encouragement
You won't find that here!
I watched five Star Wars films in a week
One of them was the new one, obviously. The first prequel had been on TV, I went to the cinema, then I found my video of the "classic" trilogy (I taped the remastered versions off of ITV when they showed them a couple of years ago) and watched all of them.
When I went to see the third Matrix film one thing I didn't like was the crowdedness of the cinema. This time however due to bizarre sleeping patterns it struck me as a great idea at 5am one day that I could go pretty much when the place opened later in the morning. Sure enough at 10am there were 7 or 8 other people in the entire cinema. Who cares about being a friendless loser?
People hate on the prequels a lot, but for me they improved a lot after I read the Starwars.com databank and the vast amount of crap in Wikipedia. I don't care about pretentious dialogue acted woodenly, in fact I think it's pretty funny. You enjoy the good bits and laugh at the bad bits. It's not rocket science, people. Save your hate for real life.
Oh but if you want a review you'll have to go elsewhere because I can't be bothered to write one. I'm not a film reviewer. I enjoyed most of it, but I'm predisposed to liking this shit!
Doom Conversions
I am however a Doom WAD reviewer. I was moved to seek out the old Star Wars Doom WADs and I might as well harp on about them. Star Wars Doom replaces four maps from Doom and Star Wars Doom 2 is an update, converted for Doom 2 and five extra levels. There is a cleaned up version of the Doom 2 conversion on Doom WAD station's Star Wars page; this might be easier to get working. Find the link that says "Download the UPDATED VERSION" or Download the UPDATED VERSION, I guess.
However, having set all that up, I can't really recommend them. Yeah okay you get to shoot Stormtroopers and whatnot but once the novelty has worn off that's about it. You get some quite crappy maps that are very mid-90s and are annoying to play.
- The first four maps (which are in both versions) are large and complicated but very repetitive and with architecture that hampers you. The first two are really just rooms and halls and suffer from too much symmetry and boring gameplay once you're over the initial "ooh I'm in Star Wars!" moment. The third and fourth maps are worse, the third is riddled with perpetual moving platforms for which you have to wait an age, and the fourth is basically the same corridor, which is boring to play once, repeated four times. However, they all look pretty good if you can ignore the weird use of tan bricks on the ceiling.
- The five maps in the updated version are bare and underdetailed. The architecture doesn't get in your way quite as much, but it looks pretty awful. Mos Eisley is a grid of square boxes, Hoth is a maze of randomly strewn vertexes, textured in this one white pattern, and Endor appears as a flat plain with some cylinders on it. The Emperor's Throne Room on the Death Star is pretty good though. Darth Vader throws homing lightsabers at you that look really strange and the Emperor does exactly what you expect.
Speaking of which, one of the appeals of Doom total conversions is finding out how the characters and settings from the source have been worked into the game. For example, replacing the archvile's attack with force lightning was natural and obvious. But, that's about it, the Dehacked patches seem rather half-arsed and leave a lot to be desired. For example, not confusing killcount and itemcount would have been a good start.
Anyway in summary I think you should only look at these wads if you're a) prepared to work out how to get PrBoom to run them b) can put up with crappyness. I recall enjoying the novelty factor when I found them a couple of years ago, but they don't stand up to replaying. Doom is what it is, don't mess with a winning formula!
Anakin bites off Obi-Wan's lightsaber and falls into Mount Doom
But who the fuck is General Grievous? Do I have to watch the whole of Clone Wars to get this shit
This update is about MY HAIR
It wasn't ever meant to get this long. I wanted it to be, you know, long enough so that it would hang over my face like curtains and flop about. No, don't ask me why. I must have seen someone else's hair doing this and, my susceptiblility to influences being proportional to how stupid the influences are, decided to copy it. Plus, subconsciously I could hide behind it.
But that obviously got a bit out of hand!
