DOOM Eternal and The Sopranos Season 2 (4/14/25 - 4/20/25)

It’s the end of a long weekend for me today and I’ll be starting my on-call shenanigans for the week tomorrow. I just got back from going to the morning class at the gym I go to. We’ll see if I can make it work over the course of this week. Historically, I don’t get calls directly after I clock out at 6pm from work, so I’m gonna just continue going to the 6pm class and just lug my work phone with me just in case. I would go in the mornings because I almost never get any calls in the morning, but those classes are either very early, like 4 & 5am, or cutting it close at 8am. I went to the 8am today because I have the day off, but that’ll unfortunately be too late for me when I do have work (especially since the gym does not feature showers). 

I initially took a long weekend because I wanted to try to see The Cat in The Hat (2003) at The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA. It looked like we would get a small party going, but close to the last minute I had to deal with last minute extended family stuff. However, my parents did take me out to Koko Chicken & BBQ in Buena Park for some KFC (Korean Fried Chicken). I really enjoyed it back when my friend took me there for the first time back in 2023 and I still love it now. We got a whole chicken to share with some wings (mostly for my sister to enjoy) and an appetizer’s portion of fried zucchini (my parents are always down for fried zucchini). In addition, I also got to try tteokbokki (dukbokki), which consists of chewy rice & fish cakes served in a sauce that’s both sweet and spicy. Great all around and I was glad to have leftovers to take home. That tangent out of the way, I didn’t really see anything new. I kinda wanted to see Drop (2025) and I could go catch the next showtime right now, but I think that movie would be more fun with friends and I’m not really feeling it today. Nevertheless I finished playing and watching through other stuff at home, so I’ll go ahead and give some thoughts on that. 

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned that I’ve been playing through DOOM Eternal (2020). When we last left off, I just finished with the main game and moved on to the first expansion, “The Ancient Gods Part I” (TAG1). Since then I have completed that and the last expansion, “The Ancient Gods Part II” (TAG2). If you got through the main campaign of DOOM Eternal and felt that you breezed by, the TAG1 expansion is here to give you a vibe check. I had to change how I played the game again to better keep track of my resources and what sort of stuff I can get away with combat wise. The addition of the spirit enemies and by extension demons possessed by spirits in particular gave me a lot of shit in this first playthrough. Demons possessed by spirits are faster, stronger, and more aggressive than their non-possessed counterparts, plus they have a lot more health to boot. Once a possessed demon is finally taken down, the spirit appears and becomes ripe for the picking, but only by the microwave beam attachment on the plasma rifle (an attachment I never used and hardly upgraded in my playthrough of the main game). All of that I can manage, but the one trait of possessed demons that really fucked with me was their immunity to being faltered. To elaborate, every heavy demon you encounter (not including bosses) can be faltered or stunned by explosions from grenades or rockets, shockwaves from a plasma exhaust blast, or just flat out frozen by ice grenades. Faltering a demon can briefly interrupt their attacks and movement, giving you a window to quickly deal damage. With that context in mind, possessed demons to me became just a continually advancing brick wall to my flow. They’re the reason the final phase of the end boss took me 7 attempts. Eventually when playing through TAG2, I learned that the only thing that can stop a possessed demon is the microwave beam from the plasma rifle, the same weakness as an exposed spirit. Of course it is not practical to shoot them with just the beam, since your movement is limited when firing and it chews through ammo. However I found that giving a possessed demon a quick blast of the microwave beam was good to briefly stop them so I can refocus, collect resources, and or get a better position.

TAG2 by comparison was an easier time and, difficulty wise, might have been a better follow-up to DOOM Eternal’s main campaign, then lead up to the combat scenario’s TAG1 puts you through. I felt that TAG2’s combat encounters were already easier in of themselves since they don’t throw as many demons with as much variety (namely spirits) as TAG1 did. However, It is the addition of a new weapon, the sentinel hammer, that really makes TAG2 easier than TAG1. The sentinel hammer essentially replaces the crucible from the base game, a limited use sword that was basically a delete button for almost every demon in the game. The sentinel hammer is not an instant kill, but rather gives off a shockwave attack that staggers all heavy demons and staggers or kills lesser demons (depending on health level). In addition, enemies staggered or killed by the hammer give the player resources like health, armor, and ammo. The main thing about the sentinel hammer that arguably makes it broken is that it can be easily charged by 2 “glory kills”, a move that the player has been conditioned to routinely do. There were some story elements in these two expansions that I found questionable, but getting into that would make this post way longer. Overall I found my playthrough of the complete DOOM Eternal to be very enjoyable, just that the scale of difficulty can be a little wonky between completing the main game, moving to TAG1, then finishing off with TAG2. Since then I have moved onto to what I intend to be my 2nd full playthrough of DOOM 3 (2004), so perhaps I may write about that when I finish. 

In addition to DOOM Eternal, I vegged out yesterday and finished watching the last 6 episodes of The Sopranos season 2. I started Season 2 back at the end of February and after that hiatus decided to finish it out so I can move onto season 3 and beyond. I remember in my post on The Monkey (2025), I said that my plan was to finish The Sopranos and Twin Peaks so that I have something to watch while I wait for season 3 of Invincible to finish. Well Invincible season 3 has been done for a while now and I still have yet to finish The Sopranos. I enjoyed Season 2, although there were some plot points that came up in some episodes that I thought would carry on through the season, but didn’t. There’s a conflict between Carmela Soprano (Edie Falco) and her daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on what college she would attend that I thought would play out to some interesting drama, but it looks like that may pickup in Season 3? I thought there would be some conflict involving the new character, Furio (Federico Castelluccio), considering the violent impression he made soon after being introduced, but he’s just kind of around for the rest of the season; perhaps as the show goes on, stuff with his character will go down. At any rate, I’m still enjoying the show and will be moving on to season 3. 

So it looks like I wrote more than I thought I would. I wanted to have some post go out for this part of April, since I’ll be on-call for the rest of this week and likely will not be posting until next week. That said the next post will likely be on a movie. Have a good day and rest of the week.