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Alien Vendetta

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I'm playing through AV again since this topic put it in my head. Just finished MAP20, and it was still really amazing work. I remembered it vaguely from before but since I wasn't a mapper the last time I played it, I had no appreciation for all the hard work that went into making that map, AND somehow making it DOOM2.exe compatible!!! Perhaps my only complaint would be that it was a bit long, almost like it could have been split up between 4 or 5 levels. If it had been a touch longer, Kim Malde could have just called it a whole new episode. It took me over an hour to finish it.

One thing I will say about my playthrough thusfar is that while AV really shines in the architecture department, with some of the brightest minds coming together to create landscapes and structures which boggle my mind, the gameplay sometimes suffers. All too often I open a door and am greeted by a room full of pink demons or chaingunners, all right in front of me and facing straight ahead. Boring. You just wait for them to file through the open door and blow them away, while the rest are infighting from shooting each other upon seeing me. At other times the gameplay seems to take a few too many cues from Hell Revealed. Slaughter, slaughter, slaughter...featuring a zillion warped-in Revenants and an Arch-vile or two. Mind you there are a lot of great gameplay moments as well.

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Vordakk said:

One thing I will say about my playthrough thusfar is that while AV really shines in the architecture department, with some of the brightest minds coming together to create landscapes and structures which boggle my mind, the gameplay sometimes suffers. All too often I open a door and am greeted by a room full of pink demons or chaingunners, all right in front of me and facing straight ahead. Boring. You just wait for them to file through the open door and blow them away, while the rest are infighting from shooting each other upon seeing me. At other times the gameplay seems to take a few too many cues from Hell Revealed. Slaughter, slaughter, slaughter...featuring a zillion warped-in Revenants and an Arch-vile or two.

This is pretty much exactly how I remember it unfortunately - rooms or corridors packed with enemies, but with exquisite scenery. The fact that it has a "Post-Mortem" alike certainly doesn't help with this memory.

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DuckReconMajor said:

You guys have convinced me to do a -nomonsters run through.


Make note of how Kim Malde uses light and darkness on MAP20. It's really quite impressive.

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Vordakk said:

Make note of how Kim Malde uses light and darkness on MAP20. It's really quite impressive.


didnt he use an editor without 3d-view? Where he had to save, and load the map up with doom2.exe to see how it turned out? If so....wtf.

I`m not familiar with the old editors, I started out with DB1.

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darkreaver said:

didnt he use an editor without 3d-view? Where he had to save, and load the map up with doom2.exe to see how it turned out? If so....wtf.

I`m not familiar with the old editors, I started out with DB1.


Yeah I started with DB2, so neither am I.

I just finished MAP23, and I am now convinced that Kim Malde is some sort of deity. The way he uses space is so ingenious as to be irritating to a non-godly mapper like myself. I tried to notice all the little touches he put into the map, like the way the door edges are inset and the cool tree silhouetted against the red sky. MAP23 has to be one of the coolest DOOM castle-type levels ever made.

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DEU and others did actually require us to save the map, hope there was no crash whilst the nodes built and then run the game with the PWAD loaded in order to test maps or even examine visuals. No such thing as a 3D mode before DoomBuilder in my experience, and that was after about 10 years of mapping for me!

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Szymanski said:

Everyone loves Revenants, they are the best non Arch-vile monstie

Haha, you mapped for it! I quite liked your MAP24, it was literally an outpost of hell.

darkreaver said:

say what

HR2 looks all dusty and decoloured, due to overusage of Doom 2 tan brick and featureless skies.

Graf Zahl said:

mainly because it didn't slavishly follow the common megawad conventions and remained interesting until the end.

Heh, I find it funny how megawads (not Alien Vendetta) stop using new music by MAP22. Lots of them use the same dreadful D_AMPIE for MAP23 as doom2.wad.

DuckReconMajor said:

That should have been written in Egyptian.

Phobus said:

The fact that it has a "Post-Mortem" alike certainly doesn't help with this memory.

Alien Vendetta's inspiration was nothing next to HR's Post Mortem (which suffers from the vanilla Doom 2 music syndrome I was talking about).

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Phobus said:

DEU and others did actually require us to save the map, hope there was no crash whilst the nodes built and then run the game with the PWAD loaded in order to test maps or even examine visuals. No such thing as a 3D mode before DoomBuilder in my experience, and that was after about 10 years of mapping for me!



Same for me.

You had to be able to visualize your level much more in your own head.

I have grown so accustomed to DB1 and now DB2 that, I can scarcely imagine not having 3D mode anymore. The concept of designing a level using only a 2D interface seems... I am not even sure how we managed to map anything. Ever.

Given the limitations of the building tools available then, AV.wad becomes even more of a remarkable achievement.

Just out of interest, are any of the original Alien Vendetta team still involved in the Doom Community?

Obviously Kristian Kall (Kristus) is still around, and I think Lee Szymanski?

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

I have grown so accustomed to DB1 and now DB2 that, I can scarcely imagine not having 3D mode anymore. The concept of designing a level using only a 2D interface seems... I am not even sure how we managed to map anything. Ever.

Before I had my first Doom editor, I always imagined Doom editing to be like in Doom Builder today (you're a camera which visits the level, raising and lowering detail). I was disappointed when I found out that level editing amounts only to "automap" editing.


Obviously Kristian Kall (Kristus) is still around, and I think Lee Szymanski?

Lee posted in this thread (and never left during my stay here)!

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

The concept of designing a level using only a 2D interface seems... I am not even sure how we managed to map anything. Ever.


