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Doom Eternal review: "Screams at you to move faster and to fight harder, and you can do nothing but obey" – GamesRadar+ AU

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Doom Eternal is at its best when it is screaming at you to move faster. As it thrusts the tools to single-handedly eviscerate the rampaging spawn of hell into your clenched, blood-drenched fists –  an array of finely-tuned weapons designed to deliver mass-demon-destruction. When you’re up to your ankles in viscera, blasting chunks of flesh from foe while the hum of the chainsaw warms your trigger fingers. As it sets its hyper-kinetic action to a cacophonic soundscape of blood, bullets, and heavy fucking metal

Doom Eternal screams at you to move faster and to fight harder and you can do nothing but obey. Not because you have become subservient to the altar of id Software, but because the cadence of Doom’s combat has demanded nothing less of you for more than three decades. 

Fast Facts: Doom Eternal

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(Image credit: Bethesda)

Release date: March 20, 2020
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Developer: id Software
Publisher: Bethesda

Much like its predecessors, Doom Eternal is a hammer-horror pantomime in which you are made an active participant. It is an elaborate and self-indulgent production, its violence so over the top that you can’t help but smile as it spills out over the stage and under your feet. It’s an utterly ridiculous and strangely endearing showing, warping your suspension of disbelief so extensively that you’ll wonder whether you’ve crossed over to another dimension – to a world where the first-person shooter followed the archaic directions first outlined by Doom in 1993 without question instead of turning toward the teachings of Half-Life. 

The problem with this stage show is that the screaming has to stop sometime. The director is hoarse and is begging you to enjoy an intermission from the action. The bullet casings need to be collected, they tell you; the buckets of blood need to be refilled, the gore mopped up, and the guitars tuned back down to D. The cast of cannon fodder needs to take a breather as the next hellish stage is reset somewhere out of sight. You were moving too fast, and there’s still a little story left to shout into your face. 

Doom Eternal is at its worst when it makes you slow down; it struggles to settle in silence. 

Feeling a need for speed

(Image credit: Bethesda)

I can count the number of first-person shooters that can function competently as platformers on one hand, and Doom Eternal is not among them. Developer id Software has found itself caught, by attempting to straddle the line between inducing nostalgia and embracing evolution it has disrupted the conditions in which Doom (2016) was able to so effortlessly thrive. 

Doom Eternal routinely breaks the pace of its action by forcing you to stiffly navigate towering spaces at regular intervals. You’ll do this by swinging imprecisely between monkey bars, scaling bland craggy walls, bouncing off of unstable platforms, dashing between spacious maws of death, and double-jumping to ledges with slippery collision detection. Doom’s movement systems are tightly refined, designed to keep your crosshairs focused on fast-moving enemies amongst a backdrop of colourful chaos. These systems struggle when you’re pushed to slowly and methodically scale the environment with little room for error to reach the next combat arena. 

It’s levels like Doom Hunter Base, Super Gore Nest, and Mars Core that make up the bulk of the mid-game that are hit hardest by this design decision. These spaces are larger and more ambitious than anything the studio has committed to before with Doom, and they struggle to maintain momentum. 

(Image credit: Bethesda)

“As a prerequisite to progression, platforming only serves to introduce points of friction in an otherwise frictionless experience.”

First-person platforming just about works for Doom when it is an optional extravagance – when you’re off exploring for the myriad of optional collectable scattered throughout each of the missions – but as a prerequisite to progression they only serve to introduce points of friction in an otherwise frictionless experience. 

By the time underwater sections were introduced – slowing you down even further, with the added annoyance of mitigating radioactive damage thrown in for good measure – it starts to become difficult to resist the urge to put the controller down and walk away entirely. That all said, it’s difficult to indulge in these tendencies when you’re faced with the prospect of coming across another sensationally-realised vista or the opportunity to shove the Super Shotgun double-barrel deep into the throat of a Baron of Hell.  

That’s where Doom Eternal feels right, revelling in ultra-violence across some impossibly beautiful environments. The game has built on the core loop that helped propel its predecessor from mere revival-project to genuine revolution, its central gimmick always working to keep players moving and – critically – engaging with enemies. 

