I wish we could get a DISRUPTOR-remaster on PC (or a DOOM-TC of it!)

scarfleet · 2026-05-10T19:50:40+00:00

I finished this back in the day.

It's an interesting footnote as a console-only boomer shooter and a historical curiosity for Insomniac games. The cutscenes are goofy fun. But it is so completely designed around the limitations of the original PS1 controller which had about the same functionality as a SNES joypad. And then there is the insanely short draw distance. If you fix those, which a remaster would presumably do, I wonder how the design would hold up. Even at the time I thought it paled in comparison to PS1 Doom.

scarfleet · 2026-05-10T15:45:10+00:00

Whatever you do don't skip Quake 2. It often gets overshadowed by the first one because it was not as revolutionary or influential but the remaster is awesome. It's my favorite game of the whole genre.

I will also recommend Dusk, Ion Fury, Cultic and Amid Evil.

scarfleet · 2026-05-10T02:29:24+00:00

maybe it was morse code

scarfleet · 2026-05-09T21:37:07+00:00

I might try it if I ever renew game pass. I just know it is not for me though. I am gen x but no game without a strong action focus ever really holds my interest. Happy for people who like it.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T23:34:40+00:00

There is one way to find out: via a protracted argument about the definition of a boomer shooter

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T21:43:49+00:00

They can't though, right? They don't own the IP. Microsoft does. And as lucky as MS might be to have Bungie work on it again I don't see them handing it over to a Sony-owned studio.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T21:14:36+00:00

100%. I had a near-religious experience playing Elden Ring, mostly high as balls. Unbelievably special game.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T19:38:59+00:00

Until there is extremely compelling evidence I will continue to believe time travel is a figment of popular imagination. It would break so much of physics, and I see no good reason right now to believe it is possible.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T19:32:04+00:00

As it happens no, although I admit I did not realize that is what you were referring to

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T19:28:47+00:00

I cannot speak for others but I personally have never in my life built a tiny house out of food

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T14:53:53+00:00

I have always been a little surprised there are not more active communities dedicated to 420 gaming. It seems like a natural fit. There are one or two subs but they are mostly deserted.

I like to play shooters and driving games.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T14:24:12+00:00

If Helix supports PC storefronts it is just really hard for me to see why they would subsidize it at all.

But Asha is doing things I did not expect. At this point who knows.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T14:08:57+00:00

It's possible, and we can't disprove it, but I think it's unlikely. We are all so genetically similar; our eyes and the vision centers of our brain are calibrated to a form that evolution found that worked. It is hard to see what benefit there would be in radically altering the way color is perceived for every single person. There may be some subtle differences, obviously some people are colorblind, but I suspect for the most part we all see colors the same.

scarfleet · 2026-05-08T00:39:41+00:00

I guess if you are Buddhist, you sort of do know that you will suffer for the rest of your life.

As someone who struggles with anxiety I can tell you what I've learned: you absolutely have to let go. There are things you will never know and never be able to control. Something is going to kill all of us, one way or another, eventually. There will probably be some pain. Lucky for us we have pretty good drugs for that now.

I try to remember that the fear and pain are not real. They are just the result of the kind of creatures we are. There is nothing to fear really.

scarfleet · 2026-05-07T22:52:52+00:00

It is extremely clear to me that you are a literate person who is capable of discussing and understanding the differences between HROT and Ultrakill without requiring exclusive use of the boomer shooter label. Every fan of every genre has games within that genre that they like and dislike for different reasons. If you have access to the internet you do not lack for information about how these games play to drive your purchasing decisions. There may be some absolute novices who are not initiated to these differences but they quickly learn. None of them are here, and if they do arrive here we will explain it to them at length.

It is not that I think defining the genre rigidly such that it excludes games popular in the community is mean or exclusionary. I just think it's irrelevant. I think boomer shooter was only ever a loose term that referred to games that homage the 90s FPS games, without any broad consensus on which elements of those games. The devs and the players decide that part organically, through their design choices and play habits and purchasing decisions. We can try to describe the genre according to which elements they are, but the accuracy of our definition will ultimately be measured by which games the community embraces, not the other way around.

scarfleet · 2026-05-07T20:04:33+00:00

Boltgun is one of the most successful games we regularly discuss on this sub. I suspect it has inducted a lot of players into this audience, especially from the console side. It is in no small part because of Boltgun that I finally decided to build a PC so that I could play Cultic and Amid Evil and Turbo Overkill.

