a few little maps
The Base (from here) A little Doom techbase with some tricky fighting - you need to know where to go to get weapons before you're overwhelmed. Quite top-heavy in that respect. Non-linear layout, uses height variation. Not bad.
A Monster Too Many Small brick/slime slaughter map probably inspired by Plutonia 32. It's far too hard for me but I'll bet someone will make a maxdemo of it one day. Could do with a bit more lighting variation.
SPACESHIP 1024 1024x1024 map ostensibly set on a spaceship; that means silver textures and a lot of windows showing a starry sky texture. Looks good, but the gameplay is a bit unbalanced. You have to kill a small horde of chaingunners and other zombies with a shotgun, and you don't get access to the plasma gun and megasphere until the entire level has been cleared.
Revisiting Phobos Doom episode 1 style map. Mostly faithful to E1 design, apart from using a lot of monster teleporters, and going outside not being optional. Quite easy. You can get trapped behind the blue door at the top of the map, as it is single use but surrounded by repeatable closing triggers. Also the chainsaw is rather useless as you only get it at the end. Summary: decent E1 map, play it if you like that style (I do)
The Killhouse Small cramped dark map from 2001. In spite of that, it's pretty good - although often made up of 64-wide corridors, it's not too cramped, and the light is dingy, rather than absent. Well-interconnected and uses height variation to great effect. Non-linear with plenty to shoot. I remember playing this and it being way too hard, but this is apparently a rerelease with better monster balance. Recommended.
What does "Tormention" actually mean, anyway?
Death Tormention 3, released at the end of last year, is the third in a series of Ultimate Doom episode 4 replacements by Paul Corfiatis and Kristian Aro. It is larger and more detailed than the first two, indeed it needs a limit-removing source port, and some of the maps use Boom features. The final map needs ZDoom to work properly although it is playable in PrBoom.
- E4M1 is like a bigger version of certain maps from the previous episodes, in particular the first couple of maps from Death Tormention 2. Starts a theme, of lots of torches (or other glowing decorations) inset into walls, that carries on for the rest of the wad. Pretty easy. Not much else to say.
- E4M2 is the interior of some kind of gothic fortress. It has Doom E4M7 influences but also a flavour all of its own; watch for the shootable stained glass windows. Not exactly hard, but tricky; can be quite low on ammunition. Leaving monsters "for later" might be necessary. Be careful.
- E4M3 The classic hub-based key quest level. Firstly you have a triangular shaped room full of blood and lost souls, then there's a dark cave with various locked doors leading away. It uses the old trick of having doors that are locked with different coloured keys on each side - people don't seem to do that so much any more, so it stuck out a bit. Gameplay is rather top-heavy, you start off up against it but about halfway through, after you've done the yellow key section, it's pretty easy.
- E4M4 A sprawling fortress made up of various different bits that'd take too long to describe completely. It starts off with a fun surprise! Also the large outdoor blood canyon in the northwest corner of the map is pretty good, although difficult.
- E4M5 This map centres on a huge lava lake crossed by stone walkways, it is surrounded by various wings of a castle. There are fiery underground sections, and blood and god knows what else. It's very hard, especially from a pistol start, you pretty much have to find the berserk box secret early on and then punch as many monsters as you dare. Also it is annoyingly complex, there's chains of keys and switches and often you won't know where you're meant to go next. This slightly lets down what is otherwise a beautiful map.
- E4M6 Some red brick corridors, lifts, bridges and smallish outdoor areas comprise the major part of this map. Plenty of traps and not a great deal of ammo again - once more, you must make good use of the berserk box. One bit I liked was a chasm in the middle of a corridor, underneath a big ceiling light. Working out all the different sectors for it must have taken ages. Anyway the map ends with a double cyberdemon arena, but there's plenty of room and hopefully you'll have the BFG from the secret area earlier.
- E4M7 is some kind of a palace. You start off in a brick room with some locked doors, and keep coming back. Firstly you go off running round some walkways over a blood river, then with the red key you go up through an area that's annoyingly symmetrical. Then to get the yellow key you go through a library into some corridors and through a large hellish underground that is too big and, I thought, felt quite out of place. But the weirdest thing about this map is the secrets. There's this one with these 7 pictures of pool players from some ancient 16-colour game system. There's also this barf-inducing room with a picture of a girl superimposed on an idyllic beach scene, and a heart shaped pit of lava in the floor. Honestly how often do you get MY GIRLFRIENDed by a doom map? Ugh!