Embracing aggression

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Glory Kills are still the star of the combat experience. Pumping enemies with enough bullets to reach a damage threshold will make them glow, indicating that you can do some graphic combination of: decapitation / goring / smashing / bashing / slicing / knifing / ripping / tearing (delete as necessary). These melee executions aren’t just for show, they serve as your primary method of retrieving health. 

It encourages you to play Doom Eternal the way id wants you to play it. The studio wants you to be moving and shooting as quickly as you can, giving as much aggression back to the hulking monsters as they give to you. To succeed in Doom Eternal – especially once you begin to whip through the difficulty levels – you must get in the face of enemies and never back away from a tough encounter; there’s no faster way to meet your maker than to engage in a half-hearted retreat, with victory earned by engaging with the relentless pace of the action on its own terms – backing off is never an option, carrying through with forward momentum towards piles of ammunition, red barrels, and, yes, fresh enemies to rip and tear through is the key to victory. 

If you aren’t in need of health, you’ll find that your Chainsaw can be used to chew through foes and retrieve ammunition, which is always in short supply. Your flame belch, a shoulder-mounted flamethrower, can burn enemies and deliver armour plating when shot, while Glory Kills also charge up your ability to deliver a devastating Blood Punch which eviscerates just about anything within your immediate cone of vision.  All in all, it’s a killer cycle that only helps propel Doom Eternal’s core combat to new heights.  

Speaking of the core combat, it’s been a long-standing rule that you judge an id shooter on the strength of its shotguns. Unsurprisingly, the studio has taken its penchant for building the best boomsticks in video games and outdone itself. The Super Shotgun is impossible to put away; it screams power with every shot, its weight and staggering punch as satisfying to use the opening hours of the game to the last.

Weapons have always been at the heart of Doom, and Eternal is no slouch in this regard. You’ll also find that each of the firearms can once again be upgraded throughout the game with Weapon Points, earned by completing in-mission objectives and chaos thresholds. Most weapons have two available modifications, each of which can be switched up with a simple button press, and offer an array of utterly ridiculous additional ways to turn demons to pulp. Exploring the environments will also help you earn Sentinel Crystals and Praetor Suit points which can be used to upgrade your armour, improving its utility and resistance, or upgrading your health, armour, and ammo capacities.  

A celebration of ultra-violence

(Image credit: Bethesda)

You’ll want to invest in these upgrades and improvements early on, because Doom Eternal isn’t afraid to beat your head against the wall until it’s a pulpy mess. By the late game, Doom Eternal gets brutal, really pushing you to utilise all of your available abilities and weapons to get through its combat arenas in one piece. 

For the most part, Doom Eternal casts its action in locked-off combat arenas, pushing you to skirt through them at speed looking for the most violent lines of none-stop navigation. These spaces aren’t as tightly designed as the ones featured in Doom (2016), which I believe is down to the increased verticality – id is desperate to get you utilising its first-person platforming systems, even in the middle of frantic fights – but they are still great to engage enemies in. 

That said, Doom Eternal does suffer because of some of its enemy design. The game is structured around escalating encounters – it introduces you to an enemy type on its own, lets you figure out the hook to slaying it, and then continues to throw a litany of them at you once. It’s a potent design that keeps Doom Eternal feeling frantic at all times, with the game’s aggressive and persistent AI ensuring that some of these creatures combine tactics to overwhelm you in some truly terrifying ways.  

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Combat arenas are usually a mixture of Heavy Cannon fodder – foes that can be quickly chewed up or smashed down for an easy burst of ammo or health – and larger, more punishing enemies that’ll take a few runs around the arena to drop. This structure maintains momentum, and the relentless pace that the core ethos that the game is built on. Until it makes you slow down. 

Boss battles with health bars were a blight on Doom (2016), and while that isn’t so much of a problem here, there are a handful of enemy types that bring play screeching to a halt. For Doom Eternal to work, it has to have you managing your time between multiple enemy types and constantly leaving you on the verge of being totally overwhelmed, constantly asking you to push your understanding of the movement and combat mechanics to the max. And in comes a Marauder (a brand new demon designed for Eternal) or a returning Archvile, Super Heavy enemies that are generally no fun to fight. The Marauder, in particular, only works to slow combat to a crawl. It’s an enemy type designed inherently for one-versus-one encounters, and it doesn’t work in the controlled chaos of the wider combat experience. 

