touch on this later a bit more, but the platforming has been somewhat controversial? I don't get it. The platforming is a major component of level exploration and secret hunting, and more importantly, unlike in 2016, it's literally also a combat mechanic now. Doom Eternal is almost manically committed to mechanics, and it uses those mechanics in every way possible. It uses all of the buffalo man. So it's not that surprising to see skill and mechanics brought over into the level exploration as well. Game is still a break from combat, but it's not quite precisely because the platforming and movement system are a big part of that pacing now. You know why I don't like Uncharted? Because moving through the levels isn't interesting gameplay. Climbing a wall isn't interesting gameplay to me, because you can't fail. You can fail at Doom's platforming. You will. You will fail. Which means that you can fail at the level exploration, which keeps things interesting. But the penalty is smartly only lost armor and health and not instant death, so it's not all that frustrating. Going to find a secret is simply more compelling when it requires skill-based usage of the mechanics, rather than making sure you've crawled every inch of the map. And this isn't a critique of 2016's pacing and exploration, I love that game. It's more of an appreciation that it didn't just remake the last game with different levels. This is a different game, with different mechanics and entirely different pacing. It works and it's a new standard that feels entirely fresh. There's literally nothing else like it in gaming now, or in the past. Now I'm of the opinion that this is as close to a perfect game as anyone can get. But it is not, of course, perfect. Nothing is perfect.  Blood of War's enemy and boss variety is bad. Titanfall 2 falls apart on Master Difficulty. The last of us's combat is mediocre. The Binding of Isaac… well, actually. Anyway, let's address a couple of my critiques about Eternal.  I happen to have loved the boss fights in the last game. In fact, I'm a big fan of boss fights in general. But I look for pretty specific things and boss fights that I enjoy. And let's get this out of the way right now, and I will repeat this point over and over as I move forward. But what follows isn't an objective assertion about design, it is a personal preference based in taste. As an example of boss fights that I find a bit lackluster, let's take Vermintide 2, which I've been playing with my son in the last few weeks. Dead bosses aren't terrible or anything, they're just kind of low effort. They're basically regular monsters but with a big health bar. Attack patterns and aggro often seem really random, so it doesn't feel like their fights you can learn, instead you kind of just mash at them until they die. Dark Souls' boss fights are so good because even though many of them are quite hard, they're based upon pattern recognition. Lady Maria or Ornstein and Smog or the Dancer are hard until you fully learn their movesets. Once you've got that, it's just a matter of executing, and when it goes well, it feels like a dance.  Fights where it's just too hard to identify what the boss is doing because of their visual design or because the attacks come out so fast it's more about twitch skills than it is pattern recognition. My favorite boss fights in games are ones that use the mechanics you've learned to test slightly different things. Doom 2016's boss fights are really well done, all of them. Their fights with phases, attacks are clearly telegraphed and they can be learned so well you don't take damage. I got so good at them that I eventually almost never even get hit. That doesn't mean they're easy, they're not. It just means that they're designed in such a way that they can be mastered by basically anybody regardless of their twitch skills. Doom Eternal has a clear design philosophy behind its boss fights. They aren't lazy or haphazard or not well thought out from a design perspective. In fact, like everything else in the game, they show a clear commitment to coherent and consistent design. To clear, an obvious philosophy behind Eternal's bosses is making them play out and test the same skills the rest of the game does.  All of the fights feature multiple ads and almost all of them are designed to feel like a normal arena that's less about recognizing the pattern of one or two strong enemies and more about continuing to play the game as you have been, but adding to it. It doesn't refine the combat system down to one target. It adds a massively dangerous boss into a regular arena. I'm not saying they're bad design or that they're terrible, I'm just saying I don't like them as much as the last game's bosses. There are five of them in the game if you count the first Marauder fight and I think you should even though he doesn't have a health bar. Let's briefly look at them in order. The Marauder fight made me so furious on my first playthrough man.  He breaks the game's rules in many ways. He has a hit scan weapon that a nightmare can take half of your health. He turtles behind a shield and can only be fought with two weapons.  And his whole mid-range requirement is finicky as hell and seems random which means the fight rarely feels like you're in control of it. I do not like him as a regular enemy and I doubt I ever will. But by the third playthrough I actually came to enjoy the boss fight so I kind of enjoy him as a boss now. But if a boss fight requires three playthroughs to fully appreciate and not be frustrating, I'd argue it might not be all that good. And again, I actually consider him one of the better bosses in the game now. Next up is the Doom Hunter, sorry, Doom Hunters. It's a two-phase fight with first one of them and then two of them. This isn't a particularly frustrating fight, but it's a really good example of the change in design philosophy. You fight these guys in arenas filled with other enemies and rather than being a dance it's kind of a chase. You circle the arena and never stop moving and only focus on the boss when you've cleared the adds. I enjoy this fight a lot actually, but it's another example of a boss that's just actually kind of a beat up regular enemy in a regular arena. As evidenced by the fact that these dudes show up all through the rest of the campaign in regular arenas. Which means that it's less of a boss and more of like a combat gauntlet. Again, here it works. It's fine, it's satisfying. But just keep that in mind as we move forward and look at the bosses. Next we've got the Gladiator. This is probably the very closest you'll get to what I would consider an actual boss fight, but it's got some issues that made me angry. First off, this douchebag is even more committed to turtling behind a shield. 