It was 10 years ago, the 20th of May 1995, that I tried to tie it back. It was a day or two after GCSE exam leave started. Five days previously, the school had had its entire photo taken; hundreds of uniformed teenagers piled perilously on a rickety construction of chairs and benches from the gym. Sorted by height, so I was right in the middle, making a spirited attempt to ruin the photo by scowling with my hair over my face. Yeah, yeah, there's always one.
It was a life choice. I could either tie it back, or not. I was experimenting with an ancient tie I had found somewhere. This guy I knew came to my house and I answered the door with it tied back. Having been seen forced the choice. Yeah, yeah, haha, I know, I didn't actually make a choice.
When it was first tied back, it was too short. I had this stumpy tail and most of the curtains were still there. And that's how I did my GCSEs, with this stump on the back of my head. Questioned, and made fun of, I just repeatedly employed a stance based on "it's just to keep it out my eyes!" or something equally dumb that didn't make sense.
Then I had the whole of summer. Tied back, it wasn't so much of a nuisance, and I'd already had the argument with my father about why my hair was like it was and when was I going to get it cut. It got longer and longer, and by the following September when I went back to school, in a suit, to do A-levels, it was all neatly tied back in a tail.
I think this timing and coincidence of the messy stage with an unusually long summer away from school, was critical. There was always the risk that in doing this I would contravene the part of the uniform regulations about bizarre hairstyles. Not that there weren't a few incidents: a couple of people reported certain members of staff giving the back of my head very dark looks, once one of my teachers said I had been "discussed" in a staff meeting, and most worryingly, the deputy head came up to me in front of a bunch of my peers and intoned "Robert, one day we must have a little chat about your hair!"
I squeaked a response along the lines of "Uhokaylookingforwardtoit!" Well, what was I supposed to say? But nothing came of it. Days and weeks went past but nothing happened. I think I managed to relax after about six months. I even became a little smug after the following summer, when I went into the upper sixth and this guy in the year below me whose hair had been getting really long all year came back into the lower sixth with it tied back.
As the years went by I let it grow, firstly because it was easier and cheaper to do so than go and get it cut, and also because of my need to accumulate superlatives. And that brings us to the present day, where at just over three feet long it doesn't seem to want to get any longer. Every time I wash it I wish I could cut it all off but I don't have the courage; I think I look awful with short hair, and if I cut it off I can't put it back again if it is a disaster. Also it annoys certain people that I have longer hair than they do, so that's reason enough to keep it.
In closing I am reminded of the dream I had before School Sports Day, 1994, in which I saw myself at a sports day, not in the horrible uniform of the school, but having long hair tied back in a neat tail and dressed casually in black trousers and t-shirt. The thing was, at the Sports Day in 1996, this vision came to pass.
Incredible.
It's just a shame the other part, about turning up on a flying motorcycle armed with plasma cannons, didn't...
I can't wait to get home from school, so I can get online, and talk with my boyfriend!!
ELL OH ELL OH ELL
THE ZIPS COLLECTION
These are a bunch of maps I've downloaded over the past two weeks. For some reason, I didn't put them in the usual place I put downloaded wads, but in a subdirectory of /tmp called "zips", probably because I didn't think I'd keep any of them around for long!
Fear II - The Spawn This is a classic Doom 2 metal-themed map that runs on map02. It's pretty linear and some might say dull, but I really liked it. There's plenty of atmospheric lighting, bright pools surrounded by darkness, shadows, that sort of thing. Oh and an outdoor not-so-secret area, I always like base maps with outsides you can get to. On the way to the blue key it switches theme to bricks for some reason. The gameplay like I said is nothing very special, mostly just follow your nose until you reach a free standing sky wall that's a teleporter which returns you to the middle. Opposition is mostly imps, spectres, zombies and a couple of revenants. There's an awkwardly placed mancubus and a classic token archvile in the brick section, so watch out. Anyway I enjoyed this map and recommend it to you.
