ETTiNGRiNDER

The dash in the D-30 makes me a bit uncomfortable, it looks a bit too much like a Roman numeral but IIII would properly be IV in that case. Maybe the outer corners should use the right-angle symbols instead of the middle line ones?

I was just reminded that Freaks! exists, and while I'm pretty sure I've mentioned it on these forums before, it doesn't appear to have been in this thread, so have it again. Weird proto-FPS that's very akin to Catacomb Abyss/Armageddon/Apocalypse in the vibe it has, but in VGA, you have a gun instead of fireballs (excuse me, Magick Missiles), and the engine has a weird quirk where, although you have free movement instead of being tile-locked like in a Dungeon Master style game, you can only rotate at 90-degree angles. I suspect the devs just couldn't figure out how to program the renderer to handle arbitrary player angles, threw their hands up and said "good enough". Would I call it a good game? Probably not, even the Catacomb A* games might be better and those are primitive and rough in and of themselves, but I would say it's kind of interesting and if Catacomb turns you on it might be something of a something-similar fix for you. It's also free now. https://triptico.com/software/freaks.html

Have you ever actually tried to play through the entire base game, let alone any PWADs, on Nightmare? I feel like if you had, you wouldn't be asking this.

Was that comparison done with or without taking the VGA mode vertical stretching into account though? I think one of the problems some of the model packs have had is they make the creatures too squat due to modeling them after sprite rips viewed at a square pixel aspect ratio when the original game resolution had somewhat tall pixels.

I'm reminded of the bit in one interview where Michael Raymond-Judy talked about how he didn't author every map but he did touch and finalize every map; they did tennis-style mapping on Heretic (or at least on the Shadow of the Serpent Riders expansion), sending the maps back and forth between authors to do edits and corrections, and that sure sometimes it bruised your ego to have someone go "this kinda sucks, what if we put this here instead" but it resulted in better maps. This being the "unpopular Doom opinions" thread, I'll let that lead into a two-for-one: - Heretic's level design is better than Doom's. - That's in part because they followed consistent rules about how particular textures and elements were meant to be used, so if you saw a particular type of door or liquid you didn't have to puzzle over how it was supposed to work. All the arguments on which Doom flats should hurt and how much are moot for Heretic, for instance, because the rules of damage floors are all there in a perusal of the IWAD, with very few deviations (and the phoenix in E4M7 is the only curveball that's clearly deliberate, the few other inconsistencies can be fairly readily chalked up as mapping errors). Unfortunately it's eroded somewhat by third-party mappers, then and now, tending to gleefully disregard all of it, if they took the time to notice in the first place.

Corvus has entered the chat

I am pretty sure similar concerns of rippers vs. chunky hitbox is why Raven Software gave the Iron Liches a resistance to the tomed Dragon Claw in Heretic.

I believe Zrrion the Insect did the arch-with-books initially. I'd have to double check if the grey brick version of it was one of my variants or from his initial set.

Hiren's Boot CD/USB is my usual go-to for getting into an unbootable PC to fix/retrieve stuff, but I'm by no means an expert. In my limited experience sometimes just the boot sector is damaged, not even necessarily by hardware failure, but definitely don't run the system more than you need to until you've managed to retrieve what's retrievable, copying any visible files to an external storage should be priority #1, then you can see about doing other checkup/fix on the system itself if you want to.

There are a lot of things in ports that I would probably categorize as "things that piss me off but I can deal with / work around them given sufficient incentive" so the main thing that would make me not even consider using a port is there not being any worthwhile mods that obligate it. (You could possibly slot easier-to-set-up multiplayer in there somewhere on the rare instances when I care about multiplayer, most of the time I don't.)

Yeah, some of the MEDIVLTX / Baker's Legacy recolors were rather... not good. It looks like @Not Jabba has been putting the earlier-posted palette research to good use in getting better results.

Locust Swarms remind me of spells that were in the old Raven games Black Crypt and Shadowcaster so I lean a bit towards that, but they all sound pretty cool.

E6M1 is a "my office" level of the Raven building. It could be meant for deathmatch, or it could have just been made for funsies like a lot of blueprint-of-familiar-place maps from the early years; IIRC it's pretty easy to just leave without bothering to clear stuff. E6M2 is probably one of the elusive cut campaign levels. The design isn't very conducive to what would be considered a good deathmatch nowadays, though I suppose standards could have been different back then. Someone probably liked it a little too much to let it be thrown away outright despite not making the cut for the official episodes. E6M3 (formerly E4M1 prior to v1.3) is a conversion of American McGee's IDMAP01.WAD so that one definitely is a deathmatch map (albeit with monster placements). I still feel like calling these "bonus levels" or "super secret levels" or something would be more accurate than the common moniker of it being a "deathmatch episode". M2 is definitely the most interesting one if you're looking from the perspective of "clean it up and put it in a single player episode".

For as much as my opinion matters on it, please make it HTML pages. I'm so utterly sick and tired of every bit of useful information only being posted as bloated video streams these days.

I wouldn't put it past the realm of possibility that it was just made up as a fantasy name without the realization that it's an actual place.