ETTiNGRiNDER

Sounds like the drawsegs limit is being exceeded (which isn't fatal in vanilla, but does cause a visual error in the form of HOM as if the wall were untextured even when it is).

Once upon a time there was a Quake 2 TC in the works called Perilith. I think the story is it was one of those projects that got over-ambitious, tried to become a standalone game, and then quit completely, but I'm not sure. The main remaining thing of it seems to be this knight model that, if you've played low-budget shareware/freeware games from a particular era, you've probably seen borrowed before, but I think there were at least screenshots and stuff at one point. http://old.perilith.com/pknight/ While I'm mentioning such things, HacX 2 as well. I think that the dev who's still in contact with Doomers said at one point that most/all of what was made for it was irrecoverably junked at this point?

Take none of what I say here as definitive, as I wasn't involved nor do I have direct word from any people who were, but my understanding of the situation has always been that Aliens Quake (and other Quake mods that suffered a similar fate) was somewhat of a "wrong place, wrong time" type of deal where A) while early Doom modding was kind of a "gamer thing" that wasn't that well known outside of the scene, Quake was sort of in the spotlight and there was real concern among companies that user mods would compete with official products, and B) there was, in fact, such a product either recently released or in the works (that probably being Alien Trilogy?) so the legal teams were extra twitchy about it. If they were aware of the Doom mod at that time, they probably ignored it as old news and old tech, not worth stomping on when it had already been in circulation for a few years at that point. I do believe there were some Doom mods back in the day (specifically a Beavis & Butt-Head one?) that got hammered down similarly, but I'm vague on those details, maybe someone can fill me in. I think it was a similar case with the notorious "Beyond Wolfenstein" mod of Wolf3D as well that happened to be on time to attract ire right around when Return to Castle Wolfenstein was coming out. Theoretically, any TC based on a corporate franchise could suffer a similar takedown, but in most cases companies either aren't aware or have weighed the possible negative backlash as not worth what they'd gain out of it. It sometimes seems rather arbitrary what attracts that sort of attention and when.

Your original vision of the Heretic/Hexen series was a trilogy consisting of Heretic-Hexen-Hecatomb. How much of Hecatomb ever got made and how much did the later parts of the series (Hexen 2, Portal of Praevus, Heretic 2) end up diverging from what your vision for the series was?

The Marine training sim thing comes to mind but might not be quite what you're thinking of. Is Twilight Warrior the one you're referring to as "the one bugged in gzdoom"? If not, you might check it out as well but I'm not sure how accessible it is to play these days either.

That thread with the fake Marathon compilation got me thinking about this again. The Witchaven strategy guide from BradyGames. I've never been able to find a copy. Hits for Witchaven guide on places like eBay tend to come up with the "Spellbook and Guide to the Underworld" which is just the game manual under its gimmicky title and not the strategy guide in question. Book sites sometimes list an ISBN for it (ISBN 10: 1566864127 ISBN 13: 9781566864121) but I've never seen them to have a picture of the cover or an available copy on them any time I've looked, either. Even with how niche an interest Witchaven is I think there were some other people looking for this book who might've bragged if they got their hands on it. It seems odd that there's so little remaining evidence of this, you could argue that Witchaven was an unpopular game and no one would've cared about a strategy guide for it, but the Corridor 7 strategy guide is available enough that it's both preserved online and I have a copy for my bookshelf, so I don't entirely buy that argument; would there really have been so few copies in circulation that they're all gone or hidden away somewhere? Or is it possible that the book never actually hit publication? I'm not entirely sure on all the vagaries of how it works but at least some sources seem to suggest to me that it's possible for an ISBN to be assigned on a book that then doesn't actually come out. So even beyond finding a copy, does anyone have any shred of evidence beyond the ISBN code that this book existed? Photos that show it, reviewed or advertised in a magazine somewhere or the like, even anecdotally want to say you had a copy in the past or clearly remember seeing it in the store back in the day, anything?

