29/06/2004 @20:28:46 ^22:50:11

PANFLUTE MORE LIKE SAUCEPANFLUTE

To go with your whistling kettle, you can now blow through the handle of this wonderful device and practise music as your vegetables boil over! Warranty excludes having your your lips burnt off.

This update is about Doom

Time to download random maps again

Crusader This is kaiser_9, I've done and enjoyed something like the first three but not being particularly taken with the Doom64-graphics-laden fourth I stopped downloading them. Perhaps this was a mistake. This is really well made bricks'n'metal techbase in a valley, a common theme in Doom 2 maps, but still. The architecture is excellent and the gameplay refreshing but not too challenging (that means it's easy) I had some trouble finding the secrets, indeed although you can bump the BFG out of the hole it's in at the start I don't think you can get the megasphere as well. Also there's four switches you have to press to get the yellow key at the end and one of them was very hard to find. However the rest of the map more than made up for that and I suggest you download it right now. Excellent.

Palace Palace is not a palace. It's an old map that start of in a featureless maze of corridors, doors (way too many doors) and tiny cramped rooms full of zombies and imps. I nearly stopped playing at this point if I had been killed, but it's really easy. Anyway it switches styles a few times and is sometimes a bit less cramped as you progress, but apart from a couple of places it's pretty much all bland. There's a kind of a throneroom which I suppose is why it's called "palace" but ends in something more like a seaside resort(!) The crampedness makes it annoying but it's pretty easy and has over 300 monsters, so give it a go if you've nothing better to do.

raid Okay this is probably one to avoid I guess. The storyline gives you the idea that it'll be all cramped underground tunnels but it's pretty themeless. Indeed it feels bit like a deathmatch map, but I think it'd be crap for that as well. There's an outdoor bit, a couple of weird tunnels and side lifts, then it finishes up another lift in an outhouse opposite a waterfall. It's all over in no time at all, but in spite of its smallness it manages to use all three keys. I think this cheapens the value of keys but hey.

Paradise Click on the link and read the description. Barons getting married? I downloaded it out of morbid curiosity. I was presented with what turned out to be quite a good map in the classic Doom 2 style. It divides into four sections via teleporters. The first is a bit crap, with bare straight brown tunnels and stuff. The second one is probably the better one, it's centred around a big graveyard with a balcony going round three sides. Monsters rain fire down on you from above and the height variation makes it entertaining. The third part is an oddly coloured church with the aforementioned wedding ("if these two Barons get married it will be the end of life as you know it"!) and the fourth is a in a computer centre. So as you can see the theme varies pretty wildly. Anyway the second bit with the graveyard is good so ignore the plotline and give it a go if you're bored.

Good lord that was a lot of words