TwistedPear

Hopefully it won't take five or six years between showing a prototype and production as it was with the Saturn Pro controller.

After six months of study, practice, and refinement, I finished Primal Rage at the maximum difficulty without any damage to health.

The run starts at 33:12

As someone whose earliest exposure to Doom was on console, and possibly one of the bottom two or three versions of the game at that, this romhack blows me away. Modders went out of their way to actually make this version playable. Not only playable, but damn good. It adds Deathmatch / Coop, all the maps, new ost, new sprites, the works. It's basically a new game.

If you have never played Doom on the Sega 32X, let me fill you in. This was meant to be a launch title, and there was precious little time to get it up and running. New system + rushed development + small dev team = 32X Doom. All the sprites face forward, even rockets - so you're essentially shooting rockets backwards. The music sounds a bit like the day after Taco Bell. The game is missing most of the maps. And my favorite - the end credits sequence dumps you into a fake DOS prompt. (It displays C:\DOOM that you cannot interact with in any way). That is why Doom 32X Resurrection is such a crazy romhack. The amount of improvement is remarkable. I can't imagine how much better it would have reviewed and sold if this is how it released.

Just like Quake 1, if you already own Quake 2, the enhanced version is available as a free update. Although unlike Quake 1, Quake 2: Enhanced is also available on GOG day 1.

In addition to visual updates, there's a new episode "Call of the Machine", Quake 2 N64, a pass to the enemy AI which changes a few behaviors and attacks, removes machine gun recoil, a new infinite use item that shows the player where to go next, and a number of other qol and accessibility options.

Anecdotally, I find the addition of Q2 N64 very appealing. It's a mish-mash of pared-down maps from vanilla Q2 and the expansions in a strictly linear fashion - no backtracking. Of course, there's also changes to the lighting and a new OST by Aubrey Hodges. Being able to control the game from keyboard / mouse is a godsend. I played the game in emulator with a modern gamepad and it was barely, barely doable, even when I could manually set deadzones and sensitivities and the like. It was awful.

Announced at EVO, Killer Instinct is getting a new balance pass, improvements to online, and more.

(Here's hoping those changes are coming to the PC version as well)

If you own a genuine Primal Rage PCB, you can flash the program and MO roms to update it to the final version of the game that only released in Japan.

Changes in this version include some alterations to a few AIs (mostly Sauron and Chaos), and separating out the Start button from the other four attacks; but the biggest changes go to special and finishing move inputs.

Specials that previously needed three buttons have come down to just one; inputs that required the Up direction have also been changed, and the 'Eat a Human' move that was unique is now a universal input. What all this means is the game can be played conventionally as opposed to the negative edge specials that it's known for.

You can try it out in MAME under primrage.zip, and if you want to do it for real, you'll need an EPROM programmer, an eraser (in case something screws up), some spare chips by Texas Instruments, and a pc.

I've been working on a retro challenge since about April this year of trying to beat Primal Rage (Arcade pcb) at max difficulty without taking damage.

I'm nearly there, but for now my best is 13 out of 14 perfect rounds and a few hits during the Final Battle re-fights.

On its face, the challenge sounds crazy - but the thing to remember is the game doesn't have some complex AI that learns about you as you play. No. It has a bank of patterns it uses, and straight up just reads your inputs to determine a response. If you know how the AI will respond, you know how to counter. Play for about twelve minutes without dropping a combo, mistiming a jump, or miss a special even once /ever/, and you have yourself a perfect game. Easy, right :p

I'm stalled right now until I can upgrade / replace my supergun over the next month-ish, but I hope to complete the challenge by the end of the year.

Ways to play Doom64 outside of an actual N64 or emulation has been pretty scarce up until now, and it's a huge shame.

There was a slow trickle starting with SVKaiser's Absolution TC, and Doom 64 EX, but we actually have choices now:

Experiment at your discretion. They're all fun. Most of them rely on the Nightdive Doom64.wad from GOG or Steam, some are still fine with doing a tc of Doom II.

Doom 64 EX + by ATSB.

Doom 64 Super EX Plus by styd051 (for custom monster and extended map support)

Doom CE by molecicco. A modernized approach to both PSX and Doom 64. There's even a bizarre add-on mod that combines them.

Doom 64: Retribution by Nevander

Brutal Doom 64 by Sgt Mark IV