WICKED.WAD This is one of those badly constructed old maps, it's quite weird really as everything is the wrong shape and all twisted and sheared. I found it quite interesting to explore but it's not great. There's bits that are sort of inspired from original Doom levels, so if you like spotting this kind of thing, have fun. Otherwise it's probably too annoying for most people to play but hey what else have you got to do?
Doomgate Training Camp Okay I think what is going on here is that some guy has come to Doom deathmatch from other more modern online games and has made a tutorial wad in which his friends, and/or visitors to his site, can practice. You can do jumping (Doom jumping, that is, running over gaps) straferunning, wallrunning and rocketjumping if you like. (I also found you can strafe50 over the rocket jumping pit. It doesn't seem that the author knows about strafe50, well, I don't blame him, I didn't work out how to do it until relatively recently... Oh yes, here is a an old update I wrote about jumps and things) There's demos to show you what to do as well, it's a complete package! It's very amusing but then my sense of humour is warped so who knows.
RH21A.WAD I don't know what the hell this is. It's meant to be one deck of a boat, or something. I guess the shape is right but as each room is textured pretty much at random it doesn't really work. It runs on E2M1. The best rooms were the storage bay with its dubious overuse of LITE textures and badly-aligned crates; and the final room at the front of the boat, which is fun if you play it aggressively and start a big monster fight. However you'll probably get frustrated looking for it as most of the doors you need to progress are invisible. There is also a roomful of gore, a science room where they are studying a whirlpool and some other bits.
The Castle from Hell!!! This is by the same author as the previous map. It runs on E2M3. At least it looks like a castle, even if it appears to be built nearly in space. To put it another way it "offers a glorious view of the surrounding mountains"; it's basically in a skybox. Jump into the moat and run all the way round to get all the weapons and lots of health. Then enter the castle, and run around and let the boss monsters kill everything else. Beware of rocket splash damage. Then you have to get inside the passages and find the exit, which is kind of hidden. There's no real sense of progression, you just find it in a dark corridor. The end.
Steel Cage Match Okay I don't know anything about wrestling but apparently fighting in a cage is something they do? I don't know. Anyway this map is meant to simulate that, it's intended for deathmatch but there's a bunch of demons as well. You start in the changing rooms with an ample weapon supply. Run out and shoot things. It's very very simple and also quite colourful. It appears to be standing room only, there's just this huge open area of blue carpet where you'd think the seating would go. There's bits and pieces dotted around it. You fight a baron in the cage and an imp is his manager(?) and the spectators are demons. It's trivial and you can beat it in very little time at all. So, it's just the sort of thing that instead of taking two minutes to play it once, I end up wasting an hour trying to minimise the time of a UV max run. I got it under a minute eventually but I suspect my strategy was all off
Shadow.wad I don't know how to describe this other than fairly standard old school map layout. You know, you clear out one room and go on to the next. There's a hub with a red key and three locked doors, you go through the red door and get the next key, come back, and so on. The thing that makes it distinctive, its gimmick if you like is that its all either very bright or very dark and uses densely alternating light and dark patterns to confuse the player. However there's plenty of ammunition and it's mostly pretty easy. In fact I thought the hardest part was fetching the red key off its pedestal without falling into the surrounding pits of poison.
stop this wads updated in 1994 Seemingly every week somebody uploads a bunch of "old classics" into the /idgames archive and every week idiots on the Doomworld forums complain about them. This is apparently a protest against those idiots, or for them, I'm not sure. This map is a Wolfenstein map. It's a flat 128 high ceiling maze of doors and hallways. The monsters with three exceptions are SS soldiers. That said it was fun to explore. Fortunately I found the hidden cache of BFG cells and megaspheres before the cyberdemon that wakes up at the start and immediately teleports away came back and found me.
