D! Zone - A longtime mystery

I used to own D!Zone 2 by wizardworks, it has a handful of gems among the piles and piles of crappy wads but one thing that has always puzzled me is the box art. I never saw anything that looked remotely like it in there. what's up with that

Does it have anything to do with the DEH patches that come with it? I used to run it back on DOS on my old comp and couldn't get a lot of those to work I've always wonderend about that gray and blue rifle that looks like it shoots a ray of light, it looks kinda cool, only too much like a hose or vacuum. And those weird tall creatures.

Here's what I'm talking about.

http://i7.ebayimg.com/04/i/04/8e/16/21_1_b.JPG
http://doddsystems.com/images/DZONE2.jpg

hope someone can answer this for me.

On the rear shot below the screenshots, there is printed "Simulated D!Zone 2 screens".

I saw that, but those sprites have to exist somewhere, they didn't go to the trouble of drawing up things that don't exist in playable form when things that are are readily available.

They probably made a cheap 3D render. I notice the muzzle flash on the gun in the screenshots has a degree of translucency - something impossible for game engines at the time.

WildWeasel said:

They probably made a cheap 3D render. I notice the muzzle flash on the gun in the screenshots has a degree of translucency - something impossible for game engines at the time.

yeah the whole thing looks post-doom, maybe thats their cheap way of boosting sales.

That has got to be one of the fucking stupidest things I've ever seen.

Actually the "Simulated shots" are put there because a license prevents them to use ANY Doom media/gfx for promotion. This is very common for shovelware.

The aftershock toolbox cd has a very silly gun painted over a screenshot rofl, i'll scan that someday

You're right; books about DOOM never use the DOOM logo, for example. Although screenshots are sometimes used. But I guess books generally had a better standing than shovelware CDs, so they could directly contact id for permission.

I recall Wizard Works having kind of a name at the time as they did strategy guides and other Zone addons like H!Zone and W!Zone.

They basically took a popular games and collected a slew of levels for them, and some utilities, addons, slapped it on a CD and turned it for some cool cash. Wish I had thought of it :P

yeah, I had d!zone. never saw anything like what was on the packaging like you said. at the time it was a pretty good front end for playing the good old vanilla stuff. it had some decent wads packed in there. most of them were for doom, not doom2, but the program let you convert them to doom2 anyway. you could throw what ever single level wad I wanted in any order replacing all of doom2's maps. it also had a randomization feature in which you could rearrange item and enemy placement, but that was problematic at time so I rarely used it. it also had a cd player utility so you could play your own music while playing. I used that sometimes to pretty good effect.

xanthier is right. wizard works did release frontends for other modifiable games, like quake, heretic/hexen, and warcraft. I don't think they did very well though.

there was a similar thing with Wolfenstein 3D from what i know, i remember seeing boxes of that game with, at the back, supposed screenshots which looked quite off from the actual game.

Could this longtime mystery be solved simply by reading the box?

Foofoo said:

there was a similar thing with Wolfenstein 3D from what i know, i remember seeing boxes of that game with, at the back, supposed screenshots which looked quite off from the actual game.

I have a copy of Spear of Destiny (the re-released bargain bin jewelcased version). The screenshots on the back look radically different from those of the actual game (because those are from the mission packs released by FormGen).

mission packs released by FormGen?? :o what art thou talking about?

Foofoo said:

mission packs released by FormGen?? :o what art thou talking about?

Some company (FormGen I guess) released two extra episodes for Spear of Destiny.

Haha! Nice one, that brings it all flooding back.

I remember when I first saw D!Zone in a shop over here.

It was still at the stage after I'd got hooked on Doom (1994) and before we had a PC of our own, so basically I was stuck. You cannot imagine how badly I wanted to play it back then.

Seeing D!Zone's box only made that worse. I'm wondering if there was a slightly different box for UK/Europe or something because I have this memory of a red featureless imp on a wall, throwing an OpenGL-esque fireball. Of course then I was jaw-dropped, but now I know the reality was somewhat different. A very cynical piece of advertising, borderline legal too I think.

Still, I'd have bitten your hand of for 150 levels of any quality then. Now the only point of getting a copy is for my Doom museum (added Hank Leukart's Hackers Guide to Doom recently :D )

I'd like to pull out some of the more decent wads for my collection IIRC there were some really fun ones, where I got a lot of inspiration, the randomization feature was troublesome though cause random sectors became dark or blinking or nukage, and man the whole level often turned into a deathtrap with completely random enemies and lots of them, it was like some patchwork aberration. I remember one particular time where the floor of a long elevator had turned to poison, I nearly died by the time I reached the bottom, ugh.

Pardon me for being a n00b, but what is shovelware?

You download a bunch of related stuff from the internet (like wads) package it into a transferrable format (floppies or a CD, usually) and sell it in stores or through mail. It made more sense back when the Internet was less widespread and downloading was slower.

Ahhhh. Gotcha. Thanks!...

...Ahhhhhh, the days when 56k was considered cheetah-like...Such nostalgia...

Wow. I can remember those days.

do we have frontends nowadays for plugging all your favorite wads into slots to play consecutively?

Xanthier said:

Wow. I can remember those days.

do we have frontends nowadays for plugging all your favorite wads into slots to play consecutively?

Sort of the DooM equivalent of a WinAmp playlist? D:

KwadDamyj said:

Ahhhh. Gotcha. Thanks!...

...Ahhhhhh, the days when 56k was considered cheetah-like...Such nostalgia...

heh, remeber trying to dm a friend of mine. I only had 14.4 and he had 56k. it was hilarious. I got stuck in a corner while he ran circles around me. lol.

I have the wads that came on the cd I got saved on my comp, BTW.

I played D!Zone again last night, and I found Wow.wad....hilarious, I started to play it only to find it unplayable, the shite that is Wow!.wad toxic stuff.

Is this wow.wad the same wow.wad with the Cyb trapped in the HOM pit in the otherwise blank-as-a-baby's-ass room?

it must have been cause he said

"the room with the cyber has a hom in it that I'm just too lazy to fix at this point"

maybe that was after he got flaque for calling it an illusio-pit.

Actually he called it "a illusio-pit".

There are several wads called wow or similar names. They include the following:
wow is of course the one with the "illusio-pit".
wow! is a porn wad.
!wow! is a map by Jon Landis that was quite well-known in its day - quite large and challenging.

how confusing, well it's called different things in different places.

a illusio-pit? even better, ha!

didn't you used to have the title "Trapped in a illusio-pit" Grazza?

I've been playing some of those wads over the past couple of days and wow, I can't believe I actually liked some of those. then again, those were all I had in the way of wads back then.

I was thinking the same thing, and whats with all these guys that use bright lighting everywhere and default textures like ashwall and gray, I know they know lighting casue they do pillar shadows and things they just make the levels too bright and get lazy with textures. and the levels with tons of baddies are pretty ridiculous.