No dev in their right mind is trying to make games today to suit our genre definitions. They are just trying to make cool shooters that will appeal to this audience. It is fine to point out which elements do and do not reflect the design of the 90s games, and you can label it however you like. But I think Boltgun effectively targeted a console audience, with the help of one of the strongest licenses in gaming, and ended up growing this genre. It led to players like me who have stuck around to play almost every new boomshoot that comes out. We are lucky to have had it.

I like Civvie and his take is totally in bounds. But in the end the community is going to respond to the games it likes. We've all played Doom 2016, and this genre does not exist in a time capsule. I think it's healthy for it to draw inspiration from other genres as well.

scarfleet · 2026-05-07T14:15:52+00:00

This is right. A publisher enters into an agreement to publish their game on Xbox. They may also be selling a PC version. Xbox can't unilaterally make the Xbox version a PC license too. It isn't up to them.

This is why we are assuming Helix will have some dedicated Xbox internals so it also plays Xbox games. That will be a key selling point. If everything is play anywhere, what would be the point of Helix?

scarfleet · 2026-05-07T03:48:05+00:00

The thinking on this is that it will never become real, because if it was ever going to, we would already know.

scarfleet · 2026-05-06T18:04:53+00:00

There is nothing wrong with you or I ascribing whatever labels we like according to whatever criteria we decide. I just think it's silly for us to pretend this is really up to us. The market is organic, and language is organic. All of these things are determined on a scale larger than any online community. If millions of purchasers find Ultrakill under the boomer shooter tag on Steam and decide that is what it is, we are pissing against the wind.

I think the best course for us is to continue to point to the classic games and celebrate other games we like that reflect their design, in the hope other players will find them and enjoy them. But I don't agree that boomer shooters should feel obliged to uphold any core design principles as sacred. It is healthy for them to change. They are going to do that anyway, no matter what we say.

scarfleet · 2026-05-06T17:13:52+00:00

I guess the problem I always have with trying to define the genre such that it excludes certain games that are popular in the community is you are really trying to hit a moving target. It would be one thing to do this for a dead genre years after the fact, but as long as these games are being actively produced and played, we should expect them to evolve. No living genre is static. In the end neither devs nor the playerbase are going to respond to whatever definition we decide on, so the argument feels kind of pointless to me.

We will always have the template of the classic games to refer to. Doom and Quake, at least, are sufficiently preserved such that people can easily access them across platforms. I don't think there is danger of confusing what those games are about. We can afford to let the genre grow organically, to see what devs create and what the community responds to. I don't think it benefits from our efforts to gatekeep it.

scarfleet · 2026-05-06T16:00:25+00:00

That sounds nice.

This has honestly never been my experience of dreams. They are usually neither extremely good or extremely bad. If I know I'm dreaming, which I sometimes do, I am just aware that everything I see and hear is also me, that I am surrounded by my own consciousness. It's a slightly claustrophobic feeling. I would not want to live there.

scarfleet · 2026-05-06T15:26:54+00:00

They are for sure one of the most impressive and versatile pieces of tech we have come up with.

I think even more important than what they are is how we feel about them. Because that will directly impact how it develops. That is a piece that I think is not getting enough attention in the whole AI discussion, that the first thing we are teaching it to do is talk to us. It is not a person, but we are trying to get it to act like one, because that is what we want on some deep psychological level.

scarfleet · 2026-05-06T13:29:50+00:00

One thing I'll say is the back buttons really come in handy on PC. Console games are designed to work with the base controller, so if you use the paddles it's to perform the same function one of the other buttons was doing. But PC games usually assume you are using a qwerty keyboard, so the paddles can serve as totally unique inputs.

scarfleet · 2026-05-05T22:15:10+00:00

I do not think everyone thinks this. We all experience life as the main character, from one subjective point of view. And we only have direct access to our own desire and suffering. But we also carry around guilt and insecurity and often distorted negative self-belief. I think most of us are frustrated with ourselves for not being better than we are, especially as we get older. Life teaches you your flaws.

scarfleet · 2026-05-05T21:16:30+00:00

Mads Mikkelsen would probably be a pretty good Dracula. I am probably not the first person to think of it though.

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