12/12/2004 @18:30:53 ^19:20:10

PIE IN THE SKY

Just what is the deal with airplane food?

Slime

So, in Elixir, it turns out it's possible to get yourself stuck by the machine off-switch without having the red key, after all. I spent ages trying to make the fence impervious to jumping (say off the top of the console) and didn't even think of being able to go halfway up the drums and strafejump off the side over the barrier.

Also there's a trap that, on Hey Not Too Rough, goes off early and pretty much at random. I thought I had fixed it, but it seems I haven't. Anyway, who cares? It's really hard to make bug-free maps.

Shoot 'em up

I was reading the Top Ten Infamous WADs from Doomworld's ten years feature and decided to play uac labs, two maps by that Harris guy who did the school shooting.

They're not very good.

In a way they're both very similar, starting off in cramped dark halls and rooms and ending up in a large open area. The first has a remake of the initial part of E1M1, which I liked, even with the monster-infested towers overlooking outside the window. Anyway you chase your way through some more corridors and find a blue key which lets you out into this courtyard in two parts, one of which is like the start of E1M9 and the other has this kind of marble garden feature which is the landing site of a huge monster teleporter. However the trap doesn't go off unless you run over a very specific part of the feature, and the key isn't even on it. Thus you can just grab the key and be on your merry way. Bizarre. Oh and you can't get 100% secrets, one of the secret sectors was deleted and doesn't have any delimiting sidedefs (but there are lots of maps where that happens, I guess I'm lucky to have yadex's cross references checker)

Anyway the second follows directly on (its start room is a copy of the exit of the first) and via some dark techbase corridors leads you to a large outdoor courtyard with a stone circle thing in the middle. Not content with putting four archviles into this circle, the author decided that upon entering the circle the walls of the courtyard would lower and you would be surrounded by about 200 monsters, including probably two dozen pain elementals. This got pretty nasty, but somehow I made it through. I think you're supposed to press the eight buttons sticking up out the floor behind the walls that lower - they open doors which eventually reveal another switch that's supposed to raise a floor to let you get to the exit, in the centre of the stone circle, but you can just jump over the gap quite easily provided you get the barrels out of the way first.