The DWmegawad Club plays: Back to Saturn X E2

[Demonologist]

MAP08 - "A Blue Shadow" by Matt Tropiano/Tarnsman
Sadness overthrows everything... As it is not every day that I see Matt Tropiano's name attached to a map this boring. Slowly plowing your way through high-HP monsters with shotgun and up to ssg which might've been given much earlier; yet, its introduction doesn't change much, anyway. The pace of this map is a decrepit turtle slowly crawling to its end. Camp, shoot from behind the corner... This is not the thing to be expected from Tropiano with his usual "kick the player from one corner to another with hitscanner-heavy deathsquads" approach. What happened? Where's that evil Matt we've all known before, the one who put constant - yet elegant enough in terms of execution - pressure upon the player? With him gone, the very gameplay of this map is gone as well.
The looks are lovely indeed, nice natural parts and that supercool blue area that immediately reminds the Wizard theme from Quake (after reading Woolie Wool's post I may conclude I'm not alone, heh), so thanks for that at least, brought back some warm memories.
The final trap was the one I never experienced, since I never played this map past the first beta where it was broken.

Overall - one of the major disappointments of this whole project (alongside Tango's ugly barrel biggotry). Slow ass boring map with some nice visuals serving as its only advantage, albeit not really a redeeming one.

[j4rio]

map 6 - I wasn't particularly thrilled by this but it wasn't offending either. The last room was nice. The secret into which you jump and 2 mancubuses pop up has a silly teleporting line placement. The encounter with 4 arachnotrons teleporting in is meh and the map wouldn't miss anything if they were completely cut.

Map 7 - Heh, I knew this was TGH map by the time I was in second room. Really nice map overall except that last room which was a little lacking.

Map 8 - This was just boring.

[Seele00TextOnly]

"Camp, shoot from behind the corner..." Didn't we go over this already in the last DWMC thread for BTSX E1? Door and corner camping is a choice of the player, and erecting walls behind the player constantly just to prevent it would be an excessive chore on the part of the mappers and the limits with regards to the additions of lines to increase the scripted nature of encounters.

If you find camping and corner firing boring, don't do it. It's not the mappers obligation to constantly force you to be unable to do your least favorite gameplay style. That's on your end, you're accountable for that. Just stop doing it if you don't like it. Just about every map and encounter in the episode is made to be played Rambo-style. Charge in and mix it up, dart about dodging projectiles and use your skills.

Masochistically playing poorly in a way that you dislike and simultaneously whining that you're being allowed to do so is just asinine.

[dew]

Playtester's War Journal, day 399: Wings of Thorn (vorpal, Xaser)

I'll keep this short, because Xaser already said much more than I could. Basically, this map flew under the playtesting radar, because there weren't any huge issues. Also Xaser teased us with screenshots for quite some time and he provided a playable version sometimes during the pre-release E1 crunch (Nov 2012). It's an easyish opener with a kickass layout by vorpal, beautiful visuals by Xaser and it doesn't overstay its welcome, yay! I wouldn't exactly call the layout a populated DM map (it's a bit too cramped and vertical, creating a vicious combo that'd lead to hide&seek play), but it's so wonderfully compact and nonlinear to see some a definite DM inspiration, yeah. I usually give pl2 map05 as a textbook case of nonlinearity done right, but this little piece will probably become my other go-to example.

The visuals are crazy. Imagine if Heretic looked this good and consistent. And it was a game as good as Doom, heh. My personal favourite, apart from the imposing exit gate and the entire revenant room, is probably the look from the control room onto the RK ledge. It looks ridiculously cool and Jimmy's song here completes the package. I'm usually a stewboy person, but Jimmy whipped up an excelent solo here, hehe. Btw, Veinen: I saw your FDA where you tried to jump onto the cliffs. I did the same in the testing phase and we had to block that area off, because it's hopeless overflow country and not really worth fixing because of a supersecret area for trick freaks. Sorry!

The only playtesting issues with this map were making movement a bit smoother and ramping up the difficulty. The opposition was strengthened a bit, but it was all the resources thrown everywhere that made it a trivial task to rush into every fight and end up victorious simply by the power of your stack. Btw, the beta2 version is a bit rougher in this department and that update was scheduled for b1 already, but it was lost in the pre-release chaos&hysteria. Oh, and those little HOMs in the RK room were something of a mystery for years, because there's no reason for them to be there, afaik. Some nodebuilder adversity, I bet. Wait, I said I'd keep it short.


Playtester's War Journal, day 400: Dirty Water (Use3D, Tarnsman)

Another map that was first released in Nov 2012 and its initial reception was a little overshadowed by E1's crunch time. Luckily, Xaser had some free time on his hands as he was strangely absent in e1's maplist, so he was the one working with Use in the beginning. I believe he will be writing a mega-post soonish. So basically Use wanted to create a sprawling maze that would willingly head into the controversial Eternal Doom territory of switches and non-trivial navigation. I think we can all agree he succeeded with that, hehe.

