oneselfSelf

6th times the charm... ROFL

I recently finished Wolf 3D and Spear Of Destiny. Not my favorite games but they were enjoyable and I found the challenge of using the lives instead of saving to be even more fun. I liked it so much that I finished both games without any saves. I just replayed through the original episodes of Doom a moment ago and I also did the same thing, didn't save a single time and if I died I just accepted the punishment. Only died twice in the original episodes, I've died maybe 4 or 5 times in Thy Flesh Consumed so far. Haven't felt any need to use a save. Has this happened to anyone else? I know a few people prefer Pistol Starts but this feels much more different.

The way we discuss level design or rather game design in general in modern times was absolutely way different back then. What would be considered "shitty" or a "slog" had no real comparison. If a level was "bad" it was given a pass for being a first timer or not even really looked upon in first place. You could probably find discussions on old Usenet posts about what people considered as the worst levels (A good example could be the reaction to "Colony Ship For Sale, Cheap" from Marathon which one of the designers made a small apology note about it in the sequel.) but in my studies reading gaming magazines I've found that most reviewers and non-hardcore players didn't care too much about level design until years later.

Okay yeah, I am absolutely putting a little too much faith in a company that could always just turn around and shit on everything. Kinda reminds me of a story I hear about now and then.

IMO calling them "this generation's Capstone" is the nicest insult anyone could possibly feel about them. I'm in the belief that nu3D Realms exists to cash in on the boomer shooter craze because it has failed to even release a game without strings attached to it and drama buried within it. Slipgate can't make a stable game for the life of them either. I cannot imagine the mindset that must have been floating around to conclude releasing Kingpin Reloaded in the state it was in other than to declare easy layoffs. It's amazing that somehow out of all of the old company revivals, Apogee is the only one to be completely normal and not try any bullshit.

I'm not sure why I bother getting excited since I can't even play any of them in the first place. My computer ain't a beast, it runs games that would have been considered high tier in 2008 at most. I am stuck just playing older games until I suddenly have a beefier rig and I probably won't even want to play AAA games by then if the industry keeps going in the directing its heading. I'm still baffled about the layoffs Microsoft was dishing out, especially to the studio that made High-Fi Rush. Even more baffling when they made tweets about wanting more games like High-Fi Rush days after the layoffs and then couldn't even answer why the hell they shut down the studio in the first place. Genuinely really sucks to be game developer right now.

I'd like to take back what I said. I'm hype.

I've released three so far this year (and hopefully more) but I've made way more in the past for different games. Doom mapping seems to be the one I can easily feel confident in finishing an idea for but I do want to eventually get back to Quake and Half-Life mapping one day... or maybe I can just stick with Doom forever.

Genuinely I might be getting worn out but I did have some irks with the game that might have added onto that. The level design is actually great with my only one complaint is that having six keys just leads to really long hunts that drag a bit. The Haunting might be my least favorite level for that reason. The weapons seem cool to me but I feel like they are way weaker than they look. Explosives for example sometimes feel like a gamble, I had way too many run ins with Cultists that managed to barely slip by my TNT and blast my body into swiss cheese. The shotgun only feels useful if you right click, the tommy gun is fine, the flare gun I barely used sadly besides on Zombies, and so on and so forth. I don't think I had any issue with the enemies though. Yeah Cultists are bullshit sometimes but they are designed with that intention. They feel like an enemy that can actually go up against the player on their own. Yeah it might have just been me being worn out.

It's weird to think I give Hexen mercy for it's faults and managed to enjoy it but I can't seem to enjoy Blood very much. I don't know why though, I just get bored of it midway through the game. I always wanted to give it a better shot multiple times but I just can't bring myself to play it the whole way through. Does anyone else have this issue with the game? I feel like everyone else really enjoys it but me.

