Four speedmaps, joined together in the middle, one mapper's work making a central hub leading to three others' as separate sections.
Central A semicircular staircase around a courtyard that contains three pillars. You have to press one button from each of the other sections to raise the pillars to reach the exit. Starting from the bottom of the staircase:
South A rocky canyon appears in front of you, crawling with imps. Behind that is a dark cave crawling with all kinds of stuff, in particular the back wall is a row of guys with shotguns. It's quite annoying since it's just a bit too dark to see anything and the stuff on the floor of the cave stops you jumping down into it. You can charge in aggressively but then you're getting pelted from all direction with bullet weapons you can't really avoid...
East Possibly a small part of a green stone castle/fortress, this one is pretty small and gives the impression that it is the easiest section, but after repeated failures I guess it isn't. I suppose you need to go somewhere else to get some ammo first. (I haven't actually manage to do this map on UV skill yet.)
North A booby-trapped dark corridor leads to ledges surrounding a large courtyard. This part is probably the hardest, and certainly the one with the nastiest monsters, with five archviles and a cyberdemon to get past. (The south section might have a higher monster count, I'm not sure, but this one is the most like a slaughter map.) It gives you lots and lots of shells, but frankly I needed a faster weapon to deal with having to fight two archviles and several revenants and imps in a small dark room, for instance.
A good map, a bit too hard for me on UV (and skill settings didn't seem to do much) and with a couple of annoying parts. Very disjoint of course, but what with the way it's been made, you can't really help that.
This is a small level I vaguely remember playing in 2002 when it came out. It is divided into a half dozen or so sub-areas which all vary wildly in theme, making it a little odd. There's a library, a dark underground cave, an outdoor area with a big helipad, an old storage warehouse that you need to blow up a wall to get inside, a pair of bathrooms with big mirrors in them, and a couple of others that are harder to describe.
Most of the areas are interconnected in some way so you get a lot of choice about how to do the map, but that also means you can get lost if you're not paying attention. The architecture is pretty detailed and the texturing of each area was done properly as far as I checked. As for resistance, there are only about 20 monsters. So, the map is quite empty, but ammunition is very tight, you can't really waste any at all.
Possibly of further interest:
- Grind - the original deathmatch level that was developed into grind2.
- Grind2X - further development, with more monsters.
A guy makes a map of his school. Something of a cliche of mid-nineties Doom mapping, recently introduced to /idgames. Nevertheless, this is a decent map, and I enjoyed playing it, all the way through, several times. Points of interest:
the main hall, with a nicely high ceiling, and a couple of classrooms round the outside; there is a megasphere up on one wall with a teleporter next to it that I spent ages trying to strafejump into, when in fact you're meant to shoot it (there's a few places in the map that really need foreknowledge)
an inner garden, one might call it a quadrangle, full of trees, with a well-hidden "VML SUCKS" spraypainted on a wall - I guess the author was glad to leave! To reach here (and the yellow key) you have to walk into a cupboard in the back of a classroom - another thing that needs foreknowledge. There's a hidden BFG in there too which activates a nasty trap a long way away. It's that kind of map.
a bit of fake room-over-room to simulate the basement, it worked really well except the teleport is quite blatant - I wonder if Boom silent line teleports would improve it. The basement contains a cafeteria with a couple of nastily-placed archviles. You can use one to jump onto a wall that has a hidden room full of soulspheres behind it. I think this was meant to be a deathmatch-only thing.
a monster spawner finishes the map off. I could do without this part, frankly. I usually kill all the monsters in the room, then quit when I activate the spawner. It's too annoying to bother with, not just because of having to fire off a moving platform, but because it spawns a load of monsters right below the target, which messes with autoaim (rockets always fly down towards the monsters rather than in the hole in the spawner's head)
So, your typical 1995 map, with quite a few of what I'll call "rough edges". But like I said, I played this several times and didn't get bored of it so that must count for something. And the description of the map in its text file is is dryly amusing. Give it a try.
A typically ancient 1994 wad, all single rooms, halls and doors, like a wolfenstein level without all the right angles... However, made memorable by its text file which gives gradiose names to the otherwise largely featureless areas.
In any other wad, a low corridor with a load of corpses hanging in your face would be unmemorable, if not mildly annoying. Here, it's The Corridor of Raw Meat!
In any other wad, a strobe-lit maze that disables the automap would have you reaching for the quit button.* But here, it's The Disco of the Damned!
And in any other wad, finding a room with a rocket launcher and a plasma gun, which tries to do it so picking up one makes the other inaccessible, but is constructed around the belief that you can't press a button that's receeded into the floor, would make you smile at the naivety and innocence of the old-school player**. But here, it's the The Pit of Choices!
