Because Doom remains a brilliant, thrilling game experience. It is so pure, so focused. Not a single pixel is wasted. “Today, playing Doom at full speed, it’s [still] one of the fastest games you can play,” says Romero, who is currently working on Sigil 2, a spiritual successor to the original Doom series. “You still get an amazing experience, even better than when we released it, because it’s a little smoother. Doom is still very fast, very challenging. It doesn’t matter what the resolution is … it’s all gameplay.”
In our 15 years of marriage, I’ve seen my husband cry a handful of times. Once, sitting on our balcony in Chicago over a few beers, on the eve of the move that eventually brought us to Seattle. Certainly when he lost his parents. But one moment, back in 2013, caught me completely by surprise.
We kept the lights off in my hospital room at Swedish Medical Center so our newborn son could sleep, uninterrupted, in his clear plastic box. I was ready to take him home—ready to take a proper shower, cut off my hospital bracelet, and tackle this new life with a tiny baby in the mix. My husband, Seth, brought our new infant car seat up from the parking garage. He’d already proved himself a worthy parental partner, hoisting my leg over his shoulder to assist with some of the gnarlier moments in labor. Now he practiced tightening the seat’s straps one more time. But the hospital wouldn’t let us go without one last test.
As writers we try to reflect humanity back onto itself. Book people should ape the real thing or else how on earth will readers know them, recognize them as human, engage with them, love or despise them?
This is a fractal story told through the fracturing of rules by a mature writer, summed up best by a character who says: “There were no happy endings, just endings. And then more endings. And that was if you were lucky and there was no final ending.”
It reminded me that life’s hardest moments — the ones in which we come face to face with death — teach us that life is a gift, one we need to savor every day.
To make his case, Fitzgerald, a professor of medical humanities and social sciences at University College Cork, Ireland, dabbles in both history and science, assembling a vigorous argument against the orthodoxies of urban green spaces and their presumption of unalloyed goodness. Given ample scientific research suggesting the benefits of urban parks — and the psychological comforts of nature itself — Fitzgerald’s battle is entirely uphill, but he relishes every bit of it.