08/10/2006 @14:14:48 ^15:42:03

Promotion

Yesterday I went from "guy who spams the prboom patch tracker" to "guy with svn commit access". I guess if I ever claimed to have any ambitions, this would have been one of them.

Maps

Damnation Awaits the Wicked Hooray, I was right - The Wicked Series is indeed ongoing, as here we have wicked_8.wad. It replaces map28 with a kind of fortress in hell. While being detailed enough to be pleasing to the eye it is quite repetitive and very circular - ReX's map often feature a lot of circles, in this one the main fortress is basically a series of concentric ones. It's not very highly populated but there isn't much health or ammo, and quite a number of nasty traps and damage sectors you have to run through, so be prepared to die a lot or use savegames.

This is worth playing but I still think the best in the series was the first one.

Let It Roll A 3 map wad for Doom 2 that I first played in 2002 and recently redownloaded. Old school design but without being too messy. Some edited textures and doom2.exe engine tricks such as glass doors. It's mostly an industrial theme, although it varies. The start of MAP02 is clearly a science lab, and MAP03 has some kind of a garden in it.

Gameplay is very variable - this is a rare example of a multilevel wad clearly designed to be played as an episode, rather than each map from a pistol start. Doing a run of all three maps is very easy. Doing MAP02 from scratch is not too hard provided you can dodge round a cyberdemon at close range to nick a BFG from under its nose, but MAP03 I believed for a long time was impossible from a pistol start due to lack of ammunition. I have discovered this is not true, but it's still very tricky - I chainsawed an archvile, and, with zero usable ammunition and 10% health, basically tickled a baron to death - all the while surrounded by piles of rockets and cells, tantalisingly whispering "you could have fired us if you'd brought weapons from the previous maps..."

But it's a decent wad and very playable - you could well argue that the huge variation in difficulty depending on whether you use pistol starts or not is a point in its favour. Give it a try.

Dethwish Another old wad recently redownloaded. It's a whole episode for Doom, E1M1-E1M9. Made in 2000 according to the text file but looks like it is from 1994. This is in itself not necessarily a bad thing, but it could do without all the flashing lights, unkillable monsters, very badly designed monster teleporters and other weirdness. Also the secret exit is on E1M1 and so doesn't work properly; the secret level itself cannot be escaped as you can't press on a walkover linedef! There are a lot of maze-type levels. The best ones are probably E1M5 or E1M6, but they're still annoying.

Probably best to avoid this one - I think I only got it again because of nostalgia (it severely reminds me of cold bright sunny Saturday mornings in February)