Month: August 2024

Enlarge / I don't know what this flame crossbow (?) is from the Legacy of Rust campaign, but I am going to keep running and gunning until I get it. (credit: Bethesda Softworks)

I have only one criticism of the "definitive, newly enhanced versions" of Doom and Doom II you can now pick up in a $10 package or as a free upgrade if you already owned one of those two games. My gripe is that it is entirely your own fault when you get hit by enemies.

On a PC, Xbox X or S, or PlayStation 5, you can play Doom at 120 fps at 4K. You are moving so ridiculously fast, speed-skating across those Marine bases and/or hellscapes, that the imps tossing fireballs at you feel like they're a parent gently coaxing their kid to catch a softball. Even the enemies with instant-hitting guns feel like they're winding up a tree sap cannon. The one time I died inside the first three levels of classic Doom was when I jet-walked right off a circular path and into an inescapable poison moat.

Does a flame thrower work against creatures that literally live in Hell? Only one way to find out. (credit: Bethesda Game Studios)

It's easy to recommend this newly packed-up and enhanced edition of these two first-person icons, released Thursday as part of QuakeCon. For one thing, it's being offered by Nightdive Studios, which has been turning out fan-favorite (and generally Ars-approved) remasters of games like Dark Forces, System Shock, Quake, and Quake II. For another, it's a real bundle, with both games, a huge number of classic add-on maps (including John Romero's Sigil), and an entirely new episode, Legacy of Rust, made by folks from Nightdive, id Software, and Wolfenstein auteurs MachineGames.

Enlarge / Rocket Lab says it fired up the Archimedes engine at full thrust this week. (credit: Rocket Lab)

Welcome to Edition 7.06 of the Rocket Report! There has been a lot of drama over the last week involving NASA, the crew of Starliner on board the International Space Station, and the launch of the Crew-9 mission on a Falcon 9 rocket. NASA is now down to a binary choice: Fly Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams home on Starliner, or send two astronauts to orbit on Crew-9, and return Wilmore and Williams next February on that spacecraft. We should know NASA's final decision next week.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Firefly inks another big Alpha contract. Firefly Aerospace said Wednesday that it has signed a multi-launch agreement with L3Harris Technologies for up to 20 launches on Firefly’s Alpha rocket, including two to four missions per year from 2027 to 2031, depending on customer needs. The new agreement is in addition to Firefly’s existing multi-launch agreement with L3Harris for three Alpha missions in 2026. What is not clear is exactly what satellites L3Harris wants to launch.