Ashley_Pomeroy

A bit of Googling suggests that Simon H Garlick went on to found NZGames.com, a New Zealand gaming forum listed in that country's national library(!): https://natlib.govt.nz/records/32385724 "Gaming spoilers and news items written primarily by Simon H. Garlick. Some discussion of New Zealand software developments, including information about Sidhe and Path of Exile, but main focus is on Quake. Includes discussion forums and links to New Zealand and Australian sites of interest." It started in 1996 and still seems to have a bit of activity. The Simon Garlick in Doom 3 is Simon R Garlick... but Doom 3 is set in the future, so perhaps it's his great-great-grandchild. I always remember emailing Jeffrey Bird, the chap who wrote Origwad, and actually getting a reply, because he had the same job! I think I added that to the Doom Wiki's page about him: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Origwad "Thus he was able, in 2009, to license Origwad for use in a community megawad of retooled 1994 levels." That's the thing about Doom. It'll never die. And all those who sailed the big ship of Doom will live forever as well.

Back when lockdown was a thing I decided to tick a few things off my list of things, including building a modular synth, which I still fire up regularly and jam with, viz: Most of that is performed with Mutable Instruments Plaits' FM model, but it's not being performed live (there are several layers).

I haven't played it, but I remember reading good things about... a game. From the 2000s. A bit like the later Far Cry games, with open-ended gameplay, but much earlier. It was apparently full of bugs but had an unusually large scope for a low-budget game. It was called... called... Boiling Point: Road to Hell, a Ukranian game published by Atari in 2005, recently re-released on Steam: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_Point:_Road_to_Hell It had a 25x25km open world. It was infamous at the time for the patch notes, which included "fixed: jaguar floats across screen at treetop level" and "fixed: size of the moon". Is it any good? I have no idea, but apparently it was at the very least ambitious. I've been playing The Talos Principle 2 recently, and it reminded me of an old 16-bit game called Tower of Babel, by Pete Cooke, who was one of those 8-bit programming legends who seemed to fade away in the 16-bit era. Technically it's not an obscure 2000s PC game - it came out for the ST, Amiga, and Archimedes in 1989 - but it's really obscure and I remember it fondly. I finished it! It's one of those puzzle games where you control a bunch of robots who each have a different skill, and you could program them to perform actions in sequence, like the old Big Trax toy. Google throws up 49 results for "pete cooke tower babel" although I note that there is an iOS remake. But it doesn't capture the original game's nocturnal atmosphere. It came out around the same time as Captive and Archipeligos but seemed to just vanish into obscurity. The third thing I can suggest is Kane and Lynch: Dog Days, which is probably more famous now as the failed sequel to a game that resulted in a reviewer being unfairly sacked, but it had an unusually bleak, downbeat tone and a really distinctive look and feel. There's nothing quite like it. The video game equivalent of, I dunno, Chris Morris' Jam.

A few years ago I visited Berlin. I would show my younger self this thing, which blew my mind when I was there: After you've finished a bottle of Bepis or Conk or whatever you bring it back to the shop, put it in the machine, the machine spins it around, and you get a voucher for 25c! Which means that if you bring four bottles back you get 1€. That's right, alt-gr plus 4 is €. Thank you, the alt-gr key. I have overlooked you in the past. Taken you for granted. But you are indispensable whenever I want to write €. The thing is that I don't speak German. I was terrified before using the machine that it would flash up an error message or ask me to enter an account number. But no! No! It just worked. I remember wondering if I could make a profit. Perhaps involving derivatives or futures contracts. Or if I could grab loads of bottles from the street and make a profit. But I couldn't find any bottles. What would happen if I stuck my dick in it? Would the machine break? Is this how German kids learn about sex? Etc. Yes, it's a stupid thing. A trivial thing. And when I was young it was actually quite common to get money back on milk bottles etc. But it worked.

