Maes

Perhaps a better metric would be "monster density". There are quite a lot of early vanilla maps (e.g. Deadbase, Trinity, ForgeX etc.) that have a decent-ish monster count, but they are so large that they appear sparsely populated, and no encounter is particularly challenging.

All of them. On a more serious note, the question is kinda meaningless without discussing placement and levels scale first. What if it's just one monster but it's a cyberdemon/archvile, and you're in a small room without cover? What if it's 10000 but it's NUTS.WAD and you can simply Indy500/NASCAR your way out of trouble? What if it's in the 500-1000 range but they are arranged like HORDES.WAD? Of even if they are in the 50-100 range, but the ammo/weapons are arranged like in this map (or most of the infamous Cabal maps by Sverre Andre Kvernmo, really...)

Hey, I had CD-Man, but always viewed it as a (mediocre) Pac-Man clone, no connection with Sony whatsoever. The high-resolution was a nice touch, though. In retrospect, those "3D" CD-men in the title screen looked kinda cool, if that was really a 1989 game...

Speaking of "acid" Tetris... I think the Amstrad CPC version qualifies, even it's not a PC game: Mind you, this was the official conversion for the platform, not some PD game.

Magic Boy, converted from the original Amiga version (also available on SNES). Colgate (Harald Hardtand}, a promotional game made by Colgate, converted from the Amiga original. Tony and Friends adventures in Kellogg Land, another promotional game, converted from the Amiga original.

That reminded me of: Pyrotechnica by Psygnosis. LGR describes it pretty much as a Descent clone, though the gameplay and visuals are much more Tron-like. Must be one of the last MS-DOS games to use polygon graphics (other than Cyberbykes/Shadow Racer VR). That ofc made the game run quite faster ;-) I distinctly remember it having a HACKER.TXT file hidden in its folders, which pretty much gave you some hints if you wanted to tinker with the game yourself. Darker, also by Psygnosis. Once again I remember it having quite a smooth 3D engine.

OK, so which thread about Doom vs Doom II is your favourite?

It's interesting how no Doom editor before Doom Builder got that mythical "3D Preview" mode really going, or at least well-implemented enough to really make a difference and save you from the chore of having to visually verify texture alignment etc. in-game. It was a feature that was forever teased in DEU's (never released) successor, DEU 2 since 1994 at least, but AFAIK never really made it into any editor before Doom Builder, at least not in an equally usable form. I heard that WadAuthor or DoomCAD had a sort of static/wireframe 3D preview, but it would have seem trivial to implement at least a static fully textured 3D preview (no navigation) in any editor, even without knowing exactly how the Doom rendering engine worked. And yet, for Doom this functionality only really was there "for the masses" well after the game's prime.

Well, there was indeed an abyss between my 486DX/40 (overclocked to 50 MHz) with VLB and 30-pin SIMMs and your Pentium 90, which would the very least have used 72-pin (EDO, even) SIMMs, a PCI graphics card etc. My system was -in retrospect- only passably able to run Doom (the main bottleneck probably being that Cirrus Logic all-in-one video card...). But at least FPS were consistently in the two-digit territory. With Duke 3D they often dropped to single-digits unless I played at minimal screen res & detail settings. Surprisingly, Quake was not significantly worse. Not that I'd consider either "playable" for any amount of time. OTOH, you reporting that your "Pentiom" was dismal in Quake sounds odd, as if it had a really crappy FPU or something. Maybe it was one of those "Pentium overdrive" chips that could be installed on a 486-class mobo? Those could indeed be all over the place, performance-wise. But still, I think my original point still holds. Duke 3D: a clearly "traditional-looking" Doom-esque engine with a limited mapping geometry and 2D sprites vs Quake, a fully 3D game. How could the former be nearly as crappy as the latter? And I wouldn't stick so much to this latter point if there wasn't already better competition out there: Dark Forces with its Jedi engine, which seemed to have all of the Duke's engine's strengths but also all of the performance you'd expect out of the Doom engine (if not smoother, at times).

This was indeed a painful fact of life back then. Still, by looking at an average Doom screenshot and then a Duke 3D one, it was hard to see what the latter had to offer over the former. Even by getting a glimpse of the gameplay (say the first level) it was hard to justify why Duke ran like crap on a system that would otherwise rock Doom. OK, so there were slopes, scripting, and Duke's one-limers... at the time, none of these things seemed out of reach of a slightly souped-up Doom engine, and at least in my eyes didn't justify the performance hit. In fact, Duke didn't run particularly faster than Quake on my system... and yes, there is an old post I made on the subject.

Well, back then, if you wanted to jump on this newfangled "First Person Shooter" or "Doom clone" bandwagon and cut yourself a piece of the pie, there wasn't much you could do other than developing your own engine (Descent, Duke 3D, Dark Forces) or license an already available one (pretty much everything else did so with Wolf3D, with Heretic being the exception and going straight to the source). Obviously this had the drawback of your game looking too much like Wolf3D or Doom with a new coat of paint. The original engine approach usually came at the cost of performance, as it was trivial to improve on Doom's deficiencies....but can you keep it just as fast even at visuals parity? Descent and Duke 3D certainly couldn't...

