Grid32 revisited
From last time: Grid32 turned out to have one good map, at least. Well, sort of. Map01, as I said, is a clone of the forest map from Deus Vult 2 - dark, no map, invisible teleporter lines, annoying as hell. Map06 was somehow worse, it's miles and miles of almost identical stone corridors and copypasted rooms. While it did seem that at least some effort had been made the basic idea was, I believe, flawed, and it was just boring to grind through.
The spider-shaped map02 was quite inventive, since much of it was not aligned with the axes. Somehow this worked despite the restriction on vertex placement. However, a certain lack of health and ammunition made it annoying, but dropping the skill level down helped. In contrast map03 - kind of an underground sewer map - was entirely 90 degree walls parallel to the axes, split into largely disjoint sections, not particularly difficult but not particularly interesting either.
I gave up on map04. It has a clever mechanism to raise and lower two bridges with one switch, but it breaks if you press the button again too quickly. The lack of health and ammo, and having to pistol my way through two imps while being attacked from behind by spectres and chaingunners just to get a shotgun, didn't help either.
The best map is map05, which a nice underground base and slime river, with lots of nice height variation, interconnection, long lines of sight etc. Unfortunately it's a ledge-running map, so it can get pretty annoying. Apart from that though the difficulty is at quite a nice level provided you know the map already (so playing it first on a lower skill level helped)
more Xenus
Xenus revisited is the "full" version of Xenus 1.5, and replaces Doom's episode 1 with your usual mixture of base-becoming-hell maps. Also E4M1 for some reason. As with previous wads in the series they suffer from hyperdetailed corridor syndrome. There is at least one map that isn't completable due to ZDoomisms (E1M2 has a walk trigger in front of the red door - there may be others, I can't be bothered running through the rest of the maps right now to remind myself)
It's a shame, really, the individual small parts of each level here are good, well-detailed and so forth, and there's no lack-of-resources irritation at all (in fact if anything the author goes overboard with giving you ammunition) but it's all very disjoint and maze-like, and it ends up underwhelming and unrecommendable.
For the sake of completeness there is also the original Xenus: Lost Base. Firstly it uses textures as flats, so only ZDoom will load it. If you work around that you get a fairly bland single map. It would suffer from hyperdetailed corridor syndrome if it were hyperdetailed. The most interesting thing is to see how the author has improved at detailing (a lot) avoiding ZDoomisms (getting better, needs more actual testing) and making maps with interesting layout (not much at all)
Blackout
Blackout Two maps in your usual abandoned where's-the-power-gone base. Small, cramped, and extremely dark. Adds a few new textures for interest. The first map was easy enough, except you're not supposed to kill most of the monsters.
The second is better, but harder; extremely low on ammunition, you pretty much have to find the secrets (one annoyed me because you have to walk into the right side of a teleporter and it's pretty much up to luck if you find it; guess which side I walked into?) However, nicely interconnected, and there's plenty of windows to cut down on disjointness.
So, a challenge. Not bad - even pretty good - if you can stand the dark and the low ammunition, but I doubt I'll play it again.
Tips: Use the chainsaw as much as you can - indeed, don't repeat my mistake and go for the super shotgun secret until you have the chainsaw, otherwise you'll use up all your shells and be pretty much screwed for later - and watch for the hellknight trap, it's nasty.
Reconsideration: I played La Ciudadela again and it's grown on me. It might not look much but it's wide open and you can run about doing what the hell you like. Of course you might die if you take the wrong order but working out the right order is what makes it fun. Too many maps feel like you're just being led through situations the author laid out for you.
PN Slime Base In some ways, the citadel's opposite. Made by a modern map editor, so architecture and texturing are flawless, as you'd expect when the program does it all for you. Nevertheless it's still just a sequence of small areas which you clear out one at a time, and move on; when you're done with each one, it might as well no longer exist. I find this kind of gameplay uninspiring. The one highlight was "give the player a rocket launcher then throw 30 imps at him".
Grid 32 For something completely different, we have here another of those restricted mapping challenge wads. This time it's "use a grid setting of 32", obviously enough. It looks nice enough. The architecture is cool even with the restriction, in fact I think a lot of Doom's textures work better if you keep this kind of grid size, but in general I found the gameplay to be quite cramped and low on ammunition, and the wad ended up annoying me. The first level being based on the most irritating map from Deus Vult II and, worse, completely disabling the automap, didn't help. However I will try again on a lower-than-UV skill because the maps are decent, at least.
Dead monitor
Last week my 21" monitor died. At least I think it's dead, it was fine one minute, then there was a kind of interference pattern, then the picture collapsed briefly when I went from a screen that was mostly white to a screen that was mostly black, then there was a loud bang and the power light went out. Since then I've been able to get nothing out of it.
So I'm back on my old monitor and 1024x768 seems so small. I can't surround my browser window with terminals! Argh.
Crawl
I think the reason I was finding Crawl easier than last time was because there was this gratuitous bug that makes your skills go up way faster than they should. Thus I have put off upgrading to the newer versions that fix it. Haha, I'm so lame, I'll upgrade soon, I promise...
As for whether or not it's better than NetHack, I'm not sure. The interface is certainly a huge improvement. However it is the most frustrating thing ever to keep losing my spellcasters before or just after reaching the Temple. Come on, it's not like I even care that much about winning, I just want Sif Muna to give me a huge pile of spellbooks to play with. Oh well thank goodness for wizard mode I guess.
Actually it's a bit of a coincidence because with NetHack I felt I only started getting somewhere after I (a) played through the game in wizard mode and (b) watched the nethack.alt.org 2006 tournament. And there's a tournament on crawl.akrasiac.org like right now, just as I am playing Crawl in wizard mode. I like coincidences so I'm wasting bandwidth writing about them.
Doom
As a result of the above I haven't played much Doom recently. So I went and downloaded something at random so I could post about it. Here goes.
- La Ciudadela (The Citadel) This is a huge field with some large buildings on it. A couple resemble ones from Doom2 map15. The rest isn't bad but it is quite bland. The large size makes it quite fun but don't bother unless you're an enthusiast for old-style wads.
- Qrumpi Old Men A three-map wad from Ruba. The first is okay, weird factory/castle/lava theme, but playable. The second is a box with four archviles behind doors. The final one looks like a sandbox. You're in the middle of a sea of 10000 imps and 16 cyberdemons. However, you can just press the exit switch. I'd like to see if anybody could get 100% kills on this, actually. I bet it's possible.
- HORDES 2 This is a stone fortress whose shape is vaguely reminiscent of an old classic WAD, FORTRESS.WAD (wadpak1a E1M8) It's riddled with shotgunners and there's no starting weapon, so I ran out of health fast. Also I couldn't get through the second door, at which point I gave up. Turns out you have to shoot the unmarked wall next to it.
- SURVIVAL OF THE WINNEST Must be a joke. Laugh. Tiny map with three barons and no (accessible) weapons. You can just about squeeze past them if you're lucky. Ugly construction, nothing to merit this at all.
