The SuperDQP Weekly - March 3, 2025
The Great Backlog Offensive returns! (...What was that, again?)
Another mod recommendation
Going back to romhacks this week, I’ll be recommending Super Metroid Redux!
Super Metroid is a classic, undeniably. It’s one of my favorite games, I replay it all the time, and it’s final moments stand as one of the finest examples of interactivity as an artistic expression. That it was able to accomplish everything it did in 1994, over thirty years ago, on a Super Famicom, is astounding.
(Honestly, between this, Live A Live, and Final Fantasy VI, 1994 was honestly a really good year for Super Famicom games pushing the boundaries of video gaming as an art form.)
Anyway, Super Metroid is a masterpiece, but it’s not exactly an accessible masterpiece. Its controls are fantastic, but they take a long time to master, especially compared to the snappier-feeling Metroid Fusion and Metroid: Zero Mission.
A friend of mine compares this contrast to driving a car with manual transmission vs. an automatic. Fusion and Zero Mission are easier to learn, but Super Metroid lets you do more for the extra effort you have to put in.
Super Metroid Redux, for lack of a better phrase, converts Super into an automatic. It’s easier to fire missiles, and elevators move more quickly, resulting in a smoother play experience.
Speedrunners can, will, and should balk at a lot of these changes, but if you’re looking for an interesting new way to explore a classic – or if you’ve had trouble breaking into Super Metroid because of its controls – Redux is a fine way to experience it.
You can download it here. A valid, legally-obtained ROM of Super Metroid is required, along with an emulator to play it on.
The Great Backlog Offensive: 10th Anniversary Edition
A little under ten years ago, on my humble little YouTube channel, I started a mini-series called the Great Backlog Offensive; an excuse to critically look at historically-acclaimed games from the modern lens of someone who hadn’t played them before.
(Warning before you click on that link, I hadn't come out as non-binary yet when those videos came out. I looked cringy and was cringy. The videos are not good.)
What a unique idea for a miniseries, I naively thought at the time. I guess every video game writer goes through this rite of passage because there’s no shortage of creators using their backlogs as an excuse to make content.
Still, as unoriginal as it is, it’s still a great excuse to dig in and experience the classics for the first time. Without this excuse, I wouldn’t have played games like Silent Hill 2, Resident Evil, Dishonored, Knights of the Old Republic, Okami, Yakuza 0, or Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines.
I’ve done this little ten-game exercise in 2015, and again in 2020, and indeed, before I stopped doing YouTube in a fit of burnout, I was planning on finding ten more games to do it again this year in 2025.
There are a few games that I’ve tried in the past few years in pursuit of that, and now no longer intend to write about; The Secret of Monkey Island and Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver being among them.
(Long story short, Monkey Island didn’t do much to convince me that I still like old point-and-click adventure games, on top of having some racist undertones in the latter half, and I put Soul Reaver on the backburner in spite of the late Tony Jay’s soul-massaging baritone. I may come back to it at a later date, though.)
But I did find five games that I enthusiastically want to write about. And this week, I’m going to start with the one that I have the least of substance to gush on.
This isn’t necessarily going to be a weekly thing; I have a concrete writing plan for the next couple months and I plan to pace these five essays out throughout the year. But hey, I’m going to be writing about shooters a lot over the next few weeks, so I may as well start by writing about DUSK.
DUSK rules!
I’m not certain that DUSK kicked off the “boomer shooter” trend – I know many don’t like the phrase “boomer shooter,” and Casey Explosion wisely started the genre name “quakenstein” as an alternative, which I intend to switch to, but old habits die hard.
Ugh, okay, never mind, let me start again.
I’m not certain that DUSK kicked off the quakenstein trend, but it is undoubtedly one of its most influential titles. It along with games like Project Warlock and Amid Evil helped developers large and small realize that there was a sizable market hungry for shooters like Doom and Quake, made like they used to. Quakensteins are grungier, punkier, and more over-the-top alternatives to the flashy graphics and military propaganda often found in more recent, mass-appeal shooters.
And quakensteins, like the similarly-portmanteaued metroidvania genre, have matured into a diverse genre, from goofy parodies like Slayers X to postmodern art pieces like MyHouse.wad to innovative genre mashups like Fallen Aces.
DUSK is something of a progenitor, borrowing liberally from Quake, and it’s that borrowing that I want to fixate on here.
The first Quake is my favorite of id Software’s catalog from the 1990s. I think that’s a controversial take? Quake’s production was extremely troubled and that much is evident from the game’s art style and gameplay. Back in the day, though it was definitely acclaimed, one perceived drawback was that, after years of John Romero manically bragging about how revolutionary Quake would be, it turned out to be a simple, more graphically-impressive iteration on Doom’s design.
But as Chris Franklin at Errant Signal pointed out in one of his retrospectives on the game, Quake has an impeccably grungy atmosphere, and it’s that atmosphere that draws me to it. And that atmosphere is something that DUSK replicates so, so well. In fact, DUSK surpasses Quake in this regard by sheer virtue of being more confident in its own identity.
DUSK is fast and fun and brutally challenging, but it’s also dark, grimy, and very moody. It so effectively captures the tone of gothic Appalachian horror, with cults and supernatural science haunting the backwater community it takes place in. Its level design takes steps beyond its inspiration into its own identity, melding id’s 90s grunge and thrash metal brutality with levels evocative of Lynchian horror while miraculously remaining readable and navigable.
DUSK is phenomenally atmospheric, capturing everything I loved from the original Quake while building an identity of its own on top of it. I vibed real hard with DUSK, and even as an early marker of the quakenstein trend, it’s still my favorite of the burgeoning genre.
If I had this game in high school, my edgy teenage self would have glomped right onto it and obsessed about it for years.
Having typed all this, I look forward to diving back into it all over again. It has that kind of effect.
This wishlist rec knows where you live
Steam Next Fest wraps up this morning, and one demo has commanded my attention in a way that few others have, even in other past Next Fests.
(Well, okay, the Citizen Sleeper 2 demo last Next Fest commanded my attention more, but still.)
If you’re okay being spooked by some Satan-adjacent horror, you need to try the demo for No Players Online. Now. Finish the newsletter, then open up Steam and download the demo and play it.
(Unless it’s near your bedtime and you’re worried it’ll keep you up at night. Then you might want to wait for a weekend or something. But then download the demo and play it.)
It opens with the premise of being a long-lost multiplayer FPS alpha test devoid of player activity, as the title implies, but that rabbit hole widens rapidly beneath the player and it becomes clear that the game is about so, so much more. I don’t want to say much else out of fear of spoilers. You should play it.
It’s a bit obtuse, but it has the potential to be something very, very special.
No Players Online is planned for release on Windows PC via Steam. A demo is currently available on Steam, and you can also play the game’s spiritual predecessor of the same name on itch.io if you’re curious. Release date TBA.
Gone rippin’ and tearin’
I’ll be taking next week off of newsletter duties. I will return on March 17 to talk about more classic shooters. See you then!