Too complex by half!
MAINTENANCE COMPLEX (2complex.wad) is big. Really big. You wouldn't believe how impossibly big this... yeah all right, but let's put this into context. It's about the same monster density as Doom 2, but there are 1000 monsters. I've done this map twice now, once with savegames to get to know it, and then today without using them I finished the map with 100% of everything after an hour and fifty five minutes. That's how big it is.
What's more amazing is that the entire map is also filled with roughly the same level of close detailing that must have taken ages to make. Nowhere looks empty. Having said that it is rather messy. Not much is parallel to the axes, which is all very well but leads to texture alignment weirdness as you can never get the lines quite the right length for the textures to fit them properly. It's thousands and thousands of packed linedefs and sectors, and it goes on forever.
Although it's nowhere near randomly textured or STARTAN everywhere or anything like that, there's no particular overall theme either. Some of it is factory, some of it is city, but I'm pretty sure if I looked I'd find every single Doom 2 texture in there somewhere. There's machinery and computers and brick and stone and slime and blood. It's crowded but it works for me. However some people might call this map ugly, especially with one section of factory full of Wolfenstein guards.
Gameplay: As I said it's pretty easy, especially when you know where the secrets - all twenty three of them - are. It's typically top-heavy and the start can be tricky, your health might get dangerously low and your shotgun might be nearly empty, but after the first fifty or hundred monsters you might well have a megasphere, backpack, chaingun and two shotguns and be off on your way. There's always plenty of resources around, indeed only once after that did I think "oh well I'm going to die now" (this was after about 280 monsters, not the bit with the cyberdemon in the library or the two teleporting archviles that manage to resurrect an awful lot) but I didn't and then soon found a soulsphere and some armour and I was off again.
In fact the worst thing that's going to happen to you is that you're going to get completely lost. If you miss a switch or something there is miles and miles of map to search. It took three hours of game time spread over three days, with much searching in the map editor, to finish it the first time. Then as I said above, two hours to play even when I did know it. The map is so densely packed that it's hard to trace out a route on the automap. There is a computer map at the end but you have to get there first, that's helpful for secrets though of course. Amazingly though I don't think I found anywhere in which I could get completely stuck.
Also, here's a tip: when you get to the aforementioned library, up on the shelves, and the roof raises up and the cyberdemon appears, don't fall off the shelves; try to get the invulnerability so you can charge the thing down. You can't get back up there unless you go the long way round, because the way past the key closes off when you pick it up.
So in summary, if you have infinite reserves of patience, this is probably the easiest thousand-monster map I've done. I don't know how long it took the guy to make but with the amount of messy, haphazard detailing on display, well put it like this it'd take me years. Sometimes I wish I could be that enthusiastically slapdash about texturing instead of an obsessive perfectionist, but there you go. It's old school Doom 2 texturing on an epic scale. Not for everyone, not the kind of wad I'd play every day maybe, but still very enjoyable.
Beckham scores; immediately throws up everywhere
Okay if you thought it couldn't get any worse than endless posts about Doom maps, now I'm going to talk about the football!
To be honest I'm a bit sick of it. I get really excited when the world cup comes around, and watch every match I can. About halfway through I realise I'm bored of sitting there for 90 minutes watching the same damn thing over and over. I really should just watch the highlights. I'm certainly not doing all those tables again, that was to practise HTML and the actual information is readily available elsewhere.
But who'd be an England fan? I mean, you spend nearly the whole match utterly frustrated at your team's incompetence "Oh god, he's given it away AGAIN!" "No idiot the goal is here, not up on the roof" "AARGH it's gone IN!" etc and I haven't even mentioned penalties. I must admit I hope England don't win the competition, mainly because nobody would ever shut up about it, I mean they still go on about 1966 like it was yesterday. One little tidbit Motson came out with was that England only played Ecuador once before today, and won 2-0. But that was in 1970! So the players are all different, the managers are all different, everything is different, you can't make any kind of prediction based off of that.
Who'd be a fan at all? It raises an important point, the fact that you can't be a football fan without having to support some team or other. Nobody can accept that you would just prefer to be a neutral and watch some decent play. Nobody can accept that you have enough of your own failures already and don't wish to allow the failure of your team in a sports match to make it worse. You don't have any control over the result, after all. Is that so unreasonable? Get this - even I can't think of a reason why England playing badly is my fault!