Still, that’s a small annoyance in an otherwise blistering FPS. If you can bite your lip and endure some routinely frustrating levels built around platforming, then you’re going to have one hell of a good time with Doom Eternal. It’s a fast, smart, and frantic shooter that seems to find real delight in testing your endurance. It’s an outrageous and ridiculous pantomime where you are bound by blood to the unrelenting cadence of the action. 

Doom Eternal was reviewed on Xbox One X

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Ask Andy: How can you tell whether a startup is a good place to work? When is it safe to disclose a mental-health challenge to coworkers? – Yahoo Canada Finance

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of Ask Andy. In this biweekly column, Andy Dunn—the founding CEO of Bonobos and Pie—offers advice on leading teams, building things, and surviving the startup life. Got a question for Andy? Ask it here.

***

As a software developer who would like to work for a startup, what should I look for in a company so that I know it’s legit? If I am putting a lot of work into a product, I want to know that at minimum it’s for a legitimate company and founder—not just another person with an overdone app idea that knows nothing about the tech world. Sarah C.

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If you’re learning the startup game, the best bet here is to go later-stage. Focus on a pre-IPO company that is growing quickly, has raised money from blue-chip investors, and is getting positive buzz in the market that it will go public within the next two years.

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Then, don’t believe any of it.

Network your way into three of the company’s team members on LinkedIn or through your network. Have three virtual or IRL coffees. Have them tell you about the culture: If they’re learning; if the company’s really growing; and most importantly, whether or not they respect and, ideally, admire the leadership.

Keep looking until you find this vetted opportunity.

That’s a systematic, rational approach. But that’s not the only way to go. You could throw it all out the window.

Find a company where you believe in the mission. One where you fall in love with the product or service. You might already be a high LTV customer or a power user. Check your credit card statement and your app home screen to source ideas. Your passion for the mission will make it work for you for some time, even if the company doesn’t work in the long run.

However you get there, once you’re inside for a year or two, you’ll be learning.

You may have to switch horses. That’s okay.

When you do, you’ll know more people, you’ll have more insight, and the path on what to pick next will be clearer. Heck, you might even notice an inflection point and meet a cofounder that leads to you starting a company yourself.

It’s like dating.

You probably won’t marry your first love—but you might. If you don’t, your judgment will iteratively improve. And the good news is unlike a marriage, you can change out your partner every few years. (What I’ve found, though, is that the most successful people professionally, and those who generate the most wealth, have more like 5- to 10-year runs.)

Trust your intuition. Follow your heart on the mission or product. Then, don’t trust yourself.  Study the market. Use the product.  And do at least three off-list references outside of who you interview with. Read every single Glassdoor entry.

And then jump!

You’ll be fine.

Do you think you could have shared your mental health conditions publicly BEFORE you were professionally successful, and still have been successful? Or was the fact that you had already achieved professional success what allowed you to be open? Zack

No, I don’t think I could have shared before we succeeded. I wouldn’t have had the courage to, and I feared it might be career-limiting.

Then again, it was almost seven years ago that I had my I-can’t-deny-this-any-longer moment with my Bonobos colleagues and investors. As of today, I think it’s becoming more possible to be candid about mental health. I hope we can move to a world where I could have been more open, sooner, at least selectively with my leadership team and board.

Some entrepreneurs ask me when to tell their VCs about the mental-health challenge or mental-health diagnosis they wrestle with. I always say the same thing: at a breakfast meeting, four months after you’ve closed the round and hit your numbers. Nobody cares about your neurodivergence if you’re performing—and most VCs actually know enough to know that most founders have more going on than meets the eye.

With your team, I think it’s doable, even now. Perhaps especially now. The truth is, they know. They know you deal with stuff because they’re around you. And the vulnerability you share in disclosing will multiply their respect for you. More importantly, it’ll give those team members the space to reciprocally share their stuff with their colleagues, and potentially you as well, and bring their full selves to work.

