A 2K Gem

[Manc]

Lost in the myriad of news and not-news we get here at dw is an email from Kurt Kesler, letting us know he's released a map he made a year ago for a project no longer active. According to Kurt it's of a "generic flavor" so it should run in your port of choice, including GL engines.

Since the archives are still getting balanced out, he's put it up on his own space for downloading goodness, and we can expect to see this reviewed in an upcoming newstuff. Finally:

I've named it "Still Kickin'", so don't be suprised if theres a sequal. Been a LONG time since I mapped for old doom, and I had fun!

If you like Kurt's work you don't want to miss this one.

[Jon]

cool.

[kristus]

So he finally did it. :/

[myk]

kristus said:
:/

?

[Graf Zahl]

It's already in /newstuff and it's a really nice map, judging from a first quick look.

[Janizdreg]

Interesting... first Lee Killough contributes to the Doom Wiki, now this. I wonder who's the next Doom legend to make a comeback.

[Searcher]

Very cool. I just love his maps. ;)

[Szymanski]

Janizdreg said:

I wonder who's the next Doom legend to make a comeback.

Hopefully Dr Sleep will finish Waters of Lethe.

[Ralphis]

Kurt Kesler is one of my favorite doomers of all time. Hooray!

[Vegeta]

Excelent map. Great gameplay ant athmosphere.

[sargebaldy]

Ugh, I was actually pretty disappointed by this map. The gameplay is just genuinely lousy, and really reminds me of stuff like Deus Vult. Lots of lots of monsters without any real thought or rhythm to it. I don't know about anyone else, but I thought there was way too much ammo and not nearly enough health. On a plus note the design was nice in places, but really only in terms of details and lighting. The design itself didn't flow in any interesting way and is pretty linear, and even the texture scheme doesn't really work for me.

In short it came across as focusing entirely on the design without any thought to gameplay. The monsters and items just seemed to have been tossed around randomly at the end without any thorough testing to see if it even plays OK. It's not a bad map, and I'm glad it was released, but I'm just not very impressed.

[Vegeta]

Well, yeah, after playing it to the end I have to agree, the last parts are a bit tedious. Probably you could make a few modifications before uploading it to the archives. Still a real gem.

[sgtcrispy]

Janizdreg said:

Interesting... first Lee Killough contributes to the Doom Wiki, now this. I wonder who's the next Doom legend to make a comeback.

DR Returns!! oh wait no one cared...
shoot.

Ah good ol Kurt Kesler maps. Sweetness.

[Belial]

Well, it's just a series of boring and uninspired fights. Always enough ammo, always lots of room for circle strafing. Even the indoor fights and the last battle were easy. And when fighting large groups of monsters is easy it usually gets boring really quick. That's what happened here. My first exit was 19 minutes and it wasn't something challenging.

Still, the map is very well designed and has some really nice views. Some better choreographed fights would give this map a 4/5 in my book easily.

[sargebaldy]

Yeah, I think you nailed most of the biggest problems. You have way too much room to maneuver, and way too much ammo. Also I don't think the combinations of what you're fighting at the same time ever gets interesting. It's just tedious to fight a horde of monsters when you have so much cover and ammo, and you can't even really get them to in fight, which would save me the bother. It's the kind of map where you just want to just run by all the monsters and move along. Which you can actually get away with a lot of the time, but then you don't even really get a good look at the map, you're just putting all your effort into avoiding worthless fights.

[Graf Zahl]

So it's too easy for the hardcore Doomers. Good. That will mean that I might like it! :D

[Afterglow]

myk said:

?

Parents just don't understand.

[CapNapalm]

I coudn't get this to work with PrBoom or Eternity :/

Played it with ZDoom and was kinda disappointed. It's not that it was really bad it was just kinda above average.

[Grazza]

CapNapalm said:

I coudn't get this to work with PrBoom or Eternity :/

Um, you need to load both the main wad (kickin01.wad) and the texture wad (ktex.wad). Otherwise, I can't imagine what the problem might have been.

[sargebaldy]

Yeah, I played it in Eternity with no problems..

[CapNapalm]

Ok I think I found my error. I was loading the texture wad before the level wad which seemed to cause problems i.e. "eternity -file wads\ktex1 wads\kickin01 -warp 1" which gave me an "Texture not found" error. Loading the texture as the last file did the trick. Why is it important in which order the wads are loaded? And shouldn't logically the textures be loaded first?

[myk]

CapNapalm said:
Why is it important in which order the wads are loaded?

In this case both wads have TEXTURE1 and PNAMES lumps, and those lumps in the resource wad are evidently missing some information used in the map wad.