The /newstuff Chronicles #334

to be brutally honest I've done many reviews without a full scan of the .txt. Often times I just glance at what maps are replaced and if it needs a certain source port but that's about it.

I always see maps not receiving the full potential of their admirable value by the reviewers. It happens very often. Many of the screenshots I saw in this newstuff look like excellent maps, but the reviews I keep seeing are:

"A set of average maps that aren't bad but aren't good either. the gameplay is average with average amount of ammo to fight an average amount of monsters in a map that uses strictly average textures to be fought and completed in an average amount of time average average average average."

One against hell is a very cool wad. The new monsters are better than many of the monsters included in the bestiary, the only problem is the final monster that seems to use the same code of the Hell-knight/Archvile hybrid but as he doesn't shoot homing projectiles he always aim in the bad direction. If that could be fixed it would be a great wad.
I think that boss could be used later (if it's fixed and also edited to be harder) as a mini boss or something. And add a new big bad boss that's to Cyberdemon what Cyberdemon is to the baron of hells on E2M8. That'd be sweet.

Cutman said:

God. If that's the attitude of Jekyll Grim Payne I'd HATE to see the attitude of Hyde Grim Payne.

*BAH DAH DUM DUM DISH*

Good one!

Hitherto said:

so here another nice example of his rudeness:

Hmmm... I read the comment he gave on the now invalid website, before it got invalid. It was something like “dumbasses cannot read the txt“, well, now he made the same mistake, but is it really important to react to him like he did in his comment? If Jekyll writes such a comment, then it is his problem that some of the people don’t play his work. I see his comment as childish behavior, so I don’t care at all and to see the reaction in this thread is just not meaningful, just send him a PM if you want so, but here it is not good, because it looks like this: the overwhelming doomworld community now is judging on Jekyll... Why am I even writing this post... Just stop doing this in the newstuff chonicles !

kristus said:

Or maybe they just don't care about conserving ammo as much as the person who made it.

If you're going to go that far, you might as well slap on all the other cheat codes too, because you've allready circumvented the map the way the author intended you to play it.

Using cheats is tantamount of saying that, becoming frustrated, one didn't like how it plays. In that case one can play on a lower difficulty, but as a reviewer won't be able to say much more about gameplay in UV other than it being a bitch. If I have a critique for some of Eternal's latest maps is that they stick too much to survival gameplay which is not as replayable as DOOM's more generous item (and monster) placement. With less and tighter things play grants less possibilities for changing the pace or the path.

Deeforce said:
Good one!Hmmm... I read the comment he gave on the now invalid website, before it got invalid. It was something like “dumbasses cannot read the txt“,

Read the text file of the mod; there's something about committing suicide which sounds pretty nasty, and it's precisely about what he failed on in the review. The not-so-smart hypocrite tells people who don't read the text file to fuck off in a really ugly way, and then makes that very mistake for a public review of something else.

At first I also felt Andrey overreacted, but with this in mind it's definitely a more acceptable (if a bit extreme) reaction.

2 pence:

1 - Reviewers are reviewing a whole map set and everything about it. If it's just too hard for them to play i don't really see the problem with cheating for ammo so that they can at least get to the end and report on the gameplay experience (a big battle / good bit of architecture at the end, for instance). "Admitting" that they needed to cheat in the review also helps to tell other players that the map is hard, or that they should run it on a lower skill than the reviewer did. Also if it was a really crappy map with an unfair inescapable trap and the reviewer said "i had to noclip out" nobody would even notice

2 - Reviewers should run maps in thier intended source port. Meant for Eternity? play it in that. And don't forget - if somebody says "boom" but has only tested it in Zdoom - to give it a deathz0r "DOES NOT WORK IN INTENDED SOURCE PORT". My own EDGE wad outmyass.wad has a review on idgames from some thick fucker who has obviously just drag n dropped it into Zdoom and then splurged "what the hell the doors don't work". That properly pissed me off. Even to the point of me saving it for posterity on my own website, with appended insults.

deathbringer said:

2 - Reviewers should run maps in thier intended source port. Meant for Eternity? play it in that. And don't forget - if somebody says "boom" but has only tested it in Zdoom - to give it a deathz0r "DOES NOT WORK IN INTENDED SOURCE PORT". My own EDGE wad outmyass.wad has a review on idgames from some thick fucker who has obviously just drag n dropped it into Zdoom and then splurged "what the hell the doors don't work". That properly pissed me off.