- E4M8: "This is what DOOM is all about!, Darkness, Darkness, Darkness!!. Go to HELL!!" rants the text file. In other words, it's really annoying! Features a partially invisible hellknight as a new-ish monster. The underground was impressive but just as annoying to play. It ends via a teleporter in some kind of futuristic hallway where you can get three spiders to fight each other.
- E4M9: the secret level is rather odd. You start in someone's bedroom next to their stereo. Go out through the garage and find the graves of those pool players from map 7... There's a lot of fences and a chapel thing, then some cyberdemons to telefrag to exit.
This map in fact has a super secret exit which only works in ZDoom, it leads to:
- E3M9: The super secret level is a fairly small thing that doesn't seem to have the polish of some of the others. There's a couple of weird texture combinations, that sort of thing. You don't need ZDoom to play it, just to get to it from E4M9; you can just IDCLEV here or whatever. It's not bad, better than the super secret level in 2002ado anyway, but requires tactics for ammunition usage (don't use it all at the start)
So in summary we have here a solid Doom episode well worth playing. It maintains a consistent architectural style throughout. Gameplay is challenging but, after a few attempts, beatable. A few weird bits that always seems to crop up in Paul's levels (he makes a lot of joke wads as well, Spacia is one example that also features one of the pool players) E4M5 is probably the highlight, even in spite of all the backtracking and whatnot (if you manage to do it from a pistol start you'll feel very pleased with yourself!!)
Overall - ignoring E4M8 which got on my nerves - pretty much excellent.
THE TALOSIAN INCIDENT
This isn't about the first episode of Star Trek, though it's probably where they got the name from. The Talosian Incident is a relatively famous 20-map PWAD from 1997, which which I decided to play after hearing about the guy who was trying to make a tribute to it (the one map he finished appeared as DAC 16)
There's a plot that can be summed up thusly: you are on a transport ship which crash lands on a planet which is meant to be uninhabited. But of course it isn't, and with the rest of your ship's crew dead you try to send for help, only to find something is blocking your transmissions. So off you go to find out what. You end up plodding halfway round this planet through a series of ever more unconnected maps...
- The first map sets the scene. There's one monster but it's in a stasis field and can't be killed. You just get to pick up a few supplies, and find out exactly how the ship is laid out.
- The maps follow on from each other so at the end of the last one you're stepping into the access lift and here you're at the bottom of it, ready to open the airlock. You run out underneath your ship towards a gap in the rock face. The rest of this map is a sparsely populated canyon with a couple of weird buildings, it's not hard especially if you use the berserk to conserve ammunition.
- Map 3 starts with some buildings on a plain, but also has some side corridors, it doesn't make a great deal of sense but whatever. I think it's more intended for deathmatch as there's weapons just lying around and a lot of teleporters. The author seems to have just worked out how to make his map editor make curves of linedefs and is using that feature to its fullest. It ends, bizarrely enough, in a silver corridor just past a hellish underground.
- You're in some caves and there's a few monsters around. In one of the caves is the entrance to the chapel that gives the map its name. Couple of rooms with monsters between you and a key on the other side. Then it opens up into a large underground river of blood, which I quite liked, the exit is on the other side.
- You're inside the fort across the river. This is the first of a number of "corridors, small rooms, and way too many doors" maps that characterise this wad. As you might guess it can get quite annoying, especially when you have to backtrack. To end the map you shoot a tall box with some kind of ball on top. I am choosing to assume this is the transmission jammer you went to look for in the first place.
- The first half of this map is in fact part of the previous map, which you have to do backwards. So, more doors. However it's not exactly the same and it's interesting to see how the two maps differ. You find you can't get back out of the fort the way you came in though, so you have to find a different way back to the ship. The latter half of the map is new, but it's more rooms, halls, stairs and doors.
- You're in some kind of underground structure. It is quite well lit, obviously since it predates limit-removing source ports it can't go wild but it looks pretty good. Run round the edge, clear out the monsters, and get the blue key, then go through the door to find the yellow one. In the centre is a crowd of mancubi, which when killed reveal a load of arachnotrons, which when killed raises steps to the exit. There's a soulsphere to be had if you can find the buttons to lower it.
