19/09/2004 @17:46:37 ^20:50:28

the roof! the roof! the roof is on fire!

You know the start of the last update keeps confusing me because it looks like it was written at 8:30am when I actually went to sleep before I wrote it and didn't start it until half six! For a moment I was all "OH NO MY SCRIPTS HAVE WEIRD BUGS IN" sheesh it's such a relief that they're okay.

DOOM MAP 2-MONTHS-OFF EXTRAVAGANZA

Man I hate doing this because I know I'll end up waffling on for ages because I have so many wads I haven't mentioned yet. I will try to keep the descriptions fairly short. I mean what I'm trying to do with these things is what Doomworld does with its newstuff chronicles, but instead of "everything uploaded in the past week" I post about the maps that I've done. And all the ones I mention are usually good enough for me to download; the ones that weren't I usually deleted so quickly that I forgot their names, so they don't get a look-in. Having complained all that I must say a good part of the time it takes to make one of these updates is for finding all the idgames links, damn things. That shit could have a better interface you know. But I didn't pay for it or anything so who am I to complain?

Castle Nevermore This was made by the author of Rebirth. You can tell because of the style of the extra graphics, gargoyles on the walls, that sort of thing. It is a very believable build of a castle, fairly nonlinear, and a good number of secrets to find. It plays pretty hard, but hindsight and in particular knowledge of which doors block monsters helps.

Shadow Pit Start at the edge. Make an octagon at light level zero and floor height zero. Then go in a bit, and make about a hundred more, each about one map unit wide, and one map unit higher and brighter than the last, until you reach a plateau. Then do the same thing but reversed, so you descend back to floor/light zero at a point at the centre. This is the jist of Shadow Pit which is supposed to be a deathmatch map but contains 4 revenants and a bunch of shotguns so you can play it single player. There's no exit though and the number of tiny disconnected sectors managed to slow the game down a little. I think it's a novelty. Like the newstuff guy said, if you want slopes use zdoom...

Phobos Power Station I think this is another in the same vein as Phobos Outpost which was the first of the maps I mentioned here. It's the same sort of thing, an E1/techbase style map with lots of darkness and pools of light and windows and all the good stuff. And it's pretty easy being an E1 map. I think however that since doing Elixir I've noticed something about Doom sector lighting that really bugs me, that is the way people make their lights work more like parabolic searchlights than normal indoor lighting. You have a lit area that is as bright on the opposite wall as it is by the light, and way too narrow, so you can be standing in shadow but still stood in full view of whatever the light source is meant to be. The trouble is people think "where is the light going" when they should be thinking "the light goes everywhere, what is casting shadows?" This general remark doesn't take anything away from Phobos Power Base which you should play because it's great.

Rocky Road This is a typical new mapper's map. There's no theme, it's just a bunch of areas connected together. All are very simple. There was one bug, a door with the wrong sector referenced on one side. This map wouldn't have been out of place in 1995 or 1996 but it was made with Doom Builder so it's recent. That being said it's pretty easy, there's rarely more than half a dozen monsters active at any one time. You can do it in about seven minutes and I don't regret doing so.

WAYBAC2 This on the other hand is a re-upload from about 1996. It's amazingly linear, just like the last one. You have to run through a bunch of areas with varying themes, first getting one key then the next. There's one of those rooms with lots of perpetual slow lifts in, a fountain of slime, a maze for which the map doesn't give you much help and some stepping stones that need shooting to be raised. It ends with the easiest cyberdemon battle ever.

The Attraction to All Things Uncertain This is number 12 in the kaiser_* series, something like the fourth or fifth one I've tried and I keep saying I really should look at the others. The first thing you notice about it is how complicated it is. The architecture is detailed to all hell and seems to go on forever. Starting off outdoors, it's very open, but progresses inside into all sorts of halls, chambers, you name it. The blood isn't poisonous but the lava is. It's fairly linear but you don't notice because of the complex design - it took me over half an hour to finish playing even with the monsters taken out... sadly it was too hard for me to do with monsters, you're just losing health all the time and have no good weapons, never mind the five or six cyberdemons that appear later and don't talk to me about reducing the skill level as it appears not to help very much. Oh and the secrets are almost impossible to find, I had to use yadex. Maybe I'm just stupid though. Its theme is vaguely that of E4 (the sky texture is from E4 anyway) though there's quite a bit of good old bricks and metal. If it weren't so hard this map would be one of the best.

An Affinity For Pain This is a followup to Outpost Recon which I posted about in March. Unlike the former which was a techbase set in a rocky valley this is more of a lava-flooded ancient city. It's crammed full of detail and looks amazing, but suffers from the same gameplay problem of its predecessor, that of a lack of ammunition that can get quite annoying. Maybe it's meant to be like that and I'm just impatient, but I eventually gave up before the end having little to no ammunition, and at death's door from all the health hits taken from having to run through lava. I was also pretty lost... Better players than I should eat this one up, though.

Okay that's all the new stuff I've got through since I last did a maps update. I've replayed some old stuff as well but not to do a review of. Well I might do some of them one day, I mean I have old favourites that I've known forever and in many cases haven't played in years and never think to review. I don't just mean the big ones that everyone's heard of, like Requiem, Memento Mori etc I mean the less well known stuff like Insertion, Sector 666, UAC.wad, even the infamous Return01 which doesn't work properly on anything except really old original Doom executables and that I spent quite a lot of time fixing with a byte editor. But that's for another time, if ever.