Crawl 0.6 alpha releases
The Crawl cycle continues, a little ahead of schedule. To explain: I seem to get interested in this game when a new major version comes out, (0.4, 0.5.) This time though, 0.6 hasn't come out yet (it's due next month, apparently.)
I'm not the only one; watching games on the two public servers, there seems to be far more activity on the beta server than the stable servers.
Anyway I'm sure I'll give up in frustration within a month or so, as usual.
A remake of Plutonia map27. It's pretty good, although aggravatingly hard, with long range chaingunners and constant attacks from all directions. But then, so was the original. So, just like the original I turned the skill down to HNTR, and then it was fun.
Eleven maps starting at map20. The first has a boss spawner in quite a small room and the text afterwards says something about it being a simulator and now you can go onto the real thing. These maps are pretty hard and highly populated, especially the last three which are all well over 1000 monsters. The first two of these were my favourites: 27 starts off inauspiciously but I liked the huge outdoor part at the end, and 28 which is a gothic castle and small town was good as well.
However there seems to be a certain lack of testing, with weird bugs on more than one map. Unreachable secrets, unwakeable/unkillable monsters, a pair of light goggles embedded in the floor in one map... Bad nodebuild or broken/unclosed sectors? I didn't really look into it.
Others
dethe1m1.WAD Original version of urbnbeta. This earlier version is populated by nothing but zombies, however there's no health and you only have your 100 hit points, so it's not trivial. It's ever so slightly simpler, there are no secrets (although some hidden areas still exist) and the update has less ugly texture choices, although I kind of like the original's sky texture replacement. Finally its exit is supposedly co-op only but I think that's only if you're a ham-fisted keyboard player from 1994. With a mouse and straferunning, it's quite easy to just run to it if you know where to go.
Mariko Kouda DOOM ][ (a modification edition) One pretty badly-made map, a load of textures featuring anime characters, and a lot of sounds replaced with lines presumably spoken by the actress in the title. This wad is pretty terrible but it made me laugh quite a lot. The file's datestamp is 1996. Moe is older than I thought...
Another 1024-square megawad. I believe the course of events was that in October 2008 Claustrophobia 1024 had far too many maps. There was also a feeling that many were unplayable. So they took the best ones (in someone's opinion) and released that. Now the people whose maps got cut from 1024clau have put together a sequel 1024cla2, apparently with the blessing of the authors of the first (this is probably how they were allowed to use the same resources - playpal, menu and intermission screen graphics, etc.)
I didn't like this one as much as 1024clau. Mostly I don't care for either, 1024 square maps aren't really my thing.* But I think here we have a lot of maps that are just trying to shove as much into a small space as possible, rather than making clever use of the restricted area. But if you like really cramped maps then go for it, I guess.
* 384, on the other hand, was really fun...
Two good episodes, nicely old school, nicely rough around the edges. Most maps obviously inspired by Doom IWAD maps. Clever layouts as well, glimpses, inaccessible areas that make you feel like you're in a larger structure but you just can't get to all of it. A few bugs, secrets getting wiped, or too thin to walk in, the odd solid hanging body in a tall sector, nothing too major.
But I had this the weird sense of deja vu on the one map where, halfway through, half the base suddenly floods with radioactive slime. I almost didn't realise at all - apart from this one thing, I played through the E1 episode with no memory of it. It turns out these are Phobos Outpost (1) and The Base of Evil (2), reuploaded with their names changed (search and replace applied to text file.) They're otherwise identical. The second episode still has the original name on its credits screen following E2M8. However, each ExM1 has had its nodes rebuilt. Why? To avoid a duplicate file detector seems a likely answer. I can't help but feel someone's being an idiot.
Others
urbnbeta.WAD Someone made their house as Doom E1M1. I actually enjoyed this wad, probably because I managed to beat it first time - including beating a cyberdemon with shotgun and chaingun, and running around with 2% health for the longest time but still surviving. Then I took it apart in a map editor and worked out a strategy. It's one of those kinds of maps, easier if you know how, and you end up playing it a bunch of times trying to optimise it.
TechNoid.WAD Runs on E1M3. A small, quite ugly tech-themed map with plenty to annoy the player (e.g. trying to get into the secret tunnel after the red door that leads to the exit... ugh, you'll almost certainly need a map editor) But, somehow it wasn't quite so terrible that I deleted it instantly... something about the interconnection and how the layout eventually comes back on itself... I don't know.