- A small but nasty map in which you must first explore some brick corridors to release a key (from the start go up the left staircase first) then through a teleporter you have a lava pit and surrounding area and another chapel. It's nasty because there's so many zombies and you can die rather suddenly.
- Although textured in tan rather than dungeon bricks, this is just another one of those maps with lots of small rooms and too many doors! It's mostly easy but don't get too carried away in the huge chamber at the east end of the map as you might end up losing too much health.
- This is a long thin map in an industrial/warehouse style which you have to run to one end then all the way to the other and back. The best bit is the far end where it overlooks an underground river. It gives the impression of being part of a larger whole. I like the architecture in this one.
- This is a small map with some more nice lighting and an "always try to open the door on the right" gimmick. There is a central hub, and side areas mostly using Doom 2 base textures. There is a rocket launcher but you don't get it until you've killed everything. Ammo and health can be quite low, so be careful.
- A typical Doom 2 techbase. Tekgren, grey and silver theme. There's a central reactor, an armoury and the north side is clearly inspired by Doom 2 MAP04. This map isn't so much low on ammunition, but you have to wait right until the end to get most of it (900 bullets, for example) and there are some nasty traps. The lighting in the crate area is fun, large contrast between light and dark, sharp shadows.
- This is basically one large room in which you get a rocket launcher to remove two archviles, two arachnotrons and a bunch of revenants. It isn't exactly hard but it is easy to screw up or have bad luck or whatever and can be quite frustrating. There's also this glowing force-field thing that you shouldn't walk into.
- For some reason we've dropped back into the caves. This map is one of the more clear indications that you're not supposed to do these maps from scratch as there are 73 rockets and nothing to fire them with. However there's enough of the rest that, with monster infighting to help, you should be all right. The super shotgun is better than rockets for spiderdemons anyway.
- You emerge from the underground tunnel with its pillars of flesh and wire, and what's on the other side? Well, I don't know but it is silver. The first part is all silver, but transitions oddly into brown bricks in one part. This one is probably the one that takes the longest time to do, with all the backtracking. Be on the lookout for very small switches, you don't just need them to find the secret exit, you need them to find the real one too.
- The first secret level is pretty much just a monster arena. The start is a bit annoying with all the barons and lost souls and only having a chaingun, but it improves and you can end up running round a large chamber organising monsterfights with a cyberdemon. The secret exit isn't too hard to find, I think.
- A typically bizarre super secret level is centred around four magic doors. Two of them take you to some side areas where you must kill the hanging corpses of marines emblazoned with the Quake logo. On doing this you get access to the third which takes you to the exit. The fourth makes you restart the level, or the entire wad, or crashes the game depending on what source port you use (it's a secret exit on a map that's not supposed to have a secret exit)
- So as the name suggests you're in a canyon that's basically Y-shaped. Take the left fork to find some more of the doors, halls and symmetry you're already familiar with. At the end of this arrangement is a switch that opens the fortress in the other fork, which contains the exit.
- 12 and 13 were quite bad but this, this is probably the hardest map in the set. You're stuck on one side of a gorge with not one but two monster spawners. You get full health and ammo but it has to last for two whole minutes after you press the switch that raises a bridge from one side to the other. So basically, there's nowhere to hide so you're running around on one side of this thing keeping the pain elementals and revenants' homing missiles at bay, hoping no archviles show up. After what seems like hours the bridge, which is crawling with monsters by now, shows up, and you dash across it, which lowers a wall on the other side.
All of a sudden, you remember the plot. You're back at your ship! It turns out the gorge was opposite the passageway by which you left it, all the way back in map 2. Unfortunately, during your absence the monsters have laid siege to your vessel, and there are about 20 cyberdemons guarding the entrance. With the gorge - rapidly filling with monsters - no longer an option, you can only run around in desperation, as there is nowhere near enough ammunition to remove the horde. However, running full speed past the airlock, you manage to trip the mechanism and the door flies open! Luring the cyberdemons away once more, you make one final attempt - charge in, and hit the switch...
