Game Review: ‘Burn Your Fat With Me!’

And now for something completely different.

My habit, until recently, was to run to the gym in the morning before setting off for work. Of course, once Corona-chan appeared, my trips to the gymnasium had to stop, and I had to find alternate ways of getting a daily workout. My gym is open again as of this writing, but it still requires members to wear a mask while exercising. That’s a no-go for me, so I’m still working out at home.

I had trouble at first getting adequate exercise while cooped up in an apartment, but I discovered two phone apps that greatly helped me out: One is the Nike Training Club app (free to all at least for the duration of the pandemic), and the other is Burn Your Fat with Me!!, a combination dating sim and workout app that was briefly a sensation when it first appeared. The former is a wealth of creative aerobic and strength-building workouts that demonstrate it really is possible to reduce yourself to a quivering pool of sweat in the middle of your kitchen with no equipment … but due to the themes of this blog, I’m going to review the latter.

Created by the Japanese company Creative Freaks, Burn Your Fat with Me!!, or Nensho, first appeared in 2013 and was briefly the most downloaded anime-themed app on Google’s app store, an oddly specific achievement. Designed mostly for sedentary otaku and weeaboos in an effort to get them off the couch, it is (barely) a dating sim game that requires the player to complete fitness goals to advance the story. The idea, which the creators call … sigh … “moe-vation,” is that weebs will be inspired to work out if it means continuing in a visual novel and getting simulated encouragement from a waifu.

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Doom Eternal: An Addendum

This came up in my YouTube recommendations because I’d been looking at so many videos having to do with Doom Eternal.

This is a video of someone playing the latest (?) version of Project Brutality, which I have previously discussed, the over-engineered mod of the original Doom.

This not only shows some impressive gameplay (the guy must have the maps memorized) but also shows just how crazy and gigantic Project Brutality has grown.

Already, in earlier releases, it had included weapons drawn from Duke Nukem 3D and probably other places. Now it includes things from Doom Eternal as well; in particular, one of the new gadgets in Doom Eternal is the “Meat Hook,” an attachment to the Super Shotgun, which fires a grappling hook on a chain. In this video here, you can see the player repeatedly using the Meat Hook, which has now been incorporated into the mod.

Musings on ‘Doom Eternal’

Rip and tear until the inevitable sequel.

Although I’m not a gamer, I’ve long felt a certain affection for the Doom franchise, so even I was interested when the reimagined game, known by fans as Doom 2016 to avoid confusion with the original game, appeared four years ago.

Doom had already seen a reboot with Doom III, which reinvented the game as a survival horror with more-or-less the same concept as the original but considerably more plot. Although generally praised, it was sometimes accused of building too slowly.

Doom 2016 triumphantly returned the franchise to its roots as an all-out blood-and-guts actioner and also created a new story line while keeping the basics of the premise.

Doom Eternal, which will appear in March of 2020 (having been delayed after a planned October release) is a direct sequel to Doom 2016 and is loosely based on Doom II: Hell on Earth, which appeared in 1995 as the sequel to the original game. The developers have promised that this sequel will contain even more lore and backstory as well as some huge areas to explore. Available footage indicates that it will also have a heavier focus on platforming than earlier entries in the franchise, and that the combat will require a lot of quick thinking.

The game is already being praised by those who have had the chance to play it. The only criticism, fairly mild, is that it is more cartoonish than its immediate predecessor: Its levels are no longer logical in layout, featuring instead a lot of floating floors and flaming chains like something out of Super Mario, and the obtainable items such as weapons and armor are brightly colored. The designers have defended this latter choice by arguing that they don’t want players to struggle to find items in the game’s environments.

Easily the most anticipated game of the last couple of years, Doom Eternal has stirred up some controversy (in a franchise familiar with controversy) because the early teasers hinted that the game’s final boss enemy might be God.

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A Peek at Project Brutality

As I’ve said before, I’m not a gamer, but this came to my attention because I regularly watch James Rolfe’s Angry Video Game Nerd videos.

Rolfe recently produced a review of Chex Quest, a re-skin of Doom that was put in boxes of Chex as a prize, and which was good enough to get its own cult following.

Here’s the video. For courtesy’s sake, I should probably give a language warning:

Toward the end of the video, he mentions that the game is compatible with a mod called Brutal Doom. When this mod is plugged in, it removes the nonviolent component of the Chex Quest game and instead allows you to slaughter your enemies with wild abandon.

I am old enough to remember when Doom first made its appearance. It was mind-blowing at the time, and it was also unusually hackable, producing a huge community of modders creating their own levels, weapons, enemies, and other features. Non-gamer though I am, even I screwed around with some of the mods lurking on the young internet and built a few custom levels. I may or may not have seen the original Brutal Doom—I don’t rightly remember—though I saw other mods that upped the gore or improved the arsenal. In any case, Brutal Doom is one of the most popular Doom mods of all time.

Because of Rolfe’s videos, I discovered something called Project Brutality, an ongoing effort to build on what Brutal Doom got started. Currently, Project Brutality 3.0 is in its beta phase, and videos showing it off have appeared on YouTube.

Some of these videos vary considerably in how they look. I’m not sure if the players have multiple mods going at once or if these represent different stages of this one project. Some seem to be playing through a version that combines all the levels into one continuous map, and others (such as the one below) are not.

In any case, the modified game is stunning.

Watching this player, I have to wonder just how complicated are the controls for this game, seeing all the different things he can do from throwing axes and grenades to kicking enemies in the face to pulling himself up platforms to switching to third-person.

I’m astonished at this player’s skill, but even more than that, I’m astonished at how completely the modders have modded the game. I mean, holy heck. It’s recognizably Doom, but the vast array of added features is incredible. Some of the added features are listed on the Doom Wiki.

And of course there’s the gore and the bird-flipping, but those juvenile bits are hardly noticeable amidst the attention to detail in the animations, weapons, and gameplay.

Watching this recaptures the feel Doom gave when it first came out, when we said, “I can’t believe this game!”

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 8

The adventure continues as we approach the end of the Prague levels. I’m taking a little time to relax here before making a final push on this section of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 7

I haven’t had much time for this lately, but I was reading Plato’s Meno this morning, and that reminded me of the fictional lost dialogue of Plato from Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, and one thing led to another, and so here we are. I took a few more minutes to continue the play-through. Enjoy.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 6

Here I go again. Now in Prague.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 5

Here we go again, and this time I make it out of Sri Lanka. The game I’m playing is Indiana Jones and the Emperor’s Tomb (2003) from LucasArts.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 4

Been a while since we had one of these, so here I go, in honor of the new Tomb Raider … I guess … a game based on the original tomb raider.

An Archaeologist Plays Indiana Jones, Part 3