I'll leave Tarnsman's retexturing aside, because I believe Xas will cover that, and concentrate on the gameplay. It is still lacking, I believe. I mean, if you are an Eternal Doom fan, you'll be right at home here, but many aren't attracted to that "lone baron in a hallway" style. We'll see what we can do to make it more fun while retaining Use's message. (There was some nerfing by Tarns that maybe got undone? I'm lost in these revisions...) I'm positive the fights won't be a problem, the core battles are already plenty fine, imo. The big tasks will be to ease navigation a little, because oh god, the way from the ruined throneroom to the blue key absolutely goads you into picking the wrong turns.

And I believe we will need to get rid of that non-key route that leads to the RL secret. We were probably looking too close to see the bigger picture after all the testers got familiar with the map, but almost EVERYONE here found that route sooner than the key rooms. That's ruining the map's intention, inconceivable! On the other hand, I'm personally quite okay with that (unexpected!) sr40 shortcut jump. That feels okay, as it requires a counterintuitive lava dive, heh. So, this map is a big challenge to the players, but also to the team to balance it for various types of players without pissing Use off. :)

[j4rio]

Seele00TextOnly said:

"Camp, shoot from behind the corner..." Didn't we go over this already in the last DWMC thread for BTSX E1? Door and corner camping is a choice of the player, and erecting walls behind the player constantly just to prevent it would be an excessive chore on the part of the mappers and the limits with regards to the additions of lines to increase the scripted nature of encounters.

If you find camping and corner firing boring, don't do it. It's not the mappers obligation to constantly force you to be unable to do your least favorite gameplay style. That's on your end, you're accountable for that. Just stop doing it if you don't like it. Just about every map and encounter in the episode is made to be played Rambo-style. Charge in and mix it up, dart about dodging projectiles and use your skills.

Masochistically playing poorly in a way that you dislike and simultaneously whining that you're being allowed to do so is just asinine.

Sorry, I personally don't buy the "map is great, you're playing it the wrong way" thing. No, there is no way to play it the way you like because you need to know the map beforehand to be aware of how map works like. Once I already know it, I can play it the way I enjoy, yes I can do that with literally every single map in doom that currently exists. See, I've done a few maxes of MM1 which I quite frankly believe to be an old load of boring shit unless I already know it inside out and play it the way I like, but that still doesn't mean I don't think what I'm playing isn't boring shit, I'm just making boring shit fun for myself. If the map doesn't suck, I can enjoy it even without the hassle of learning it inside out and then enjoying it.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 07 -- Shrine to the Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riot) - 101% Kills / 50% Secrets - FDA, 0 Deaths, also uses beta 1.
Yes, I am aware of beta 2, I've switched over to it as of map 08 (just in time, apparently).

Ah, another stone ruins + water setting, this one naturally quite reminiscent of TGH's CC4 map (though that one was more nature and less temple, while this one's the other way around). The slate-grey color of the temple + the generally coastal tableau gave this one a decidedly Mediterranean cast in my mind, but perhaps I was predisposed to reach that conclusion after reading the map's title. Unlike so many of the other ruins in this area of Saturn X we've explored thus far, the spiritual bent of this temple seems inclined not towards the expressly moribund, but as a gauntlet of ordeals, a series of tests of agility and fortitude. Perhaps it was used to prepare ancient holy warriors for some terrible struggle.....a struggle against what, I wonder?

Seeing another water/ruins theme doesn't bother me, I quite like the general theme. That aside, the fairly simple color scheme (pale grey masonry, tan rocks/clay, and soft blue water) in combination with the consistently spacious nature of the play areas lends it a different flavor from the other thematically similar maps thus far. Unlike map 04, it is completely and unabashedly linear, following a simple circuit path that revisits a couple of areas a couple of times, via the over/under path approach. Actually building/opening this path via switches accounts for a lot of the flavor of progression in the map, although there's one section of floor (right before the rocket launcher) that insta-raises for no apparent reason other than that it needs to for videogame reasons. It's a very minor detail, but I think I'd suggest retexturing this sector with the gray temple stone to match the nearby lift sector that acts as a bridge over to the green armor altar--kind of weird that it's made out of earth instead, especially considering the switch on its north face that actuates it as a lift in order to facilitate quick backtracking. The other notable aspect of the environment is that it's just as setpiece-heavy as the actual combat, with marked themes at work during different parts of the progression--leaping and platforming in the southeastern area, the span of crusher-trapped hallways not long after that, etc. Adds to the impression of a series of physical tests, as aforesaid.

Battles here tend to involve a lot of bodies but are mostly very straightforward. Hitscanners are relatively rare here (mostly just occasional groups of shotgun zombies), with the major opposition consisting largely of revenants, hell knights, and gasbags, with the latter tending to be the star of the show--it's here that we encounter our first proper cacofleets of the episode, on no less than three different occasions. Others have noted that the monsters here tend to hang around mostly with their own kind, which is true, but most areas are large enough that there will be more than one group of monsters present, so the impression of homogeneity here is mostly limited to a visual quirk just as combat begins (it does mean that largescale infighting is a choice tactic the player can return to over and over again, however). Armor is scarce and shows up a bit late (apparently there's a hidden blue one that I didn't find), so early mistakes can be painful, but generally speaking the item/ammo balance is quite generous to the player--solid amounts of health, lots of ammo (esp. shells and rockets), etc. There's a berserk pack early on again as well, but using the fist seems patently unnecessary at any point in this one.