Of course, at least these are internationals, people are playing for their countries or whatever instead of for money. Club football is essentially two teams of hired mercenaries playing for the club that can pay them the highest wage. The club with the most money gets the best mercenaries and thus wins everything. And I'm not on about recent times, it's been like that at least since the Premier League started and certainly since Euro 96. It's just business now. I mean I thought the point of it was that instead of actually going to war with your neighbouring town, you send your champions to battle with theirs. But how can they be "your" champions when they're from Timbuctoo and Oompaloompaland...
Still, now I've annoyed myself and probably ended up looking like an idiot I'll shut up and go watch the rest of the tournament, after which I'll be so sick of football it'll take me four years to get over it.
One Bloody Night
One Bloody Night is a 9 map compilation released in 2002. It's by Erik Alm so you can assume it's good, not quite as good as his more recent stuff but that's to be expected, improvement comes with practice! I say it's a compilation wad because the levels are all pretty unrelated thematically, except to say that about half of them are tributes or reworkings of more well-known maps. I think each map is meant to be played from a pistol start too. Gameplay is typically very hard and I gave up trying to do most of these on UV.
- The Abandonded Base We start off with a space station map, clearly inspired by Fredrik Johannson's Vrack series (in fact the wad uses the same sky texture) It looks nice and is easy.
- Stream of Death A sewer system constructed out of green bricks. Interesting layout - I like how you get a glimpse of the red key in a cage, then lower it, then jump down the sewer to retrieve it. Then you teleport to outside the sewer. It's definitely harder than the last one with monsters everywhere and lots of nukage taking hits off your health.
- Main Base Now we're in some kind of open pit surrounded by slimefalls in the centre of a large building, itself in a valley. Surrouding are a couple of other buildings and some caves. One of the buildings contains a secret that is nearly impossible to get; you have to lower the lift, run back out of the building to trigger a door to open above you, and run back to the lift before it goes back up. To do this requires flat-out straferunning with slaloming round crates, and if you catch yourself on one of them and lose momentum, you'll miss it. Apart from that though the rest of the level is great, the lighting is especially good.
- Warehouse Half of this map is instantly recognisable as a harder version of the crate maze from E2M2. Then after the yellow key there's three corridors to run down, and a nicely made puzzle where you must press three switches to lower the red key. The optional blue key gives access to a room full of supplies.
- Suburbs Starts off in a small village of identical fenced-off buildings, then you go through the underpass to some larger buildings. It ends at a massive staircase covered in teleporter lines. Cyberdemons patrol, and keep teleporting about so you can't hit them easily.
- Dreamworld A number of very dark brick corridors amongst some lava-filled, glowing caves. This map is short, but nasty, but uses its small size well, as you take quite an interesting route through. Good hell-cave at the far end, in the style made familiar by the last episode of Scythe.
- Cave of Hades You have a choice at the start; west to a red, yellow and white hell cave, or northeast, to some green stone halls. There's a bright maze of hot rocks, revenants and archviles, a cave full of chaingunners where a partial invisibility can really prove its worth, and a metal platform with a cyberdemon and two teleporting archviles. Unfortunately this map never had skill levels implemented so it's just as hard on HNTR as it is on UV, and further there are three hellknights stuck in a wall because the door never opens. Seems like a lack of testing.
- Living Dead This is most simply described as a harder version of MAP29. The resemblance is blatant and I approve entirely. My favourite part is new, the mountains in the north-west corner in the outdoor area behind the red key. Huge crowds of monsters await. There's also a demon stuck in a wall, and elsewhere, you can get stuck if you fall between the steps with the blue key on top and its surrounding walkway. It's also quite annoying if you fall off into the floor of the cavern, e.g. after you teleport up to the blue door, as you will have to run all the way back round again. But this is a decent reworking of the original.
- Ashes to Ashes This is a monster spawner map and it's pretty ridiculous. You teleport in, waking the double-headed Icon of Sin up before you, and its cluster of cyberdemon guards. You then teleport up to the surrounding ringway, and you can either go left or right. Both ways will take you through three sets of bars, a switch in a roomful of big monsters having to be pressed before each set opens. If you make it through, you find yourself up above the ledge you initially teleported to, now above the level of the brain. You must jump off the platform and fire a rocket while falling, at exactly the right moment to hurt the brain. But once isn't enough. Three or four rockets need to strike their target. So you teleport back up, and find the bars closed, and the rooms refilled with monsters... I have just about managed this level on HNTR, where there are very few monsters around, and none in the side corridors except for those spawned by the brain. It took six jumps to kill the thing, three misses. God knows how you'd do it on UV with all the teleporting archviles - which makes it all the more galling that somebody did, and recorded a demo of the map in under three minutes...