- Okay, so you're back in your ship, having removed the transmission jammer. Fortunately you know the layout, from map 1. But things have changed - the thing in the stasis field escaped and let on an army. You have to activate a bunch of manual overrides for half the doors in the ship (yeah, your ship has way too many doors too) and rid it of monsters. Finally, you make it back to the cockpit - and not a moment too soon, as clearly it is being subverted. Success! Wearily, you activate the communications panel at the front, and the level ends. It's just a good thing that battalion of cyberdemons you left underneath your ship at the end of the last level can't do any damage..!
So, there you go. I think the wad falls short of being a classic - some of it is good, but some of it isn't and dare I say part of its fame is due to having been made by some "names" who've gone on to bigger things in the gaming industry. There's a lot of decent architecture and as pretty lighting as you can do with the limits of the vanilla engine. But, all those doors, and the maps are quite empty - sometimes it feels like there's more doors than there are monsters.
All the maps are possible to do from scratch but some aren't easy. However, doing the wad as a mission run, and carrying ammunition forward, probably makes it too easy - although it isn't easy to do the whole 20 levels in a row without dying or using saves (and it took about two and a half hours of gametime so it's not something you could do any old time)
In summary, I don't know. It's pretty good but not wonderful and in some ways I'm glad to be done with it.
HARM THY BROTHER
Before Doom's source code came out there was DeHackEd, which allowed a number of changes to be made to the game behaviour. One of the more interesting ones was called "Monsters Infight".
When the source was released obviously DeHackEd no longer worked, as it was tied to specific binaries of vanilla Doom. The solution was that the ports had to load DeHackEd patches themselves and modify their own internal tables. Boom did this and also extended the format a little, making the patches easier to write.
However, for some reason, the Boom developers glossed over the Monsters Infight option. Some sort of a misunderstanding occurred. Boom - or possibly MBF, I'm not sure exactly when this was implemented - does have an option in its menus called "Monster infighting", but it is not the same as DeHackEd's, not at all.
Boom's monster infighting is the literal interpretation of the term. It asks
If a monster takes damage from another, will it consider stopping its chase after the player, and instead chase after its attacker?
The answer to this question is overwhelmingly "yes" - inducing monster infighting is a standard tactic when the player is low on ammunition, and the game can become significantly more difficult if you turn it off.
DeHackEd's monsters infight option has a subtlely different effect. Namely
If a monster is hit by a projectile launched from another monster of the same type (barons and hellknights count as the same type), will it take damage?
The answer in this case is certainly "no" - if you get a big crowd of imps or whatever all shooting at you they don't take damage from each other. Turning this option on in vanilla Doom or a port that supports it makes gameplay a lot easier.
Note the subtlety in the difference - Boom infighting is just that, whether or not a monsters will go after an attacker, if damaged. The monsters can always damage each other, except for in the most common case of two monsters of the same species accidentally shooting each other - and in that case, DeHackEd allowed you to choose whether or not these attacks were felt. Nothing said about whether or not they were acted upon. Also note that it only applies to projectiles - all the other ways monsters have to attack each other, bullet weapons, etc. - will happily cause damage anyway.
Hence, when I put this into rboom yesterday, I called it "monsters_harmbrother". I tried to come up with something with some fancy latin or greek prefix that meant "self" or "same" but no dice, sadly...
"2006, it's Swiss O'Clock" is the new "1990s, Time for Guru"
This is why you don't let the internet choose the shit you write on the side of your team's official bus. Mind you I can't decide whether or not that's funnier than the fact that for security reasons the USA's bus is the only one that won't have its flag on the side
OGRE LABS
A new and extremely large map from Russell Pearson, the guy who made Blastem2. Let's get the bad news out of the way first - it can't be finished in engines that aren't ZDoom, even though it's meant to be Boom-compatible. I tried to debug it, as did some other people but I don't think Russell can be bothered with fixing it, as if you read that thread you'll see he seems to hate it. Oh well, that's a shame. However, I found that in Prboom I could do almost the entire map, except for pressing the two switches right at the end that open the exit. I would say it is still worth doing.
You start off outside surrounded by trees, and gain access via an airvent to a corridor which leads to a central hub. Then you go up the lift to the roof and a helipad, and the first key is in the control tower. Then you go to the bottom of the lift and through the storage bay, at the end of which you get the second key, back at the central hub. Then you go off into the containment area - this bit is rather like a certain area from Doom2 map10. Anyway you fetch the last key and get into the research labs, where you eventually find a shielded area housing yet another portal to Hell.