2016 bosses had immunity phases, but this dude like turtles behind his shield. Second, enemies spawn in consistently and they can easily do some damage before you clear them out. These adds are obviously there to provide armor and ammo during the fight, but couldn't that have been accomplished by just not having this asshole turtle behind a shield? The biggest issue with the fight is it's too hard to read and dodge his attacks. Even on my third playthrough, I never felt like I had a real handle on his second phase and I don't think I ever really will. His attacks come out very fast. They're very hard to dodge and it feels much more like a DPS race.  And again, none of these fights are bad, but none of them are as good or memorable as the last game. Let's move on. Next, we have the Connaker. Another example of a fight that's not about pattern recognition and fighting the boss and more about constant movement and add control. The Connaker's fight is so chaotic, I honestly don't even know what attack she has.    Between a floor on fire, two hit-kill boss attacks and three to five high damage enemies constantly spawning in, you never have a chance to even really focus on the boss. It's just chaos of, like, running in circles and swinging on bars and damaging the boss as you fly through the air. Again, this is really more like a harder arena than a proper boss fight. And I hate to repeat myself, but I do really admire the commitment to the game's core mechanics. I think it's really clever and interesting to try something new and different by making the boss fights more closely resemble the base combat. I just don't like it as much. Finally, there's the last fight, which I just do not like at all. The Icon of Sin is the boss from Doom II and also this Doom II. And like in Doom II, it's kind of like fighting a stationary target more than an actual enemy. In Eternal, it feels like you're fighting a skybox. That's fine. That's not the problem. The Icon is properly epic in scope and it is an impressive spectacle. The problem is more in how the fight can feel quite random. This fight doesn't spawn a few enemies to refill your health.  And so it honestly doesn't feel like you're fighting the boss. It's just an insanely chaotic mess of tough enemies and heavies with the very rare chance to stop for four seconds to shoot at the sky. The madness is mitigated by blood punch and crucible ammo being all over the map, so it isn't impossibly hard, although it is obviously quite challenging and I've yet to beat it without dying at least once. It's just insanely chaotic. So chaotic that again, it's almost impossible to see what the boss is doing. He spends most of the fight lighting the floor on fire, blasting off a death laser and mashing his fists down as well as destroying the arena around you. I honestly have no hope of ever beating this boss without taking damage. I mean, someone will probably do it someday, but it would be a ridiculous achievement that relied as much on RNG spawns and attacks as it did on skill. There's just so much going on. You can't even see the boss' attacks much less learn them. In many ways, it is extremely similar to the con maker fight, just multiplied by several factors. It is just a constant state of running and jumping and ad clearing. Maybe things feel different on hurt me funny, but I kinda doubt it. It's not the difficulty, it's the design. I'll wrap up this boss section by again saying, I understand what the idea was here. I get the goal was to make the boss fights more closely conformed to the regular combat. An effort was made to make boss encounters just extreme versions of the tougher arenas that only end when you've done enough damage to the boss. In fact, the truth is the only thing that separates them from the harder arenas is that ads will never stop spawning. I get it. I just don't like it as much. 2016's bosses played into the game's pacing. They were a great change of pace that slowed the combat down without being too easy or boring. Eternal is, without a doubt, far more intense and challenging than the last game. And as such, bosses that changed things up and slowed it down a bit would have worked just as well, if not better, in this game. Battle mode. How about the PvP battle mode? I'm conflicted. On one hand, again, I'm impressed by the desire to innovate and the commitment to a coherent design across all of the modes and difficulties. Battle mode has more in common with Doom Eternal than 2016's PvP had in common with that campaign. I haven't plated a huge amount, but one mode isn't all that much. And even though it's reasonably fun, it's still less fun than just playing the campaign again. Here's what I think should happen next time. Someone send this to Id so they know. If the idea is to have a PvP mode that fully captures what the game does best, how about a death match where players are just as fast and mobile as the campaign, and best of all, a competitive PvE match? Have teams of slayers let loose in a map with demons, ramping up to a boss, and score the game based upon points players get by killing enemies. This should be a one-on-one mode and a two-on-two mode. In one mode, it will be totally PvE. You can't damage other players and it's strictly erased to see who can get the most points by killing enemies and bosses.  