Despite the considerable amount/strength of the opposition, I didn't find this to be a particularly difficult map...you get so much room to move and so much freedom to do so that it's tough for the monsters to effectively cope with your speed, which usually works to the map's favor--my favorite part was the platforming + brawling in the tall southeastern area, lots of fun, and showcases a fairly rare proper usage of pain elementals to boot (if you're not being a dick about it you're not doing it right as far as this enemy type is concerned). At times, however, the lack of any real restriction on the player's movement is perhaps a little too powerful...despite its bark, the map's climax doesn't actually have a lot of bite, because even when the viles/minions appear on the shrine it's easy to just jump down and continue fighting them comfortably ala the earlier part of the battle--beaming in more pressure on the ground might be in order here, maybe another vile and a few more revenants on the ground on each side of the shrine, something like that. Incidentally, the single nastiest encounter occurs in one of the few narrow corridors--I was lucky I didn't get crushed in the HK/crusher trap, I wasn't really immediately aware of the rear crusher while focusing on the knights. Anyway, I reckon the map is probably a lot more stressful for cautious/conservative players who prefer to methodically clear out demonic infestation from afar/in a very controlled way--the spaces and distances involved in the battles in combination with the fairly robust concentrations of monsters mean that sniping from a static position is liable to be a rather inefficient approach in this one.

Solid map, very straightforward in comparison to other maps so far, but there's nothing wrong with that.

[dew]

j4rio said:

Sorry, I personally don't buy the "map is great, you're playing it the wrong way" thing. No, there is no way to play it the way you like because you need to know the map beforehand to be aware of how map works like. Once I already know it, I can play it the way I enjoy, yes I can do that with literally every single map in doom that currently exists.

I'll agree with that to an extent. If you present camping a corner as the easiest, most efficient solution of a fight, the player will take it no matter how much an action freak they are. There needs to be an incentive to go & fight for reals, be it a barrier behind your ass or resources running low with a nice stash in sight in the combat zone. However there must be balance. I personally dislike the Ribbiks style of mapping where every fight becomes an arena setpiece. I can barely stomach it in skillsaw maps and he has a more varied style! It kills my suspension of disbelief and reminds me I'm jumping through someone's hoops, often with no correct solution but the one the kind mapper envisioned for me. This style can be used occasionally to spice things up with an arena or two, but if it becomes the prevalent method of mapping, I will go play something that isn't a stupid agility test of pressing the correct keys at the correct time. Variety is the keyword.

Also if a player goes and chainguns a cyberdemon to death, because they're afraid to run past and they have the ammo for it from continuous gameplay, they do lose the rights to complain, because that's self-inflicted boredom and I don't see where the mapper went wrong.

[Dragonsbrethren]

MAP07

Loved the hectic arenas in this.

MAP08

Beautiful map!

[Seele00TextOnly]

j4rio said:

Sorry, I personally don't buy the "map is great, you're playing it the wrong way" thing. No, there is no way to play it the way you like because you need to know the map beforehand to be aware of how map works like.

It's called being brave, taking risk, having fun. Playing the game constantly creeping around scared of dying is no way to go. If that means using saves, then use saves. You're more likely to have fun that way than corner camping at every opportunity.

And I'm not saying 'map is great, you're playing it wrong'; I'm saying 'you say you're not enjoying how you play; stop choosing to play that way'. If a player is playing in a way that they dislike, and they are playing that way entirely of their own choosing, then they are only hurting themselves and almost deliberately trying to not have a good time.

The mapper cannot constantly supply pressure from behind or lock the player in, or any other number of tactics to supposedly force the player from camping. Here's an idea for pressure from behind: The player is motivated to have fun. If the player is motivated to have fun, they'll charge out guns blazing and using their dodging skills, prioritizing monsters they want to and leaving others to deal with later, etc.

The player has to be motivated to get out there and have a good time, they can't constantly be whining for someone to push them out the door. And I'm not entirely even saying that door camping is wrong; but if you dislike it, and you're doing it, then you're engaging in some really peculiar behaviour. Stop doing things you dislike doing. It's simple logic.

[mouldy]

MAP08 - "A Blue Shadow" by Matt Tropiano/Tarnsman

This one started off quite hectic, seems like a common thread in a lot of these maps is to drop the player in a low ammo/weapon situation and let them dodge monsters hunting for resources, but with this one I was hunting for quite a while, to the point where I wondered if i really was supposed to fight everything with the peashooters. But finding SSG made things ok again. After the fun of having quite an open start, it turned into more of a linear key/switch adventure, the route becoming more and more focused until by the end if felt like I was being handed the map a corridor and a few enemies at a time. Still, archviles can always be trusted to make things more interesting. Highlight of the map was jumping into the chasm of reckless infighting around the plasma rifle.