My left-field choice would be ArmA III. I remember enjoying Operation Flashpoint when it came out back in 2001, because it was a major leap at the time. A military game with huge, open maps, realistic combat distances, realistic damage, realistic sights, etc. On top of this the player was free to achieve the objectives however they wanted, which from what I recall often involving stealing a BMP and blowing things up from a distance. The only game that remotely resembled it was Delta Force, which was much simpler. This was back when the notion of a game having a definite completion time - "it has twenty hours of gameplay" - was alien and weird. I remember at the time thinking that Flashpoint couldn't possibly work on a games console, because it required a high-resolution monitor and fine mouse control. And the engine was sheer brute force - massive draw distance with lots of polygons. Whereas console games use all kinds of tricks to reduce the draw distance, reduce the player's field of view, reduce the amount of polygons the player can see at any one time. I learn from the internet that the original Flashpoint actually was ported for the OG Xbox, and there was an attempt to bring the later games to consoles - Codemasters released Dragon Rising for the PS3 generation - but the results were pretty poor and didn't sell well. As such ArmA III is PC-only, and will probably remain PC-only, because it just doesn't work as a console game. The gameplay involves running behind cover for ten minutes before being shot dead by a distant speck. It demonstrates that there is a market for one realistic military shooter, probably not two.

In fact Paul Turnbull was the chap who originally announced Evilution on Usenet, back on 11 October 1995: https://groups.google.com/g/rec.games.computer.doom.editing/c/is-NnpsIwyc/m/yriLKYZxHHYJ NB I realise I'm replying to an old post, but this is a perennial thread and I'm reading it in backwards order. Ye Gods it's fascinating. It's full of things about Doom that I've only just found out! Because that's what it is. I was always curious about the Evilution Usenet controversy because it happened at almost exactly the same time I got on the internet, but I remember largely avoiding Usenet back then. In homage to id Software, we have chosen today, DOOMsday, to announce release of TNT: Evilution in "2 weeks". Reading through other Usenet threads from the same period it appears that about four hours before uploading the finished products to ftp.cdrom.com TNT had an email from John Romero offering to buy it, and the rest is infamy. There's a funny rant in that thread from J Box, which ends with "well Id I know rank you down with Midway", which stings even nineteen years later. You know, in an age when games cost £54.99 and are then followed with £60 worth of DLC there's something heartbreakingly old-fashioned about Simon H Garlick's objection: "You expect us to _pay_ for a PWAD? Did you pay for your level editors? For the tips and skills you picked up in this forum? For the advice you received from other players? When other players have made suggestions or criticism, have you paid them consultancy fees? Did the authors of great pwads such as Aliens-TC!, trinity.wad, uac_dead.wad, raven.wad, asd2.wad, 2diehell.wad, boothill.wad, return01.wad, etc. ask anyone to pay them for it? You may get a _few_ dollars - although Doom will never die, Quake is just around the corner - but is it worth the contempt and disgust of the entire Doom community?" He was right though. Doom will never die. It seems that DOOMsday was a reference to the launch party for Doom II, which took place a year earlier (on 10 October 1994, but presumably it lasted well into the next morning because John Romero was there say no more): https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Doomsday_party I was fascinated by this part: "A number of protesters were also attracted to the event, coming there to confront id Software over the controversial and unscientific idea that violence in video games could potentially lead to real-life violence or corrupt the minds of children. One such protester interrupted Jay Wilbur's opening remarks but was silenced by a response from Shawn Green and others." I wonder what Shawn Green and others said? "Suck it down"? "Don't go near that man in the white suit otherwise he'll make you his bitch"? Usenet is a bizarre relic of a period when people used their real name on the internet(!) and their actual unhidden email addresses, and everybody's home page was something something dot edu forward slash tilde bsmith. Somewhere in this mess of a post is something I just found out.

Ricochet. Just Ricochet. The existence of it. It's one of a tiny number of original games made by Valve - it came out in the post-Half Life / pre-Steam era. It's so obscure it doesn't even have a wikipedia page. Technically it's a Half-Life mod, but it was released officially by Valve and is still on sale on Steam for £4.95. Here's the most substantive article I can find about it: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=137883201 Steam itself has some oddities that jumped out at me. In theory it's also a video hosting platform. For a while you could buy Max Mad, the film: https://store.steampowered.com/app/398330/Mad_Max_1979/ It was apparently a promotional deal with the game that included all of the other Mad Max films: https://www.engadget.com/2015-09-01-steam-mad-max-films.html And one of the earliest titles, a Flash spin-off of Half-Life called Codename Gordon, was discontinued when the developers went bust and their website was bought up by a porn company, although you can still install the game: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1199430851

