02/04/2009 @15:04:33 ^16:43:11

2x2 series

More from Eternal who set himself the limit of only using two textures and two flats from the Doom2 IWAD in each map. Amazingly, this actually works. You end up with a lot more done with linedefs, sectors and texture alignment to provide visual detail.

However, note that two textures doesn't leave enough room for switches, so you might find, as I did, that you get stuck easily because you don't know you're actually meant to press on that knobbly thing in the corner.

Eclipse

Two maps. On the first you're on a spaceship which you must rid of monsters and then activate the self-destruct. Some impressive DeHackEd work gives this illusion. However as you might expect from a spacecraft map it's all thin corridors and tubes and stuff, so is very cramped. The second is a more traditional large dark techbase with some good use of height.

Several monsters are replaced with relatively pointless recolours and sprite edits, which has become somewhat the norm for Eternal's maps. Having said that the imps are replaced with these nasty-looking things that are sped up quite a lot and are some threat.

Textures The spacecraft is made of COMPTALL - not surprising - and ZZZFACE6, which is part of the machinery behind the Icon of Sin, but works quite well on its own; the flats used are CEIL4_2, a dark blue shade that usually goes with the COMP* textures, and FLOOR5_1, a variant of Doom's common hexagonal floor panelling theme. The base is darker, but has the more surprising choices of MODWALL2 (some mostly black panelling) and LITE3, a 32-wide strip of lighting which is usually repetitive when overused but works here; flats are FLOOR7_1, a fairly generic brown floor and CEIL4_1, a slightly darker blue than the one used on the spacecraft map.

Nightomb

Survival horror map set inside a pyramid-like tomb. Usual high detail, high linedef and sector density, lots of fancy lighting, and plenty of advanced DeHackEd stuff to make a creepy atmosphere (evil laughter coming out of nowhere, etc.)

It likes its traps. One room has three switches; the one you want, one that drops the ceiling slowly and silently on your head, and one that just kills you instantly, to the sound of more laughter. I suppose you'd expect this from a tomb.

Also at one point I found myself completely stuck and had to go and look at the thing in a map editor. Spoiler: at the top of the curved ceiling "maze" you have to open both of the windows, and shoot through them with a bullet weapon. I had stood back and used the rocket launcher.

Overall, the kind of map that's worth playing due to being technically impressive but not really my sort of thing in terms of gameplay.

Textures On the walls, BRICK7, generic enough for most places, and BIGDOOR7 for doors and switches. FLOOR7_1 appeared again as a flat, and the other was CRATOP2, which usually looks awful if you use it anywhere but on the top of a crate, but has been made to work here with lots of fancy shapes drawn on the ground using different light levels.

To Fight

A rather abstract metallic tech map whose form is less important than the fact that it is utterly stuffed with monsters. You start on a central tower, cramped exploration of which will net you enough guns and ammo to start you off. Then, the most memorable part of the map - jumping off the side surrounds you with an enormous horde of revenants.

After that you have to go into the four corners of the room and clear them out and press on something to reveal a teleporter that takes you to the red key, then you can teleport back up to the central tower (and a chaingunner horde that takes too long to teleport in, bad design) and open the red door that leads to the exit, which incidentally is a monster spawner.

I quickly gave up trying to play this one properly and loaded my dehacked patch for slaughter maps. Once I did that it was really fun.

Textures TEKWALL6, mostly, which doesn't tile vertically too well; and an inspired use of SPCDOOR3, which not only has some nice bright green lights on it, useful for switches, but also contains most of DOORTRAK so he got that for free. Most flats are SLIME14 - one of the worst-named flats in Doom, as it is actually 4 metal panels - and TLITE6_5, red lights on a dark background, used sparingly for lighting and teleporters (it looks bad if you use it on too large an area)