And I didn't even mention The Zombie Shootout, The Rodeo of Infinity, and The Apocalypse! I won't spoil them, to entice you to play the wad (and I'm not too sure which part of the map the last two are meant to be)
Anyway, so much for sarcasm. It's not a particularly stand-out wad, so whether or not you'll like it is dependent on whether or not you like this era of mapping. I liked it, I played it several times, it's not too hard and more importantly it's not too aggravating, although it does abuse those really slow-moving perpetual lifts a bit too much at the end.
* There is a well-hidden pair of light goggles which makes this bearable; the text file mentions them, but doesn't tell you where they are...
** Speaking of a time of innocence, the completion time in the text file is quoted as 20 minutes. This is... rather high. It was a simpler time, when everybody used the keyboard, and no-one had cottoned on to the benefits of the mouse.
Well I had a bunch of Doom maps last month that I actually found really fun, and I thought for a while I had found temporary respite from some of the malaise and ennui I sometimes felt when playing new maps. Plus, maybe I'd manage more than one post in a month. However, then I got distracted by Crawl again since 0.7 came out and there's another tournament on. I even woke myself up in the middle of the night to watch the start of it, because it's always fun watching people attempt crazy speedruns to get the first win.
I gave up trying to actually play Crawl properly a long time ago. Fortunately, since it is an open source game, I can patch it to make it easier. You can argue that that's cheating, and it is, in fact the commit messages of my patches start with "CHEAT:" to make them obvious. But as I see it, I don't have to follow someone else's rules if I don't find them fun. I'm not playing competitively or going on forums and bragging about having won a hundred games, I'm just trying to have fun.
Fun is a subjective thing. If your game is too easy, it gets boring. The Crawl developers will tell you they want their game to be fun for players for years. However, they are mostly people who have played a lot in the past and have many wins to their name. As I see it, they make the game harder so it is still a challenge to themselves and the best players in the world. (And having said that, apparently, Crawl, in its current form, the Stone Soup variant as it is now, is a lot easier than it used to be, than the newest versions of the long-since-dead "official" version.)
On the other hand, if your game is too hard, it gets frustrating. This is especially the case when you know there's a load of cool stuff in the game that you never get to see because you die before you get that far. This feels especially the case for the type of character I like to play (spellcasters) since quite often I would not find any spellbooks other than the one I started with. Having to play the first half dozen dungeon floors over and over again, doing the tedious item identification dance repeatedly, only to die before the game gets interesting, dozens of times, over and over again, got old fast. The developers and top players don't have this problem because they've seen and done all the cool stuff already.
Another thing is that I don't care about winning. If you're a game designer you have to work under the assumption that your players are trying to win. You must balance the game that winning - whatever that means - is difficult, but not impossible.
In Crawl this means retrieving an artefact known as the Orb of Zot and taking it out of the dungeon. In order to do this you must find three items called Runes of Zot first. These are used to open the gates to the domain in which the Orb is found. Compare NetHack's invocation ritual - however in Crawl there are a total of fifteen runes available and you can use any three you like. Runes are located at the ends of variously themed dungeon branches which have different challenges to reach their ends. (E.g. if your primary way of doing damage is with fire, a branch full of fire-resistant monsters will be harder to retrieve a rune from.)
So, the game is balanced under the assumption that the player will try to get three runes, then enter Zot and fetch the Orb. This is a difficult, but not impossible, task: every possible character race+background combination has been won on the public servers at least once. Alternatively he can try to get all fifteen types of rune by doing all the branches. This is more difficult, obviously.
But as I said, I don't care about that. If I win, the game ends and I have to start all over again. It's no different from dying! What I want to do is make a powerful character that can knock the entire dungeon over. I enjoy working towards making such characters, working up their skills to get the powerful spells castable, and so on. I also like the feeling when you find a really nice bit of artefact equipment. I would prefer it if the dungeon was much larger and more or less went on forever. (There are infinitely large dungeon branches in Crawl, but they're mostly full of demons, and there's a lot more monster variety in the game than just demons...) Obviously this is playing the game nothing like the developers intend players to behave. So, I tweak the game so I can play more like how I want to play. I fully accept I'm not playing the same game as everyone else.
Finally, there is the simple fact that changing the rules of the universe is fun. Seeing the universe one way and then changing something and the universe is suddenly different is great. You could probably do some armchair psychology here and go on about how how this is some power/control issue stemming from my having so little control over the real universe, but I never intended to write such an introspective article.
So anyway, that's some thoughts about Crawl, and game design, fun, and why I don't like closed source games. If you got this far, thanks for reading.