Not so much lost, as hard to find, but NASA's historical image galleries have always been a mess. I assume it's because NASA was one of the first organisations to embrace what was then the world wide web, so they have the pioneer's curse. The organisation's images have always been split between different websites run by different bits of the US government, and latterly Flickr for some reason. It's particularly frustrating because it's fairly easy to search for an individual image - NASA has a consistent, multi-decade-old image naming scheme - but actual structured galleries are hard to come by. In particular there's a curious dearth of images from the Skylab missions, and all of the Shuttle missions pre-1994 or so. The crew of Skylab 4 were in orbit for 84 days, but NASA only has a couple of dozen images readily available: https://images.nasa.gov/search?q=skylab 2&page=1&media=image&yearStart=1920&yearEnd=2023&keywords=SKYLAB 4 There's something depressing about Skylab. There's the "we're not going to the moon any more" aspect. There's the fact that the interior colour scheme was brown and pale green and the astronauts wore brown uniforms and looked exhausted all the time. The fact that the interior was so large they had to use a flash, which makes all of the pictures look like a low-budget early-70s BBC television drama. The astronauts trained for Apollo 18-20, but they were cancelled, so they ended up stuck in a broken fuel tank for two months growing a beard. Like in Dark Star. And this was the early-to-mid-70s, when everything was depressing. Johnson Space Centre used to have a simple but easy-to-use image gallery, but it's now defunct: http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/ I mention it because I was curious about STS-5, which was unusual. Columbia originally had ejection seats, because STS-1 to STS-4 only had two crewmembers. Commander and Pilot. The general consensus was that the seats were useless during lift-off - the astronauts would either have been toasted by the SRB plume or killed by hitting the Mach 15+ airflow - and possibly useful during landing but generally not worth the trouble. But for STS-5 alone there were four crew, so the ejection seats were disabled. And for that one mission the Commander and Pilot had to wear a peculiar uniform that consisted of the pre-Challenger disaster blue jumpsuit plus the early gold-coloured launch escape suit. The only image of this configuration on the internet appears to be this, which isn't even officially there any more, and because the JSC's website is no more - and because it used CGI-script-genreated galleries and not flat galleries, the internet archive doesn't have a copy of the thumbnail page.

You know, I remember playing a legitimate map several years ago that had a puzzle involving barrels - you had to gently nudge them with pistol shots, and they were set up so that if you shot the right barrels you could get out. It came from the early, prototypical days when a lot of Doom level designers were fans of Dungeons and Dragons / The Bard's Tale / grid-paper map designs, and also Sierra Adventures-style puzzles. "Click button / 'you slice your hand open on the button, you are dead'". That kind of puzzle. A bygone kind of gameplay that I'm not particularly nostalgic for. I can't remember what it was called. But it was real, it existed, and it wasn't supposed to be a joke. There's something about the heady days of 1994 - some of those maps had ambition.

I recently bought the remastered version of Quake. The first mission pack, Scourge of Armagon, has a power-up that spawns a monster to fight by your side. The conjuring process clouds their minds, so they're like a big clumsy dog. The monster follows you around the level and fights to the death to protect you. Like best buddies. Ranger and Shambler adventures dot com. One hundred years Ranger and Shambler, forever and ever, Ranger and Shambler adventures a hundred years dot com. The outside world is our enemy. But the game still treats the monster as a baddy internally, so in order to get the full kill count you have to kill your friend at the end of the map. To this day I've only played the first couple of levels of Armagon because I just can't do it. It's like learning how to butcher a rabbit, but worse because the rabbit is your pal, your partner, your battle buddy. I just can't do it.

It's the spaceship from GALAXIA.WAD, from 1994: Spaceship escape-ship thing. The level is inspired by a Czech comic, and I did a bit of googling and found this, which makes me wonder if the design was based on the little spaceship in the strip: The big spaceship looks like a rip-off of the Battlestar Galactica, and the overall thrust of the plot resembles The Black Hole. I wonder if it was based on a Czech TV show that used stock footage from Galactica?

