Month: March 2020

I remember a lot of things about the summer of 1991 (like sneaking into the theater to watch Don't Tell Mom the Babysitter's Dead because my parents absolutely did not approve of movies that so clearly showed teenage disrespect for authority), but the thing I remember most about that summer is spending countless sun-dappled afternoon hours staring at a rotoscoped little dude on my computer screen as he died a million deaths. Sometimes he'd fall. Sometimes he'd be impaled by spikes. Sometimes he'd be chomped in half by giant steel jaws. And sometimes he'd collapse into a bleeding pile after crossing swords with pixellated bad guys.

It was, for me, the summer of Prince of Persia—and I was completely entranced.

Created by Jordan Mechner a couple of years earlier in 1989 for the Apple II, the MS-DOS port of PoP came thundering onto shelves near the end of 1990, just as the Apple II platform was gasping its last breath as a viable gaming platform. Mechner had quite famously spent literally years working on the game's animations, tracing them from videotaped recordings of his brother (also of Errol Flynn, interestingly enough), but I didn't learn about any of that until some time later. All I knew was that from the moment that game came into my life—likely purchased from our friendly neighborhood Babbage's—I was hooked.

Enlarge (credit: BioFire)

Back in 2018, the disgraced biotech company Theranos sold its patent portfolio to Fortress Investment Group, a division of Softbank. Now two of those patents have wound up in the hands of a little-known firm called Labrador Diagnostics—and Labrador is suing a French company called BioFire Diagnostics that makes medical testing equipment.

And not just any medical testing equipment: BioFire recently announced it had developed three tests for COVID-19 using its hardware—tests that are due out later this month. But Labrador is asking a Delaware federal court to block the company from using its technology—presumably including the new coronavirus tests.

As Stanford patent scholar Mark Lemley puts it, "this could be the most tone-deaf IP suit in history."

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  *Insert Tarzan scream*

It's been almost four years now since the 2016 edition of Doom showed us the right way to revisit a classic shooter franchise. But, thrilling as that game was, by the end of its running time the crowded firefights already started to feel a bit repetitive. Doom Eternal, the newest entry in the series, hopes to recapture that same fast-paced shooter magic without feeling like more of the same.

For the most part, it succeeds. Doom Eternal returns us to the familiar feel of its run-and-gun predecessor, with just enough variety to keep the new game from feeling like a mere expansion pack. But a few changes throw off the game's flow so badly that they threaten to derail the whole experience.

What are we doing?

The story specifics in Doom Eternal are as wonderfully ignorable as they were in the previous game. Instead of fighting in Hell or on Mars, this time you take the fight directly to the demon-infested Earth, tearing through countless grunts to get to three demonic priests. You have to go through a series of plot points on the way to confronting each priest, but each one may as well read “[Insert mystical hell-demon gibberish],”

Some short cut scenes try to build out your character's history and motivation a bit, complete with a lot of hard-to-follow proper names for demons and settings that will have no resonance for most players. You can pore through pages and pages of hidden lore if you want to get a better grip on all this, but I found it easier to just tune out. I was much more intrigued by the holographic displays and the loudspeaker voice-overs sprinkled through random hallways, all hinting at a vast propaganda regime trying to integrate human society with the demonic interlopers seeking to harvest their souls.