This Week @ Shack: 'Doomy Doomy Doom' Edition

Welcome back to This Week @ Shack, our weekly roundup of news, commentary, video, guides, such-and-such.

We have a soft spot for Doom here at Shacknews. Our humble roots were as a Quake fan site, so id's trademark brand of splashy violence is connected by proxy. Doom 2016, as it's been called, was our Game of the Year. This was after it had received high praise in our review, including one of my favorite review subtitles of all time.

I usually use the intro to this column to talk about some happening in the world of video games, but this time, I want to give a shout to the whole team, and David Craddock in particular, for the fantastic work on our latest Shacknews Select. It's called Doom: To Hell and Back. These longform features have been pretty ambitious in the past, and covered subjects as diverse as the end of the console ban in China. This one combined a post-mortem for Doom 2016, an in-depth story of the creation of the series as told by the people who were there from the beginning, and firsthand accounts regarding how the fan community has made it their own.

It's the most massive feature in Shacknews history by far–almost 40,000 words, so long that we broke the site and had to tinker with the backend just to make it work–and it's utterly fascinating. This holiday weekend you probably have some time off, so make sure to brew a cup of coffee, or maybe a bathtub of coffee, and sit down for a deep dive into hell.

Uh, happy Easter?

News of the World:

Chalk this one up as a rumor, but we got some indication that Apple implementing AR tech may force them to push back the release of the iPhone 8.
Square is all aboard the Switch train, and the Chrono Trigger director is teasing a... something. Could it be Chrono Break? (No.) But what if it is? (It isn't.)
Overwatch's latest update event was leaked and then released in quick succession this week
BioWare's next new IP will feature aspects of Destiny and The Division, by which they presumably mean "loot."
The ongoing Oculus-Zenimax legal drama will make a great David Fincher movie someday. But who will play Carmack?
Well, PCs had a good run. Looks like the party's over.
Our own John Keefer will be seeing what EA has to show at Star Wars Celebration tomorrow, but until then, it appears the trailer for Battlefront 2 has already leaked.
Xbox and Windows might soon offer digital refunds, further jeopardizing brick-and-mortar stores.
A Nintendo Direct this week focused mostly on Arms and Splatoon 2. Plus the Switch boasted the best opening sales of any console in Nintendo history.
But, Nintendo being Nintendo, it couldn't just let itself have a positive news cycle, as it also announced this week that it's discontinuing the wildly popular (and hard-to-find) NES Classic Edition.

Featured Features:

Blizzard has always given us really cool access for new Hearthstone expansions, and the latest is no exception. We got a behind-the-scenes look at the creation of the new Legendary card, Elise the Trailblazer.
This week was the anniversary of The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, so Raqib penned some thoughts to mark the occasion.
In case you missed the link above, here's that Doom feature. Doom: To Hell and Back.