Wouldn’t that be cool?

Andy Dunn is the founding CEO of Bonobos and Pie and the author of Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Take-Two Buys Gearbox And Its New ‘Borderlands’ Game From Embracer – Forbes

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If you’re a game developer owned by Embracer Group at this point, you are nervous about layoffs, shutdowns or game cancellations after the last few years. But now, there is a somewhat happy ending for one of them, Gearbox.

It’s just been announced that Take-Two, which owns GTA developer Rockstar, will purchase Gearbox for $460 million. This also includes the properties Gearbox owns, the Borderlands and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands franchises, Homeworld, Risk of Rain, Brothers in Arms and Duke Nukem. The report says Gearbox has six games in development, five sequels, including a new Borderlands game, the not-announced-but-definitely-happening Borderlands 4. Here’s Strauss Zelnick:

“Our acquisition of Gearbox is an exciting moment for Take-Two and will strengthen our industry-leading creative talent and portfolio of owned intellectual property, including the iconic Borderlands franchise,” said Zelnick, Chairman and CEO of Take-Two. “This combination enhances the financial profile of our existing projects with Gearbox and unlocks the opportunity for us to drive increased long-term growth by leveraging the full resources of Take-Two across all of Gearbox’s exciting initiatives.”

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Gearbox has been working with 2K and Take-Two for decades, so it was a logical place for them to land. This is, of course, not a great look for Embracer, who only purchased Gearbox three years ago. The price tag back then was “worth up to $1.3 billion” but there were a lot of strings attached to that where it’s not necessarily the case that selling for $$460 million netted them a ~$900 million loss.

As for what this means for gamers, it would seem something like the Borderlands franchise is now on more stable ground, as it was hard to believe any project at Embracer is fully safe these days. Last year, Embracer quietly cancelled 29 different unannounced games and shut down seven studios in a six month period including Volition and Free Radical Design. That came with around 1,400 layoffs. More recently, Embracer laid off 97 people at Eidos in Janaury and cancelled a Deus Ex game.

Sufficed to say, those at Gearbox probably feel pretty good about this. And as for Take-Two, Borderlands is still a valuable IP, and Tiny Tina’s Wonderland was a surprise hit. There’s a new Homeworld game coming as well. In an era for multi-billion dollar acquisition, Gearbox for $460 million doesn’t seem that bad. That’s probably a third of what GTA 6 will sell on day one next year.

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What's Brewing in the iPhone 16 Rumor Mill? AI, Action Buttons and More – CNET

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As the iPhone 15 settles into the market, the tech community is buzzing with anticipation for Apple’s next-generation handset, which is expected to be named “iPhone 16.” 

We’ve heard whispers about the iPhone 16’s features, which are said to span from a new power-efficient display to larger screens, better zoom lenses, an action button and, perhaps not surprisingly, a suite of new gen-AI powered features.

Read more: Best iPhone of 2024

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However, the iPhone 16 is still presumably six months away and nothing will be confirmed until Apple’s iPhone event in the fall. Still, these rumors could give us an idea of what to expect from the next iPhone.

Here are the most credible rumors for the iPhone 16.

Will the iPhone 16 fold?

Probably not. The newest rumors suggest Apple has been working on iPhone Flip models in two different sizes, though there have been difficulties in making the devices to Apple’s standards. The company may also be working on a folding tablet with a screen around the size of an iPad Mini. Even though virtually every major phone-maker — from Google to Oppo to OnePlus and Samsung — have launched their own bendable handsets, Apple has been characteristically quiet about whether there will ever be an iPhone Flip or an iPhone Fold.

Prior rumors said Apple may not launch its own flexible screen device until 2025. Samsung hasn’t let phone fans forget it — by releasing an app that will let Apple phone owners experience a Z Fold-esque experience by placing two iPhones side-by-side.

iPhone 16 Pro models to get bigger screens?

Apple has maintained the two screen sizes for iPhone Pro models since 2020 when it launched the 6.1-inch iPhone 12 Pro and the 6.7-inch iPhone 12 Pro Max. However, that’s rumored to change with the iPhone 16 Pro models, which might get bigger screens.

