Television is nothing but repeats
Torchwood lifted an entire episode plot from The Outer Limits
CH_RETRO & RETROEPS
Released in 2001 at the height of the E1 revival, ch_retro was a single map for Doom that was meant to be as authentically true to episode 1 design principles as it was possible to be. A year later retroeps, an entire replacement episode was made as a sequel.
Beyond that there's not much to say! It does exactly what it set out to do. True to form, there's no plasma guns or cacodemons, barons only on e1m8 etc. There's no great amounts of detail and they're easy, but you'd expect that. The only incongruity I noticed was the use of teleporters, which are almost nonexistant in the original. ch_retro's monster teleporters could be better designed, they go off too slowly and, in one case, can break, leaving unkillable monsters.
ch_retro appears in retroeps as e1m6, with minor differences. There is also a deathmatch wad which is an update to retroeps e1m4. In summary I had a few little annoyances but it's mostly a decent set of maps for purists and I recommend it.
Anniversary
The current incarnation of rboom, based on PrBoom 23x, was a year old sometime in the last fortnight. I kind of missed this but I wasn't too bothered as it is difficult to pin a start date on it. There was an older incarnation, based on 2.2.6, but that didn't have much besides the map cheat in it, so doesn't really count - indeed you could argue that it started in September 1999 when I started hacking DIY.
Now onto some unusual wads.
A 32-map doom2.exe-compatible megawad, made in 1998 or thereabouts. A gameplay experiment, in which you are largely forced to play in a style known to some as "hypocritical pacifist".*
Cyberdreams is 32 maps of pretty much nothing but cyberdemons. You don't get any weapons, so there's not so much conventional Doom skill involved. You still need to be able to move well though, indeed your movement is your only hope. You're basically meant to get 100% kills although on some maps you can exit before you do and indeed on others it's impossible due to bugs. You hit them by teleporting on top of them, setting off crushers and avoiding the rockets until they're dead, and so forth.
You're either going to love this wad or hate it. My own opinion is that it's a good idea, but can be utterly frustrating, and - after a certain number of levels - begins to get repetitive. There's only so many ways you can kill a monster using moving sectors. However, most of the levels, if you manage to beat them, you will beat them in only a couple of minutes. The whole wad can easily be finished in a few hours if you're lucky.
In summary, there are over 200 cyberdemons, a voodoo doll that talks to you, and an extremely secret shrine to Helen Hunt.
* Pacifist is of course where you play without deliberately harming the monsters. Hypocritical pacifist is therefore trying to kill all the monsters indirectly, by making them kill each other, or luring them under crushers or teleporting on top of them. Actually that last one is dubious - the pacifist rules say "no intentional telefrags", but I don't see how you can tell whether something is intentional or not, so whatever.
This is a 3-episode replacement for Doom, with new levels, graphics, sounds and everything. It's pretty much a total conversion. It's set on modern Earth, and you're some sort of SAS guy sent in to infiltrate a millitaristic (is that even a word?) satanic cult. On the way you go through jungles, secret military bases, ancient temples, and cities.
Being on Earth there are no futuristic weapons. You get a small uzi instead of a pistol. There's a shotgun and an AK-47 and a bazooka. The plasma gun is "the big minigun" and the BFG is a grenade launcher. It still pretty much works like the BFG though. As targets for these you have:
- Two forms of basic soldier, one is more powerful than the other. It does this a lot - one set of monster graphics, using colour translation bits to make more than one version of the same enemy.
- A guy with a shotgun, chainsaw and hockey mask. I forget which series of horror movies this is from.
- Three different versions of a guy with gasmask and taser. One runs straight towards you and zaps you up close. Another has a long-range taser that fires pulses. The third has a chaingun.
- Two forms of what I can only describe as "stereotypical terrorist guy", complete with dodgy sunglasses, beard and teargas launcher.
- A small flying robot thing that launches itself at you
- A larger flying robot thing that looks a bit like a Terminator
- Gun turrets. One is large, obvious and can be killed. The other is invisible and likes to hide in walls. Avoid the latter type, it will kill you very quickly without warning and cannot be disabled.
The graphics are rather cartoonish, the sounds comical for a while until they begin to grate (the soldiers shouting "on the floor now!" and "dieeeeee!" were funny, but hearing "all right!" for the fiftieth time whenever you pick up a dropped shotgun got old very fast) and the maps very simple if you look past the fact that it's all new textures (that, as I'm sure I've said before, seems to be a peculiarity of total conversions - with all new textures, you don't need to make particularly detailed levels to make them look "interesting")
The gameplay can be rather unbalanced; it varies between quite easy and irritatingly difficult. In particular the start of episode 2 lacks ammunition. Some of the monsters seem to have too much health - the grey taser guy is basically a baron and has a baron's hit points total. The dehacked patch doesn't really do all that much - it's pretty obvious how the new monsters map onto the original Doom monsters, and same for the weapons. The last map of episode 2 is a complex made up entirely of gun turrets, and when you finish it it doesn't feel like the end of the story. But it is, as episode 3 is made up entirely of deathmatch levels.
But it's quite fun, and for something that was started in 1994, impressive. Its author went onto much greater things.
Promotion
Yesterday I went from "guy who spams the prboom patch tracker" to "guy with svn commit access". I guess if I ever claimed to have any ambitions, this would have been one of them.
Maps
Damnation Awaits the Wicked Hooray, I was right - The Wicked Series is indeed ongoing, as here we have wicked_8.wad. It replaces map28 with a kind of fortress in hell. While being detailed enough to be pleasing to the eye it is quite repetitive and very circular - ReX's map often feature a lot of circles, in this one the main fortress is basically a series of concentric ones. It's not very highly populated but there isn't much health or ammo, and quite a number of nasty traps and damage sectors you have to run through, so be prepared to die a lot or use savegames.
This is worth playing but I still think the best in the series was the first one.
Let It Roll A 3 map wad for Doom 2 that I first played in 2002 and recently redownloaded. Old school design but without being too messy. Some edited textures and doom2.exe engine tricks such as glass doors. It's mostly an industrial theme, although it varies. The start of MAP02 is clearly a science lab, and MAP03 has some kind of a garden in it.
Gameplay is very variable - this is a rare example of a multilevel wad clearly designed to be played as an episode, rather than each map from a pistol start. Doing a run of all three maps is very easy. Doing MAP02 from scratch is not too hard provided you can dodge round a cyberdemon at close range to nick a BFG from under its nose, but MAP03 I believed for a long time was impossible from a pistol start due to lack of ammunition. I have discovered this is not true, but it's still very tricky - I chainsawed an archvile, and, with zero usable ammunition and 10% health, basically tickled a baron to death - all the while surrounded by piles of rockets and cells, tantalisingly whispering "you could have fired us if you'd brought weapons from the previous maps..."
But it's a decent wad and very playable - you could well argue that the huge variation in difficulty depending on whether you use pistol starts or not is a point in its favour. Give it a try.
Dethwish Another old wad recently redownloaded. It's a whole episode for Doom, E1M1-E1M9. Made in 2000 according to the text file but looks like it is from 1994. This is in itself not necessarily a bad thing, but it could do without all the flashing lights, unkillable monsters, very badly designed monster teleporters and other weirdness. Also the secret exit is on E1M1 and so doesn't work properly; the secret level itself cannot be escaped as you can't press on a walkover linedef! There are a lot of maze-type levels. The best ones are probably E1M5 or E1M6, but they're still annoying.
Probably best to avoid this one - I think I only got it again because of nostalgia (it severely reminds me of cold bright sunny Saturday mornings in February)
