Grain of Salt

FWIW, the Demonstar games are essentially an offbrand version of the Raiden games* (vaguely similar to Jazz Jackrbabit 1 and Sonic), except with much less evil gameplay (in Raiden, as usual for arcade shmups, you have 1 hp and 3 lives for the entire game, and the opposition you face basically requires careful study if you want to have a chance of beating it without numerous continues). So if you like demonstar you have a bunch more games to check out that you might like (particularly there's an old windows port of Raiden 2 which has selectable difficulty and options for more lives iirc, so it ends up being very close to a demonstar game. but with better art. although it has a weird stretched aspect ratio which is pretty distracting if you've seen the correct way the game looks. you could also just play raidens 1, 2 and DX on mame) * "What are the actual similarities?" well I'm glad you asked. Here's a list of the gameplay elements both Raiden and Demonstar have: Red and blue ships for player 1 and player 2, which look veeeery similar. Weapon powerup item that shifts between 3 colors and spiral around the screen. One color is a wide spray of yellow projectiles, another is a fast projectile that fires straight up, like a laser. Missile powerup that shifts between 2 colors, one of which is aimed missile and the other fires straight up but theoretically does more damage. Missiles fire at the same time to your main attack and are like a parallel weapon system. Bomb powerup that shifts between 2 colors, one of which is a scatter bomb that explodes around you and the other is a projectile that fires straight up and then explodes a little way from your ship, taking longer to go off but theoretically doing more damage (in all raiden and demonstar games this bomb is pretty useless, heh) You take off from a floating aircraft runway thing at the start of stage 1 If you look at the HUDs they even have the same information in the same place for some reason (in fairness it's common to have these things in roughly those places in arcade shmups I guess) To answer the question, I do like the demonstar games though. As others have said, they're that same chilled out PC shmup style as Raptor. I think Raptor has better art and music, but Demonstar possibly has slightly less nothingy gameplay. SM1 and SM2 also greatly improve on Raptor and demonstar 1 in that they made each stage visually unique.

Some of the art is quite nice. A lot of the ideas are cool. The level design seems alright. It's just the completely non-functional engine and lack of polish that make it unplayable. It's like playing Hover for windows 95, but with new sprites. When you play hexen you can tell what's happening.

I had this old idea of a trap where a conveyor belt outside the map gives the player every weapon in succession, so they're forced swapping weapons for about 20 seconds or something like that.

This one definitely rings a bell

Yeah, I was gonna say Korendian, even though he doesn't play doom much anymore, just quake. Which is alright since it turned out his quake videos are lots of fun tbh. Have some links, in case anyone doesn't know about Koren's alternate channel https://www.youtube.com/@korendian/videos https://www.youtube.com/@KorendianB/videos My favorite Koren videos are probably this playthrough of Warpspasm ("the Sunder of quake", allegedly) on a hidden, mostly-untested difficulty mode:

The weird ramifications of E4 retconning that rabbit to being "your pet rabbit daisy": You have a pet rabbit on Earth despite living longterm on Phobos. The demons somehow found out this rabbit is your rabbit. The demons located your rabbit. The demons specifically killed your rabbit and placed its corpse near where the exit from E3M8 would spit you out, just to be mean. The demons knew you would beat the spider mastermind and their main concern was how to mess with you afterwards.

Almost no one balances for nightmare, because making sure it's possible on nightmare would usually result in making it too easy on UV. Nightmare isn't just harder, it's *inconsistently* harder (some parts are about the same, some parts are now impossible), and it involves gameplay dynamics that never come up in the other skill levels (infinitely respawning monsters, much faster monster reactions, some monsters fire so frequently they don't move far from their starting point). Finally, some people do play on nightmare, but it's a bit different to UV because you can never be sure what you're trying is going to be possible. It's kinda like spelunking into an unknown cave. Why am I writing a proper reply to this, I came here to make a bad joke....

My personal favorites in no particular order: Gusta Erik Alm Darkwave Ribbiks (hi ribbiks) Didy Timeofdeath Danne Memfis Honorable mentions: Insane Gazebo Mechadon Eternal Death-Destiny Benjogami Tourniquet Bonus quake mappers: Mazu ijed Riktoi Smilecythe Newhouse Fairweather Quasiotter SR

I used the red stone of Aja to become a duck who can absorb water, and now I'm pretty much invincible

absorbs the water and becomes stronger

Barons are great, idk why anyone dislikes them. Sure they're not fun if a mapper tries to get you to kill multiple barons with a single shotgun, but in that context neither are cyberdemons, archviles... pretty much anything. Do you also think cyberdemons aren't fun??? Do you think that????? What's so bad about infighting and close quarters pressure..... :(

Riktoi what are you doing here :0

I'm sorry...

"It's cats, bitch" - Britney Spears, maybe.

Ribbisk has edited a few minor things and uploaded an updated version of the wad. Here's a summary of changes: Updated version same link as before: https://www.rbkz.net/doom/wormwood5.zip. Unless we find a gamebreaking bug, this is the final version. The update does desync existing demos of 03 and probably desyncs 01 and 02 too despite how minor the changes were. So if anyone wants to watch Maribo's FDAs of the previous version, or any other demos that might've been recorded before now, here is that version: wormwood5_old.wad.zip