05/08/2008 @10:03:06 ^11:05:55

Dead monitor

Last week my 21" monitor died. At least I think it's dead, it was fine one minute, then there was a kind of interference pattern, then the picture collapsed briefly when I went from a screen that was mostly white to a screen that was mostly black, then there was a loud bang and the power light went out. Since then I've been able to get nothing out of it.

So I'm back on my old monitor and 1024x768 seems so small. I can't surround my browser window with terminals! Argh.

Crawl

I think the reason I was finding Crawl easier than last time was because there was this gratuitous bug that makes your skills go up way faster than they should. Thus I have put off upgrading to the newer versions that fix it. Haha, I'm so lame, I'll upgrade soon, I promise...

As for whether or not it's better than NetHack, I'm not sure. The interface is certainly a huge improvement. However it is the most frustrating thing ever to keep losing my spellcasters before or just after reaching the Temple. Come on, it's not like I even care that much about winning, I just want Sif Muna to give me a huge pile of spellbooks to play with. Oh well thank goodness for wizard mode I guess.

Actually it's a bit of a coincidence because with NetHack I felt I only started getting somewhere after I (a) played through the game in wizard mode and (b) watched the nethack.alt.org 2006 tournament. And there's a tournament on crawl.akrasiac.org like right now, just as I am playing Crawl in wizard mode. I like coincidences so I'm wasting bandwidth writing about them.

Doom

As a result of the above I haven't played much Doom recently. So I went and downloaded something at random so I could post about it. Here goes.

• La Ciudadela (The Citadel) This is a huge field with some large buildings on it. A couple resemble ones from Doom2 map15. The rest isn't bad but it is quite bland. The large size makes it quite fun but don't bother unless you're an enthusiast for old-style wads.
• Qrumpi Old Men A three-map wad from Ruba. The first is okay, weird factory/castle/lava theme, but playable. The second is a box with four archviles behind doors. The final one looks like a sandbox. You're in the middle of a sea of 10000 imps and 16 cyberdemons. However, you can just press the exit switch. I'd like to see if anybody could get 100% kills on this, actually. I bet it's possible.
• HORDES 2 This is a stone fortress whose shape is vaguely reminiscent of an old classic WAD, FORTRESS.WAD (wadpak1a E1M8) It's riddled with shotgunners and there's no starting weapon, so I ran out of health fast. Also I couldn't get through the second door, at which point I gave up. Turns out you have to shoot the unmarked wall next to it.
• SURVIVAL OF THE WINNEST Must be a joke. Laugh. Tiny map with three barons and no (accessible) weapons. You can just about squeeze past them if you're lucky. Ugly construction, nothing to merit this at all.