Check out Eamon. It was a (primarily Apple II but there were a couple of DOS ports) text adventure system with RPG elements that had a whole bunch of modules made for it.

As I recall there was a jwango13 as well, once upon a time I had both of them, but never burned them to disc or anything and it's no longer possible to get either from Wayback anymore either. I still kick myself when I think of them but it was before I really realized the importance of personally archiving anything that might be interesting. I'm honestly not sure if there was anything unique about them beyond the compilation arrangement, though, I'm pretty sure the custom sprites were just a mashup of selections from other sources and the maps may have likewise been borrowed.

You could always use this and then patch it back up to 1.2 using the official patch: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/utils/exe_edit/herdwngr I'm not sure there's actually anything in the HHE patch that makes it incompatible with v1.3 though, is there? Is there demand for minimal ZDoomification patches to load on top of this and the couple other sort of worthwhile HHE-based partial conversions? It's an idea that's crossed my mind but never felt high enough on my "things worth doing" list to have bothered.

You're somewhat misinterpreting what the limit is (it's about the number of sprites to draw in a scene, not things placed on the map in general), but it does exist. It tends to happen more often in Heretic and Hexen, where some of the special effects (powered up Hellstaff in Heretic, frozen corpses shattering in Hexen) can put a lot of sprites in an area at once.

Only ever tried the first one and it's been an age, but I played it through once, and I remember enjoying it but not a whole lot else about it so it was probably "just ok"? One thing that does stand out in my memory as something it did well was escort missions of all things, the MC even lampshades it the first time (when you're capturing some company exec and taking him with you for the info he has or something like that) with comments along the lines of "an escort mission, really, you mean I can't just shoot this guy?"; it was clear that the devs knew that escort missions usually suck and they made an effort to make them better by having the characters you escort actually try to hide somewhere safe when there's fighting instead of just running into the crossfire like a dumbass Speaking of the MC's commentary I guess he was kind of divisive, I remember thinking he tended to be spot on in voicing my thoughts about situations as a player, but I've seen reviews that were like "I hate the MC, he's a complete dick" so maybe that says something about me. I also remember appreciating that there was some boss I was having trouble with to the point that I looked at a walkthrough thinking it was one of those annoying trick bosses that were popular for a while, and the answer was just "nope, you just didn't shoot him enough yet". All in all looking back at my comments in this post as a whole, I'm going to conclude that it was probably a "just dumb fun FPS" that had the misfortune of coming out in an era when people preferred to bitch against those. Although I've seen other people accuse it of having been a Half-Life knockoff which... I didn't see it that way at all personally, beyond there being sci-fi and mad science stuff which is true of a zillion games.

Now, or back then? Nowadays, just about any of the Doom Builder iterations do a good job. In the 90s, good options were indeed fewer than those for Doom, in my experience of messing around with a few of them, WinDEU was probably the best choice but there were some others that saw use too.

The ones available on idgames, so probably mostly the final version but I think I did at least try loading v0.53p to see if it ran any better (it didn't as I recall).

I've tried. It's hard to get it working (I forget all the specifics offhand, but I remember having a dickens of a time, it seems to dislike DOSBox and on my Windows 98 computer I had to use a throttling program because it's made with Turbo Pascal and has the infamous divide by zero bug that the patch for rarely seems to work right and didn't in this case either) and it's even more limited than HHE. Combine that with Hexen, even more than Heretic, having weird hardcoded aspects to entities and functions, and it's not really any wonder that no one did much with it.

I'm not sure how obscure it was at release, but Archangel (the 2002 JoWood one, not any newer game that took the name) seems like it's rather forgotten. Played through it somewhat recently and I thought it was rather cool, although there's definitely a thing or two one could dislike about it. Felt like it was made by people who were fans of Quake and such in their formative years as gamers but also wanted to do something with a more "modern" (for its time) spin with more emphasis on story and RPG-ish elements.