I'm going to take a long drag from my pipe at this point and put on my comfortable slippers. My recollection is that the two things that separate Doom from modern (e.g. post-Quake, so not objectively modern) FPSes is the speed disparity and the monster count. I remember being disappointed with Quake because you fought a couple of tough monsters rather than hundreds of weak ones, but the AI and tactics weren't any smarter, so the gameplay felt slower. That was one of the reasons Half-Life felt fresh - it had reloading, which introduced a tiny tiny bit of tactics, and the monster AI was a lot better. You had to sometimes back off and reload, as if you were storming a room. And then a couple of years later there was Rainbow Six and Hidden & Dangerous etc, which tried to emulate real tactics albeit that it was several years before that kind of thing felt natural. I think it took until the invention of cover (in Kill.Switch (2003)) and games like Mirror's Edge (2009) where your character moved and felt like a living being rather than a camera floating in a void, comma, until FPSes lost the arcadey feel. But is that Doom? On the one hand the fast pace and huge monster counts of Doom are refreshing because there isn't anything quite like them - not Serious Sam, which is just big arenas - and the other hand... I can't think of a downside. The simplicity is what makes Doom stand out. It's interesting to compare Rage (2011) with Doom (2016). They're obviously produced by different versions of Id, but I remember thinking that Rage felt at times like a distant prototype of the Doom reboot, but one of the things that irritated me most was weapon reloading. Without a cover system or any tactical elements there are no natural pauses, so weapon reloading in Rage is just irritating whereas in a purpose-built tactical game it might work. Doom didn't have reloading and I didn't miss it. The other thing that irritates me about Rage in retrospect is that despite having dialogue choices and role-playing elements the main character has zero... not even zero charisma, he has zero presence, whereas THE DOOMSLAYER has personality. I have to make an effort to remember Rage. I felt that Doom (2016) had a nice balance between monster/player speeds (you're slower, but so are the monsters) and monster numbers (perhaps inevitable to accommodate console owners) although at the same time I felt sad that the large-scale 10,000-monster slaughter gameplay of some of the best Doom levels hasn't become the norm.

I've always disliked it for much the same reason. Individual levels are great fun - Map11: Hunted is a classic, Map18: Neurosphere is hectic but gives you room to move around, ditto Map19: NME - but then there are maps like Map15: The Twilight, with respawning chaingunners and narrow corridors, and what was the one that I remember in particular? Oh yeah, Map10: Onslaught. That's the map I think of when I think of Plutonia, because there's a chaingunner directly behind you at the start. It's just so cheap and obvious - it feels like a parody of a Plutonia map but it actually is Plutonia map. The map is cramped, it has another respawning chaingunner trap, it's just irritating to play. On the positive side it feels more polished than TNT. Some of TNT's maps play like 1994/1995 shovelware. As you point out it is at least consistent. I just didn't find it entertaining.

Well I never. If you shoot one of the panels on the left, inside the crusher, the floor rises up. I didn't realise that. It looks really odd though, especially if the crusher has already been activated. I wonder if it's a bug? I'd forgotten how many crushing ceilings there were in E2M4. The others are very close to the Barons of Hell and I used to love luring them into the crushers. My and my friends used to play that level a lot back in the day because it's fairly large and non-linear. I remember that it was part of the attract mode demo rotation in one of the earlier versions of Doom. Is the eating machine the only example of a piece of actual machinery in the original Doom levels? Obviously most of the E1 maps have computer banks and objects that are supposed to be electronics of some kind, and there are lots of crushing ceilings, but this is the only thing where the crushing ceiling looks like a deliberate human design and not just random nonsense. I like to think it was an industrial press that the demons have turned into a trap because they're mean. The more I think about the crushing ceilings in Doom the less sense they make. They look too regular to be demon-made, but their placement makes no sense from a human point of view, unless the UAC loved playing pranks on the workforce. Containment Area makes a little bit of sense if you imagine that they're supposed to be blast doors.

It'll be interesting to see how he explains that the final boss is John Romero's severed head, and that you have to blow it up with a rocket launcher to win the game. "Now, little lady, this is your chance to make John Romero your bi... to win the game. This is your chance to win the game."