I loath the term "bad game design" because it's usage nowadays does not usually have any meaningful weight to it and more often than not I've seen it be used on things that aren't "bad game design" but rather the person just didn't get the rules of the game and blamed it for being bad rather than acknowledging their own faults. With Eternal I think literally most people just don't want to admit that they don't vibe with the game or just that they weren't suited for the type of gameplay Eternal has, so they up the ante just blame the game instead and act like they have vast knowledge of the DOs and DONTs in game development. They just make an ass of themselves in the process and never learn.

I've learned a lot about PC gaming back in the 90s but I've always seen Mac be cast to the side. Marathon being one of my favorite games ever did get me interested in other games made exclusively for Macs but it got me thinking about how Mac users, or Apple as well, were able to keep up with the rapid advancement of computer hardware especially in a time when was Quake coming out. It never seemed like the Mac was built to run games beyond the most basic ones.

I'll try to throw in a map for this, I've had some creative burn out recently but I'll muster up something small probably

Honestly I think both sides had some unfortunate circumstances and I do not blame the original Blood team for bailing. I cannot imagine the stress Ken had to go through while developing the Build Engine with three whole games being developed on top of it. All handled by separate teams that, just based on the text file alone, didn't really communicate whatsoever. Not only that but the second coming of Digital Christ, John Carmack, was about to unleash the Quake engine onto the world so they needed to act fast before the spotlight gets ripped from them. It's amazing that those games even came out, let alone a few months apart.

I don't exactly have a set of techniques, the first map I posted started a single scenario I thought would be neat and the rest was ad-libbed. No real planning, just winging it the whole way through. I want to genuinely change that though eventually.

UDB is genuinely the only thing really holding me back from using Linux. It's too good for me to really let go. While my first map editor was Euerka back when I was using a Raspberry Pi as a personal computer, I doubt I'd remember anything from when I used it and it would be such a struggle for me to even get used to it after the luxury of using UDB.

I hope I can be proven wrong then, until then I won't think much of it

I said it before in a different post awhile back but genuinely I don't think I'll be interested in this one. Maybe I'll look into it a bit but Eternal wasn't exactly my cup of tea and I'm sure the game will just be Eternal 2 gameplay-wise.

Are you sure? Because the original covers do have the Durandal subtitle in it. The XBLA version dropped the "2" and called it "Marathon Durandal".

I refused to check this thread because I wasn't exactly the most fond of the "caveman speak" gimmick but I am suddenly glad I did now seeing the complete 180 this has taken

Oh yay it got fixed!

The W'rkncacnter ain't nothing to me. They couldn't even consume one very sleepy Battleroid.

Do you think people would have enjoyed it as much as people enjoyed the Doom we got? Was Tom Hall really cooking with what he had in mind or would it have been a massive flop? Personally after doing a lot of studying of every alpha build available, I do not think that it would been a huge deal as the series is right now. Too ambitious in some aspects, too boring in others, and some more realized in Rise Of The Triad. My biggest issue, which I'm happy was improved way better over time, was just having really big ass flat "realistic" maps all the time with routes that kind of go nowhere. I cannot imagine enjoying going through them on top of the other mechanics that were planned for the game, like how there was supposed to be five different shields for particular resistance to things or six whole episodes for the game. It just seemed way too much and I couldn't imagine Doom going past the cult following status had the game been like what Hall planned.

Weirdly I don't often play custom Megawads, mostly just singular custom levels. I've been meaning to get around to playing a few. Last one I remember finishing was "Doom 2 In City Only" which I had a genuine blast with. That being said I don't have a map that I wouldn't want to revisit from any of the official Doom maps. Hell I don't even mind the city levels in Doom 2 anymore, they barely even feel like the chore most make them out to be.

Alright before it gets out of hand and someone really tries to find this, I need to admit that this is not real and is merely a tribute I created for those crappy shovelware packs like D!Zone. I find them really fascinating and I don't ever think Marathon ever had shovelware made for it, so made a mockup of what it possibly could have looked like if it did. Had this been real though I think it would have been called M!Zone but I wanted to make it obvious that it was a fake so I used a different name. I don't think WizardWorks ever went off the "!Zone" branding.