Basically, points per target are awarded on how much health they have. Players have more health than an imp, but they have less than a mancubi. I think that would do a better job of capturing the magic of the game. And more importantly, it would be a unique mode that people who love shooters end competition, but don't really like PvP would be much more likely to play. At the risk of complimenting myself, I honestly believe a mode like that would be a tremendous hit. Still, battle mode deserves praise for trying to innovate. It's just kind of strangely balanced and it's just less fun to play as a demon because movement is so important in mechanics. I'm not sure it'll have a very long shelf life, but honestly, I should play it more before I dismiss it. Let's get my other nitpicks out of the way before I respond to some reviews I've seen and we wrap it up. And they are nitpicks, I promise, okay? So there are four or five arenas in the game that might be pushing things into the realm of frustration.  There's a couple of arenas in the final level and there are a couple of slayer gates that are kind of crazy, including one that features a marauder and a doom hunter. I don't know if the arenas are really a problem because as I got better, I handled them with a lot less frustration. I just think they are right on the edge occasionally.  So, you know, if you find yourself getting pissed off like I did, I will say this. After another playthrough, you'll probably have much less trouble in these spots while still feeling challenged. It's just a nitpick. The secret combat encounters don't refund your ammo when you fail.    I'm not sure why it's even a thing. Like, is it purposely designed to make someone like me explode? Several levels lock you out of previous areas so you can't go back to find secrets and the early areas don't allow fast travel back, which is annoying. Why isn't the fast travel at the end of the level thing available right from the start of the game? I don't get it. There are a few secrets that require you to reload checkpoints if you miss them. Like this one here that requires you to fall down a huge hole and dash through a wall on your way down. If you miss it, you just have to miss it or reload the last checkpoint a few times until you get it. I think I've made it clear over the years that I'm not the kind of dude who will just miss it, so that means reloading the checkpoint over and over. That annoyed me. Don't force me into loading screens, dude. Finally, anytime the Marauder shows up mixed in with a bunch of other dangerous enemies, he grinds the game to a halt as you have to play footsie with him and can't really use the movement system. His axe throw is way too fast to consistently dodge. The shotgun is hitscan.  He is immune to your super weapons, so the only, and I mean the only way to fight him is to hit him with the super shotgun and immediately switch to the bowster to get a second hidden on him. On easier difficulties, you can hit him like three or four times, and I know that because I saw people defending him on Reddit and saying it's not a problem, so I went and tried it and hurt me plenty, and sure enough, he is much easier to handle there. Now, Eternal is one of the best shooters ever, probably the best shooter ever, because it requires you to use all of the mechanics while offering a shocking amount of improvisation in how you use them, being suddenly forced into an annoyingly narrow set of options is frustrating. As I said, I can handle him now, but it's still easy to get killed because the enemy's response is seemingly so random. He at least needs a patch, man. He'll attack from right in your face or he'll throw the axe when he's in midrange. He'll spam the wolf sometimes. He'll get stuck in an infuriating loop of teleporting behind and around you.  I honestly think he should have been used in the boss fight and never again. As a boss, he is challenging. As a regular enemy, he's toxic. Wrapping up. All right, this is longer than I'd hoped it would be, but I ended up having a lot to say about this game, and it's so rare that I'm compelled to make a video by a game I really love, so I figured I'd get this one out of my system. Now, I don't read reviews before playing a game I'm interested in, because I'm afraid I'll end up writing about the game and that it will like, you know, seep in and infect my writing, so I just don't, I never do that. But I did read reviews for Eternal about halfway through my second playthrough. And while Eternal reviewed well, I think it actually did not review well enough. This is not an eight. I don't see how anyone could possibly rate this game lower than a nine. If I had to give it a numeric rating, it would be a 97.5. It's honestly nearly perfect. Many of the reviews dinged the game because of the platforming. I don't get this. It is amongst the best first-person platforming you will ever play, because movement and controls are absolutely tight as hell. Not only did I not mind the platforming, I'm willing to state that the game would be much diminished by its removal. It doesn't take up a huge amount of time, and it serves to pace the game and the exploration by grounding it in the game's top-notch movement systems. This is a weird criticism to me. Jumping, moving, and dashing all feel great here. Using those mechanics as much as possible seems like a natural fit. The platforming here never gets as involved as Destiny 2's Dungeons or Raid platforming. And falling doesn't mean death or failing to finish a dungeon under a time limit. More than that, it's incredibly rare that you have frustrating moments with it, because it smartly didn't have your character stumble or drift when they land. When you dash to a wall, you stick hard to the wall. When you land from a jump, you stop solidly and immediately. It is unbelievably tight. The game never takes control away from you, and it leaves you feeling like you're always able to make your character move how you want him to. I don't think FPS platforming has been done better. And it's yet another example of a developer at the top of their industry in almost every way. Aside from the swimming, which can get a little wonky, but those are a nice little change of pace, even if they're the least solid of all the movement puzzles and there's not that many of them. I saw complaints in reviews about how hard it was to find secrets. Listen, man, if you don't want to find the secrets, you don't have to. I found everything in every level. And at the end of the game, I had 10 extra suit tokens and like 10 or 15 extra weapon upgrade points. There is more than enough to completely fulfill progression without obsessing over it. If you don't like hunting secrets, don't hunt them.  