14/06/2008 @11:45:34 ^13:07:57

I'd better write something before it all breaks again.

PUTRICE Following Alpha Map, another Duke mapper turns up and makes something decent. The theme is a brick castle in a lava canyon. It's nicely wide open, there's a big pile of shells and weapons right at the start and you can just run about. Nevertheless it suffers a little from top-heaviness as all the monsters on the level are just there (there's no waves) and ammunition is a bit limited unless you know where to go.

Here's my hint: run forwards from the start until you reach the backpack and green armour, then go back the way you came. There's no point hanging around the top of the map, you'll just run out of shells and die. (There is a strafejump you can do to a ledge and find the red key that way, but it's tricky)

In summary this is a fun map and worth playing. I found it entertaining once I was past the annoyances and I have cheerfully replayed it several times since.

A Pyramid of Curious Origin and Question I want to like this but I can't! The good: it's an enormous map most of which is in one huge outdoor area. Wide open and with a very high ceiling, very nice. You start in the lake surrouding this enormous rectangular structure and work your way around it, eventually getting to the top. The bad: there is nowhere near enough ammunition to deal with the monsters, so unless you like berserk punching hundreds of demons, you'll have to cheat.

You might like to run it just to look at it but if you play it you'll need god mode or infinite ammunition or something, I don't know. It's a shame because it seems like it has had a lot of effort put in.

Hellward Bound First thing to say about this one is that there are missing textures everywhere. Its texture definitions lump is a ZDoomism*. After that you find it's a huge map, and disjoint, like four or five smaller maps included in one. It starts off with some cramped metal corridors and a couple of mazes then you teleport to a town. At this point the map turns into a switch quest (and an annoying one where I kept having to look at the map in an editor to work out what to do next) The final part is a castle floating in hell, this is probably the best part. However there are several other ZDoomisms apart from the texture issue (e.g. implicit passuse is necessary) Ultimately I can't recommend this.

* If you load a PWAD with a lump named the same as one from the IWAD, the new lump replaces the old one. This is the way Doom has always worked. Therefore if you replace the texture definitions lump (named TEXTURE1, there may also be a TEXTURE2) you have to include all the IWAD textures or they won't work any more. But Hellward Bound's TEXTURE1 lump only has the new textures the map uses in it. It relies on ZDoom's behaviour of merging all TEXTURE1/2 lumps it finds in all loaded wads. Fortunately in the case of Hellward Bound the problem can be fixed by simply extracting and rebuilding the wad with Deutex, but this won't always necessarily work as Deutex has a habit of mangling other stuff that it thinks isn't strictly doom2.exe-compatible.