Grain of Salt

FWIW, the Demonstar games are essentially an offbrand version of the Raiden games* (vaguely similar to Jazz Jackrbabit 1 and Sonic), except with much less evil gameplay (in Raiden, as usual for arcade shmups, you have 1 hp and 3 lives for the entire game, and the opposition you face basically requires careful study if you want to have a chance of beating it without numerous continues). So if you like demonstar you have a bunch more games to check out that you might like (particularly there's an old windows port of Raiden 2 which has selectable difficulty and options for more lives iirc, so it ends up being very close to a demonstar game. but with better art. although it has a weird stretched aspect ratio which is pretty distracting if you've seen the correct way the game looks. you could also just play raidens 1, 2 and DX on mame) * "What are the actual similarities?" well I'm glad you asked. Here's a list of the gameplay elements both Raiden and Demonstar have: Red and blue ships for player 1 and player 2, which look veeeery similar. Weapon powerup item that shifts between 3 colors and spiral around the screen. One color is a wide spray of yellow projectiles, another is a fast projectile that fires straight up, like a laser. Missile powerup that shifts between 2 colors, one of which is aimed missile and the other fires straight up but theoretically does more damage. Missiles fire at the same time to your main attack and are like a parallel weapon system. Bomb powerup that shifts between 2 colors, one of which is a scatter bomb that explodes around you and the other is a projectile that fires straight up and then explodes a little way from your ship, taking longer to go off but theoretically doing more damage (in all raiden and demonstar games this bomb is pretty useless, heh) You take off from a floating aircraft runway thing at the start of stage 1 If you look at the HUDs they even have the same information in the same place for some reason (in fairness it's common to have these things in roughly those places in arcade shmups I guess) To answer the question, I do like the demonstar games though. As others have said, they're that same chilled out PC shmup style as Raptor. I think Raptor has better art and music, but Demonstar possibly has slightly less nothingy gameplay. SM1 and SM2 also greatly improve on Raptor and demonstar 1 in that they made each stage visually unique.

Some of the art is quite nice. A lot of the ideas are cool. The level design seems alright. It's just the completely non-functional engine and lack of polish that make it unplayable. It's like playing Hover for windows 95, but with new sprites. When you play hexen you can tell what's happening.

I had this old idea of a trap where a conveyor belt outside the map gives the player every weapon in succession, so they're forced swapping weapons for about 20 seconds or something like that.

This one definitely rings a bell

Yeah, I was gonna say Korendian, even though he doesn't play doom much anymore, just quake. Which is alright since it turned out his quake videos are lots of fun tbh. Have some links, in case anyone doesn't know about Koren's alternate channel https://www.youtube.com/@korendian/videos https://www.youtube.com/@KorendianB/videos My favorite Koren videos are probably this playthrough of Warpspasm ("the Sunder of quake", allegedly) on a hidden, mostly-untested difficulty mode:

The weird ramifications of E4 retconning that rabbit to being "your pet rabbit daisy": You have a pet rabbit on Earth despite living longterm on Phobos. The demons somehow found out this rabbit is your rabbit. The demons located your rabbit. The demons specifically killed your rabbit and placed its corpse near where the exit from E3M8 would spit you out, just to be mean. The demons knew you would beat the spider mastermind and their main concern was how to mess with you afterwards.

Almost no one balances for nightmare, because making sure it's possible on nightmare would usually result in making it too easy on UV. Nightmare isn't just harder, it's *inconsistently* harder (some parts are about the same, some parts are now impossible), and it involves gameplay dynamics that never come up in the other skill levels (infinitely respawning monsters, much faster monster reactions, some monsters fire so frequently they don't move far from their starting point). Finally, some people do play on nightmare, but it's a bit different to UV because you can never be sure what you're trying is going to be possible. It's kinda like spelunking into an unknown cave. Why am I writing a proper reply to this, I came here to make a bad joke....

My personal favorites in no particular order: Gusta Erik Alm Darkwave Ribbiks (hi ribbiks) Didy Timeofdeath Danne Memfis Honorable mentions: Insane Gazebo Mechadon Eternal Death-Destiny Benjogami Tourniquet Bonus quake mappers: Mazu ijed Riktoi Smilecythe Newhouse Fairweather Quasiotter SR

I used the red stone of Aja to become a duck who can absorb water, and now I'm pretty much invincible

absorbs the water and becomes stronger

Barons are great, idk why anyone dislikes them. Sure they're not fun if a mapper tries to get you to kill multiple barons with a single shotgun, but in that context neither are cyberdemons, archviles... pretty much anything. Do you also think cyberdemons aren't fun??? Do you think that????? What's so bad about infighting and close quarters pressure..... :(

"It's cats, bitch" - Britney Spears, maybe.