Display analyst Ross Young suggested earlier this year that the iPhone 16 Pro models will have larger screens, putting the sizes at 6.3 inches for the iPhone 16 Pro and 6.9 inches for the iPhone 16 Pro Max. That rumor was later corroborated by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, who said the iPhone 16 Pro models could grow by “a couple tenths of an inch diagonally.”

The iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus models are believed to be sticking with the current 6.1-inch and 6.7-inch sizes. If the size increase is accurate, it would be yet another move from Apple to distinguish its Pro iPhone models from its regular ones.

iPhone 15 screen sizes

  • iPhone 15: 6.1 inches.
  • iPhone 15 Plus: 6.7 inches.
  • iPhone 15 Pro: 6.1 inches.
  • iPhone 15 Pro Max: 6.7 inches.

Rumored iPhone 16 screen sizes

  • iPhone 16: 6.1 inches.
  • iPhone 16 Plus: 6.7 inches.
  • iPhone 16 Pro: 6.3 inches.
  • iPhone 16 Pro Max: 6.9 inches.

iPhone 16 gets more AI tricks

One of the most salient selling points of Samsung’s Galaxy S24 series and Google’s Pixel 8 lineup were each of their souped-up AI tips and tricks, and it wouldn’t be a major shock if Apple went in the same direction. Apple CEO Tim Cook has gone on the record this year confirming Apple sees “a huge opportunity for Apple with gen AI and AI.”

According to Gurman’s Power On newsletter, iOS 18 will feature generative AI technology that “should improve how both Siri and the Messages app can field questions and auto-complete sentences.”

A September report from the Information says Apple plans to use large language models, a crucial part of generative AI, to make Siri smarter. The report said this feature is expected to be released with an iPhone software update next year. 

Read More: iPhone iOS 18: A Possible Big Leap In AI

iPhone 16 design: New action button?

In March, AppleInsider published a collection of photographs purportedly displaying 3D-printed dummy models of the rumored iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro. The images revealed that the iPhone 16 may have a vertical camera stack as opposed to a diagonal one and an action button, similar the one on last year’s iPhone 15 Pro.

iPhone 16 gets more power-efficient display?

Another change that could make its way to iPhone 16 displays is greater power efficiency. Samsung Display is apparently developing a new material set, dubbed M14, specifically for Apple, according to a TheElec report, which says the new technology should arrive on iPhones launching next year. M14 will replace the blue fluorescent technology that’s used now with blue phosphorescence technology, creating an even more power-efficient screen than the current LTPO ones used on Pro models, the report says.

Andrew Lanxon/CNET

iPhone 16 gets better zoom?

Both the iPhone 16 Pro and the iPhone 16 Pro Max could both have 5x telephoto lenses next year. According to Apple analyst Ming Chi Kuo, a tetraprism lens will make its way to both Pro models next year, as opposed to just the Pro Max model. Apple equipped the iPhone 15 Pro with a 12-megapixel 3x optical zoom, while the iPhone 15 Pro Max has a 12-megapixel 5x optical zoom camera, which is the equivalent of 120mm lens on a full-frame camera.

If this rumor is true, it could mark a breakthrough in design. When Apple launched the 15 Pro Max with its 5x telephoto lens, it cited the phone’s bigger body as to why the Pro Max had it, but the Pro didn’t.

iPhone 16 processors: A18 chip for all models?

In a break with the past two years, all four iPhone 16 models will apparently get a next-generation Apple chipset, which will all receive A18 branding. According to a MacRumors report citing Jeff Pu, an executive analyst for Haitong International Securities, all four models will have an A18 series chip with Pro iPhone models getting an A18 Bionic Pro and base models getting a regular A18.

The iPhone 15 and 15 Plus currently have an A16 Bionic, which debuted on the 2022 iPhone 14 Pro and 14 Pro Max, while the 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max run on the A17 Pro processor. Pu says the A18 chip will be manufactured with TSMC’s cutting-edge 3 nanometer process.

Read more: Apple iPhone SE 4 Rumors: iPhone 14 Design, Face ID and More



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