Ponte And finally, we have a large, sparsely decorated map that I really want to like but I can't! You start off on a sort of porch in front of a grassy field. It's crawling with zombies. Emerging you find a bridge over a deep cacodemon-infested canyon. Scarper over this to an enormous cross shape with a key and a huge crowd of barons and hellknights on top. Get the key, then past an awkwardly placed archvile you have a plain split by a bottomless chasm. There's a ton of imps and a cage full of mancubi. Behind the mancubi is a second key which lets you onto an island in the middle of a lava lake. There's two cyberdemons and a load more cacodemons here. In the lava are four transporters; if you pick the right one you'll find yourself behind the door you started in front of. Hope you have enough health to jump into the slime pit and run to the exit.
Okay okay enough of the walkthrough, tell the people why you don't like it: It's mainly that it is way too hard, and not in a good way either - there is far too little ammunition and health and it's too easy to die accidentally. I found it pretty frustrating. This is a large map, plenty of room to run about and suchlike, and large groups of monsters. If there was tons more health and ammunition, I think it would be a lot more fun.
SUMMARY
- Fear2 is good
- Ponte would be good if it wasn't so annoying
- I have weird taste in maps.
rm -fr /tmp/zips
TAKE AN INTEREST
Stop being so self-absorbed and thinking about how you come off to other people and be interested in what they have to say!
Kama Sutra is easier than it looks
I have to admit I misjudged the difficulty level of Kama Sutra in the review I did last week. On a whim I ran one of the earlier maps from a pistol start and to my surprise I killed all the monsters with relative ease... Intrigued, I went on and as of now I've managed to do a total of 14 of the maps from a pistol start without using savegames. Furthermore, most of those went easily on the first attempt.
I think the misjudgement occurred because I was carrying ammunition forward; this meant I was aware of the high monster densities but less aware of the easy availability of weapons, ammunition and health on all the maps. Also, all the ones I've done are early maps. Towards the end it gets ridiculous and it probably biased my memory.
DBD::SQLite is a bit of a disappointment
SQLite 3 supports binary data in tables properly, calling them "BLOBS", to distinguish them from text strings which are zero-terminated. Great, I thought, I can put JPEG thumbnails and crap like that into them. But wait! In order to use this for the site, I need to use it from perl which means using perl's SQLite interface, DBD::SQLite.
I would say that this isn't really up to standard. It switched to SQLite 3 some time ago (without renaming itself, which caused a lot of problems as v2 and v3 databases are binary incompatible and if you upgraded all of a sudden your scripts would stop working) In spite of this, it appears to treat blobs exactly the same way as text, and so if you try to insert data that contains zeroes it happily chops it off at the first one. I can't find a way round this. Perl strings are binary-safe, you can put as many zeroes in as you like. It's annoying.
Oh yeah, it's not threadsafe either and there's no option to dynamically link with whatever version of libsqlite3 you have on your system instead of using the (old, obsolete, susceptible to database corruption bugs) version 3.1.3 that it ships with.
That was boring, wasn't it! I get complaints about the updates I write these days, they're all boring technical nonsense instead of the drama filled faggot shit I used to write about.
Oh my god, what the hell is that thing?!
I went for a walk yesterday. I guess I was feeling odd because of sleep deprivation. Anyway, as luck would have it there was this 100-foot balloon version of the nodding dog off those bloody insurance adverts on the common. It was hilarious and pretty scary close up, especially when the wind blew it so that its bloated chops plummetted towards you!
I enjoyed leaving the house for the first time in months, indeed I kicked a football a couple of times as I was passing some kids who let theirs stray. However there were too many people around and I couldn't relax so unless I can find an easy way to get out of the house when it's like 5am and the sun is just about to rise I won't be repeating this.
Everybody go and vote tomorrow
I don't care who you vote for but you are a hypocrite and have no right to complain about the government if you don't take each and every legitimate opportunity to go and do something about it.
Aphorisms on being blown up by cyberdemons
Okay here is a hopefully brief review of Kama Sutra. I played this megawad using lots of savegames and carrying ammo forward, although I think the intention is that you play each level from scratch. But, who cares.
