one of my favorite little details of the original Doom games, for some reason, is the big floppy disk icon that flashed in the bottom-right corner as the hard disk did stuff

it's not actually in gzdoom. not sure about chocolate, i'll have to look for it next time. running off an SSD tho :X #mastodoom

i think part of it is it's a nostalgic reminder of when this game was very high-end. even on our pentium 90 in 1995 the framerate would dip below 35 (the max) at times

i've never quite been able to untangle why (for lack of a better term) the technological impressiveness of a given game has contributed to my enjoyment

i'm rarely impresssed these days, but back then it was Very Cool when a game busted out some novel effect or hit a level of fidelity rarely seen on its hardware

and to play something on the then cutting edge felt... invigorating somehow. maybe it was just the novelty, which is gone now since most tech is Good Enough to render pretty scenes

everything is pretty, so nothing is pretty

perhaps in response we're seeing a lot of games that intetionally adopt visual/tech constraints, such as low poly counts or chunky pixels, as a way to stake out a unique visual identity

instead of getting lost amid the same-same 3D productions that are choking the market they make up the difference by combining carefully chosen constraints with sharp art direction

ofc that's also a function of budgets; small teams literally can't afford to chase the "AAA" look

guess it's another case of constraints fostering creative responses, just like in the old days