30/05/2005 @19:23:28 ^20:55:06

encouragement

You won't find that here!

I watched five Star Wars films in a week

One of them was the new one, obviously. The first prequel had been on TV, I went to the cinema, then I found my video of the "classic" trilogy (I taped the remastered versions off of ITV when they showed them a couple of years ago) and watched all of them.

When I went to see the third Matrix film one thing I didn't like was the crowdedness of the cinema. This time however due to bizarre sleeping patterns it struck me as a great idea at 5am one day that I could go pretty much when the place opened later in the morning. Sure enough at 10am there were 7 or 8 other people in the entire cinema. Who cares about being a friendless loser?

People hate on the prequels a lot, but for me they improved a lot after I read the Starwars.com databank and the vast amount of crap in Wikipedia. I don't care about pretentious dialogue acted woodenly, in fact I think it's pretty funny. You enjoy the good bits and laugh at the bad bits. It's not rocket science, people. Save your hate for real life.

Oh but if you want a review you'll have to go elsewhere because I can't be bothered to write one. I'm not a film reviewer. I enjoyed most of it, but I'm predisposed to liking this shit!

Doom Conversions

I am however a Doom WAD reviewer. I was moved to seek out the old Star Wars Doom WADs and I might as well harp on about them. Star Wars Doom replaces four maps from Doom and Star Wars Doom 2 is an update, converted for Doom 2 and five extra levels. There is a cleaned up version of the Doom 2 conversion on Doom WAD station's Star Wars page; this might be easier to get working. Find the link that says "Download the UPDATED VERSION" or Download the UPDATED VERSION, I guess.

However, having set all that up, I can't really recommend them. Yeah okay you get to shoot Stormtroopers and whatnot but once the novelty has worn off that's about it. You get some quite crappy maps that are very mid-90s and are annoying to play.

• The first four maps (which are in both versions) are large and complicated but very repetitive and with architecture that hampers you. The first two are really just rooms and halls and suffer from too much symmetry and boring gameplay once you're over the initial "ooh I'm in Star Wars!" moment. The third and fourth maps are worse, the third is riddled with perpetual moving platforms for which you have to wait an age, and the fourth is basically the same corridor, which is boring to play once, repeated four times. However, they all look pretty good if you can ignore the weird use of tan bricks on the ceiling.
• The five maps in the updated version are bare and underdetailed. The architecture doesn't get in your way quite as much, but it looks pretty awful. Mos Eisley is a grid of square boxes, Hoth is a maze of randomly strewn vertexes, textured in this one white pattern, and Endor appears as a flat plain with some cylinders on it. The Emperor's Throne Room on the Death Star is pretty good though. Darth Vader throws homing lightsabers at you that look really strange and the Emperor does exactly what you expect.

Speaking of which, one of the appeals of Doom total conversions is finding out how the characters and settings from the source have been worked into the game. For example, replacing the archvile's attack with force lightning was natural and obvious. But, that's about it, the Dehacked patches seem rather half-arsed and leave a lot to be desired. For example, not confusing killcount and itemcount would have been a good start.

Anyway in summary I think you should only look at these wads if you're a) prepared to work out how to get PrBoom to run them b) can put up with crappyness. I recall enjoying the novelty factor when I found them a couple of years ago, but they don't stand up to replaying. Doom is what it is, don't mess with a winning formula!