23/06/2007 @14:50:16 ^16:09:19
Knee-Deep in ZDoom
Everyone's written about this already so why not me? However everything that could have been said has been and I have no particular opinion one way or the other. Besides, it's for ZDoom, which I cannot be bothered to get working on my system again, not after the last time.
Status of /idgames
It appears to be back online. As growler pointed out the web server came back up only a few hours after my last post, but as FTP was down, the system was still effectively dead. But I just checked now and that appears rectified. Not sure how long it's been back, but anyway there you go, some good news.
Hellfire (again), Zap18: Paradox Lost, Systemic Corruption
Yet more on Hellfire. For some reason I couldn't just give up. It's not extraordinarily bad, it's far from the level of innate worthlesness that makes me stop playing a wad completely. It does have some merit. It just has a lot of annoyances that put me off it, too.
- I've been playing a bit of TNT:Evilution recently and it turns out a lot of the graphics Hellfire uses are from there. I thought they were new. My own fault for not really ever bothering with Final Doom (I don't care if it's an actual commercial product, the two Final Doom IWADs are just third party PWADs they decided to cash in on and better stuff has been made for free)
- While it doesn't have any gratuitous, show-stopping ZDoomisms that I noticed, it is rather full of situations where mouselook and proper 3d thing clipping would make the game much easier. Steep staircases with monsters at the top, high ledges with monsters at the bottom, etc.
- A number of the final maps are clearly influenced by original IWAD maps. The most obvious was map26, which was basically three parts E3M6, one part MAP29.
- On map25 I one-shot-killed three spiderdemons with three consecutive BFG shots. Incredible luck!
- 27 has a great name - "The Evil Holes"! It's also one of the better ones, you clamber around a bunch of mountains over lava, there's lots of jumps to make and it's all very three-dimensional. However, that made it suffer even more from things mentioned above.
Oh well after three posts I'm pretty sure I'm done with it for now. As I say I've done all the maps, and it's an explorer wad that's fun to go round once, but now I've done it once I don't feel like playing it again.
Zap18: Paradox Lost Ah this is more like it. Made some years ago for a project that never finished, Zap18 is a grey techbase of moderate difficulty. The architecture has the right balance of simplicity and interest, and the difficulty is quite low, although you can't go mad. There is excellent use of height. I wish more maps were like this.
Systematic Corruption (UPDATE: /idgames link) is another well-detailed techbase which hasn't made it to /idgames yet. It seems highly reminiscent in both architectural style and difficulty, of the base/mines levels in Scythe 2. It looks pretty much flawless, but I found it rather hard, especially the end where you are locked in a room and a huge horde of monsters teleport in. With many revenants especially, the chance of having a huge accident is quite high, and there's hardly any health available, and it was quite frustrating. I found it much better on HMP - strangely HNTR was somewhat lacking in ammunition...