Hell is like a completely separate map. It is a floating catwalk in a very large open dark space. The best part of Hell is a circular room where people are being tortured. The sound effects are hilarious and worth playing the thing through just to get this far. Anyway once you've destroyed that you go round the rest of Hell, through some more portals, eventually finding yourself by the aforementioned pair of switches, which if pressed, lower the shields around the evil face of Hell itself, which can then be shot and the level ended.
This map is believable and engrossing. There are section signposts over doors that announce what theme the next area will be (in Impact font, as far as I can guess) Also some of the weapons are in clearly labelled security lockers. In the occasional visit outdoors, there's plenty of beautiful green foliage. It's far from "a steaming pile of dung"
There are a lot of monsters, 850 or so, but they're mostly small and there's plenty of ammo. In fact once you know the level, it's quite easy. A lot of the monsters teleport in or come out of the walls behind you. The action isn't always immediately in front of you, instead it's well spread out around you and keeps things interesting. Secrets are also good, there are decent clues and you don't have to search too much to find most of them.
In summary: This is nowhere near as bad as Russell thinks and is definitely worth playing so I hope he releases a fixed version!!
Industrial: probably will be the last time I play this
Continuing with shit I played in 2002 we have Industrial. I've mentioned this before a couple of times.
This map goes on and on forever, it's like six levels joined together or something. Hardly any of the sections have any relation to any of the others, they're almost entirely disconnected other than having to do all of them in order to open the next one. There are invisible doors everywhere which you have to find to make progress. It's really annoying and takes absolutely ages - the first time I did this map it took 5 hours of game time, this time I got it down to 2 but still that is ridiculous.
Furthermore it's stuffed with monsters, over 1300 of them. However the size of the level means they're fairly thinly distributed - for the most part. In fact what happens is that every so often you get a trap where the monster density ramps up to unmanageable proportions. See for example the room with the super shotgun in, if you even can be bothered to get that far.
The map divides into sections
- The start area, which is a crate maze. If you can find the secret doors to the switches that let you into it, that is. On the other side is a red door.
- You first have to find the red key the route to which is hidden somewhere inside one of those secret doors you found earlier. This route takes you through a number of 1024x1024 squares with varying layouts. Ammunition is very very low. Each area is a huge struggle and your prize is invariably another invisible door opening to get you to the next one. Watch for: the room with the four boxes of revenants, the room with the 16 switches down one side (the aforementioned ssg is in here somewhere), the huge chamber of slime, etc.
- If you managed to get that far - I didn't, I cheated - you go back to the red door and work your way round a number of other miscellaneous situations similar to the last bullet point; they're a bit smaller though, it won't take quite as long. Eventually you'll loop back round to the start area, but higher up so you can run over the top of the crates instead of among them. Now the idea is to run over the crates to a secret door in the corner across from the red door. If you don't know it's there it's very easy to miss and/or fall off the crates and have to run all the way round again to get back up. UGH.
- Then it's the Big Dark Corridor! Work your way around here as doors on either side fly open and monsters are released. What a pain! One side area contains about 50 revenants but you need to do it as you need the plasma gun. Another is a huge flooded chamber crossed by fake 3d bridges (and the first enormous monster teleporter). At the end is a spiderdemon.
- Then you're outside in the fresh air, this area is huge and full of monsters, you run up one side and they all pop up out of the ground, then the other side has another big teleporter and some cyberdemons guarding a key. Also, there are all these little doors on either side of the arena which open up and are full of chaingunners, revenants etc. If you get all the way across you can get inside and find another key.
- Finally you have to go back and then the last key opens up a branch of the Long Dark Corridor that's pretty much more of the same. The exit is this way, past a room full of archviles, a tricky set of jumps on pillars over poison, and a sinking floor with tons of monsters hiding underneath. The exit itself is up on a ledge between four cyberdemons and a spider.
The sting in the tail is that to get into the exit you have to creep along a tiny ledge that unfortunately is blocked by a torch below if you're not using a port that does proper 3d thing clipping. However I have recently discovered that it is possible to strafejump past it, something which I didn't know was possible four years ago. So I guess I'm still improving as a player then!!
Seriously it's probably not worth the bother. Read Doom underground's review, it's pretty funny, especially the part about "monster" levels.