I enjoy those games more ignoring those things. I enjoyed Eternal more by finding them because everything is tricky enough to give you satisfaction, but easy enough that nothing takes more than two or three minutes to figure out. They're fantastically balanced. There's been some talks and reviews that the combat is too busy. I disagree wholeheartedly. Doing Eternal, I'm sure, is something anyone can enjoy, but it's also a shooter for people who love shooters. Let me give you an example. The most recent Call of Duty was a pretty good game that I considered doing a video about, but ultimately when I got to writing, the combat is so bland that I decided it was just kind of a waste of time. What was it gonna say? Like, you know, the combat's the same as it's ever been. You get behind a box. Great shooters are exceedingly rare and the vast majority of modern FPS games take no chances at all. Complex shooters that are mechanically deep are vanishingly rare. It's basically doom, destiny, rage tube, and Titanfall 2 as far as like, big budget shooters. I'd ask the reviewers what they'd have thought if Eternal was just 2016 with different environments. It had every right to play it safe here, to take the last game they made and just make it longer without changing much. They didn't do that. They set out to take the last game and ask, okay, how can we make this unique? How can we push the player out of their comfort zone? How can we take even people who've played 2016 10 times and challenge and delight them? Doom Eternal might in fact be too busy if you're not someone who loves shooters. But I have a feeling that playing on easy probably makes many of these mechanics less crucial. If you're finding it too mechanically complex, I'd recommend just playing it on easy until you're comfortable. It's not a pissing contest, man. Play on the difficulty that feels most fun, not the one that proves you have a penis. If you're not interested in having a shooter push you mechanically, then this probably isn't the game for you, I guess. There hasn't been nearly enough praise for just how innovative and unique the combat system is here. If you find a combat too intricate, I mean, all I can say is there are people like me who've been dying for more mechanically complex shooters and there are dozens of conventional shooters out there for you. A common complaint I saw was about tutorials and tool tips. I don't get this. First off, you can turn off the tutorials in the menu and after your first playthrough, I recommend you do just that. But Eternal is not only very challenging, it is easily the most complex shooter around. It has multiple guns that work best on only certain enemies. It has multiple movement systems that need to be mastered. It has multiple tools that aren't just extra damage dealers but crucial mechanics that must be used properly to succeed. It took a bold step making this game so unforgiving. Throwing players into a game where you move 60 miles an hour and can be killed instantly for failing to use the ice grenade right was risky. Doing that without some tutorial risk alienating players who weren't aware that they were about to play a game far harder than the last one. I think Eternal does a nearly masterful job, balancing difficulty and hand-holding. It's hard but every crucial piece of information is boldly and explicitly put on screen. By all means, turn the tutorials off from the beginning if you wanna figure it out yourself.  I commend the clear player education the game does. Finally, I saw a lot of talk about the story and lore being totally inconsistent or silly or disjointed and anyone who's watched my videos knows I am generally very harsh on video game stories. I don't agree. I'm not gonna argue that this is some masterpiece of storytelling but listen man, Doom Eternal isn't about its story but surprisingly I found the lore and narrative to be pretty damn entertaining and anyone who watches my videos knows I think stories in games are usually putrid. I was actually pulled in by the lore. I found the world building really interesting and the overarching themes quite good. Civil War views said they felt like the story was thrown out with little explanation but unless you're giving me a narrative based game, if the choice is drowning me in exposition or giving me a clear tale that is then expanded in the codex, I will take the latter every time. The quality of the storytelling is pretty good. Interesting locations, interesting characters, interesting motivations and an interesting world. The story and narrative here were far more ambitious and confident than I expected. I thought Eternal had enough twists and turns that it works if you don't pay attention and it has enough good lore that it also works if you wanna think on it and dig into it. I'm about to get into a few lore spoilers for like 10 seconds, I don't know man. Here we go, ready? Three, two, one. I like that it seems Samuel Hayden is actually one of the makers and that he's the one who gives you your powers. I like that it seems like he's playing a longer game. I like that none of this is explicitly explained but is heavily implied merely by his actions and dialogue and the weird fact that he like seems to know an awful lot about what's going on. I like that Vega appears to have been the father. I love the story of the betrayer and his son. I love the codexes about the Night Sentinels and their king and the slow corruption of the Khan makers. I enjoyed reading about this warlike conquering Argent society. I