Woolie Wool

I have never seen any such program, and a 16-bit .com executable wouldn't run under modern Windows anyway.

I've been playing through Eviternity 2, loved Heartland and Tetanus, and recently reviewed Man on the Moon, all modern wads, so I don't know what you're talking about. Also I would expect a commercial release to play it safer than a community pwad, kind of for the same reason a radio rock band plays things safer than a technical death metal band. Subjecting non-Doomer normies to "The Coiled City" seems a bit of a stretch to say the least. But your presumptuous condescension is duly noted.

I played through most of the first episode on UV when it came out and I dialed it back to HMP for a repeat playthrough. I don't think the problem was that UV was too hard per se, but that I hate "The Coiled City" and I hate it no less when it's watered down. It's not just that it's hard (it is, but I've played a lot harder), it's that basically everything about it touches one of my pet peeves--the Vassagos and Shock Troopers you can't kill for most of the map but who can certainly kill you, and quickly, the forcing you to use the Incinerator but making all the encounters incredibly unfavorable to the Incinerator, the "The Chasm" style platforming while under attack from Vassagos and Shock Troopers, trying to puzzle your way through a cryptic layout with extremely abstract design and some staircase maze that is mostly unmarked on the automap and is laid out like manual transmissions fucking--and except while you're in the staircase maze, the aforementioned snipers are attacking you the whole time, while a loud and very demonstrative midi is trying to grab your attention for the whole level, the harsh contrasts in lighting and texturing leading to visual overstimulation, and more. Absolutely infuriating level and while I could accept it in a niche PWAD as something eccentric that I don't "get", it seems very strange to have such an aggressively unapproachable and obnoxious level in a commercial release, especially in the main sequence of levels.

Is there any way or any possibility that a way might be added to customize the appearance of the HUD on a per-user or per-wad basis? I would very much like to make the HUD look closer in its color choices and appearance to MBF 2.03.