Heh. I've worried a bit about that, too...I've considered including a little reminder map to be shown if the Eternity project I'm working on is loaded in ZDoom. I know most people aren't that dumb, but I might as well just avoid the confusion before it has a chance to start :P

deathbringer said:

My own EDGE wad outmyass.wad has a review on idgames from some thick fucker who has obviously just drag n dropped it into Zdoom and then splurged "what the hell the doors don't work". That properly pissed me off. Even to the point of me saving it for posterity on my own website, with appended insults.

I'm in the same boat, some of my Heretic maps have comments from some random tard proclaiming it doesn't work in jHeretic. No shit it doesn't. Who the hell even uses jHeretic anymore?

Funnily enough there was a wad in 2002 (an episode no less) which specifies jHeretic is needed...probably cos it was the only fully working source port at the time. (wHeretic was unreliable and ZDoom didn't have everything implemented back then)

Vegeta said:

One against hell is a very cool wad. The new monsters are better than many of the monsters included in the bestiary, the only problem is the final monster that seems to use the same code of the Hell-knight/Archvile hybrid but as he doesn't shoot homing projectiles he always aim in the bad direction. If that could be fixed it would be a great wad.
I think that boss could be used later (if it's fixed and also edited to be harder) as a mini boss or something. And add a new big bad boss that's to Cyberdemon what Cyberdemon is to the baron of hells on E2M8. That'd be sweet.

that crucified cyber-caco-thing is amazingly surreal. it shouldn't be forgotten just because the map wasn't something special. make him a demon god who sacrificed himself for the good of demons or so. enlarge the sprites to make him a huge, booming appearance (like the stomp of the old cyberdemon scared the crap out of beginners), at least twice the cyber's size, floating above hell and hellishly hard. with a cyclops eye shooting eyebeams ;)

or as a pun to warhammer 40,000, a golden cyber in a life support sacophagus. destroying his material form and letting him ascend to his evil spiritual form makes things even worse...

accompanied by afrits and crippled, skinned, bfg-throwing barons who went through this pain to get greater psychic powers. call them "xipe totec" of the aztec mythology, "our lord the flayed one".

i've also come up at some point with hapless cacos nailed to walls as turrets (they have a "pain" idle sound and shoot a stream of fireballs in agony), burning imps howling and attacking rabidly, bleeding, skinned former humans, a revenant version with bits of its rotten flesh hanging from the bones instead of goofy pants.

too bad i don't have the time and the skills to make these look as imagined, but perhaps the artists here like some twisted imagination.

in a nutshell, after 15 years of futile assaults, the demon gods have decided that fear and pain will be a better motivator for some lesser minions.

udderdude said:
Who the hell even uses jHeretic anymore?

People who use Doomsday? I'm pretty sure there's a good deal of those, as on some sites it seems the more popular engine.

It's not the same situation though, because the guy who said that seems to know perfectly well it doesn't work with it. He just let you know he'd like to see stuff that works with the port. In deathbringer's case the dude didn't read the text file and tried some random engine like an idiot and then complained.

One Against Hell is PSYCHOTIC GENIUS.. Like, I want to shake Azamael's hand now for coming up with the most hilariously awesome thing I've seen in years.

And this, oddly enough, is no sarcasm.

myk said:

People who use Doomsday? I'm pretty sure there's a good deal of those, as on some sites it seems the more popular engine.

It's not the same situation though, because the guy who said that seems to know perfectly well it doesn't work with it. He just let you know he'd like to see stuff that works with the port. In deathbringer's case the dude didn't read the text file and tried some random engine like an idiot and then complained.

