Doom: The Dark Ages just launched on May 15. But it's already received "difficulty" balance changes "that have made the demons of Hell even more dangerous than ever," writes Windows Central: According to DOOM's official website Slayer's Club, these balance adjustments are focused on making the game harder, as players have been leaving feedback saying it felt too easy even on Nightmare Mode. As a result, enemies now hit harder, health and armor item pick-ups drop less often, and certain enemies punish you more severely for mistiming the parry mechanic. It reached three million players in just five days, which was seven times faster than 2020's Doom: Eternal," reports Wccftech (though according to analytics firm Ampere Analysis (via The Game Business), more than two million of those three million launch players were playing on Xbox, while only 500K were playing on PS5.") "id Software proves it can still reinvent the wheel," according to one reviewer, "shaking up numerous aspects of gameplay, exchanging elaborate platforming for brutal on-the-ground action, as well as the ability to soar on a dragon's back or stomp around in a giant mech." And the New York Times says the game "effectively reinvents the hellish shooter with a revamped movement system and deepened lore" in the medieval goth-themed game... Double jumping and dashing are ditched and replaced with an emphasis on raw power and slow, strategic melee combat. Doom Slayer's arsenal features a brand-new tool, the powerful Shield Saw, which Id Software made a point to showcase across its "Stand and Fight" trailers and advertisements. Used for absorbing damage at the expense of speed, the saw also allows players to bash enemies from afar and close the gap on chasms too wide to jump across. While previous titles allowed players to quickly worm their way through bullet hell, The Dark Ages expects you to meet foes head on. "If you were an F-22 fighter jet in Doom Eternal, this time around we wanted you to feel like an Abrams tank," Hugo Martin, the game's creative director, has told journalists. And Doom Slayer's beefy durability and unstoppable nature does make the gameplay a refreshing experience. The badassery is somehow ratcheted to new heights with the inclusion of a fully controllable mech, which has only a handful of attacks at its disposal, and actual dragons. Flight in a Doom game is entirely surprising and fluid, and the dragons feel relatively easy to maneuver through tight spots. They can also engage in combat more deliberately with the use of dodges and mounted cannons... One of my favorite additions is the skullcrusher pulverizer. Equal parts heinous nutcracker and demonic woodchipper, the gun lodges skulls into a grinder and sends shards of bones flying at enemies. The animation is both goofy and satisfying. Another special Times article notes that Doom's fans "resurrect the original game over and over again on progressively stranger pieces of hardware: a Mazda Miata, a NordicTrack treadmill, a French pharmacy sign." But what many hard-core tech hobbyists want to know is whether you can play it on a pregnancy test. The answer: positively yes. And for the first time, even New York Times readers can play Doom within The Times's site [after creating a free account]... None of this happened by accident, of course. Ports were not incidental to Doom's development. They were a core consideration. "Doom was developed in a really unique way that lent a high degree of portability to its code base," said John Romero, who programmed the game with John Carmack. (In our interview, he then reminisced about operating systems for the next 14 minutes.) Id had developed Wolfenstein 3D, the Nazi-killing predecessor to Doom, on PCs. To build Doom, Carmack and Romero used NeXT, the hardware and software company founded by Steve Jobs after his ouster from Apple in 1985. NeXT computers were powerful, selling for about $25,000 apiece in today's dollars. And any game designed on that system would require porting to the more humdrum PCs encountered by consumers at computer labs or office jobs. This turned out to be advantageous because Carmack had a special aptitude for ports. All of Id's founders met as colleagues at Softdisk, which had hired Carmack because of his ability to spin off multiple versions of a single game. The group decided to strike out on its own after Carmack created a near-perfect replica of the first level of Super Mario Bros. 3 — Nintendo's best-selling platformer — on a PC. It was a wonder of software engineering that compensated for limited processing power with clever workarounds. "This is the thing that everyone has," Romero said of PCs. "The fact that we could figure out how to make it become a game console was world changing...." Romero founded a series of game studios after leaving Id in 1996 and is working on a new first-person shooter, the genre he and Carmack practically invented. He has no illusions about how it may stack up. "I absolutely accept that Doom is the best game I'll ever make that has that kind of a reach," he said. "At some point you make the best thing." Thirty years on, people are still making it. And in related news, PC Gamer reports... As part of a new "FPS Fridays" series on Twitch, legendary shooter designer John Romero streamed New Blood's 2018 hit, Dusk, one of the first and most influential indie "boomer shooters" in the genre's recent revitalization. The short of it? Romero seems to have had a blast. