Imagine if it were still the mid-nineties and somebody went forwards in time ten years, saw Alien Vendetta and Deus Vult, and came back and tried to remake what they saw. That pretty much sums this wad up.
Quite an easy slaughter map given the number of invulnerabilities available, but linear and disjoint (clear out an area, move on) garishly textured (e.g. walls thousands of units long with LITE5 on them, oh and let's not forget all the flashing lights) and has several bugs (monsters stuck together inside a teleporter trap, lava pits that don't actually damage you containing non-functional escape teleporters)
Finally, I never realised how cheesy B-movie-ish the name was until I looked it up just now. The filename is just "deep.wad"
Two small deathmatch maps modified for single player. The most interesting thing about these maps is that they are made by one of the authors of Hell Revealed, and it shows. The style is unmistakeable.
They're not brilliant, but... well, obviously you should play this. It's more Hell Revealed!
As the name suggests, a 1024x1024 map. Textured mostly in green variants of IWAD textures like BROWN96 and BRONZE, and makes excessive use of curve approximation, which I assume is one of those modern editor "press button to add gratuitious detail" features.
Ignoring this, it's just a small cramped maze of corridors, but is easy and will only take five minutes of your time - so worth a go if you're not bothered by people who abuse "instantly make my map look pretty" map editor features.
A harbour-side town, overrun by monsters. Somehow has a 19th-century feel to it - maybe inspired by the town maps in Mordeth, I don't know.*
Heavily detailed, but not just for detail's sake - it actually looks good. Interesting progression too, most buildings are locked from the outside but you jump from one to another via holes blown in the sides. The interiors of the buildings are a little cramped, though.
Gameplay is a fair challenge but not insurmountable. Most of the monsters are small but you don't get much of the heavy weaponry either. The worst part is that there are three chaingunners on towers overlooking the main street and it uses that irritating plutonia-style archvile-in-the-wall trick to keep them alive.
* After writing this I realised that rather than Mordeth it was more similar to another wad - Hellfire. I shouldn't be surprised at all - they have the same author, but I've only just realised this. Oh well.
These are three completed maps released by their author, after the project for which they were intended was cancelled. The author, best known for his Xenus series, feels rather aggrieved about this, ranting on at some length in the text file.
Now, while Xenus tended to be techbases, Dark Caliber is more about bricks, wood and torches, but still has the same high detail density and rather cramped feel of the author's previous work. There is also the fair share of minor bugs; nothing serious that would break the map, but I noticed missing textures and items stuck in the air after a floor had lowered, for instance.
Each individual map: the first is a cramped, complex maze, but fairly easy; your main problem is avoiding getting lost. The second is more straightforward - you have three keys to fetch and can get them in any order. It is more difficult, though, especially when it throws 12 pain elementals at you at once in a cramped area (I managed to kill them, but was finished off by rocket splash damage from the following cyberdemon. Last monster killed me, damnit.)
The most interesting map is the third, which is a town, absolutely stuffed with monsters. It felt nicely "whole" (as opposed to disjoint, like the three entirely separate key sections in map02) and had some good secret area placement. However I felt the monsters were a little excessive and the map was too cramped for a slaughter map.
Community Chest 4
I don't think I mentioned this already, but I joined the CC4 team (yes they're doing another one already...) I'm still pretty sick of the thought of mapping but I wanted to be involved somehow since I've done the previous two, so this time I am a tester. That means instead of making a map I get to write long diatribes about ZDoomisms and poor decisions made by the Boom developers, and tell everyone else what I would have done if I had made their map. I think as a map reviewer this might suit me better...
Anyway speaking of criticising other people's maps, I have such a backlog of stuff in my downloaded maps directory I hardly know where to begin...
Exl maps
A guy named Exl did some really nice nonlinear maps in projects such as CChest2 and NDCP. I happened upon some references to his older stuff and decided to play some of it.
This is a stone castle, surrounded by grasslands and lakes, running for some reason on MAP20. It has enough, but not too much, of the right kind of detail (views, glimpses, windows) and avoids being cramped. You must visit the north wing to open a central room with the red key, then the south wing to press a button to lower the yellow key which is on a pillar outside (being accessible once you have the red key.. well, sort of) Once outside you must fetch the blue key from a tower, allowing entry to a cave, under the ground of which the exit is located.
Intriguingly there is a secret area in the south wing which allows the player to get outside without the red key. It contains an invulnerability and seems to exist entirely to encourage speedrunning. However, while the red key can be skipped in this way, you must still have pressed the yellow key switch, and if you take this route you cannot get back inside. And the invulnerability never lasts quite long enough to barge through the necessary monster packs to reach the exit. A better player could probably do a nice demo of this map, though.
Definitely recommended.
Replacement E1M9. Not too nonlinear (but see below) Is obviously E1-themed, some areas obviously being remakes of original maps. Large, but not ridiculously so; has a high number of small monsters and plenty of ammo, so it's a lot of fun to blast through.
The "obvious progression" through the level is completely destroyed if you either (a) find the hidden switch in the outdoor area at the start or (b) find the hidden teleporter room just after you go inside the base for the first time. I advise you not to do this on the first play around the level, else it gets pretty confusing. In fact if you use one of the teleporters it can leave you stuck on the wrong side of the blue door with no key to open it.
Nevertheless a really good map.