love the mixing of Judeo-Christian cosmology with sci-fi interdimensional travel which isn't new or anything in sci-fi stories but it's always entertaining because I like sci-fi and I like Judeo-Christian cosmology and myth. I even like that the game is a direct sequel to Doom 64. I think that's cool. I'm not gonna argue that this is a narrative masterpiece like The Last of Us or something but I will argue the story is benign enough to not get in your way if you don't want it and you can skip all the cutscenes but it's still substantial and interesting enough that I actually read all of the codexes which I didn't in the last game and really honestly never do that actually. I generally skip codexes. And most importantly, it makes me want more of the story in future games which is all you can really ask of a shooter's story. Let's wrap it up with this, ready? There is no other game like this. There has never been another shooter like this. Shooters, even the more involved ones like Destiny tend to keep it pretty simple. I'm one of the rare people who loved Rage 2 because I so greatly appreciated a shooter that reveled in mechanical complexity and required more of me than just mouse one and scroll wheel. Doom Eternal isn't a simple game. Its difficulty isn't balanced by enemy health or shields or having numbers go up on your guns. Doom Eternal is the most finely balanced and mechanically complex and satisfying shooter ever made. It takes one of the best games of the last decade and instead of making it again, it pushes it forward while still staying true to the feel and flow that 2016 established. It is bold and risky and damn near perfect and it's the best implementation of difficulty in a shooter ever and probably in any game ever.  I'm having a lot of trouble playing the Borderlands 3 DLC because it is so much less engaging and satisfying mechanically. Doom Eternal is so good.   I guess I'll finish up Neo2 next because I don't think I can enjoy another shooter for a good long while. All right, thanks for coming. I'll see you next time. Bye.


Sean Bonner is someone who I kept running into online and I never met in real life. We retweet each other a bunch, reply to each other a bunch, and then finally just decided to have lunch one day. And it turns out we have a ton of sort of like shared history and surprising that we haven't met before. We have a bunch of mutual friends. And he's doing stuff with radiation these days. I think he's creating some sort of superhero or superhero defense over in the Japan. So he'll tell you all about that. I think you have your visual aids. He's got a couple of visual aids. Visual aids. Okay, Sean Bonner. So I actually don't have a set presentation thing for this because it's kind of brand new. So what I would have done is like had some sort of professional presentation that then I just didn't show and just talked. But I've never talked about this at all. I'm going to make it up along the way and so expect lots of mistakes and random divergence that would be cut out on something that was more professional. I guess. So yeah, so like two months ago there was this earthquake in Japan and you probably heard about it. Stuff shook and stuff. And nothing really bad happened with the earthquake because Japan's like earthquake proof.  There's actually sort of a side grant. But there's actually all around the coast of Japan are these huge rocks that have these etchings in them. They're really old and I'm going to get the translation wrong.  And that's like everything below there is what got destroyed by the tsunamis. Everything above them is fine. And they've been there forever. And I guess they were like, ah, these are old. What do they know? You don't have to worry about this. But yeah, there's these huge rocks and they're all around the coast and now everybody's like, oh, weird.  So I have a bunch of friends in Japan who right away were like, okay, this is weird. What do we do about this? And we started trading a bunch of emails to try to figure out how do we actually find out what's going on since they're locking things down. And the only numbers that are being released on anything is by TEPCO, which is the Tokyo Electric and Power Company. And they don't really have a huge interest in reporting numbers that are above what they should be, as well as Greenpeace who's releasing numbers who doesn't really have an interest in reporting numbers that are below what they should be. So with everything being like, well, I can't believe any of these numbers and I don't really know where they're coming from. We're like, well, we're going to figure out how to get some real numbers. And at the same point, we got introduced to a handful of guys in Portland who were trying to figure out how to build a system where anybody could submit radiation tracking numbers from their own devices and then throw those all together somehow and get a little bit of a map that they could try to put something together. So we decided to combine forces with these guys, reach out to a bunch of Geiger counter builder people and see what we could do to create a network of Geiger counters and things that were reading radiation all around in Japan. So we went and tried to buy a bunch of Geiger counters, but they were all gone because everybody in the Midwest of the US bought every Geiger counter. So yeah, literally everybody who sells anything is like, I don't know, I got like a thousand orders for Ohio, so we can't send anything to Japan, sorry. And so we're like, okay, well, that's a little bit of a hiccup in our plan there. So we started searching around and found, well, we found two things. So we found that there's lots of surplus Geiger tubes all over the, so a Geiger counter is actually a stupidly simple thing of DNA. And there's lots of Geiger tubes around from Chernobyl, from Russia, which is weird because the Russian government actually made it illegal for citizens to own Geiger counters right after things started happening.  