31/01/2009 @10:52:30 ^14:38:38

Deep Into The Depths Of Hell

Imagine if it were still the mid-nineties and somebody went forwards in time ten years, saw Alien Vendetta and Deus Vult, and came back and tried to remake what they saw. That pretty much sums this wad up.

Quite an easy slaughter map given the number of invulnerabilities available, but linear and disjoint (clear out an area, move on) garishly textured (e.g. walls thousands of units long with LITE5 on them, oh and let's not forget all the flashing lights) and has several bugs (monsters stuck together inside a teleporter trap, lava pits that don't actually damage you containing non-functional escape teleporters)

Finally, I never realised how cheesy B-movie-ish the name was until I looked it up just now. The filename is just "deep.wad"

Dead Perfect

Two small deathmatch maps modified for single player. The most interesting thing about these maps is that they are made by one of the authors of Hell Revealed, and it shows. The style is unmistakeable.

They're not brilliant, but... well, obviously you should play this. It's more Hell Revealed!

Ivano: 1024

As the name suggests, a 1024x1024 map. Textured mostly in green variants of IWAD textures like BROWN96 and BRONZE, and makes excessive use of curve approximation, which I assume is one of those modern editor "press button to add gratuitious detail" features.

Ignoring this, it's just a small cramped maze of corridors, but is easy and will only take five minutes of your time - so worth a go if you're not bothered by people who abuse "instantly make my map look pretty" map editor features.

Inflation Bay

A harbour-side town, overrun by monsters. Somehow has a 19th-century feel to it - maybe inspired by the town maps in Mordeth, I don't know.*

Heavily detailed, but not just for detail's sake - it actually looks good. Interesting progression too, most buildings are locked from the outside but you jump from one to another via holes blown in the sides. The interiors of the buildings are a little cramped, though.

Gameplay is a fair challenge but not insurmountable. Most of the monsters are small but you don't get much of the heavy weaponry either. The worst part is that there are three chaingunners on towers overlooking the main street and it uses that irritating plutonia-style archvile-in-the-wall trick to keep them alive.

* After writing this I realised that rather than Mordeth it was more similar to another wad - Hellfire. I shouldn't be surprised at all - they have the same author, but I've only just realised this. Oh well.

Dark Caliber

These are three completed maps released by their author, after the project for which they were intended was cancelled. The author, best known for his Xenus series, feels rather aggrieved about this, ranting on at some length in the text file.

Now, while Xenus tended to be techbases, Dark Caliber is more about bricks, wood and torches, but still has the same high detail density and rather cramped feel of the author's previous work. There is also the fair share of minor bugs; nothing serious that would break the map, but I noticed missing textures and items stuck in the air after a floor had lowered, for instance.

Each individual map: the first is a cramped, complex maze, but fairly easy; your main problem is avoiding getting lost. The second is more straightforward - you have three keys to fetch and can get them in any order. It is more difficult, though, especially when it throws 12 pain elementals at you at once in a cramped area (I managed to kill them, but was finished off by rocket splash damage from the following cyberdemon. Last monster killed me, damnit.)

The most interesting map is the third, which is a town, absolutely stuffed with monsters. It felt nicely "whole" (as opposed to disjoint, like the three entirely separate key sections in map02) and had some good secret area placement. However I felt the monsters were a little excessive and the map was too cramped for a slaughter map.