[Steve D]

Seele00TextOnly said:

"Camp, shoot from behind the corner..." Didn't we go over this already in the last DWMC thread for BTSX E1? Door and corner camping is a choice of the player, and erecting walls behind the player constantly just to prevent it would be an excessive chore on the part of the mappers and the limits with regards to the additions of lines to increase the scripted nature of encounters.

To camp or not to camp, this is one of the great Doom debates. To Rambo or not to Rambo is another.

You can't place all the blame for camping on the player, because that assumes a player should cooperate with a mapper's design just because the mapper wants/expects them to. OTOH, we should not overlook the reality that camping, or ducking behind some sort of cover when things get hot, is in fact a valid approach to playing a map, thus why it is frowned-on to place Archies in open areas with no cover.

I haven't done a lot of camping in E2 so far -- mostly in Map03 -- and I did really like Vader's "Fuck you, campers!" teleporting Revvies in Map06, which encouraged me to go out and have fun getting my ass kicked on the mean streets of Doom City. One way to lower the camping quotient is to hand out the SSG/RL sooner, and if you think that makes things too easy, then drop a building on the player to compensate. First-time players armed with nothing but a single-barrel and a handful of gravel may be a bit reluctant to go Rambo against a room loaded with Revvie snipers on ledges and more Revvies or Mancs on the ground. Then again, if people find themselves continually discouraged and frustrated, if they're not having fun, they should, as essel said, try a lower difficulty, but we know how often that happens! ;D Most players will instead whine that a map is too hard without considering that it's only too hard for them.

BTW, I'm not suggesting Demonologist is such a player, and I'd be amazed if he finds these maps very difficult. Quite the opposite, I'm sure.

I'm one of those players who'll actually drop to a lower difficulty when necessary. It hasn't been necessary so far. I'm beating the maps. I usually consider a map "hard" once I've died 10 times, so by that measure, only Map04 and Map06 have been hard, but 07 and 08 are waiting for me. I generally don't consider a map "frustrating" until my death count reaches 25, but if I'm dying in ways that keep me entertained, I'll stick with UV even when my death count tops 50.

Everything's relative.

[j4rio]

dew said:

...

Everyone has their way of enjoying and not enjoying the game. It's down to personal tastes. I just wanted to point out that I find this very particular instance of disregarding someone's complaints about map and blaming it on player to be unjust.

[scifista42]

MAP07 - "Shrine to the Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots)" by The Green Herring

The Green Herring's mapping style here felt differently than other BTSX maps. More "casual", for lack of a better word - that's my main impression from this map. Not so much extra effort to make the layout compact and crammed with detail and to make each gameplay setup complicated and overthought. Still a definite masterpiece of quality, though. The visuals were beautiful (specially outdoor) and somewhat atmospheric overally. I liked the map for all its gameplay, its aesthetics and its distinction from maps I've seen in BTSX so far.

Well, it's linear. That's a minus for me. On the other hand, particular setpieces were enjoyable and worked well, either if you decided to use monster infighting or not, so that I was pleased anyway. In this map, I've seen the monster placement as "brilliant in its simplicity" (not at all as lazy, heh). I can say pretty much the same about the overall layout structure. Just room by room - but none of the rooms was bad, what more would I want? Mixing easily skippable battles with those almost unskippable ones was performed greatly too. I've died multiple times again. Not in the PE trap, but at other times when enclosed by hell knights or revenants. Well, the amounts of revenants were pretty excessive at times - seems that my early suspictions are already fulfilling. The final area - okay, I needed several attempts to get the right position to snipe archviles with rockets / plasma. Exited the map with full shells (and lots of them were still lying around), but no rocket / plasma ammo, heh. I don't complain about it - somehow it seems appropriate for this kind of map and for my playstyle I've used.

I wasn't able to find any secrets this time, but got reconciled with it.

[dew]

j4rio said:

Everyone has their way of enjoying and not enjoying the game. It's down to personal tastes. I just wanted to point out that I find this very particular instance of disregarding someone's complaints about map and blaming it on player to be unjust.

And I agree. Actually, you're one of the most reckless FDA players I can think of (I'm another one), so I wouldn't blame you of excessive camping and tedium. I want to improve BtSX wherever it's lacking, but it's obvious that the reception often goes in different, sometimes opposite directions and some people hate what other people swear by. That's why I talked about variety, at least that way you piss everyone off roughly the same and no two people will agree where you went wrong. :p

[Steve D]

dew said:

That's why I talked about variety, at least that way you piss everyone off roughly the same and no two people will agree where you went wrong. :p

Ah, how true. Correct me if I'm wrong, but what you guys are going for here is a "Hardcore Oldschool" approach, and since Oldschool typically means attrition/resource management, amping the difficulty is not the easiest thing to pull off. It's not like a slaughtermap where you get a shitload of resources to try and beat hordes of enemies, so it's a different kind of balance.

[Veinen]

Map07: Shrine To The Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots) - FDA recorded with b1.