So there's a bunch of tubes, most of the tubes don't work because they were all made in the 70s and 80s and they were all in equipment and got used by stuff. And used for years and years and years and then somebody like salvaged them out and was trying to make the top dollar. So you'll see these tubes all over the place that are in class and have like fancy caps on them and all these stuff and none of those work. The only ones that are actually worth any good that are salvaged are these, you can't really see it in here. I'll pass this around in a second, but this is, so this is what we're calling an eye Geiger. And it's a Geiger counter that plugs me into an iPhone and then we have a little piece of software that sort of keeps track of the counts that go through it and uploads it to our server, so a little bit of a geotag and stuff. And so, you know, like, okay, wherever this is, this is where the counter is happening and what's going on with it. And it's pretty cool. So this tube that's in here is an old Russian tube cell and that out from Puster. I'm not sticking my iPhone in it, I'm doing another show without it. Sorry, you have to pretend that it would be counting something if it was in the front. But it works pretty cool. So we got a bunch of those tubes and started putting together random devices like that and some bigger ones that sort of are plugged into networks that people can stick outside their house and just a whole bunch of things that we could actually farm out to hacker spaces. I run a hacker space here in Los Angeles called Crash Space and I was working with a hacker space in Tokyo called Tokyo Hacker Space.  So we put together some little PCBs with the really simple stuff that goes into what drives a geiger counter and so we're in the process of getting parts out to these people all over the place so they can sort of put them together and then ship them back or do whatever they need to do with them to start tracking them. And then at the same time we got in touch with this guy. His name is Dan and he runs a company called International Medcom and he helped design the sensor networks at Chernobyl and at Three Mile Island so he knows a little bit about radiation and tracking it and stuff. So he's got a whole bunch of commercial devices like this that he has these brand new sensors on them that are these big round like two inch pancake shaped sensor that picks up so that one that's going around those old tubes they track mostly gamma and a little bit of beta which is what people are mostly worried about when there's some sort of a nuclear event because gamma is the stuff that if you get a dose of it you're dead in like a couple hours or a huge blast. And sort of the common thing that's set around is not really to worry about alpha because it can sort of bounce off clothing. It's such like really slow and light. But alpha is actually a really big problem in stuff like this because the surrounding areas are farms and alpha rains down and falls on the ground and gets in food and if you eat it the things like Sysium 137 and these particles look a lot like potassium and things that your body thinks is good.  And so people in Japan are sort of freaking out because they don't know what's going on and they just want to know what's going on. They're like anything, any data would be great but the numbers that are being released are like here's this one reading from this one city that's 50 kilometers away from where you're at and that was taken three weeks ago. You're fine, don't worry about it. And radiation can change by the minute. The number here can be normal and over there can be like a super crazy hot spot. So we got a whole bunch of these counters and a whole bunch of these tubes that we're building into other counters and so we've been giving those out to people and then we rigged up some car settings with a couple of these outside of car, a couple of these inside of car. We mapped out where all of the schools are within like a 60 or 70 kilometer radius of the evacuation zone and there's tons of them that are still open and still with kids playing on them. And so we went and started driving the cars there and walking around in the schools and just tracking numbers and putting them online and just publishing everything as you can. So I'll pass this around too. So this, be careful of that back sensor, don't poke anything in it. Otherwise it's fairly rugged. So as you can see like right there, the CPM which is sort of counts per minute of particles that are flying through that sensor, there's radiation everywhere so don't be worried about that. There's radiation everywhere like this is radioactive, everything's radioactive and you can walk around and see a few counts different depending on what you put on the bananas So you can see that's like 20 counts per minute on that. I was in Portland yesterday and flying back from Portland, it was about 250 counts per minute. I was in Tokyo like two weeks ago and flying from Tokyo to LA is like 800 counts per minute. On a lot of several of the kindergarten and elementary schools that we've gone to like on the playgrounds, it's like 9,000 counts per minute. So it's sort of concerning and the parents at these schools don't know that and they're not being told that. So we got this site set up which is called SafeCast.org and we're publishing all of the data that we can get from any place as well as all of the data that we can collect ourselves and putting it up there. And the driving around is sort of the stop gap until we get enough devices that we can just hand them out everywhere and then sort of create this thing. But there's still this problem with those where people have to, we have a little piece of software for smartphones and stuff where people can take a picture of it and then it automatically sends up to like a Flickr account and then OCR is what the reading is and sort of geotags and stuff. So we know they're barely where it flows but there's still a little bit of interaction. So we have a couple folks working on designing our whole new, our own device which will be based off that same tube that measures alpha, beta and gamma and it'll be a network