SLAPDASH - 60 MINUTES WITH DEVIL DAGGERS

Personally, I enjoy the aesthetic of the upcoming Doom game, set to release May.13.2016, and yes that's a Friday the 13th. Good one id Software, a bit campy but what else would you expect? The impression that the latest trailer left me with is that id Software is upholding the core values from the dawn of the Doom series. The original games, Doom, and Doom 2 focused on frantic circle strafing run and gun action in big open hell-scapes teaming with heaps of demons, big fuck off guns, flaming skulls and color coated key cards. As opposed to the bland corridor heavy space station shooter they gave us in Doom 3. The one constant being the oppressive atmosphere. In our current age of gaming, the Doom reboot looks like it could be a welcome change from the heavily scripted 'on rails' set piece shooters that clog the digital landscape and dominate much of the market. That being said, I cant help but wonder how it will be received by today’s gamers who grew up on COD and Battlefield. Simply put, developers aren't really making those shooters anymore. The FPS market has been dripping with carefully constructed blockbuster movie-esque titles for so long, the current generation of FPS players could very well balk at the simplistic, over the top style of game play that Doom is traditionally famous for. If only there were some way for the new breed of gamers to test the waters without having to dive in headfirst….

Enter Devil Daggers.

Devils daggers is a $5, “endless” first person shooter, set in a what is assumed to be a small infinite pitch black plane of someones own personal hell. I put quotation marks around 'endless' because no one has survived much past the 8 minute mark. It could have an ending, though I sincerely doubt it. And it doesn't really matter, as the goal is to stay alive as long as possible, and the average player (myself included) usually peaks at about 45-60 seconds for the first hour or two. Why so difficult? Well, the foes are as agitated as they are lethal, and much like a bad burrito from Chipotle, they can seal your fate quickly, with just one erroneous decision.

This shit was cutting edge in 1994!

Devil Daggers' core mechanic is circle-strafing fast paced first person shooting, and it feels incredibly fluid. This is due partly to the fact that the games engine and art design is very old school and strikingly similar to a higher resolution version of the original quake, albeit with slightly more complex visuals. This allows most PC's to easily run the game at 60+ frames per second, which is key, as everyone on the leader boards is theoretically on the same playing field regardless of the rig they have. Devil Daggers' descent into madness starts in a dark room with a lone dagger floating in front of you. Once you take hold of your basic weapon it multiplies, streams of red daggers spew from your hand, immediately plunging the user into dubious peril. The daggers can either be shot in short bursts, like a pump-action shotgun or can be spit out in a steady, viscous stream like shooting the Devils' sandblaster.

Evade Gismo's Kevin McKenzie demos Devil Daggers

As you begin to acclimate yourself to the oppresive surroundings, it becomes obvious you are walking on a small plane of stone or concrete, with a sudden drop-off around the edge that will send you plunging into dark nothingness with one misstep. Then, suddenly you hear a sound, it's coming from behind you – a gurgling, sinister spawning noise that could only mean that terrible is on its way. Abruptly, as you try to focus on the area the sound came from, a spire forms out of nowhere and releases a series of skulls and demon heads into the dark, and will continue to do so, until you erase it from existence by shooting at its rotating weak spot. Then another will form, and another and so on and so on. As time goes on things get more and more hectic with different enemies spawning in random locations at preset timestamps. The key to survival seems to be in directing your focus on the spawning spires, while at the same time managing the wave of floating skulls and demon heads chasing you down, but that knowledge itself will only get you so far. The game play feels as fluid as it looks, and you are always just a quick tap of the R key away from an instant retry, which really supports the “just one more game” feeling you are left with after any given run.

Certain enemies drop gems that power up your weapon when killed, allowing you to spit thicker, faster and more powerful streams of magical daggers as the frenzied action carries on. These power ups are very important not only to your progression past that elusive 60 second mark, but to your confidence as well. They will help you to dispose of the waves of enemies with greater ease, allowing you to free your focus to deal with more pertinent demonic apparitions. Like, say, the giant evil spider that sucks up your treasured power gems before you can get to them, or perhaps the twisted, flying Ogopogo-like entities that swoop through the air with equal parts grace and death lust... all while the super spires keep launching skulls for you to fend off … Yeah, she's a bitch, but its that kind of addictive action that keeps me in front of the screen for much longer than I originally intended to be. 

