I wasn't implying that was a bad thing, Prodeus I was just saying- "We better do as best we can to make them as murky and indistinct as possible anyway, and all with the same color scheme! Phew! Now we're real game designers!" Well, not all with the same color scheme, actually there's two factions of demons that fight each other whenever they meet: Team Blueberry Ice and Team Orange You Glad You're In the Chaos Dimension? "What?! Sprite enemies aren't murky and indistinct?!" No, Prodeus, and- "Oh no! I'm so sorry!" No, uh. And there are other reasons for it: to simultaneously evoke and enhance the classic boomer shooter retro look, and as I said in my Doom retrospective review, those crunchy pixel sprite enemies make for a greater expedience, 'cos it's a lot easier to distinguish them from the background environment, in contrast to the murky waiting for indistinct bits of distant chest-high wall to return fire, as seen in the Gears of Wars of the world. Obviously, it would've been easier just to print out a Google image search result and glue it to your spectacles, but that's not the point the sheer amount of unnecessary effort is what makes it impressive. On the one hand, it's good, old-fashioned showing off, like recreating the Last Supper by delicately arranging different-colored Cheerios on a parking space. Obviously, this is fucking "used teabags in the eye sockets" mental, because at that point, it would be approximately ten septillion times easier just to use 3D models this look has been chosen for deliberate stylistic reasons. You know how the 2D sprites in Doom always looked like they were turning to face you, because there wasn't a different sprite for every angle you could view them from? Well, in Prodeus, there is a different sprite for every angle, as well as every vertical angle, for every single animation frame of every single entity. "How much work, Yahtzee?" Well, besides the modern lighting and texturing and inevitable exaggerated "dripping off the ceiling" gore effects, Prodeus is doing its damndest to make 2D sprite work look like 3D graphics.
In fact, I wonder if it was originally going to be some kind of HD Doom mod, the sort of thing those eye-twitchy toothbrush-chewers in the Doom modding community consistently put worrying amounts of effort into to stave off having to play another fucking game one of these days, but after the creators had some kind of sanity fart, they realized it would be a lot nicer to actually be paid for all that fucking work, and here we are. It's even got the same bloody monsters: zombie man, fireball imp, evil Christmas decoration, annoying flying skull prick, evil Christmas decoration that spits out annoying flying skull pricks. Prodeus is a Doom clone, and while " Doom clone" is largely an outdated term for "FPS" from before the genre was fully codified, I can think of no more adequate description for Prodeus, not while it's a 2.5D first-person shooter about a burly, yet remarkably light-footed soldier battling demons from Hell on a space station. who, by the sounds of it, was very much in favor of public transport.
#Zero punctuation shadow warrior series
Which brings me to today's subject: Prodeus, not to be confused with Proteus, which was a walking sim from 2013, or Parodius, which was a series of cutesy arcade shoot 'em ups, or indeed, Probus, who was a Roman emperor in the third century A.D. Maybe we could broadcast a popular children's cartoon in which every episode's plot is resolved by a character setting themselves on fire, then wait twenty years and buy a controlling interest in every major burn ointment manufacturer, or perhaps alternatively, just hack out another fucking Doom clone. The ongoing glut of indie retro boomer shooters has proved the absolute motherfuck out of the twenty-year nostalgia wave theory, so now I'm just trying to think of a way to exploit it. This week in Zero Punctuation, Yahtzee reviews Prodeus.
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