"Hardly enough to fry a cat"
My mother's opinion of the quantity contained in a bag of Frazzles
Tracks!
No don't get excited, I haven't released anything. I just fixed the scripts on dog following its disk upgrade on Sunday. The file script has in fact been broken since early June when cron-apt upgraded perl from 5.6 to 5.8. And I never noticed. Oh well.
I fixed the tracklist so it has mp3 links again but I took down the DSyms because they are useless to everyone else.
Miscellany
Here is a link to oliford's blog. I doubt linking to it here will get it updated again, though. Also I would put it on snafu but E-lab seem to be too lazy to do Last-Modified http headers (grumble)
You Only Live Twice was on TV a few days ago and I watched the end of it. Having seen it turned into a Doom map over the last 12 months, seeing the film version again was... interesting
stuck in a wooden house in the middle of a forest fire
the only source of water a dozen miles of blazing bracken away
I have nothing much to write about
In the previous update I neglected to mention the player death sound replacement in heroes.wad. This was an oversight as it is very funny if you first loaded the wad at the about the same time you saw Star Wars Episode 3.
Since then I've been half-heartedly doing ancient maps off that D1000 CD from last year. Most of them are either unplayable due to being bug-ridden or deathmatch maps or too trivial to even warrant a mention, although I've found a few nice ones.
Sometime during doing map 5 of my megawad project I found myself completely stuck, not due to lack of ideas but simply from running out of patience implementing them. The testing cycle when you're putting the monsters into a map is the worst. You have to play the damn thing over and over again until it even the mildest of annoyances causes rage. Since it's a fifth map in an episode it has to be significantly harder than the first, which means that to test the end half of the map you have to get past the first half. Over and over again. And carelessness through rushing to get to the bit I'm meant to be testing I get killed in the bit that's done already and have to restart. But you can't use god mode or whatever because that will ruin the balance. Eventually you just can't face even looking at your map editor.
The father has acquired a garden table and associated paraphernalia from another relative. At least it's made of wood, not plastic. There are, for some reason, two parasols, one of which is small and pitiful and the other is absolutely, almost comically, enormous. To top this off the mother did not like the chairs so the parents went to some charity thing and bought four old fashioned wooden kitchen chairs. I really don't understand why my mother wants all this stuff. Our garden here is way too small. It'd be good to sit there with a laptop and a wireless connection but they had garden furniture back in the day we all lived in the same house, and it was rarely, if ever, used... In fact it was almost always covered in rain. This spell of hot weather isn't going to last forever
I went for a walk round the common and took a ball to chuck around. I managed to get it stuck in a tree but somehow avoided panicing, instead I looked for a stick to poke it out. I found a large lump of rock, which I lobbed at the ball in the tree. It struck cleanly and knocked the ball back into my hand. Sadly I lost sight of the rock
In conclusion here are some fake spoilers for Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
- Sirius Black is resurrected and becomes Sirius White
- A misprint in the Daily Prophet alleges Lucius Malfoy is "Darth Eater"
- Harry, Ron and Hermione discover the ancient treasure of Godric Gryffindor in a box under the lake. Unfortunately, the Slytherins steal it off them and tie them up. They gleefully open the box, only to find it is full of angry Dementors.
- Dobby bites off Peter Pettigrew's fake silver hand and falls into Voldemort's cauldron
- Coming up in Book 7: Harry stares into the heart of Dumbledore, becomes one with the space time continuum, and fixes everything that ever went wrong in the whole of everywhere ever and still gets home in time for tea!
Heroes When people were first putting wads out there was a brief fashion for wad compilations. You'd get a bunch of your favourite maps, put them all in an episode or whatever, possibly slightly edited, and release it. For example there is the WADPAK series, each of which replace all 27 maps in Doom.
Heroes, recently uploaded to /idgames, is another one of these. It was made at a later time than the wadpaks and thus knows about episode 4 so you get 36 maps. They are pretty average, I mean they're not great but they're not bad for the time they were released, anyway. There's a few weird ones, but a few good ones too. Okay I admit it it's been a month or two since I played this so I can't remember too many specifics. I do recall E4M4 has a porno cinema though!
You also get a bunch of replacement sound effects, only one of which - the item pickup sound - I thought was any good. I've definitely heard it before, I think it must be from another game (or at least, in some other wad I've played ages ago.) But, after 36 maps, it grates just as much as the others.
Get the demo pack from the speed demos archive page
Death Tormention 1 and Death Tormention 2 Two full replacements for Episode 4 of the Ultimate Doom. I first played these in about 2001 and recently replayed them. They're not as good as I remembered. The first is kind of bland, but it's easy. I wish it weren't quite so linear though, I don't know, I mean, you do each area and then that's it, it's finished, done with. And what's with the secret exit on E4M6? There's a proper secret exit on E4M2 where it should be, but if you take the one on E4M6 you'll end up having to do 3 4 5 and 6 all over again... E4M8 is the infamous "fortune favours the brave" map. Don't hang back and try to kill the cyberdemon from long range, just charge towards it and hope you survive... You'll see why
The second episode has better looking levels but they're a lot harder. Indeed it contains the infamous map 6 where you have to kill a cyberdemon with your pistol if you start it from scratch. It's not that it's lacking in ammo, well, it is, but it's more that all the ammo is at the end and the monsters are at the start... E4M1 is also severely lacking in ammunition and E4M5 has this cutesy trick on it where you think you're getting a BFG but you kill yourself instead. It is most droll. The author seems to make his maps around the belief that the BFG is the be-all and end-all of desirable acquisitions. Finally there is E4M7 which has more in common with Doom's E3M4 and E2M6 than an episode 4 level. Still, I will recommend these two episodes; I've enjoyed them in the past, and everything I write sounds unduly negative...
Oh yeah before I forget the second one has three secret levels which I must admit I didn't realise existed for a very long time. And then I nearly missed them out of this article! Oh well!