This game will have you seeing red.... often... 

If the early sales performance of Devil Daggers is any indication, the millennial crowd might just be interested in the style of game play after all. In its first 5 days, Devil Daggers has over 12,000 copies “sold” on steam through world of mouth alone. That's a strong start, especially in this day in age. Though difficult, this game is immensely rewarding in the same way that arcade shooters have been since the inception of the genre, with shooters like Robotron 2000 and Smash TV, with a wonderful first person twist. I can confidently say that Devil daggers is the love child of Doom, Quake and Geometry wars in the best possible way (video game relationships are complicated, okay?). And if that intrigues you, I suggest you pick it up.

Go to hell, have fun.

Devil daggers is out now on steam. 

Once you beat this score (you will) your better than me

----------------------------------------THIS JUST IN: TRISTAN BREAKS KEVINS SCORE!--------------------------------------------------

Sorry pal, i gotta say this game jacks my heart rate to an unhealthy level and i love it! It is as you said: very Intense and rewarding.

I guess i am better than Kevin...

Oh sheeit son! i did it again!

----------AND AGAIN! I'm not sure I can do that again though. So intense; had to calm down after this one. Hands were shaking a bit heh.  

VIRTUALLY 200 MILLION DEAD AND COUNTING...

I must confess, I am a murderer. No, I’m not a violent person by nature, quite the opposite. I work for the local Ambulance service part time. I care about people and their well-being for a living; very much. Treating symptoms, maintaining patient dignity and transporting them safely to the hospital is my primary concern. But when I get home from a hard days work, sometimes all I want to do is shoot something in the head and smash some dick-holes.

Loitering tends to lend itself to interesting conversation. One clear Spring, evening outside a local movie theater, I was speaking with some close friends after a particularly violent movie, ‘The Raid’ I think it was. “How many people do you think you’ve watched die in a movie?” I asked- reliving the darker moments of the movie. I noticed many furrowed brows at this question , “hrmmmm lots, I can’t count how many, thousands I guess, maybe hundreds of thousands!” This number surprised exactly none of us as we all nodded casually. “So how many people have you killed?”  I asked as a follow up question, this caused many more confused looks. ”Virtually I mean, how many people (or creatures) have you killed in your gaming career you think?” A good friend of mine replied with a wide and very inarticulate gesture. Palms up he guessed “uhhh, jesus, I dunno….probably millions.”

I do realize that the sensitive nature of this theme could easily regress into ‘game violence’ territory but I’m not going there, so lets just put that little baby to bed right now. My concern here is specifically with a ‘virtual death toll’ if you will. So how does one enumerate that? Lots of games like ‘The Last Of Us’, the ‘Call Of Duty’ franchise and many other first person shooters lately actually have that stat buried in the menu somewhere, it’ll usually say ‘Kills:’ and a number. But most games don’t count your dead so this will be an extremely rough calculation (and im being generous.) I’ll be using some artistic license with this math so please bear with me.

One night years ago when I was a young impressionable youth I was asked by the neighbours across the street to babysit there kids. When I showed up the little ones were already in bed and the father, ill call him Eric, was a massive computer nerd and was a programmer for ‘Reboot.’ He sat me in front of his computer and loaded up ‘Doom.’ When they arrived home some hours later I hadn’t left my seat I played that fucking game till my eyes were as red and pixelated as the eviscerated entrails of my fallen enemies. (I don’t even need to put up a screenshot  here I know you can see it in your minds eye right now, that’s how ubiquitous that game is.) So I was hooked, ravenous and thirsty for more, blood drunk you might say yet oddly satisfied and serene. I got my cool $15 bucks went home and slept like a baby.

But the first time I remember going “damn, I just murdered that guy” was in Metal Gear Solid for the PS1 (by this time i had plenty of ‘murder practice’ via the Sega Genesis, NES and SNES). At the dock in the beginning of the game after that epic opening sequence, where the first enemy is waiting. I clearly recall knocking on a wall, sneaking behind him and chocking him out until his little neck popped. Maybe this dude had a family back home? After that my virtual murdering career truly began.