Guess I'm left looking dumb, I could have sworn there was a similar comment that said "does not work with jheretic". Maybe a mod cleaned it up. I didn't think the report feature actually worked when I used it .. :p

For all those interested in using the crucified cybercaco, I must warn you: the textfile for One Against Hell quite clearly says "Authors (MAY/may NOT) use the contents of this file as a base for
modification or reuse."

Also, as part of the end-user license agreement, the player must "delete one of these two paragraphs," apparently.


Edit: Okay, so I was hoping to enjoy the surreal One Against Hell experience. I load the wad up in GZDoom, and immediately find myself stuck in a small area with two sets of bars I can't raise and a teleport that doesn't work. I open up the wad and I find no other lines that I could activate. None of you have mentioned getting stuck even momentarily. What the fuck?

Edit again: Seems like GZDoom and ZDoom both stopped handling Hexen teleports in a recent SVN build.

It's little things like that which keep me from using SVN builds on a regular basis.

That's only because the author used a mapspot rather than a teleport destination...

Hexen teleports still work. But some time ago a bug was found that improperly tagged teleport spots could really and seriously screw up proper desination picking.

As a side effect of that bug the teleport-to-mapspot workaround even was triggered when it was not supposed to. What nobody could foresee that a handful of mappers were really sloppy enough to use such badly designed teleports.

It's too bad that this can't be undone without breaking the intended functionality again so we'll have to live with a few broken maps.

Alright. I haven't done any Doom-in-Hexen format mapping so I thought "mapspots" might be the correct thing to place. I guess they aren't.

With the permissions for that wad as absurd as they are, I'm sure we could interpret them as allowing us to upload a fixed copy.

Creaphis said:
I'm sure we could interpret them as allowing us to upload a fixed copy.

There's nothing to interpret. It just means the author did not address copyright or permissions, leaving that section of the template unmodified, thus granting nothing. But in any case there's little reason to upload a fixed version of a WAD when the author can be contacted about the issue. Replacing his original file would be silly even when usage permissions are given, and slight variants of files aren't encouraged on the archive.

It's a 15-seconds fix with any map editor that lets you do search and replace.

myk said:

There's nothing to interpret.

Yeah yeah... I was joking.

Gez said:

It's a 15-seconds fix with any map editor that lets you do search and replace.

How about that, so it is. I suppose that most people who download ZDoom SVN builds also know the basics of ZDoom editing, so I'm one of the ignorant few here.

entryway said:

It's not a part of any contest. It's just with the same rules.


Read the rules. It should be DOOM compatible.


Are you stupid? Specially for dumbasses... READ THE FUCKING TXT. IT IS LIMIT REMOVING AND DOES NOT NEED BOOM.


You are sucker if you need IDFA on these levels and if you are sucker, you should not speak it to all, because it's a shame to be a sucker.

Short version of your review:
This level is for BOOM, because I am dumbass and did not read TXT. It's pretty good. I have finished it with cheats and I did not see some of effects, because I used not recommended port

Well, you see, actually it IS a part of 2x2. On the other hand, 2x2 is not much of a contest, it is more of a simple wad series.

It should be limit removing, to be precise. These are the rules of 2x2.

You call it sucker, I call it a person who doesn't find high difficulty too interesting. You see, for some reason I consider games a kind if entertainment and I like to enjoy them, not to be frustrated. Additionaly, usage of idfa only tells me that there is slight shortage of ammo on the map (let's say, noticeable shortage of ammo, comparing to average difficulty maps like original Doom), so this doesn't affect the objectivity of my review. Nothing to be ashamed of.

On the other hand, to express one's childish feeling of "I feel so insulted because someone who had been asked dumb questions which he answered before hundreds of times recommended all the dumbasses commit suicide, bo-hoo" is something to be ashamed of. Oh, wait... does that mean that you admit that you're a dumbass? Because if you aren't, you surely shouldn't be bothered by what I wrote in my txt. But if you are bothered... Well, that's very self-critically of you.

Speaking of RECOMMENDED port, it is PrBoom plus, as the author states it.