connected device that will connect to all sorts of different networks, 3G networks, Wi-Fi networks, any different number of networks. It'll, it's going to be powered by a Reno. It'll have modular pieces. We can plug other things into it to measure other things beyond radiation if and when we want to and it'll just automatically upload new readings to our server like every five minutes or something. So once we get these things made, which is maybe six or eight months down the line, then we're just going to send them all over the place and people just stick them outside their house in place and then they'll over-report back to us and keep track of it. So that's kind of what we're doing with it at the moment. I don't know. That may have been way too short. Yeah, absolutely. So how much do these devices cost and what are you doing to bring prices down? Well, so there's not much you can do to bring prices down because, because the devices are expensive as hell. So we just, we ran a, we had, we got a couple people who chipped in some cash right initially that we were able to like just start doing things with. A lot of people are just kind of buying things on their own. We just did a Kickstarter campaign and made about $37,000. I think it ends sometime this afternoon, but we passed our goal, so we're good. That pays for about 150 counters or so. So that device that I'm passing around, the more made one, that's like $800. Those, that sensor, just the sensor tube inside it itself from like the plant that manufactures it is like 220 bucks. Just on its own. So the way Geiger tubes work is it's a pretty simple thing, but it's kind of complex to design is it's, it's an almost vacuum filled with like a very specific combination of noble gases that both explode and extinguish depending on what particles are flying through them at any given moment. So, and then like a receiver that counts how many little explosions there are that goes through and then calculations after the fact, but maintaining that, that sensor devices, getting that set up correctly is, is kind of pricey. So we're, we're working on a couple of grants as well with this. So the team is, so it's this, like I say, this, this webshop in Portland called Uncorked. And there's a couple of guys there. It's not the entire, the entire guys, it was just a few of the guys there who were sort of jumped on and tackled it with us. There's me, there's Joey Ito, Ray Ozzie, and Dan Sinfu is running this thing. There's a guy named Bunny who you may have heard of from hacking Xboxes and Chumbies and things. He's heading up our hardware piece and there's a guy Peter on the ground in Tokyo who is organizing all the volunteers who are driving around to schools and stuff to track this stuff. And then, yeah, that's sort of the core team of people who are all kind of volunteering to do stuff as we can at the moment. Yeah. Has anything come of the information that you've been publishing in Japan? Well, there hasn't, there hasn't. So we've just started publishing stuff in the past few weeks. And the Japanese government has made two statements which are completely unrelated. They should never be combined at all. They're two independent statements. And the first of which is that there's this thing, it's kind of like a press club in our sort of connotation. But if you're not a member of the press club, you're not considered an actual media and you don't get into press conferences. So you have, like everybody who is a journalist joins this thing and that's like how they're allowed to go to any official press conference or anything. Like basically you can't be a journalist if you're not in this organization. So the two statements that were made were that anybody who reports any radiation numbers that are not official will be instantly kicked out of the press clubs. And then the second completely, don't tie these two together, they're separate, is any number that we didn't tell you is not official. So the press is kind of like hands tied in a whole lot of it. So what we're doing is, you know, we're doing it online. I'm not a part of the Japanese press club so I don't really care about getting admission to any of that. You know, bloggers and people on Twitter and Hacker Spaces and all of these people are sort of doing what they can to get the readings out of it. First of all, it's really to try to get stuff to the people in the cities around there because radiation is a really kind of scary thing in Japanese culture for obvious reasons. And it's invisible and you just don't know. And so people are sort of like, I just want to know. Like if it's good, I want to know if it's bad. I just want some answers that I'm not sitting here just like freaking out. And so, you know, when we've been giving these counters to people, the first thing they're doing is taking them and like sticking them on themselves. Like that's their immediate like first reaction is like, am I radioactive? And unfortunately those things, I mean, that's not the way it works. You need other equipment to find out if you're actually screwed or not.  That's the thing they want to know is like, are they already dead and they just don't know it. I know we all laughed with that statement about Geiger counters in Ohio. But it seems sort of implied that perhaps we cannot necessarily trust official numbers or they may not even exist. So maybe your project implies creating a citizen network of radiation. Japan is definitely the sort of start of this. But assuming this all works and assuming that we don't lose like, you know, all of our cash that we possibly have doing Japan and exhaust any output. We realize that there's a need for this everywhere. There's no independent source of radiation data anywhere. And the problem is that there's counts per minute, there's microceverts, there's nanoceverts, there's grays. There's like 15 different ways that radiation is tracked. And they're not really easy to calculate from one to the other. And so it's really, really confusing system. And so part of what we want to do, so we want to get this network. And