I return with a review for Yugiboy85's space-themed slaughter-lite epic "Man on the Moon" Man on the Moon (MOTM_21.wad) Author: @Yugiboy85 Release date: May 27, 2021 (original version November 11, 2018) IWAD: Doom II Format: Modern MBF-compatible (played in Woof! 14.5) Completion time: 40 to 80 minutes Layout: 4 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 5 | HMP: 4 | Overall: 5/5 Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/m-o/motm “Man on the Moon” entirely passed me by on the release of both the original and rerelease versions, I ended up becoming aware of it and downloading while trawling for the download link to another wad I was looking for (Avactor, which I will also review...eventually). I still hadn’t planned to play it immediately until I wanted to take a break from Avactor’s monumentally bloated magnum opus “Overflooded with Ideas”, browsed through Dean of Doom’s Sawed off Wads, and in a sort of synchronicity he reviewed this and knew I had to play it right then and there. “Man on the Moon” is a very large silver space map in the long and venerable tradition of the Vrack series, but also calling to mind Huy Pham’s “Stargate” from Deus Vult II and the final episode of Skillsaw’s Valiant. While not really nonlinear (as the various paths for the keys are linear sequences, as is the final battle), the map lets you approach the key paths (with these sections of the map clearly color-coded in the usual Vrack-esque fashion) in any order you like. I would recommend going for the red key last, as it is by far the most harrowing and will drain you almost dry of the ammo you stockpile on the other two paths, especially a vicious sequence where you are pinned between a cyberdemon and a cavalcade of revenants and pinkies, which is one of the few big fights where infighting helped me very little as I blew my last cells carving a path through the throng of smaller foes to get away from the moocow, leading to a long and bruising close-quarters rocket duel that was probably the most difficult battle of the wad and punched my ticket at least ten times. Perhaps it would have done so fewer times if I hadn’t quicksaved here... Speaking of punching tickets, “Man on the Moon” gave me a nice stiff challenge on Hurt Me Plenty, but never crossed the line into feeling cheap or sadistic. The combat is heavily influenced by Skillsaw’s famous slaughter-lite gameplay, and much like Skillsaw’s work most of these fights can be circled around indefinitely to provoke massive infighting that will often do much of the heavy lifting for you while you focus on surgical hitscanner removal and making sure you are never blocked in your loops by anything, ever (the aforementioned cyberdemon fight being the major exception). One difference from Skillsaw’s oeuvre is a heavier dependence on hitscanners; there are hundreds upon hundreds of them in this map, and the humble shotgun guy might be the most vexing enemy in this wad, lurking everywhere in almost every fight to spoil your movement and inflict surprise damage if not proactively hunted down and exterminated quickly enough. There are eleven secrets, many of them quite obscure; I found five, including one (not even sure which) that opened up the “BFG shrine” (you’ll know it when you see it), leading to an entire extra section of the map with its own green key and a madcap two-stage burly brawl with almost the whole bestiary before you are allowed to lay hands on the BFG. While the BFG can only really be used for the final fight, it comes in immensely handy at carving through the enormous tide of revenants that pour in during the second stage—conquering that encounter with only rockets and plasma would be a tall order indeed. The hectic pace of combat really doesn’t lend itself to secret hunting; poring over rooms you’ve already cleared feels, in the context of “Man on the Moon”, like dead air, time not spent doing what the map clearly wants you to do, which is to rush headlong into the next encounter and continue the thrill ride. Go on, press the switch. What’s the worst that could happen? “Man on the Moon” plays the Vrack and Valiant hits visually, and doesn’t try to do anything radical with the now very familiar space theme, but it is a very well-crafted example of the form, clean and tasteful without being austere, with impeccable texture alignment and attention to the cut lines and shapes of textures so they’re not “wallpapered” over ill-fitting geometry. Circular elements and sweeping curves are used frequently and all look great, never lopsided or inappropriately scaled. I will have to dock a point from its layout score, however, as despite the map’s imposing size, it has no defining setpieces that give a shape and sense of place to the map as a whole, and the various areas (central hub, three key paths, BFG detour, and final sequence) all function independently of one another. The micro layout of individual encounters is uniformly excellent, but the wad falls into (quite literal) pieces when considered at the scale of the entire map. But atmosphere and wonder aren’t the point of this map, action is, and “Man on the Moon” has all the blood-soaked, buckshot-slinging, rocket-dodging thrills to turn your mouse hand into a rubbery, quivering wreck by the time the Dehacked boss monster (which could have really used an MBF21 glow-up) falls over and the “Final Countdown” inspired exit arena goes quiet. If you haven’t played this yet, what are you waiting for? Those fifteen hundred demons won’t kill themselves.

I really enjoyed this one for combining classic style encounters with a really unique aesthetic that calls to mind both Western films and Roger Ritenour's Earth. The crashing waves from Earth are still a sight to behold after all these years, I spent a good minute or so of the finale map just looking out to sea. The bonus map seemed like a step down in difficulty from the ones before, mostly because of how there's no issue with ammo famine like there is in the earlier maps.

But why remove the old in-game interface for this? This is absolutely something I want to have access to in-game, along with message colors.

Just tried out 14.5.0--really cool to see hardware midi working on Linux! I am confused a bit by the new menu system--where would I go to configure my automap colors? I accidentally selected one of the presets and I have no idea how to change it back to my custom colors.

A shame that's a microcomputer and not much different from any other workstation. I would have thought some of the '80s big iron machines would have had graphics serving X or similar to graphical terminals.

Some of the 32-bit XAX minis from the '80s seem incredibly powerful for their time--has anyone managed to run Doom on them? I looked it up on YouTube and saw someone running Doom on OpenVMS, but on a modern PC, not a VAX. Any information related to the running of Doom on vintage big iron would be appreciated.

"In The Womb" from Sunlust broke me to the point where I started cheating at points, and "Inverti in Darkness" was where I was like "fuck this, I'm out".

The current upload of novert of idgames is from 2003, but the description makes it clear that the utility is much older than that and was distributed in deathmatch communities long before being uploaded to the archive. Does anyone know about the origins of this utility?

I managed to fix the runtime environment problem.

That installer crashes too. I suspect it may be expecting SSE2 and thus would require a Pentium 4 or Athlon64.

It doesn't.