A TGH map, nice. This is a really simple and linear, advance from one battle to the next with light opposition in between, type of a map but I thought it was pretty fun throughout. The layout does loop around itself a few times and TGH does a decent job repopulating and reinventing combat in such areas. Didn't think it was very difficult at all, simple strategies work well enough everywhere. The PE horde was the trickiest encounter although I suppose you can just leave and let them roam around for all eternity if you wish to do so. The finale was a bit lackluster; just circle the "shrine" and rocket spam. I agree with Demonologist that adding a few Mancs at the back side of the shrine just to make it a little less easy wouldn't probably hurt. PEs... yeah sure why not, but a Cyber on the pedestal would add absolutely nothing to the battle but more time spent cleaning up.

Visually it's not as complicated as pretty much everything that has come before but since gameplay works... And yeah, everybody has already mentioned that this resembles Nectar of The Gods from CC4 and I couldn't agree more. You could really tell that it's a TGH map a couple of rooms in if you're familiar with that CC4 level. Good stuff overall, enjoyed it for sure.

[dobu gabu maru]

MAP08: Had a good time. It felt like a "cool down" map, something that took it slow but had some mild surprises here and there (I died more than I'd like to admit inside the blue complex), but seeing as how I wanted to unwind with some Doom today I think this map hit the spot. It's atmosphere is my favorite so far, with the midi going a long way to help provide a somber, downtrodden aura. Great work on this one; I don't necessarily disagree with the "boring" assessments, but it's a change of pace I think fits well here.

[j4rio]

dobu gabu maru said:

I don't necessarily disagree with the "boring" assessments, but it's a change of pace I think fits well here.

I think I was being nice when I called it just boring. It made me fall asleep on laptop. The gameplay in the map was just non-existant.

[dew]

j4rio said:

I think I was being nice when I called it just boring. It made me fall asleep on laptop. The gameplay in the map was just non-existant.

At 19:48? Must have been some microsleep cause map09 FDA says 20:09. ;)

[j4rio]

Yep, I was actually asleep halfway through FDA. My somnambulism took care of the other half.

Admittedly, it could be partly "my fault for playing the wrong way" as I managed to find ssg and rl after cleaning almost everything with cg and sg. Still, the no-ambush-at-all-costs ideology, which is quite prevalent here with the exception of the very last sections and not exactly intelligent monster placement overall is something I'll never manage to like.

[40oz]

I'm actually a bit surprised as I've always been under the impression that the set-piece style of planned situations ala Ribbik's maps has mostly been very well received. Personally I'm a huge fan of the way he can give you a megaarmor, a supershotgun, and 100 shells and still make you terrified of what the next switch press will do, because in general, those items are a recipe for an unstoppable doom marine.

I understand there's a degree of linearity involved with that style, but I believe a very nonlinear map can also include a variety of GOTCHA moments (not the map) where the player gets lured into a room by a nice item or key or something and get monsters dumped in his face. There's definitely some extra work with that, but with practice, designing nice traps can come naturally, and with a little extra thinking, can even include extra players in coop in the fun.

Some of the maps I've played so far (particularly MAP01 and MAP04, and sort of MAP02, after all the barrels are blown up) depend on ammo famine and easily avoided monsters, which at times makes me feel like you don't even want me to kill the monsters. I'm often asking myself what are they doing here at all besides nagging me as I try to figure out where to go? There needs to be some pressure involved with going into an area and thinking "holy shit how do I do this without dying" where the solution isn't as trivial as to avoid standing still.

[Steve D]

40oz said:

I'm actually a bit surprised as I've always been under the impression that the set-piece style of planned situations ala Ribbik's maps has mostly been very well received. Personally I'm a huge fan of the way he can give you a megaarmor, a supershotgun, and 100 shells and still make you terrified of what the next switch press will do, because in general, those items are a recipe for an unstoppable doom marine.

Indeed, that approach has been well-accepted, including by me, at least when Ribbiks does it. Not everyone does it as well as him, and I can only play his maps on HNTR/HMP.

But not everyone likes slaughtermaps, or even mildly slaughtery maps done in that herky-jerky style, so there will always be room for Hardcore Oldschool, as well as Eternal Doom-style ginormous exploration maps like Map04. The BTSX team is lucky with me, because I'm psychologically incapable of not killing monsters as I see them, so if they want to ammo-starve a player, I'm their man, well and truly starved. ;D

[kmxexii]

MAP08 CURIOUS GEORGE FINDS A BLUE SHADOW

all the waterlogged caverns that line the southwestern edge of the map remind me of some of the BTSX E1 maps, but this is a crazy good ruins level that is packed with enemies that are carefully placed to make moving dangerous so that youll have fits no matter what you are shooting at. the map was kind of slow going for me but thats mostly because i somehow missed teh combat shotgun in one of those bed alcoves early on in the map which would no doubt have made a lot of the skirmishing much easier. its still fun with a regular shotty, it just takes a bit longer and you have to spend more time keeping your gun trained and you tend to waste ammo on stuff like revenants. so i guess it might turn someone elses experience from "wicked cool" to "sucked ass" but i have no one to blame but myself. way to go dumbass