This one says it's for Doom Legacy but I ran it anyway! It's not bad, although a little cramped and linear, and meanders between tech and brick themes. The secrets are mostly invisible and I think you'd need clairvoyance to find them. Not too hard either.
Legacy use is limited to a couple of 3D floors, which in rboom degraded into 64-wide holes in the floor that I correctly guessed I should jump over instead of letting myself fall in them. However, you can cut out most of the map if you jump in the first one...
Others
Since I've started writing I might as well carry on and clear out some more.
A map obviously by Tango (Systemic Corruption, Gyrotechnics, Toxic Cove) Typically highly detailed techbase with outdoor areas, this one has a bunch of new textures from some texture resource wad I can't be bothered to recall the name for right now. Gameplay is typically polished - only criticism would be its top-heaviness. The end of the map is rather easy due to being able to run in through the red bars, activate the teleporter(s) and run back out again, and pick off the monsters through the doorway. Contrast to the start where you're often surrounded with monsters teleporting in all around you and little health available.
Incidentally I've thought before how Tango's mapping style was rather similar to Erik Alm's base maps in Scythe 2, so it was quite nice to see him acknowledge it in the text file...
Instantly recognisable as map 11 of Memento Mori. More rough around the edges, the Memento Mori version had obviously been cleaned up, but this version is a slight improvement in that you can actually get 100% kills...
Survival horror style map set in a shopping mall. Monster count is relatively low, but it's very dark and full of traps.
Has had a lot of obvious effort put into the look of the thing, and is covered with new graphics. Author obviously has a sense of humour - note the people on the missing persons posters, the corpses of which you actually find later on, and the fact that you find a chainsaw hidden behind an Evil Dead poster. He also seems to like weird puzzles and well-hidden teleporters that lead to your instant death.
However the bottom line is that I am not a fan of dark, survival horror style gameplay, so I can't say I enjoyed it much. So, I'll just say it is "great if you like that sort of thing".
The text file claims no annoying traps or mazes, but I disagree, the whole level is pretty much a maze of 128-wide corridors. That said, at least it's 128 so there's room to move, and you're not constantly twisting and turning. Texturing is mostly green marble and demon faces with a few fiery bits, but all the doors are tech ones - quintissentially 1994, really. The dagger of the title is in the north-west near the exit, and not particularly well-drawn (it's map writing)
Note you won't get 100% kills unless you know there's an invisible shootable door in one of the fiery corridors - if you miss it you won't want to go back in because it's a high-damage floor and there's only one radsuit.
hardware changes
unexpected freeze
So, not-so-funny thing. Last week I woke up to find baron had completely
frozen.
- didn't respond to pings
- no monitor output (monitor stayed in poweroff mode when I plugged its
cable in, so obviously no signal)
- cable modem lights were hardly flashing (when usually the server is
constantly getting hit by overzealous web spiders, brute force ssh
attacks, and rtorrent is merrily chugging away)
- most tellingly the hard disk light was apparently permanently lit (it
was obvious something was wrong here because I had noticed the light
had been on for over a minute and it was nowhere near the time that
cron.daily is run, which is the usual reason for prolonged disk
activity. This was not a nice thing to slowly realise as you are
waking up)
baron is the name of my server, an old machine that sits in the corner
of the room being a router, firewall and host for this website. It also
has most of the hard disks in it which it shares via NFS. Therefore it
needs to be reliable. If NFS goes down everything else freezes as well.
It came back up when I pressed the reset button and acted as if nothing
had happened, so I have no idea what is going on. The only thing I can
think is that maybe there is a bad bit of memory somewhere (I remember
about six months ago waking up to find irssi had inexplicably segfaulted
during the night, which irssi never does)
dissatifaction with NFS
That's one thing. Another is NFS itself. Ever since I upgraded baron to
Debian Etch and a 2.6 kernel, NFS had become rather unreliable. While I
appreciate that this was as likely to be a dubious network card as much
as a software issue, the fact is that every so often it would freeze,
apparently uninterruptibly, for a period of time that can last anything
up to an hour. You can imagine how annoying this is!
(Indeed it's more likely to be hardware as stressing it by copying
hundred-megabyte-plus files around would vastly increase the chances of
freezing - although, why had this only begun to happen after a software
upgrade? Who knows?)
NFS is also comparatively slow, what with all your disk accesses going
over a network. Running autoconf-generated configure scripts was
especially irritating as was anything else that created or deleted a lot
of files.
power consumption
A third issue and possibly the most important - the rising cost of
energy. A few months ago we got an electricity bill that was far too
high. It was around that time I decided having a machine sat there
switched on 24/7 but, to be quite frank, doing pretty much nothing at
all, wasn't the best use of resources. The time spent outside of the
idle loop was less than a fifth of a percent.
conclusion
Okay this is getting pretty long so let's finish it up. I spent last
week installing and copying over all the configuration files for the
various bits of software that were on baron but missing from vile, my
desktop machine that actually gets used. A couple of days ago I switched
everything off and moved the disks from one machine to the other.
I believe the merge has been successful. As vile has twice as much
memory and a more powerful CPU I figured it could handle the increased
load, and I am hoping having only one machine drawing power will make a
difference (although that remains to be seen since the one machine has
three hard disks in it now)
Nevertheless it is a sad day on which you take out of usage a system
that's been there and running mostly smoothly for well over seven years.
However, as I keep telling myself, given the reasons described above,
it's probably for the best.
