Hell Revealed II

Some of you have by now gotten used to the way I post without regards to what news item I'm posting under. If you haven't yet, deal.
Linguica has asked me to browse /newstuff weekly and put up descriptions and whatnot of what's new. These are not really reviews, more of just a "heads up." So, here's the New Stuff for Sunday, 19 March, 2000.

The Agony and the Ecstasy - file - A 3-map romp for Doom2 by Aussie Doomer Chris Lloyd. Most of the levels are in sort of a techno-industrial/metal2/brick/stone combination, and appear to take place in lots of underground tunnels. There are a few tricks that would've been groundbreaking back in '95 or '96 though now I just think "Ehhh I know how he did that..." Still kinda fun to play.

Demonfear - file - Here's what ZDoom had to say about this new 32-level megawad:
<center>ZDoom Fatal Error
9725 errors encountered during texture generation
Getlasterror = 0</center>
The author lists a beta tester in his credits, but apparently not a very good one.

Entrance - file - Newcomer Joel Sheehan's freshman wad. Kinda reminds me of the wad everyone would make when all they've got for inspiration is Knee Deep in the Dead and nothing but Hell on Earth for textures. The author does avoid all the usual newbie pitfalls--everything appears to be aligned correctly and he even remembers to unpeg his doortrak sidedefs, something even the greats usually neglect. The map isn't as cool to look at as, say, Darkening E2, but it has the kind of enjoyable simplicity I haven't seen since the demo .WAD that came with DEU.

Doom .MUS Player v.0.25 - file - The Netherlands (well, Belgium, anyway) gave us Fab and Boris, and now they've given us this: a .MUS player, apparently written in QBASIC, that can extract and play the first six .MUS tracks from doom2.wad. I don't like to shoot anyone down but this is a DMAUD-era utility, sort of like showing up to the Persian Gulf in a triplane. I will refrain from bitching only because it's good to see people working in the community, no matter what they're doing. :-)

Shell Shock planet one - file - A deathmatch wad. Since I have no access to other players (and no bots) I can't judge it. Doesn't LOOK as sophistocated as many new wads, but that's not generally an indicator of how well it plays...might be worth a look.

Strife Music Wad - file - A wad featuring the first nine music tracks from Strife. Enjoy.

There are a few more wads up right now that I don't feel like checking out. I feel like watching TV and going to sleep. I'll get the rest tomorrow, sometime (as well as anything that gets reviewed between now and then).
--Levendis

This is all well and good but I sort of wanted you to email this stuff to me so everyone visiting DW would see it :P

"I aimed to provide 32 short, sharp shocks for Doom 2 that were both highly playable and visually impressive" That is what the great Adam Windsor says about it and he definately succeded! I have never had a problem when running his releases in the dfreax series so I bet that is just a zdoom screwup and nothing else. It was meant for doom2.exe anyways so stick to that

Hey, the idea of listing all WADs in /newstuff is really cool! But please say how big is the file in size!

lazy ass bastards :p

Note that in the "engine" line of the Demonfear text file, it says "Doom2" not "zdoom". The WAD runs fine with doom2.exe, which is the executable it was designed for and tested with. Also, calling a WAD "new" when most of the levels are four years old is perhaps a bit inaccurate :-)

As I stated in my e-mail reply to you, Capellan, any wad that runs with Doom ought to run with Boom, and therefore all the ports that are based on it (MBF, SMMU, ZDoom, RoRDoom). Even if it's not ZDoom-compatible, which is possible although something I can't comment on, why'd it make wintex barf? The errors file generated when I ran the wad checker was gigantic.

I'd really like to play your levels, once you decide to update it so modern ports can run it.
--Levendis

The operative phrase below is of course "ought to run". :-) The fact is (and I don't pretend to know why) that it appears dmonfear.wad runs fine with Doom2.exe, but not with whatever version of zdoom it is that you are using. Or at least, my original wad file does. Has anyone else downloaded the WAD and had trouble with the source port they are using? I suppose it is possible the file on ftp.cdrom.com is corrupted somehow. In the mean time, I will run dmonfear.wad in my copies of the various source ports (including zdoom 1.21) and see if I get similar crashes.

hehehe... j/k... LIve long and prosper Chro ;)