A better question would be if id or even Raven Software themselves kept using the original NextStep-based mapping tools for Doom II, Heretic, Hexen and later titles (e.g. Doom 64). Even the first versions of DEU were far more practical, e.g. they didn't require having all those separate external data files for nodes, sectors etc. nor a separate "compilation" process (other than building the nodes, that is).

And it was invented by none else than Bill Gates himself. To really get in an early 2000s mood, let the good jokes about Windows 98's unreliability roll! The truth is we all got WADs from magazines or shareware CD-ROMs back then. How they got there in the first place, was nobody's business.

@tsak thank you for your detailed explanation. It's interesting how that same technique was also used e.g. in that Duke 3D port for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. And they also had to deal with the vagaries of a tile-based display!

You mean SLIGE right? That thing was the bomb!

By looking closely at the screenshots/videos, it's clear how the "striped" look of ceiling/floor textures is created: just an alternating pixel pattern, which is -presumably- being rapidly blitted as a traditional line/pattern fill. This gives a bit more texture -pun intended- to floors and ceilings, but it remains constant no matter the view distance, and also they are not rotated or anything. This same trick was used for ages in polygon-based engine, so no big mystery there. What's not so clear -at least for me- is how/why the striped look of wall textures is created. I've seen the same kind of visuals on other "low end" Wolf3D/Doom-like engines, especially on 8-bit and 16-bit machines before, but I never understood the technicalities/reasoning behind them. They too give a faux "hi-res" touch to wall textures, but unlike floors/ceilings, these cannot be created as cheaply -the patterns seem to be applied at the texture pixel level. I cannot imagine this being particularly efficient vs using a single color, unless the blitting hardware has something to do with it and they are used as a kind of color dithering.

Well, mostly because you dispatch of your immediate problems rapidly and cleanly, and for the most part without pesky legal and ethical considerations. If only it was that easy in real life, eh? Even if you consider the lightest version where you simply "defeat", rather than "kill" your opponents.

Crystal Caliburn, of which I happened to have the registered version back in the day. Somehow, I'm not surprised it originated as a Mac game. Too bad that for all of its praise, at least the Windows 3.1 version I had was nearly unplayable due to the choppy framerate, couplied with miniscule visuals. It may have had its merits, but I cannot remember it as anything but an unplayable mess. Perhaps this should double as a porting disaster... For some reason, all videos that i can find online of it also show a piss-poor frame rate regardless of version. I dunno, is it really that good that it's worth all this suffering?

TRWTF is that Windows is still doing this "hiding file extensions by default" in 2022. Does it really make the newbies' life so much easier, that it's worth having even if it's a known malware exploit (think of the many "image attachments" that are really executables....) and it will create ambiguities in nearly every other scenario? Users will eventually have to learn about file extensions anyway because, guess what, pretty much every other source of files will have them and use them [/rant]

Wow, that looks kinda like a poor man's cross between Virtua Fighter/Tekken (to which the "barebones gameplay" is quite similar) and One Must Fall. I admit however that the graphics aren't half bad. It's also one of the few instances of games from that era where the intro actually has worse graphics than the actual game.

Perhaps related? Then again, if the terrywad comes prepackaged with its own source port + IWAD, you might want to double-check the executable ;-)

Digital Illusions' Pinball Fanstasies received a little-known port for the Sony Playstation -yes, the first one-, called "Pinball Fantasies Deluxe", exclusively for the Japanese market. Not unusual per-se, considering that there was a CD32 port before, and other pinball games of the era received Playstation ports as well. Unfortunately, while it might look the part, it plays nothing like the original Amiga and PC versions. The music is somewhat off -as if the PSX had a problem with tracker music, which might as well be, there are some annoying voiceovers, but these are non-issues. What really kills it, at least for me, is that they somehow managed to make the controls stiff and delayed, to the point that the "flow" of the original tables is completely ruined. Maybe if you never played the Amiga or PC versions before, you might be able to adjust and even consider it "normal", but I would have to completely re-learn everything, so I'll pass. Only buy/download/burn/whatever if you have to collect every pinball game for the PSX ever made. Otherwise, if you want a fun game to play, try something better. Like Kiss Pinball. And yes, I mean the Playstation version, which is a notable porting disaster itself of an already mediocre pinball game, but I'll make a separate post for that. Someday. Edit: there's a -presumably better- port of Pinball Fantasies for the PS3, made by the Silents, FWIW.

I'd say scale plays a role too. Lots of monsters also need lots of space, and thus plenty of opportunity to show off with large, memorable structures of every kind. Even copy + paste detail will get a flying pass if the map is large enough.

A little told truth is that there have always been prepackaged, "ready to play" distributions of various mods out there, which included everything you needed to play them, including a source port (usually, some outdated version of ZDoom) and an IWAD. The latter is considered a no-no, but it does happen. Perhaps you were spoiled by something like this all along?