blue shadow has like three major danger zones, which are all outdoor-ish areas staffed with monsters. well i guess im calling the grotto with the hole in the ceiling a danger zone with all of its commandos standing around but you can neuter most of that with chaingun sniping. okay so there are TWO major danger zones. the yellow key area is a big one since it is fully staffed with enemies and is a total clusterfuck to run around in with the revenants in the gallery and that tricky archvile who due to genius design if left alive will sneak out to greet you right when youre picking up the rocket launcher. plus there are a hojillion enemies running around in the beginning including a pain elemental so while youre navigating cover like a madman youre trying to put out fires and i guess this would be way easier with the SSG but i bet i still would have felt a lot of heat on my ass. i was for sure i would get fucked with when i grabbed that key but it turns out there arent a whole lot of dick traps to deal with, just dick monster placement. "well ill just walk down these stairs oh hello mr archvile sorry didn't mean to intrude"

the western area is the other danger zone, but you get a key and a plasma rifle. the monsters on the ledge arent bad at all to take out but at some point youre gonna have to jump down off your perch and fight the power aka a screaming horde of skeletons plus a couple of arachnotrons. not bad at all if you corral them right and hammer them with the rocket launcher but if you dont think about it youll get mobbed like i did the first time. then of course there is the finale, which takes place in a big blue network of hallways. the visuals make it pop compared to the rest of the map and it has a neat hook where you gradually lower the water level to get to the exit. its also staffed with monsters that do some nasty work in close quarters, so be on the lookout. the final fight is frantic as hell with your scant two pillars and all the things running around on the ground and taking shots from the galleries.

visuals as usual are cool. lots of love for the caves and vines. the ruins sections are good as well but my fave part is the blue temple, its just a great way to introduce a new area of the map and has a very different aesthetic, like teh shocking blue of heretic's dome of d'sparil. and uh, not much else to say. there arent a lot of standout features in the ruins themselves but there is that badass alien relief overlooking the rocket launcher.

rating: true blue, for the bluest blue that blued

[Steve D]

Map07 – Shrine to the Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots) by The Green Herring – Kills – 100, Items – 100, Secret – 50. End Health – 36, Armor – 0. Death Count – 5. Shells – 6, Bullets 0, Rockets – 5, Cells - 0

UV pistol-start, GZDoom, frequent saves, keyboard-only

Probably the first map I've played by TGH, and I was well pleased. I decided to take Seele's advice and Rambo the map, a task made all the more enjoyable because – for once! – the SSG was right there after a wee bit of fighting, and there was plenty of ammo, too, until my stash got whittled down at the end.

As others have noted, this map is linear with one setpiece fight after another. I sometimes describe this as The Hamburger Hill Syndrome, and in this case, we end the map almost literally on Hamburger Hill, the last objective we have to conquer before heading back to home and hearth.

Worth noting is that TGH also supplied excellent BGM.

So, right from the start, this is one of the less visually impressive maps. It does have its moments, for example the distant view of the exit from near the Soulsphere secret, but it's mostly rather basic.

Fights were kind of easy, with good opportunities to provoke infighting, even in the first battle, though them damn Sergeants always managed to get a bead on me through an open gap between the meat monsters. Second fight was a back-up and draw the Chaingunners to death, camp 1 Revvie from the door, then go in and kill the other. I tried to camp those Cacos guarding the SSG, but as DotW noted, this map punishes camping owing to – in this case – a longass hallway that allows the ketchup bags to close on you and waste your ammo. I wasn't happy with my result, so I opened a save and from then on it was all-Rambo, all the time. It was much better to charge the Cacos and do the old ring-around-the-rosie to provoke infighting and save ammo.

After that came the most dangerous fight for me, in the water cave next to the Soulsphere. First try, I took 2 steps and got blitzed from behind by Revvies because the HKs distracted me. I died 3 more times trying to provoke infights, and 1 of those deaths came by HK slime, which is probably the most humiliating way to die that I can think of. I feel diminished as a human being every time one of these lumbering jagoffs actually hits me. It's dishonorable.

I was so butthurt over getting killed by a damned Hell Knight that I decided to quit infighting practice and end the fight by actually shooting at monsters. This worked much better, and led to another HK/Revvie ambush in the next room, but with a handy escape stairway that led me back to the SSG room and an even bigger ring-around-the-rosie than the last time, but I saved a lot of ammo by letting all those mid-tier morons tear each other up. I was also in bliss to finally get some armor after I took out the final HK.

So, on to the infamous platforming/PE Surprise room. I decided to figure out the Soulsphere secret first, and came back with 140 health and ran right out there, just like Seele said I should. It worked nicely until I ran into a Sergeant and got blocked long enough to take a load of buckshot in my face plus a double-blast of Caco spit in my back that dropped my health to 50. Being the savesumming little weasel I am, I opened a save after the first PEs teleported in, and on the second try cleared the room with remarkable ease. I was laying for those PEs with my RL this time, and took out 3 of them very rapidly, and even got the last one with a nice rocket blast. Whee, that was fun! Even the platforming, which I normally detest on principle, was no problem here, and it was well-designed enough to even – dare I say it? – be fun.

There followed a Pinky punch-out – thanks for the Zerk! – and some easy biz with Hks and crushers, before we finally arrive at Hamburger Hill itself.