Don't use DoomBuilder (played with it, never completed a map), also never used a 3d mode, and I don't plan to. So people still do fine without it. I just see it as a crutch really.

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Back when I used WADED I used to map with a calculator to try and get alignments right :-)

Without 3D mode I remember being surprised how simple architecture in the editor looked more elaborate in game but picking textures took practice to do in time.

It was a lot more work and lead to me mapping more conservatively but it had a bigger gratification value when the vertices, lines and sectors you'd been staring at in the editor came out looking great in the game.

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purist said:

Back when I used WADED I used to map with a calculator to try and get alignments right :-)

Without 3D mode I remember being surprised how simple architecture in the editor looked more elaborate in game but picking textures took practice to do in time.

It was a lot more work and lead to me mapping more conservatively but it had a bigger gratification value when the vertices, lines and sectors you'd been staring at in the editor came out looking great in the game.


Yeah. I used to use pencil and paper sometimes for working out alignments. And it took me a while, for me at least, to get the hang of how upper and lower unpegged would affect alignments too.

Though mostly it didn't matter so much. It was more about getting the 'feel' of the areas right rather than uber detailing.

And speaking of which, Map 21 of AV is an amazingly detailed level for one done purely in 2D. I remember being really impressed by the level of detail the first time I saw it. Of course, now, such detailing is so common that it barely stands out. But for the time, it was pretty impressive.

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I liked the megawad, though in all honesty, I didn't particularly care for the more mazy levels given that I tend to get as much kills as possible. (Map11 and Map20, in particular. Though I really did enjoy the latter's egyptian theme, even after Epic 2 came out)

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gun_psycho said:

I liked the megawad, though in all honesty, I didn't particularly care for the more mazy levels given that I tend to get as much kills as possible. (Map11 and Map20, in particular. Though I really did enjoy the latter's egyptian theme, even after Epic 2 came out)


I agree, the Egyptian themed map was the worst for me.

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Question for all you people who know more about this stuff than me.

Did Martin Aalen Hunsager (The guy who made MAP 11 from Alien Vendetta) ever do anything else? I have only ever seen his name in association with that one single awesome level. He feels to me like the Zorro of Doom mappers. Rides into town, does one amazing map, then rides off into the sunset, leaving everyone asking "Who was that masked mapper?"

I mean seriously, you don't make one single map that amazing, then just vanish, well there must be more stuff of his lying around somewhere.

Use3D said:

also never used a 3d mode, and I don't plan to.


Could you post some links to your maps? Not looking to be critical, I am just interested to see what sort of maps you make.

DuckReconMajor said:

I've only used 3D mode once, but I've only made like 4 maps ever. I'm sure if I took on something big I'd rely on it.


I remember you ASHWALL.wad series. Awesome stuff. And I refuse to believe that you did these maps without 3D mode. ^^

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gun_psycho said:

I liked the megawad, though in all honesty, I didn't particularly care for the more mazy levels given that I tend to get as much kills as possible. (Map11 and Map20, in particular. Though I really did enjoy the latter's egyptian theme, even after Epic 2 came out)

I hear you on MAP20. It's a beautiful level but I've spent hours in there and am barely starting to understand the layout.

Actually MAP11 is a pretty bad offender too. Sometimes it's like if I see green tile one more time I'm going to vomit.

KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

I remember you ASHWALL.wad series. Awesome stuff. And I refuse to believe that you did these maps without 3D mode. ^^

Yeah that was the one. It's hard as hell to get the alignment on those ASHWALL textures right.

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KiiiYiiiKiiiA said:

Did Martin Aalen Hunsager (The guy who made MAP 11 from Alien Vendetta) ever do anything else? I have only ever seen his name in association with that one single awesome level. He feels to me like the Zorro of Doom mappers. Rides into town, does one amazing map, then rides off into the sunset, leaving everyone asking "Who was that masked mapper?"


Maybe he mapped under a differet name or a nickname before the AV project. But regardless, it's amazing that he was able to do all those subterranean caverns and that temple without some sort of 3D mode. People like that can probably visualize layouts extremely well in their heads, and know exactly what it's going to look like when they raise or lower a sector a certain amount of pixels.

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Do not count too much on it though. Being able to visualize your map while drawing and setting sectors is a much more efficient time saver. Sometimes I only use 3D Mode once everything is set.

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Well, I just finished MAP30 of AV, completing another playthrough. I forgot how ridiculous the last few maps get. MAP25-27 are akin to receiving a lubeless anal fisting, with monster counts ranging from 850-1350! MAP28 and MAP29 are a little less ridiculous with monster counts in the 300s, but feature a ton of "you vs. Cyberdemon in a small room" type fights, which grind my gears a bit as well.

Favorite maps off the top of my head are 3,5,8,10,11,20,23.

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I've been looking forward to playing AV every since I saw some screenshots of the Egyptian map, but I'm reluctant to play it now due to the "ultra hard" gameplay the later maps allegedly have (I don't like to play through most of megawad only to get stuck near the end). If I was able to beat all of Scythe except the last 2 maps on UV w/o saving, do you think I could do the same thing with all of AV?

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Processingcontrol said:

I've been looking forward to playing AV every since I saw some screenshots of the Egyptian map, but I'm reluctant to play it now due to the "ultra hard" gameplay the later maps allegedly have (I don't like to play through most of megawad only to get stuck near the end). If I was able to beat all of Scythe except the last 2 maps on UV w/o saving, do you think I could do the same thing with all of AV?

skill 1 is your friend

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