10/10/2010 @20:29:02 ^21:15:21
I'll just briefly mention these. New stuff:
TNT: Renascence (episode 1) Eternal (Hell Ground, Cybersky, Nordhell etc.) remakes the first 11 maps of TNT:Evilution. So it's like Remain 1 but for TNT. Okay. That's pretty much all you can say about it without going into a description of each individual map and how it differs from the original. The map design is better, neater layouts and better texturing and so forth. I'm not sure if it's harder, I'm not actually all that familiar with Final Doom. This one probably deserves more attention from me, but not now. Oh and yes that is how it spells the title. Be fair, English isn't his first language.
Reality Maps Three very hard maps with the gimmick that you start with 1% health and basically can't take any damage at all. Interesting from a point of view of pushing classic Doom gameplay into new places, but too hard and frustrating for me. I ran through it in god mode though and had some fun, the map designs are good. I should try it in lower skill levels, where there is health, but does that miss the point..?
Scorching heat One map for the Plutonia IWAD. Interesting mostly because it was apparently made by about a dozen different people. That must have taken a bit of organising. Anyway, what you have is a city, very complex with this weird system of colour-coded unlockable doors that don't have keys but have switches instead. The actual keys are replaced with "objects" - so far I've found a battery and "a demon's blood" (sic.) There are other sections besides the city - one I've seen is rocky and lava, hellish. I haven't finished this map yet, I'm about one third to one half of the way through based on different estimates, it's pretty tedious going sometimes and as the /newstuff review says, you can't really play it all at once. It's not great but I feel like I want to play through it to the end.
The Hell Cave This is kind of a slaughter map, but really it's just very large, the only real slaughter is towards the end. However it starts off in some dull stone corridors, throwing a few hellknights and cacodemons at you, and you only have a shotgun. I couldn't be bothered. The architecture isn't up to much, although there are some nicely large, high areas later. It could do with more lighting variation as well. Still that's not so much of a problem. The gameplay is, though. Oh and it's quite beset by ZDoomisms, mostly of the "solid hanging body in tall sector" variety.
And one old favourite:
Sector 666 An old classic from 1998 or thereabouts and a favourite wad of mine from a long time ago. Gameplay is pretty easy, I managed to go through all the maps without saving on the first time I played it, having not seen it for probably eight years. It was easy to do most of the maps from pistol starts too. As for looks, you can tell it's from the "just before source ports" era because of how individual areas are quite highly detailed but there's a lot of disjointness with individual rooms being quite separate from each other. This is presumably to avoid overflowing the visplane limit. The space base maps look the best, the others are a bit more generic. Also I love how there's a map named "Hell" followed by another named "More Hell".
