Hi, Barry Scott here to tell you HOW MUCH THIS SUCKS
Did anybody else see Stannah Stairlifts in one of the advert breaks in Gremlins?
Speedmapping!
The girl challenged me to a speedmapping contest, which I won comfortably. She didn't even finish, huh. Okay okay I had an advantage, I've tried (and failed miserably) to do speedmapping contests before, and I picked the theme ("the theme is a roman villa, you have to start outside, and there has to be a courtyard in the middle"), and when the 100 minutes were up I wasn't quite done so I changed the rules and granted an extension to take it to two hours. But still.
Anyway the map is named Speed Villa. I replayed Curses a few weeks ago and I think I was thinking of the endgame when I came up with the theme. Please note it is a speedmap so there's no texture alignment and some areas are pretty bare and look shitty. MAP01 is the 120 minute version, MAP02 is the 100 minute version which I only put in for completeness.
I found it quite fun to play repeatedly so I made a bunch of demos for it, all of which require PRBoom and are included in the zip:
- UV Max 1:10
- UV Speed 0:19
- UV Pacifist 0:25
- NM Speed 0:35
I don't like nightmare mode very much. Pacifist is basically the same as speed only you're not allowed to directly harm any of the monsters. This means no shooting monsters, no shooting barrels to kill monsters, and indeed no firing weapons unless it's to activate an impact linedef. Actually I think you might be allowed to fire to wake monsters up, I forget.
I can hear the sound of sleighbells no wait it's just the roof leaking
That is all, merry fucking christmas
CC2 is cool, I'm having much fun playing it through... except, map5 has to be the single most annoying Doom map I have ever played.
the reviews are coming in
troa review backlog mountain
If I can update every day this week I might manage to get through all this stuff
Exquisite corpse Okay let's quote the text file here, I'd only be repeating it otherwise:
The phrase "exquisite corpse" originates from a surrealist game in which sentences were created by a group of people, each person not knowing what the previous words were.
In this WAD, each of the 12 authors was given a block of space 1024x1024 units big and asked to create a part of a larger level. However, all they were given to guide them were small slivers of the previously created pieces adjacent to theirs.
Good idea, huh? Like Consequences or whatever that shit I played a couple of times in May 2000 was called. Anyway the map turned out pretty well. The joins are usually visible (with the notable exception of the starting area at the top left of the map, and the area to its immediate south) and for the most part it all somehow managed to follow a techbase/factory theme (even when they didn't it still fitted in..except maybe the underground bit at the bottom left hand corner, but oh well) Gameplay is hard until you know where you're going and where the traps are, but the secrets are quite inventive, especially the one in the top left square (hint: you need a super shotgun to set it off)
Here is the thread about the idea if you really care
Area 51 Two maps set in a secret base out in the desert. The plot goes, contact has been lost with Area 51, you have to go in and see why. Usual stuff. The first map starts outside the base, you find your way in via this "biochip scanner" thing that the WAD uses a few times as a gimmick. There are storage rooms in which the exploding barrels feature a cameo appearance from a dying cyberdemon, and tunnels full of an interestingly bright yellowy orange acid. There are research labs with monsters in suspended animation - watch for an archvile trapped in some sort of force field, it's creepy (only a decoration, you can't shoot it) There's a commander's office with a photo of Smoking Man on the wall. There's a dead spiderdemon that has been dismantled. You should play this thing if only for the graphics.
The second map is more like a toxic waste plant. There's lots more of that weird orange/yellow acid, and a yellow and black railing texture that works quite well. Later on you find yourself in a huge room with four huge baths of the stuff; it's an impressive setpiece, and quite dangerous too. The map ends when you board a small spacecraft at the end, full of writings in an alien language. This part reminded me very strongly of Equinox, in fact, what with the extra graphics giving it a similar atmosphere, the whole WAD did.
I think there was meant to be a third map since when you finish the second map the title of the third map on the intermission screen has been changed to The Mothership, but it was evidently never made, which is a shame.
Overall, the construction is quite simple, There aren't that many sectors and linedefs in view at once. Since this map predates limit-removing sourceports, this is not surprising. The texturing is, well, the word I would use is "noisy". That is, it uses a lot of textures that are better used sparingly. Huge walls of computers and wiring. Long repeating stretches of textures that aren't meant to be repeated (e.g. the TEKGRENx ones that aren't the basic green wall) That sort of thing. It's hard to explain. Gameplay is tough. You are up against it pretty much from the start, both monsters and the environment are against you, and health can be quite hard to come by. As you go on it gets easier (obviously) but there are some nasty traps and a number of archviles in awkward places. However if you find the secrets, which aren't too hard, you should end up with quite an arsenal. I'm not sure the maps are enjoyable enough to have great replay value but the first time you will be drawn in.
PIE IN THE SKY
Just what is the deal with airplane food?
Slime
So, in Elixir, it turns out it's possible to get yourself stuck by the machine off-switch without having the red key, after all. I spent ages trying to make the fence impervious to jumping (say off the top of the console) and didn't even think of being able to go halfway up the drums and strafejump off the side over the barrier.
Also there's a trap that, on Hey Not Too Rough, goes off early and pretty much at random. I thought I had fixed it, but it seems I haven't. Anyway, who cares? It's really hard to make bug-free maps.
Shoot 'em up
I was reading the Top Ten Infamous WADs from Doomworld's ten years feature and decided to play uac labs, two maps by that Harris guy who did the school shooting.
They're not very good.
In a way they're both very similar, starting off in cramped dark halls and rooms and ending up in a large open area. The first has a remake of the initial part of E1M1, which I liked, even with the monster-infested towers overlooking outside the window. Anyway you chase your way through some more corridors and find a blue key which lets you out into this courtyard in two parts, one of which is like the start of E1M9 and the other has this kind of marble garden feature which is the landing site of a huge monster teleporter. However the trap doesn't go off unless you run over a very specific part of the feature, and the key isn't even on it. Thus you can just grab the key and be on your merry way. Bizarre. Oh and you can't get 100% secrets, one of the secret sectors was deleted and doesn't have any delimiting sidedefs (but there are lots of maps where that happens, I guess I'm lucky to have yadex's cross references checker)
Anyway the second follows directly on (its start room is a copy of the exit of the first) and via some dark techbase corridors leads you to a large outdoor courtyard with a stone circle thing in the middle. Not content with putting four archviles into this circle, the author decided that upon entering the circle the walls of the courtyard would lower and you would be surrounded by about 200 monsters, including probably two dozen pain elementals. This got pretty nasty, but somehow I made it through. I think you're supposed to press the eight buttons sticking up out the floor behind the walls that lower - they open doors which eventually reveal another switch that's supposed to raise a floor to let you get to the exit, in the centre of the stone circle, but you can just jump over the gap quite easily provided you get the barrels out of the way first.
baby found in mud
said to be content
Community Chest 2 released
CC2 has come out so you can download from that link I just wrote. I was going to write "CC2 has come out, you can get it from here" but I got "tip of the day: don't use click here as link text" from the w3c validator page yesterday
You can download it if you want I guess. Among other things it features a rare map from the guy who made Equinox, but that isn't a stupid gimmick.
ahahaha
seriously I laughed for about half an hour
She looks thinner, especially around the neck
and blonder, especially around the hair
but blatantly trying to look professional, and not laugh at the camera
she's hardly changed a bit
May we be truly grateful
I've had this cable modem for two years. To commemorate this increasingly bitter and hateful time of alienating every single person I know and losing any ability I might once have had to face the world and generally regressing to the level of a spoiled 13-year old wrapped in cotton wool I'd like to
oh fuck it I'm sleepy
