Wagi

Artificial difficulty is when a map designs a fight that entirely relies of foreknowledge in order for the player to succeed instead of skill. After the cheap trick is expended and it no longer works, the player simply memorizes the trap and clears it every time without issue because it was never actually challenging in the first place.

Those aren't ripoffs, those are just homages. They are entirely intentional and they weren't exactly trying to hide the similarities.

I've heard this claim so many times before and I have no idea why people keep repeating it because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny at all. There are a ton of modern games with explosions in them and none of them are called Boomer shooters. "Boomer" is an obvious reference to it being old, that's why it's being applied exclusively to oldschool-style games. The term "Boomer Shooter" started showing up around the same time that "OK, Boomer" started being a thing. It stems from Zoomers calling anybody or anything that is older than they are "Boomer".

There's nothing stopping somebody, whether they are working with a hardware renderer or a software, from creating an additional buffer that marks whether or not a pixel belongs to the floor, and excluding those from Z buffer checks when drawing sprites.

The only way the revenant missiles could go in the hole at all would be if you were killed and knocked into the hole with the John Romero head. Revenant missiles do not do splash damage so they would have to hit it directly. The problem is the boss brain is extremely short, so they would have to somehow fly through the hole without descending enough to hit the bottom (and if you're dead on the ground next to Romero, they would probably just descend enough to hit that and explode there). Assuming it could even get past that narrow chokepoint, it would then have to quickly descend all the way down to Romero's height level over an extremely short distance that I don't think they're capable of. None of this is possible anyway because homing missiles will stop homing as soon as you die. Even if they could, they are designed fly 40 units above your "feet", but the boss brain is only 16 units tall.

The problem is for virtually every bug you can fix, there is some map that depends on that bug in order to function properly. There could be some map, for example, that might rely on this behavior for a secret ("Kill these Arachnotrons fast enough for this BFG and Megasphere to be reachable") and then it's suddenly up to the player to know ahead of time to turn on a compatibility flag before playing the level. You have to be careful what you do and don't fix.

Correct. Thankfully the math behind making the bullet puffs appear in the correct location is simple. The vanilla behavior is for them to spawn below the floor and then instantly snap up to the floor level. The math is just finding the ratio between (source.z - puff.z) and (floorz - puff.z) and pulling the puff back toward the source by that much

It also appears in Doom, a printf format string "fuck %d". It appears to be leftover debugging code for the automap. They have code that tests for a condition where an automap line's coordinates escape the boundaries of the screen, and it prints "fuck 0", "fuck 1", "fuck 2", etc. for each time that condition occurs. It obviously doesn't ever seem to happen in practice, of course.

I don't know if it's still the case, but older versions of Doombuilder required you to have at least two sectors before it would even run the nodebuilder, and probably for this reason. My best theory here is that maybe it doesn't know what to do with with the REJECT map calculations here, as it's basically acting as if there is no line of sight between any two objects, preventing enemies from seeing you and preventing any splash damage from working.

You can tell who here uses Vanilla ports versus who uses GZDoom based on who thinks the chainsaw is useful. If you kill a pinky with an SSG blast, you are wasting only 25% of your damage output, and that's assuming you hit absolutely nothing else behind it.

MAP12 of Hell Revealed 2. Basically there are a couple of points in the map where a giant, coverless empty room opens up full of tons of monsters, including Arch Viles, and you have no choice but to wait for them to come and revive basically everything that you killed earlier. And this happens TWICE. And the act of killing everything is a slog, because you're basically trapped inside of a building where you can just BARELY auto-aim at the monsters wandering around through the window, forcing you to resort to splash damage to kill anything because the rockets don't actually go up far enough.

Hell Revealed 2 had some real bangers, especially MAP15, MAP23, MAP24.and MAP29. 2002ado had some classics too. E1M8, E3M1, E3M7 and E3M8 we're all great.

Even with all the void glides involved, that MAP29 rocket jump might very well be the most insane part of the TAS.

Counterpoint: Heretic's ultra colorful palette is the reason its appearance stands out among all of the other bog-standard fantasy games that all use the same drab gray/brown colors everywhere. Look at E2M4, E3M2 or E5M7... You just don't see places that look like that in other fantasy games.

I'm going to chime in here and say one aspect where Heretic really outshines Doom is the bosses. The bosses in Doom wander around and fire projectiles at you that you just circle strafe to dodge (with the exception of the JOKE BOSS at the end of Episode 3). In Heretic, the bosses have different attacks. The iron liches can shoot tornadoes that actually follow around and displace you. The maulotaurs can charge at you, giving them mobility, and they can lock you into certain areas with their instakill flame snake, and they have a wide "sweeping" flame attack as well. D'Sparil obviously teleports and spawns disciples.