19/06/2005-20/06/2005 @03:23:00 ^04:36:33

GOSH ISN'T IT WARM? GOSH!

I spend probably three quarters of the year feeling cold so I welcome the warm weather. Nuts to all you haters!

THE ZIPS COLLECTION: AGAIN

I seem to have acquired a /tmp/zips2

Room of Ob "Room of Ob will blink and flicker while the hideous horde of monsters will eat you." Yes, pretty much. There's lots of flashing lights and what I call "noisy" texturing, that is a lot of textures used in a small space, and also a lot of use of textures which contrast lots of different colours and don't really look right in great quantity. Gameplay-wise though it's pretty fun, although the first room, a short corridor with a bunch of mancubi, is fairly pointless, and just serves to make the invulnerability you start with, run out faster. The next area contains a couple of awkward jumps over some pillars, with armour fragments on. I didn't like this because it's more like a secret area thing but you need to do it to progress to the final chamber. Everywhere is stuffed with large monsters but I managed to 100% it after a few tries. The balance is all wrong, the boss monsters at the end are pretty trivial to remove because it gives you an invulnerability, but immediately before that you have two archviles and a crowd of mancubi and arachnotrons to deal with and you don't get squat. The crowd of cacodemons and pain elementals was tough too. Overall I'd say good effort but not great.

Not Enough Brown Shit This map probably would be mistaken for a 1996-era map if it were not for the fact that it has been completely re-textured in this pattern of brown and orange. It is vaguely reminiscent of Doom's E3M3 and also of Quake, although I don't know why I think that as I haven't played Quake in years. But it does feel old, because it uses perpetual platforms. Although interacting with them is optional, it's nevertheless the case that their use is very rare nowadays because they're annoyingly slow. The map is small and cramped but over quickly and all but one of the monsters was a spectre or less. The button you press to get the red key isn't very obvious. There isn't very much health, and quite a lot of zombies, especially chaingunners; I was pretty low on health most of the time but somehow finished with 100% kills. I'm probably being too negative, but it's nothing incredibly wonderful. On the other hand it is well made, and the new textures are a novelty.

JERICHO.WAD Sheesh I don't know what the hell this is, other than obviously very very old and made before the time when you just don't make maps with wild light level differences and ugly texturing and all sorts of stuff like that, I don't know. I rather liked the way that the walls in the start area are false and as you go through the map they lower, but there's an ugly maze and lots of teleporters and a nice setpiece with the red key overlooked by a ledge full of mancubi and a cyberdemon at the end which was kind of pointless as it just gives you an invulnerability and there's a really obvious secret with a BFG and tons of ammo. That kind of sums it up, pointless - and lets not forget it changes all the sounds into stuff from Star Trek ("that's what a teleporter is supposed to sound like", says the text file. How do you know? Anyway, I just don't like sound replacements)

Tides of Sin This is more like it. A replacement of Doom E1M8 that is more like a silvery Doom 2 techbase than an episode 1 map, it is still very nice looking and quite fun to play. The area around the exit has some nice hell corruption work going on, as you'd expect from an end of episode 1 map, I suppose. The patches of skin or whatever the hell that swirly flat is meant to be look good, anyway. The gameplay is quite dependent on luck, as you start you face a number of sergeants armed only with a pistol. The crowd of spectres and demons are not so much of a problem if you're good at the punching thing, but the final crowd of teleporting imps and barons can cause problems if you get trapped in the small room with the rockets and plasma. However the major complaint about this map is that the final two battles are based around large monster teleporters that are very badly designed. You have to kill all the barons to end the map, and it is very possible that you have to wait an irritating length of time for the damned thing to come out of the holding pen. See it's all very well to start with when the holding pen is full because there's lots of monsters that can walk over a teleporter line but towards the end with only one or two in a large and otherwise empty sector, well, you could be waiting for a very long time. This is a blight on an otherwise very decent level. On Doomworld, the newstuff reviewer complained that he couldn't get this map to exit, and I suspect what happened was a baron got stuck in the teleporter and he got fed up of waiting. Summary: looks great, could play better.