I'll echo the previous comments that this fight is a major disappointment. Never has such a mass of Revvies and Cacos been so completely ineffectual. I couldn't even get them to infight, because as I did rapid orbits of the shrine, the Revvies clustered in the lower corners while the Cacos formed a cloud of confused gasbags over the exit, so I had to kill everything my own damned self. That took a lot of ammo.

The next phase was the Archie/Revvie warp-in, and here I died, because as I calmly circled the shrine, rocketing the skeletons and medics above me, one ill-timed rocket hit a tree close enough to drop me to 11% health, and shortly thereafter, an Archie found an angle on me and that was that.

Luckily, I had saved shortly after being dropped to 11%, so I scummed, found a couple Stimpacks, and went on to victory.

So this was a fun map with a ho-hum, sloggy final battle. I think the solutions thus far proposed are effective, so I have nothing to add, except that I think adding Medikits at the exit for continuers is a good idea. The traditional 2 kits should do. I'm sure that starting the next map at 36% would be a rough go, even with SSG in hand.

[Velvetic]

MAP08 - "A Blue Shadow" by Matt Tropiano/Tarnsman

It is indeed blue, and a lot of blue. A nice compliment to the difficulty of the last one, not to hard and not to easy. The quest for the red and blue card in this one is accomplished by an amazing work by Matt and Tarnsman, although that last maze was a little too obvious to put monsters behind the walls (at least they didn't put any arch-vile behind a wall *starts shivering*). Also, it was the first map for me to complete in under 10 minutes. YAY!!

[Demon of the Well]

Map 08 -- A Blue Shadow - 103% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA, 0 Deaths. Uses beta 2.
Yes, shades of 'Tough Skin River', indeed. 'A Blue Shadow' takes place in the dilapidated remnants of an old fort-city in the hills, built in a similar temple-tech sort of style as the metal/basalt offshore shrine from 'Underwater Explosions' (perhaps the two are contemporaries?). This one has not fared as well under time's trampling tread, though--at some point during the last few centuries a nearby body of water (or perhaps several of them) apparently exceeded whatever boundaries it was subject to during the city's heyday, and is now in the process of inhuming the legacy of that bygone era in a liquid tomb of endless blue. Very little of the structure remains above the waterline--just the upper stories of the taller buildings and some symbolic entablatures in the surrounding hills--and so the area's most enduring visual impression is not of the ruins themselves but of the vine-covered, watercarved network of tunnels and grottoes and erstwhile reflecting pools that surrounds them, a doleful funeral elegy of green and blue beneath the brooding sky, now little more than a hunting ground for demons (and indeed, the landscape is decorated with some of their gruesome trophies at various points). A very fine music track by Jimmy completes the picture, which progresses from sounding wistfully nostalgic to communicating a sense of grim urgency to finally ending on a note of bitter resignation; I like to imagine this as a musical narration of the story of this particular setting.

So, anyway, it is aesthetically a very pleasing map, certainly a looker amongst lookers. Gameplay and thing placement could do with some retooling, though, I think. The style of combat presented here is very direct, based largely on imps, demons, and members of the Doom II bestiary (esp. revenants) deployed as blockades along paths and as entrenched clumps of snipers in some of the larger areas--most of what variability there is in the combat is a function of the non-linear layout of the first half of the map. Early on, it's possible to take a number of different paths to reach the red key, and while it can be reached very early, it's not strictly necessary to access the junction with the yellow doors until quite far into the map, and eminently possible not to do so, which can be somewhat problematic in that the map's only SSG is there. This is what happened when I played--I didn't get the SSG until right before going through the yellow doors, because that was the last part of the area I visited, meaning that I fought quite a few HP-laden battles with just shotgun/chaingun, so the pace of the action was a bit choppy, to say the least. In truth, I'm not actually terribly miffed about this--there's a certain satisfaction in winning through a situation like that presented by the yellow key area with only basic armament to your name--but I strongly suspect many players will find this very aggravating and sloggy (and I myself probably would've been annoyed if I'd had to do it more than once). Fortunately, a solution to this seems pretty easy--just put a second SSG in the map somewhere along the route that avoids the yellow door junction. Even a berserk pack might suffice; the little black box was quite conspicuous by its absence here, the chainsaw that can be gotten early on is really no substitute when so many of the enemies are revenants and knights and the like.

j4rio has described the nature of the action here as 'no-ambush-ever' in flavor, presumably meaning that nothing unexpected ever really happens in this map, and assuming that's the correct interpretation I'm personally inclined to agree--its only real trick is frequently tossing some of the trickier enemies in one's face a few at a time. This might suffice for players who are very uncomfortable with those enemies, but I found myself wanting some more complex action by the end. Again, I don't really mind the earlier part of the map, since the non-linearity actuates a certain degree of variability in player status (even if the extreme of possibilities sees you hammering your way through everything with the basic shotgun), but after a certain point the map becomes a lot more linear while the style of action hardly changes at all, if anything becoming even simpler because ledge-snipers and crossfires are eventually replaced by predictable ground-level closets in corridors by the time the player reaches the blue temple area. In a sense, this is similar to what I saw as a problem in map 04: after a certain point the player builds up enough material momentum that simply tossing monsters in front of him/her stops seeming like a credible threat and more like a perfunctory gesture. It's not all bad--there was an attempt at a more prickly scenario with the warp-ins outside of the exit room, for example--but also some bits that seemed like missed opportunities, e.g. when the blue shrine's floor collapses into a pool of blood and the player jumps down to face a whopping TWO revenants. Wow. Granted, the layout of this last area is pretty compact/simple and not really conducive to a ton of fancy choreography, but I reckon more pressure on the player (again, at least on UV/solonet), perhaps some from behind instead of always from the front, might be in order--just turn MTrop and Tarnsman loose, they'll come up with something. They both know how to be dicks about monster deployment.