Riktoi what are you doing here :0

I'm sorry...

https://www.rbkz.net/doom/wormwood5.zip

Ribbisk has edited a few minor things and uploaded an updated version of the wad. Here's a summary of changes: Updated version same link as before: https://www.rbkz.net/doom/wormwood5.zip. Unless we find a gamebreaking bug, this is the final version. The update does desync existing demos of 03 and probably desyncs 01 and 02 too despite how minor the changes were. So if anyone wants to watch Maribo's FDAs of the previous version, or any other demos that might've been recorded before now, here is that version: wormwood5_old.wad.zip

Yeah, this is complete revisionism. The idea that episode 1 is universally liked more than the others, to the point that the others are considered "filler" or whatever, is a very recent invention... caused mostly by the tendency of online doom community people to just mimic each others opinions and rehash the same memes ad infinitum (the chasm is bad, ooh sandy makes traps, romero is epic or something, rip and tear, fireblu is funny, zzzzzzzzzz)

I left it ambiguous what eras were covered by that statement, as a merciful gesture. I thought that would be obvious. Oh yeah, Treasure Chest is pretty good. IIRC even the minor levels are quite charming.

All vanilla hexen: Shadows of Chronos (excellent hexen hub, very close to the vanilla style but a bit more user friendly with regards to puzzles and stuff, and fun to play. About as close as you can get to going back in time and playing hexen for the first time in 1997.) Riverwood (single level, very good. Wish it was longer.) Centromere (can't remember if I ever finished this. It's alright.) Newhub4 (If I remember correctly, Newhub is the one with the confusing canyon start map and Centromere is the one with the really square start map...) The Kristus heretic and hexen wads (mentioned by pretty much everyone above me I assume) are also pretty good despite requiring zeedoom. Last time I checked all other heretic and hexen wads seemed to be tasteless gzdoom shit with a dozen recolored monsters and you can play as megaman if you want.

I'd love to see more Jonas Feragen maps some day, I think his HR2 maps are overwhelmingly the most interesting and unique. Maybe a little episode of whatever the HR2 episode 1 style might've evolved into in his imagination over the years.

At least one of the final HR2 maps (sewer slaughter) was also kicking around in the very old PL2 betas, which leads me to suspect its creator (Gemini) submitted it to PL2 and Sam Woodman just moved it to HR2 at some point. IMO it looks and plays much more like a tribute to Plutonia MAP28 than a HR1 or HR2 map. That, combined with the maps that had already been released as standalones (28 obviously, but also 08 and 26 iirc) makes for a pretty uneven mix.

HR is good!!!! Funnily enough, iirc in the first ever demo pack for HR2, in one of the text files the runner said something like "this is nothing like HR anyway, HR didn't have blocks of homogeneous monsters" :3 That said, I like both HR1 and HR2. I think they're both mixed bags, but they both have many fun maps and instances of clear innovation. They have completely different styles, and I guess a lot of people that like one are likely to dislike the other (you're not really going to get much power metal 2000s proto-slaughter in HR1, and similarly you're not going to get many plutonia-but-harder quasi-set-pieces in HR2). Both of them often have a kind of "have prior knowledge or die" approach that was common in older games (imo) but isn't very popular these days. I do think that HR2 shouldn't really have been called HR2, and, like you say, only Donner and Niv could make a real sequel. I think this custom we have in the doom community of making "sequels" to things we weren't involved with is tiresome. At best it's mislabeling wads that should be seen on their own merits (HR2, Plutonia 2) and at worst it's just grabbing a popular name to artificially generate interest. If you're making a tribute wad just call it Hell Reviled or Protonia or something. Back To Salad Eggs. Eeveeternity. Tsundere. Anyway here's a list of HR1 and 2 maps I like.

TOD In your episode 200 you mention how you'd like to convert midis to audio files. You can do this with reaper... but only on OSX, because OSX lets you loads its equivalent of the GM wavetable as a VST. You could do something similar on windows (including batch rendering multiple clips, which is so useful) but you'd have to use some weird free soundfont player VST, which I'm 99% wouldn't be an acceptable solution to you :/ You can also export midi as audio with FL studio, but you'd have to do the midis one at a time, and tbh the result is very slightly different to GM playback. And FL isn't free. Congrats on getting to 200. I'm hoping to catch up (a bit) during your hiatus.

:D Much better than the original (maybe a low bar, but still). I love it. Reminds me a bit of one of the claus1024 wads, what with the nice detailing and floating-in-sky setting.