24/03/2010 @10:48:35 ^12:06:39

Guess what, I lost interest in updating this thing again.

Site notice: One day I might get bored and switch rjy.ath.cx's web server from apache to something else. (Why? Well, why not?) If I do that, I probably won't bother to preserve the redirects from there to rjy.org.uk. So please stop relying on them. (Fortunately almost no-one does.)

List of recently-played wads

I can't be bothered to go into too much detail. New to me:

• DEATH IS JUST THE BEGINNING (v1.0) Replacement E1 that's more like an E2 with E1M8 at the start (you die.) Although the next couple of maps are in hell you somehow end up back in techbases in the middle. Strange really. The best one was E1M7, a large castle with several cyberdemons to lure around it. Quite tactical. Some bugs, E1M3 requires 3d thing clipping at one point and has unkillable monsters, for instance.
• Brood of Hatred A large hell-on-earth kind of map. Sort of verges on being a slaughter map at some points. Decent but nothing that really grabbed me. A few bugs here and there, e.g. you need to run over the yellow key from the north side if you want 100% kills.
• cacoland You get a view of the ruins of some buildings infested with cacodemons, then you go into an undergound temple kind of thing. I found this map quite annoying, low on ammo and full of ZDoomisms and didn't really bother to finish it. I got both the keys and fell into a dark reactor core with an archvile and died. Never did reach the city of cacodemons.
• Spacious Depot of Decay A long-time return for tolwyn03: tolwyn02 being An Affinity For Pain and tolwyn01 Outpost Recon, both from 2004. As ever this map looks really nice. Here though the amount of backtracking, searching around with no idea what to do next, pressing buttons and having no idea what they just did etc got annoying. Poor flow or whatever. Getting secrets long after the time you needed them. And going up and down that bloody lift at the start, the one that takes an age! Gah. Difficulty was pretty high but not impossible, but there are a few close calls.

Played years ago, recently revisited for no real reason:

• Fava Beans E1 replacement that everyone has heard of. Still great but having played it so much, even a long time ago, I know it too well. What I did this time, several times, was just to run at it and try to finish all 9 maps as fast as possible. It's easy enough to be able to do this without dying even with my increasingly worse playing skills. Some lovely bits of weird flow, ranging all the way up to utter incomprehensibility. E.g. E1M6, you don't get the plasma gun until you've cleared out the entire level. E1M3, a well-hidden switch in a slime lake gives you, not access to the plasma gun, but the grand opening of a window through which you can see the plasma gun. To actually get it all you need to do is push at a hidden door right by the thing. I could go on here but I won't. Maybe another time.
• Way Out and Still Doomed (aka ALL-E1) If large mazes, hundreds of secrets, and requiring clairvoyance (or cheating with a map editor) are your thing, you'll love this. It's dry and repetitive for most, though. Ugly as well, typical dark ages architecture, although the later maps get a bit better. Sometimes you have to find secret doors to even get anywhere. Nostalgic but if I downloaded this now I probably wouldn't bother with it. Also it comes in 9 individual wads, the author evidently didn't have the tools or knowledge to build a single wad at the time.