23/08/2010 @19:49:24 ^20:51:58
Van Maerlantlyceum
A guy makes a map of his school. Something of a cliche of mid-nineties Doom mapping, recently introduced to /idgames. Nevertheless, this is a decent map, and I enjoyed playing it, all the way through, several times. Points of interest:
the main hall, with a nicely high ceiling, and a couple of classrooms round the outside; there is a megasphere up on one wall with a teleporter next to it that I spent ages trying to strafejump into, when in fact you're meant to shoot it (there's a few places in the map that really need foreknowledge)
an inner garden, one might call it a quadrangle, full of trees, with a well-hidden "VML SUCKS" spraypainted on a wall - I guess the author was glad to leave! To reach here (and the yellow key) you have to walk into a cupboard in the back of a classroom - another thing that needs foreknowledge. There's a hidden BFG in there too which activates a nasty trap a long way away. It's that kind of map.
a bit of fake room-over-room to simulate the basement, it worked really well except the teleport is quite blatant - I wonder if Boom silent line teleports would improve it. The basement contains a cafeteria with a couple of nastily-placed archviles. You can use one to jump onto a wall that has a hidden room full of soulspheres behind it. I think this was meant to be a deathmatch-only thing.
a monster spawner finishes the map off. I could do without this part, frankly. I usually kill all the monsters in the room, then quit when I activate the spawner. It's too annoying to bother with, not just because of having to fire off a moving platform, but because it spawns a load of monsters right below the target, which messes with autoaim (rockets always fly down towards the monsters rather than in the hole in the spawner's head)
So, your typical 1995 map, with quite a few of what I'll call "rough edges". But like I said, I played this several times and didn't get bored of it so that must count for something. And the description of the map in its text file is is dryly amusing. Give it a try.
RIKER11.WAD
A typically ancient 1994 wad, all single rooms, halls and doors, like a wolfenstein level without all the right angles... However, made memorable by its text file which gives gradiose names to the otherwise largely featureless areas.
In any other wad, a low corridor with a load of corpses hanging in your face would be unmemorable, if not mildly annoying. Here, it's The Corridor of Raw Meat!
In any other wad, a strobe-lit maze that disables the automap would have you reaching for the quit button.* But here, it's The Disco of the Damned!
And in any other wad, finding a room with a rocket launcher and a plasma gun, which tries to do it so picking up one makes the other inaccessible, but is constructed around the belief that you can't press a button that's receeded into the floor, would make you smile at the naivety and innocence of the old-school player**. But here, it's the The Pit of Choices!
And I didn't even mention The Zombie Shootout, The Rodeo of Infinity, and The Apocalypse! I won't spoil them, to entice you to play the wad (and I'm not too sure which part of the map the last two are meant to be)
Anyway, so much for sarcasm. It's not a particularly stand-out wad, so whether or not you'll like it is dependent on whether or not you like this era of mapping. I liked it, I played it several times, it's not too hard and more importantly it's not too aggravating, although it does abuse those really slow-moving perpetual lifts a bit too much at the end.
* There is a well-hidden pair of light goggles which makes this bearable; the text file mentions them, but doesn't tell you where they are...
** Speaking of a time of innocence, the completion time in the text file is quoted as 20 minutes. This is... rather high. It was a simpler time, when everybody used the keyboard, and no-one had cottoned on to the benefits of the mouse.