[Crusader No Regret]

map 3: Wings of Thorn
Exited with 100% kills on first attempt. Won't say if that's good or bad. From the start, there were some surprise Revenant encounters that I somehow managed to evade without taking damage. Crossing into to main portion of the map, everywhere I turned alerted more monsters to my presence. Nearly got killed trying to goad them into fighting each other since I was rather low on ammo. Yellow key alter had me taking more damage from a hellknight than the revenants and mancubus. Got a bit lost finding where to use the keys. When I found out where to go, the pack of Revenants spooked a bit but I had enough rocket ammo to handle them comfortably. Found no secrets.
Visually, I enjoyed the waterway on the lower level. The rest is consistently well done though didn't grab my attention to the same degree.
Blooper reel: taking an age to locate the SSG and getting blindsided by a hellknight at the yellow key altar.

[Steve D]

Map08 – A Blue Shadow by Matt Tropiano/Tarnsman – Kills – 100, Items – 100, Secret – 40. End Health – 60, Armor – 0. Death Count – 5. Shells – 14, Bullets 142, Rockets – 14, Cells - 0

UV pistol-start, GZDoom, frequent saves, keyboard-only

A very nice-looking map complimented well by Jimmy's BGM The Night Guard. Layout is nice and flowy until the later, more linear stages. Found 2 secrets, both of them Soulspheres.

I found the SSG early, and as a result, the fights were enjoyable up to the Plasma Gun battle which, IMO, was terribly staged. An army of meat below me and snipers across the gap that I can't shoot rockets at because the meat below is going to screw me with auto-aim fuckery. Shades of Jim Bagrow's Die Hard. This always irritates me when I encounter it.

Without any decent angle to shoot at the monsters below, I had no choice but to Rambo this battle, finding even more Revvies down there than I expected. If Cacos were the official monster of BTSX E1, then Revvies must be the official monster of E2. Damn, but there was a shitload of 'em down there! I'd gotten this far without dying, but fell thrice to King Revvie in this battle, using rockets exclusively and not getting the PG until after I killed everything, including the snipers.

BTW, I can't help noticing that it looks like the Marbgn21 texture, and all the many-colored variants, looks like it has a penis in its mouth. ;D

After getting the blue key and stumbling into the lovely blue area, the progress became a bit of a slog until finally I got to the rather sweet trap at the exit, where I died twice thanks to that Archie. Nice little bit of tight nastiness there. And of course, being an Mtrop map, there had to be an Archie in the exit itself, easily-dispatched as usual.

Not a bad map overall except for the PG area and that succession of stairs and switches in the blue zone.

[Worm]

MAP06 - "Useless Inventions": Warehouses and crates, but well-done. The archie/revs trap is very cruel, even if you have the plasma.

MAP07 - "The Green Herring: Shrine To The Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots)": Surprisingly short and very linear. Liked the pillar-hopping on the ruins. The areas are kinda disjointed and the map feels a bit like different fights stuck together. No individual moment is too tricky, but there were enough of them that I felt destined to eat a revenant rocket eventually when I tried playing without saves.

MAP08 - "A Blue Shadow": Excellent layout, organic and interconnected, looks good and flows well. Balance leans toward more ammo, less health, which is my preference. Getting pretty sick of these arch-vile & revenant traps though.

[Surreily]

MAP07: Shrine to the Dynamic Years (Athens Time Change Riots) 100% kills, 100% secrets
Phew, what a long title! So anyways, this one is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion. The map is fairly challenging with its brutal traps, especially towards the end. Some of the rooms are pretty unique - there's a room that's basically a 'jump-maze' sort of thing which I liked even if I fell off numerous times because I suck, and another that involves hordes of revenants and cacodemons which I died on once or twice because, again, I suck.

Now, I think it's a mixed bag because there are some areas I don't like - mainly the hallway with the two mini-crushers and the hell knights. I saw the knights teleport in, backed up, and got smooshed. If I'd known about the crushers beforehand, I would have been somewhat prepared for it. Aside from that, I am not a huge fan of caves, and this map has a few cave areas in it, so it didn't really appeal to me very much.

My favorite part of the map was right at the end when the two arch-viles that I mentioned above teleported in to say hello. Big thanks for providing a teleporter that takes me back from the final area too - otherwise, I would have missed both secrets! So, although this isn't my favorite map, I still enjoyed it.