I LOVE the indie boomer shooter trend

Trying to play Selaco but it feels like you are forced to trade HP every single fight and it always feels like your scraping by but in a frustrating way.

Old shooters liked to have segments where they put you in an arena and then spawn a bunch of enemies, plenty of mods did that. As well as the classic trick where some hidden closet suddenly opens and you have an enemy already aiming for you. You're also forgetting that doom on the hardest difficulty spawned enemies all the time.
Also I have no idea what you're talking about when something like Dusk doesn't put you in arenas all the time like you claim, but you just run through levels gunning down enemies like in old shooters. Same with something like cultic. Turbo overkill likes spawning enemies on you but you're not really trapped and it doesn't take long to kill each wave. Also none of them do "glory kill" bullshit so killing enemies is much faster than in zoom eternal.

He says this posting a shooter where the protag uses Injun powers to commune with his ancestors while fighting aliens.

das rite, just because I don't want gay nostalgia shit doesn't mean I want CoD either

You haven't named which games do this.

mods

Don't count. You can mod these games into literally anything.

Just doom alone has a good number of "ambush" scenarios where an elevator either drops you into an area with a good number of enemies or where walls slide open and suddenly reveal enemies that start attacking you right away, or segments where you fight a big number of enemies in a small space.
Also you make it sound like boomer shooters do nothing but nu-doom style arenas with waves of enemies when it's not the case, the ones I played had normal level design and enemy spawns.

Monster closets =/= nuDoom style arenas

Arenas are only bad when they become formulaic. Doom 2016 suffers from this to a certain extent, the game becomes a bit repetitive and predictable because there are a number of limitations in the way combat works.
But they're not necessarily bad. Doom 1 and Doom 2 try at various times to make you get overwhelmed and fight instead of fleeing or using a tactical approach. Heretic much more so, there are several levels in the original campaigns that put you in a hot start and no matter where you run, you'll end up waking up more enemies making the situation even more complex. These things are necessary because if the player can be tactical at all times, he will impose his own pace on the game, playing super slowly and still winning.

Good shooters have more in common with old 70s and 80s dungeon crawlers than they did with the arena shit that got popularized first by Serious Sam and Painkiller and now more recently with Doom Eternal (maybe Doom 2016, I didn't play that one).

can just pick off all enemies from outside their aggro range

seemed like a pretty big flaw
rolling was kinda tedious as well

I never said they were bad or that all modern 'retro' shooters use them. I just want some examples of 2016/Eternal style arenas appearing in actual retro shooters. I have yet to receive any examples yet.

Cultic is waaaay too easy though.

Not him but Painkiller comes to mind

Serious Sam, but the bulk of the encounters you're only limited by the number of enemies coming at you

Well, you clearly don't know.
To give a single iconic example:
Doom 2 - MAP07: Dead Simple

That's literally just an entire level. An arena is a segment of a level where you get locked in once entered and cannot leave until you kill all the enemies. For example, if you walked into the first door of Hanger and the door locked and you couldn't progress to the area with toxic waste walkway with the imp until you kill everything in the the prior room.

Native Indian guy vs. aliens

I mean, if it worked for Turok doing the same but vs. dinosaurs.....

103 fps with those graphics at 4K

skybox and fence textures being way too detailed compared to the rest of the scene

Why do indies always fuck up the texel scale between assets?

Doom 1 has an area that fits what you said (fight against the two barons at the end of episode 1), but you'll keep putting more restrictions until you get to the point where you'll be saying something like “tell me a retro shooter where you have to remove the heart from the demons' nest and kill the enemies until an electronic voice tells you that you've cleared the area! You don't know any! Ha! I told you, no game ever used arenas in the history of FPS before Doom 2016 ahhhhhh!”

I'm simply stating what an arena is. People don't know and make false statements because of it. The Barons example is a boss fight, which is, definitionally speaking, not an arena.

Anyone else play the final episode of Alien Armageddon? What did you think?

That's cool as fuck tho

I enjoyed it. Cultic feels good. I don't need a game to kick my fucking ass.

Dead Simple inspired thousands of Doom maps with arenas like you describe, because it was tricky to achieve in original mapping formats, they just have something like 4 switches needed to unlock next room, each of the switches is behind a column and each switch lowers the next switch's column, each column lowering for a minute or more, so you practically need to kill everything in the room while running between switches and waiting for columns or monsters will kill you.

I finished Wrath: Aeon of Ruin.

Me too. Best FPS of the last few decades.

It is ~retro~

Sure it doesn't need to be contra hard but with the pistol and lever rifle effectively having infinite range and being highly accurate a lot of combat encounters are significantly reduced in what I feel is their intended challenge.

Yeah, on NORMAL maybe lmao. Come back when you've beaten hard or outlander. Seriously though fuck the rending chambers.

Was it part of some new release? I just played through caribbean with it but some of the new mechanics got a bit out of hand imo

Is it good? I remember dropping it during the dev drama and seething over being retarded enough to buy EA and I haven't picked it up since.

dev drama?

It is good but the levels are longcat long and with the save system and in general being fairly challenging a lot of players burn out trying to play it at the sort of pace they do for other recent(ish) shooters like dusk or ion fury.

Meh... sniping won't carry you in every enemy encounter.

It's genuinely fantastic.

It was alright. In some ways I'd say it is the most true modern emulation of a 90s shooter. The last episode wasn't so great with some exhausting enemy placement, but the first episode was up there with the greats in terms of level design and just general game ambiance. Despite being a horror-ish shooter, it had a beautiful ethereal quality to it if you just stopped and absorbed the environments. I would like to see more from the devs but I doubt that's ever going to happen given how troubled the development for this game was.

it's fuckin mid, I feel like they made it shit on purpose and/or just stopped working on it and then slapped it all together in 5 months

If you think Wrath is 'mid' then what fps do you consider good?

Any boomer shooters that are VR compatible aside from Amid Evil?

A lot of them feel subpar and like they're missing the point, but by and large I'm glad it's gotten popular. I'm perfectly content to buy Doom wads for $10-15 if they're good quality like Hedon

Painkiller Black, especially if you want something in that style that's consistent fun

I'm fine with $10-15 quality WADs if it means getting DOOM-like gameplay but without seeing the same art assets and enemies for the 100th time.

Yeah, it finishes the story. The final quarter of the episode is kind of a slog. Everything leading up to that is fantastic, though.