Welcome to another installment of the fantastic world of /newstuff! In this week of Doomy-flavoured goodness we have a total of eleven new zips to discover, excluding the typical /oldstuff (har har, geddit) submissions and ports that have already been uploaded three times before. We have a mixed bag of Single Player, Deathmatch, Capture the Flag and even Last Man Standing. Oh deary!
(EDIT 08/02/05) I apologise for the lateness, but I had uhh, personal reasons. Let's just say I'm not in a particularly happy mood right now.
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CDoom - Carlos Guariglia
??? - ??? - 42kb
Uh... this WAD does not appear to be functional at all.
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E1M3: Toxin refinery - Dutch Devil
ZDoom - SP - 465kb -
The first functional WAD to be reviewed this week is a remake of E1M3 that seems to fit perfectly into KDiZD; too much attention given to detail, not enough to gameplay. When I was playing through this map, the thought that was going through my mind was that the intention of this remake was to show off how much better one of the original maps will look like if it was remade using ZDoom's features. The amount of health is very limited at the start, which can be very frustrating for lower-skilled players (and even myself, as I died before I was able to get past the first door) into not wanting to play this map at all. Fortunately it becomes trivial when you go past the second door, but the high difficulty level at the start and the excessive "oh look at me, I can make pretty walls" really brings this WAD down a fair bit.
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Kaiser's Strife Script Compiler - Kaiser
Strife/ZDoom - N/A - 39kb
This program allows you to create custom conversation scripts that are frequently used throughout Strife. Pretty frickin useful for creating custom Strife levels or even ZDoom wads that are geared towards dialouges and stories, plus it includes sample scripts as well!
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Kaotic - Jacob H. Orloff
"ZDoom" - SP - 28kb -
This WAD is really bad overall. The texture theme varies between each room, and the gameplay is particularly dull. Avoid
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Morbid Scream - Walter "Daimon" Confalonieri
Doom.exe - DM - 514kb -
Now, I'm known to be a lenient man towards deathmatch levels, but this map is not a worthy level to deathmatch on against your friends. The layout is pathetic, there's way too many places to hide/camp, and there's some really, really weird use of ceiling heights (see second screenshot). While this map is suited for at least six people, I wouldn't ask five other people to play against me in this map.
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Motor Rail: EFTPB - I'm me
Boom compatible - SP - 398kb -
Whoever the real identity of "I'm me" is, I'd tell him to learn how to make maps that don't suck. There's an overabundance of cells, and I did not encounter any other types of ammo when I played this for a grand total of five minutes, before I came to the conclusion that this map is a masterpiece of crap.
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Pistol Whip - Edward Dassmesser
ZDoom - SP - 75kb -
Pistol Whip is an... unusual level to say the least. The use of textures are literally eye-gouging, but the only thing to save this WAD from belonging in the shit pile is the fact that the only weapons you can use in the entire level is your pistol and fists. Now, if you're a Tyson freak you'd be screaming in joy and glee, but us normal Doom nerds would find this map incredibly boring and dull to play.
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Sanity Bleeds "Demo" - Vile1011
ZDoom - SP - 2.8mb -
It's a shame that this planned megawad was cancelled, as it had the potential to be a high-quality ZDoom that is original (take note KDiZD authors) and sure as hell interesting to play.
Moving on, this two-level "demo" contains an intro map and the first gameplay-oriented map. The intro map is confusing if you don't bother reading the text file, as it took me five minutes to realise that you had to press the 'Use' button in order to get past the first line of text. Once you get past that, you progress through a nice blend of interactive and cutscene-oriented dialogue, and then you move onto the first real map. Although the map is unfinished and plagued with unaligned textures, the overall detail is very nice and the gameplay is somewhat challenging, as there is a limited amount of ammo and health laying around. The monsters are not particularly tough, but you do encounter a fair amount of them in each area. If the unaligned textures were fixed, this would be an awesome map to play, but there will be a large amount of nitpickers who will endlessly complain about them.
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Skulltag Community LMS Project Version 2 - Various
Skulltag - DM/LMS - 3mb -
The biggest (and currently most successful) project to come out of the Skulltag community is this incredibly fine masterpiece. Included in this WAD are fourteen levels created by various authors (which uses the non-standard map title format of STLMS** instead of MAP**) which all have beautiful detail and amazing gameplay to boot. The layouts are flawless, with great weapon, health and powerup placement, connectivity between areas and decent-sized areas to battle your weak foes in. The themes between each map are not consistent, and have a broad range going from tech, base, hell, forest, even a sea oilrig-type level! The music replacements for each map are also appropriate, as they help enhance the fun atmosphere that this WAD radiates with. All levels play perfectly fine with at least eight players (as it was discovered in last week's Friday Night Fragfest), and most can even handle twenty players without anyone suffering from claustrophobia. If there is one single flaw that I have to point out in STLMSv2, it's that STLMS03 does not contain a Player 1 start, which means it's not viewable in Single Player. Definitely the WAD of the week.
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Tagzonez - Jacek 'Illdo' Dobrzyniecki
Skulltag - DM - 11kb -
Now, I'm aware that the author of this map does not natively speak English, but for the love of god, do not use ghetto writing for titles ever again. It is horribly wrong and it makes this WAD bad for the following reasons:
1) It portrays the author as a retarded 13-year old male who has just reached puberty
2) It makes the map sound like something that's 'hip' and 'trendy', and also horribly gay
3) It's a disgrace to the English language
Please keep these points in mind when you make another map Jacek, as it's not hard to spell words like 'zones', 'steps' and 'maps' and anything else that ends with the letter 's' properly.
As for the level itself, it sucks.
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Turrents CTF - Jules "julz_D" Spindler
ZDaemon - CTF - 119kb -
Typos aside, this Capture the Flag map is unique for the fact that it has turrets embedded in both bases, which can be used to effectively defend your base from incoming intruders. However, I found that the inside of the bases themselves were very dull and extremely symmetrical. If you take away the turrets in this map, then this level literally becomes an uninteresting CTF map. The detail is ok, but nothing too spectacular, or horribly bad either.
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