The maps have a unique feel to them. They are apparently doom2.exe compatible and have been checked for visplane overflows. You'd be forgiven for disbelieving this, though. Nearly all of them have scenery by the bucketloads. Huge expanses of water are common. There are bays, coastlines, the city maps have enormous skyscrapers on the horizon, etc. This sort of atmosphere makes this wad worth playing by itself. There's also lots of realism, fake 3d bridges and other things you can only do with masses of self referencing linedefs, that sort of thing.
The gameplay is pretty hard. Even when you're carrying ammunition forward you're up against it. I admit I skipped a few levels or cheated my way through them. It's Hell Revealed skill level, or often above it. Mostly I only got through with luck and lots and lots of savegames.
- Map 3 has a bay with a sailboat and a really stupid secret area which the title hints at.
- Map 5 starts off in a cave system and you think it's going to be all cramped and awkward until you emerge into an enormous outdoor scene with a bay and a lighthouse and all sorts!
- Map 8 has this cute "passage of time" gimmick. There's this part with a clock that you keep coming back to and as the level progresses that area gets progressively darker and the time on the clock gets later and later.
- Map 11 what the hell I'm in an electric chair! Aargh!
- Map 13 is in a city. I really like the part where you get the blue key. You're on top of a towerblock with this view of an enormous urban landscape. It is very impressive.
- Map 14 is even more impressive. I don't know what it is about huge maps that have huge height differences, but it looks amazing. Scythe-style overhead roads as well.
- Map 15 is a sports centre. Amazingly I've played Doom in a swimming pool before but never on a tennis court or a running track.
- I skipped the secret levels. The first one is a harder remake of Hell Revealed 22 and I would die within five seconds of starting it so I decided to go back to the end of map 15 and press the normal exit switch instead. Of course this made doing map 32 impossible.
- Map 16 is called "Leeds Castle". This made me go "huh?" The weird part is it does feel like a tourist attraction!
- Map 17 is a puzzle level and I skipped it because it was really annoying
- Map 18 is like a souped up cross between Alien Vendetta 6 and 24 (the new 24, not the old one). Imagine that. This is an incredible map, I could hardly stop grinning.
- Map 20 is a fortress or a factory or something in a valley. The trap on the red key is fierce and I don't know how I managed to get past it. It's probably the hardest map that I didn't cheat my way through or skip outright. It also features a gap in a wall that has the alarming property of being traversible in one direction only with no moving parts.
- Map 21 starts in hell and has more archviles at the start than I care to imagine. And you have to charge past them.
- Map 23 features a battle with five cyberdemons at once!
- Map 24 has a funky cutscene ending that exploits old Doom2 quirks like voodoo dolls and zombie exits (so it won't end properly if you don't run it in PRBoom's compatibility mode)
Map 25 is basically another remake of Hell Revealed 25 UPDATE (9/9/2005) No it isn't. It has similiarities, like how you come out of an earthy hole at the start, and the descending arches with dozens of revenants behind, and the general feeling of being a small map so stuffed with monsters you can hardly move, but it's nowhere near similar enough to be called a remake.- Map 27 is like a lot of smaller maps in space connected by teleporter. It is a weird gimmick map and I didn't like it.
- Map 28 is an oversized remake of Hell Revealed 24 and was too hard for me. I got through it in the end but only by watching a demo and using the cheat for infinite radsuit. There's over 1700 monsters, but the worst part is most of it is poisonous.
- Map 29 is another amazing map for scenery and it appears to go on forever. Starting in a brick fortress you end up going through a city which descends into hell. The bit where you jump into the abyss is exhilarating.
- Map 30 has to be seen to be believed! A few years ago I'd have probably killed myself laughing but I don't know. Now it just says "made by eternal virgins". However I admit the blood made me laugh. (Okay okay this map is a joke, but still, they thought it was a good idea for long enough to make it...)
In summary, you should play this because apart from one or two points it's up there with the classic "hard" megawads like HR, AV, Scythe, etc. (from all of which it draws influences.) Very good.
PS Oh yeah I forgot they're doing demos for it at a site called Ksutra-N