I was going to exclude games from the Mario franchise because I thought that stomping a Goomba doesn’t really feel like your killing it. But that’s bullshit. I almost let the squishy-pop sound effects fool me. Beneath that Plumbers outfit and just behind the mustache lies an ice cold murdering psychopath, as calculating and remorseless as a contract killer. So I’m including Mario, and his whole damn family, as well as any game where you must (or choose to) eliminate an enemy. Just because Goombas guts didn’t blow out of its mouth and made a splat sound on the bricks when you stomped it doesn’t mean you didn’t erase the son of a bitch from existence. Very cleaver Miyamoto you almost fooled this one. I just want to include kills, where you have stomped, shot, stabbed, burned, poisoned, crushed, maimed or bombed an NPC or another player.

I’ve just spent about an hour doing some back of the napkin math for my career death count. I was going to do something like multiply my average games played per year with a reasonable average of kills per game (about 600) then multiply that by the number of years that I’ve been gaming which turns out to be about twenty-two-fucking-years! (omg what the hell have I been doing with my life) The final tally was something like 210,000. They say death in war is just a statistic. This number, I realized, was meaningless once I thought of a few unique cases.

In Mass Effect 3 there was an option to kill the entire Krogan race. This becomes a morally grey area, you didn’t actually physically kill them all but a choice had to be made for the greater good of the galaxy. The decision comes in the form of a cure for the Genophage. If you lie, which I did, and deny them the cure every Krogan in the universe become sterile. Effectively allowing the entire species to die out.Which is perverse. Being responsible for the Genocide of an entire race was unsettling and made me feel deeply ashamed of myself (for a time.) In fact I think there were several chances to do this; with the Rachni and with the Quarians. Im not sure of the numbers but  its safe to say they were in the tens of millions.

The final and by far the most obscene example I was reminded of was from a game from September of 2009 called ‘DEFCON.’ The subtitle of this game was ‘everybody dies’ or ‘the only way to win is not to play’ and it was a simulation I equated to the movie ‘War Games’ with a very young Matthew Broderick from 1983. (huh, my spell checker knew how to spell Broderick!?) In the game you are playing on a world map, you choose a country to defend, and the point of the thing is to intercept nuclear weapons and launch your own offensive. The most disconcerting aspect of the game is the dream like aesthetic. The deep neon colours, slow pace and depressing music accumulate to what I can say is a surreal experience. An average game gave me an absurd death toll of about 60,000,000 dead. I must have played 10 or so games since I got it. The death toll when I hover my cursor over  Mexico City says ‘13 million dead’ in a handsome and authoritative type font. Funny enough just seeing this number makes me feel much worse than if I shot someone personally. I quietly reflected on the lives lost before I high fived my buddy for dropping a 50 kiloton dick smasher on Moscow.

So I’m a killer, I suffer no consequence but that which occurs within the game itself. I die then I come back to life or I quit the game as I see fit. The remorse I feel is minimal. If I quantified my remorse as a percentage I would say my remorse level for any given kill count in a game is hovering around %6. That’s being generous, without real life consequence how can I feel bad about killing something? Im not there, I don’t know these people or non-people and they’ve been put here (usually) for me to dispatch as I see fit. The biggest joke here is that it’s not even free! We’re not forced at all to do this, shit man, we even pay just to be given the privilege of simulated murder. This is not conditioned reinforcement, I don’t drool or get a hard on when I see blood. I celebrate my victories shake off the shred of remorse I felt and go back to reality . Virtual murder, for me is the guise of therapy. Recently my lovely wife and I were eating dinner I guess I looked frustrated because she looked at me with those big green eyes and said to me ‘You need to relax baby, you should go upstairs to your man cave and kill something.’ And you know what I DID.

That same night outside the theatre I asked “how many people have you saved or brought back from the dead?” “including  necromancy?” another friend chimed in. “Sure necromancy counts.” I replied. “…..not as many as I’ve killed.”  he says with a smile on his face.

Tristan Mowat

Kills: 217,000,000 and counting…