23/06/2007 @14:50:16 ^16:09:19

Knee-Deep in ZDoom

Everyone's written about this already so why not me? However everything that could have been said has been and I have no particular opinion one way or the other. Besides, it's for ZDoom, which I cannot be bothered to get working on my system again, not after the last time.

Status of /idgames

It appears to be back online. As growler pointed out the web server came back up only a few hours after my last post, but as FTP was down, the system was still effectively dead. But I just checked now and that appears rectified. Not sure how long it's been back, but anyway there you go, some good news.

Hellfire (again), Zap18: Paradox Lost, Systemic Corruption

Yet more on Hellfire. For some reason I couldn't just give up. It's not extraordinarily bad, it's far from the level of innate worthlesness that makes me stop playing a wad completely. It does have some merit. It just has a lot of annoyances that put me off it, too.

• I've been playing a bit of TNT:Evilution recently and it turns out a lot of the graphics Hellfire uses are from there. I thought they were new. My own fault for not really ever bothering with Final Doom (I don't care if it's an actual commercial product, the two Final Doom IWADs are just third party PWADs they decided to cash in on and better stuff has been made for free)
• While it doesn't have any gratuitous, show-stopping ZDoomisms that I noticed, it is rather full of situations where mouselook and proper 3d thing clipping would make the game much easier. Steep staircases with monsters at the top, high ledges with monsters at the bottom, etc.
• A number of the final maps are clearly influenced by original IWAD maps. The most obvious was map26, which was basically three parts E3M6, one part MAP29.
• On map25 I one-shot-killed three spiderdemons with three consecutive BFG shots. Incredible luck!
• 27 has a great name - "The Evil Holes"! It's also one of the better ones, you clamber around a bunch of mountains over lava, there's lots of jumps to make and it's all very three-dimensional. However, that made it suffer even more from things mentioned above.

Oh well after three posts I'm pretty sure I'm done with it for now. As I say I've done all the maps, and it's an explorer wad that's fun to go round once, but now I've done it once I don't feel like playing it again.

Zap18: Paradox Lost Ah this is more like it. Made some years ago for a project that never finished, Zap18 is a grey techbase of moderate difficulty. The architecture has the right balance of simplicity and interest, and the difficulty is quite low, although you can't go mad. There is excellent use of height. I wish more maps were like this.

Systematic Corruption (UPDATE: /idgames link) is another well-detailed techbase which hasn't made it to /idgames yet. It seems highly reminiscent in both architectural style and difficulty, of the base/mines levels in Scythe 2. It looks pretty much flawless, but I found it rather hard, especially the end where you are locked in a room and a huge horde of monsters teleport in. With many revenants especially, the chance of having a huge accident is quite high, and there's hardly any health available, and it was quite frustrating. I found it much better on HMP - strangely HNTR was somewhat lacking in ammunition...

12/06/2007 @08:38:16 ^10:13:17

The End?

Well it looks like the archives are down, and have been for several days; if that's true, then it's really the end. Doom's great strength is that (nearly) every map ever made could be found in one place; if it all spread across different websites nobody'd be able to find your new wad when you finish it.

My CC3 map is a bit of a disaster. I've already missed two deadlines because a) the usual Yadex effect (god damn I hate that program) and b) whenever I playtest the thing I can't shake the feeling it's a convoluted mess of ugliness and contrived gameplay. However, I'm not starting again, not now. But whenever I look at it in yadex I go "ugh, can't face this" and close the window again.

Why you shouldn't write a review not having played the whole thing

Hellfire, despite a promising start, is turning out to be a disappointment. Let's see, I was in the middle of map 4. Well soon after I posted, I reached one of those mass start blinking effects which turned off all the lights in the towerblock. Combined with a lack of health (made more irritating by being locked out of the start area where I knew there were two untouched medikits - I loathe maps that permanently prevent backtracking) and lots of zombies, it made it all very very annoying. Pandora's Pox was a good example of how to use the start blinking effect - here, it was too pervasive.

Then I made several attempts to do map 5 from scratch, and failed all of them very quickly. You start apparently on an electric chair in a prison (recall Ksutra map 11) That's not a problem. Having no health and hardly any ammunition, however, is, and I got fed up of running out and dying. I gave up, returned to my savegame at the end of map 4 and began to carry ammunition forward. The prison interior wasn't too bad, albeit slightly repetitive and full of wolfenstein guards. Outside was bad, you have chaingunners everywhere, far off and at different heights, so you can't shoot them. There's a secret megasphere which hardly lasted any time at all. So frustrating.

Map 6 was equally irritating, being a maze of caves again with the characteristic lack of resources; map 7, back in a town, this time with freedom to roam, was much better. At least it would have been but there's mancubi everywhere and the usual lack of resources. There's no way I would bother with this stuff from scratch, you'd just die, weaponless and destitute. Having said that, if you have weapons and stuff, and you like exploring, map 7 is definitely recommendable. I enjoyed the creepy girl pinup too.

Then we get on to the Hell levels which begin at map 21. These are just as annoyingly limited, but since you've had to warp to get to them you don't have the luxury of reloading a savegame! (I suppose there's always playing the original maps 8-20 to amass resources but that is questionable to say the least) Although I beat map 21 after about 50 reloads I am stuck a way into map 22 with no ammunition and no health, and I pretty much give up, it's not worth wasting more time on this.