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A humanoid robotics startup co-founded by prominent artificial-intelligence futurist Ray Kurzweil said on Tuesday that venture capital firm Gauntlet Ventures will back its $100 million Series B funding round. The company, Beyond Imagination, will be valued at $500 million, and venture capital firm Gauntlet Ventures will be the round’s sole investor. Kurzweil is known for popularizing the term “the singularity,” when he predicted two decades ago that by 2045, artificial intelligence would surpass human intelligence and embark on a path of accelerating self-enhancement. These ideas, which once seemed like science fiction, are now viewed as mainstream by many technologists. Beyond Imagination is co-founded by scientist, entrepreneur and filmmaker Harry Kloor. The company has developed a humanoid robot—the Beyond Bot—and accompanying AI models that it intends to deploy in industrial settings such as factories, pharmaceutical plants and chip manufacturing facilities, said Gauntlet Ventures co-founder Oliver Carmack. The company has been testing its robots and is now looking for large enterprises into which they can be deployed, Carmack said, adding that he chose to back Beyond Imagination because of its potential to revolutionize U.S. manufacturing and address the projected global shortage of skilled labor. Major tech companies including Nvidia, Meta Platforms and Tesla, alongside various startups, are rushing to make humanoid robots, and are betting that recent advances in AI will also lead to breakthroughs in robots and automation. In October last year, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that “a lot of progress” has been made with its humanoid robot, Optimus, which could perform many daily tasks. Progress on robots has been slow, however, as researchers have found that the language-related AI breakthroughs driving chatbot development have not necessarily helped with understanding of the physical world. Many companies are spending enormous sums to collect the real-world training data necessary to train models that can power robots. In addition to humanoid robots, Beyond Imagination is also developing Aura, which co-founder Kloor described as a universal operating system for intelligent manufacturing, allowing humans, robots and legacy machines to work together. Beyond Imagination has attracted an eclectic roster of advisers, including former Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, motivational speaker Tony Robbins, and onetime Paramount Pictures chairman Jim Gianopulos. —Dawn Chmielewski and Anna Tong, Reuters

In context: Google researcher and reverse engineer "LaurieWired" recently posed a thought-provoking thread on X: What would happen after a CPU manufacturing apocalypse? How would the tech world respond to a future without newer, faster processors? Programming and optimization legend John Carmack offered an equally compelling answer. LaurieWired proposes the idea of a "Zero Tape-out Day" (Z-Day), an event causing manufacturers to stop producing new silicon designs. Considering the existing supply, the researcher predicts skyrocketing computer prices, stalled cloud capacity, and a ticking clock on electromigration slowly degrading the most advanced chips built on smaller nodes – all within the first year after Z-Day. Conditions would deteriorate even further in the following years, with a booming black market for processors and Xeon CPUs valued more than gold. Computing technology could regress by decades as older systems built on larger nodes prove far more resilient to electromigration. People would mod classic processors like the Motorola 68000 to operate for thousands of years without significant gate wear. More advanced systems – such as the iMac G3s sold between 1998 and 2003 – would become workstations for the elite, while the proles use repurpose hardware from Gameboys, Macintosh SEs, and Commodore 64s. LaurieWired suggests that 30 years after Z-Day, the world would become a dystopia where computing resembles the 1970s or 1980s. The modern internet would vanish, replaced by sneakernet data exchanges on SSDs and efforts to safeguard valuable desktop hardware from confiscation. Former id Software developer John Carmack decided to weigh in on the thought experiment. Having created the Doom graphics engine in just 28 hours on "vintage hardware," his expertise provided some perspective. Carmack said that a significant part of the modern world could run on outdated hardware if software optimization were a priority for developers. // Related Stories The god-tier coder suggests that developers could transition all interpreted, microservice-based products to monolithic, native codebases. Programmers would abandon modern development patterns and seek more efficient approaches, such as those used during earlier computing eras when there was no internet to push patches. Such a paradigm reset would force post-apocalyptic coders to make ancient hardware hum through software optimization. Carmack also acknowledges that innovative new products would become much rarer without ultra-cheap and scalable computing. While framed within the context of LaurieWired's thought experiment, Carmack's ideas hold practical relevance in today's computing landscape. For example, would Microsoft still impose strict hardware requirements if it prioritized optimizing Windows 11? It's a question worth considering. Similarly, how much could the gaming industry benefit from better optimization?