So in summary, as I said, 9 maps from earlier in the career of one of today's best mappers, loosely arranged into order of difficulty. Good detail and lighting considering it's for doom2.exe. Very difficult, although in most cases skill levels have been implemented. Some maps have small bugs, perhaps another round of playtesting was needed before release, but no really bad problems. All in all, recommended. Play it with super weapons or something if you feel like indiscriminate killing.
According to Erik's page for One Bloody Night a sequel was in the works with 18 maps at least, and possibly a full replacement. But that page has not been updated since 2003, around the time of the release of Scythe. Also I suspect the abandoned megawad mentioned in the text file for eaxt.wad might well be One Bloody Night, but I don't know.
spontaneous reboot part 2
Summary: It was the CPU fan and then, the power supply. I apologise if you came here looking for SNAFU or whatever and just got a timeout. Part 1
caco rebooted a couple more times the following day. I eventually discovered that the fan on top of the heatsink had stopped turning and the CPU temperature was through the roof. I thought the reboots were a safety thing cutting in.
I went to see if I could get a new heatsink. There aren't any components shops within walking distance of where I live though. There was a Maplin but they've moved to new premises, a long way away. Plus, nobody does heatsinks for Socket A processors any more. However I realised I could take the broken fan off the top of the existing heatsink, and replace it.
That didn't fix it though. I'd already been off air two days and the thing was still rebooting spontaneously, in fact by now it wouldn't stay on more than half a minute. I thought maybe the heat had burned out the CPU so I switched it with a spare I happen to have. That didn't help either. I didn't know what was going on, I thought I'd have to replace the entire guts of the machine.
But then for some reason I thought of the power supply. I think it was because when the thing rebooted there was no error message or anything, it just happened. Also, the fans were cutting out briefly. I had a spare power supply from somewhere, so I gave it a try. Success, the thing stayed on for an hour! So I put it all back together.
Some problems still remain: the replacement CPU fan is too noisy, that's what happens when I am forced to make snap purchases with no research. Also, due to its design I had to use too small a screwdriver on the screws that attach it to the heatsink, and now their heads are mangled and I can't turn them.
caco really needs to be retired and replaced somehow.
caco just spontaneously rebooted
Ugh, I have no idea why, there's nothing in the logs, that either means the messages got eaten as they hadn't been written to disc, or it was a hardware overheating thing and the kernel didn't even know about it before the motherboard kicked in. Makes no sense though as heat has never caused it to reboot before! On the other hand having been on for months it is probably very full of dust which doesn't help and should be removed, maybe I'll go offline in a day or two to give the thing a clean!*
Yeah yeah I'm a useless sysadmin, whatever ho. In other news I have done little else but watch football matches and pinch ugly demo compatibility hacks from prboom-plus. Good night.
*This update was really just to say that if, in the next few days, you visit this site, and find it is down, that's why
Extremal Doom
Extremal Doom is a full replacement for Doom, pedantic notes notwithstanding. It is apparently quite old, but has only recently appeared in the archives, having been converted into a PWAD.
So we have three episodes, that is 27 maps, in various themes, and it seems in no particular order. There's quite a lot of new textures, and some new tree sprites that are more green and less burnt. I assume this is why it used to be an IWAD, as sprite replacements and doom.exe don't mix well.
Monster population is usually quite low, most maps don't go above 100 monsters and I don't think any go above 150. However they're often large monsters, crowds of barons are comparatively common, and ammunition is very limited as well so it can get quite frustrating. Often you'll find that in order to avoid completely running out of ammunition, extensive infighting, leaving monsters until the end, trying to catch them in groups for more efficient use of rocket splash damage, use of fists/chainsaw etc. is required.
The author has a penchant for missing out upper and lower textures above and below the more colourful animated flats. This might have seemed innovative at one time but to me it looked ugly, especially when it all goes to HOM when you see it at the wrong angle. See for example the jet engine on E2M4 (or whatever it's supposed to be, the rest of the map is a hot rocks cave map under a deep cyan sky, so it really could be anything)
The author also has a penchant for cinemas. E3M3, which I think is one of the best maps, is a cinema complex and surrounding town. E2M2 has a cinema at the end, although it's mostly a castle and lava map with a lot of crushing ceilings. This is old school incoherent theme mapping at its best. Other maps are castles, space stations, towns, caves (E1M7 is part town, part underground flooded cave - it's really good except for having no ammunition or health)
In summary it's a bunch of old school maps that show their age slightly but aren't too ugly and randomly textured. Gameplay is tight and can be frustrating (from pistol starts - it's easier if you carry ammo forward, obviously) If you like megawads of smallish maps with, how shall I put it, some "innovative" design, it's definitely worth a try.