that's why we're building this device, because it'll be outside of the actual sensor piece as cheap as possible. And then we're going to get, we're going to do a little bit of like sort of one laptop per child model, get them out there, get grants, get rid of some of them. One Geiger counter for child. Exactly. But I mean like lots of different ways to sort of get those out there. And once we're actually manufacturing them, we'll be able to sort of deal with a bunch of the cost on that as much as possible. And then, yeah, we'll try to get them everywhere, because that information, it's not like that information is everywhere except Japan, like nobody has that data. So if we can open that up and make that available for anybody, anywhere, then that's a good thing. And so that's sort of the plan. Yeah. So I guess my question is about... Can we do the wireless for questions so they show up on the... Yeah. So I don't really know what 9,000 units means. Right. How are you deciding to, I guess, educate people about what... What do those relative numbers mean and where is the lethal cutoff? Right. So that's a very important question and one that I am not qualified or prepared to answer. I'm not a nuclear scientist. I'm not a doctor. I don't want to get into where I'm making statements that I can't back up because I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. I can read a measurement and accurately say this says 20. I'm pretty sure that I'm right. That thing actually says 20, but what 20 means, what anything else means, I don't know. But a lot of people don't know and at least knowing some piece that you don't know is better than not knowing anything. And so we want to get that out there and then you want to point to other people who have made statements on it. So we're collecting universities who have made studies.  Oh, this is 300 times over that, probably a concern. I don't know what that means. Is that insurance? I don't know what that means specifically, but when those numbers are being crossed, that's something that people should be aware of. So then if we give them the data, then they can sort of make their own decision about how concerning they are or not or whatever. But at least they have the information and can do research and we're going to try to provide links to people who have done more research and know what they're doing. But I don't want to get into saying some number is safe or not because I don't know. On the set that you guys are building, is there a corollary customer app where people in Japan can install an app and they can see what the radiation reported in their area was? Well, yes sir, I mean that's on a separate thing. We're working on a couple of different mobile apps for different platforms and all sorts of things that will do that. One will show whatever the most recent stuff is from our map on our site that we've taken. There's a girl named Haiyan who is the lead data visualization at IDEO and she's doing all of our maps and all of our data and everything. So she's sort of taking all of this crazy amounts of numbers and making it make sense on a map for us and that should be together very shortly. Right now we just have a whole bunch of Google points which is a little overwhelming at times. So that should be a little more clear and then the mobile stuff should play into that as well. So you can sort of see where you're at and what's been pulled around you recently. But we're also opening, I mean we're putting all of the data, we're publishing it all with a CC0 designation. So it's open for anybody to do anything with at any point. So once it's out there and it's starting to be now, anybody can build any apps on top of it or they can reference it. They can do whatever they want with it as soon as it's out there. So there's nothing to stop anybody else from building those things at all. But every point of data has the actual measurement that measurement calculated into other common measurements. Latitude, longitude, altitude, which is something that's a big issue. So we realize that looking at this, so here's a good example of that. So me, so this thing, this guy that was being passed around, everybody saw. Putting it on here, it goes to 60. Putting it down here, it's at 70, 60, 78. Radiation particles are heavy, they fall down. So surfaces are always heavier, like more than what's above. The number that is here is going to be less than or more than it is out there. So we were able to find out that all the government readings that they're publishing are from six meters above the ground. So that's very, very different than ground level where kids are playing, which is the number that we were taking. So that the altitude of where the reading is actually taken is going to be part of the fee, as well as the device that was used, the tube, the sensor that's in it. All of these pieces are going to be in our data that everybody can build whatever on top of our reference and cross-reference. So you'll be able to take that feed and say, I don't want any of the readings that came from Russian salvage stuff. I only want to see stuff that's from these other sensors and then be able to take a look at what that is and then you'll be able to pull in other pieces and see what it looks like with that. Are you publishing your raw data or just like a service that people can do? Yeah, we're publishing the raw data. Yeah, we're publishing logs with all of it. And then we're creating an API for that that you can do everything on top of. Are you publishing that on GitHub? Yeah, we have some GitHub stuff right now. The problem is that we have AfterSpace in Tokyo, Developers in Portland, all these people, and they all have their favorite flavor of where to publish things and all this stuff that we're trying to sort of tie together with the majority of the people being volunteer, you know, like saying, don't use your favorite thing, use this other thing. People are like putting on my own thing. And so everybody's kind of doing their pieces and we're putting it together and trying to tie that up. Any other questions?