rzh

Trust me, you don't want to make it faster and smaller.

If this was true the world would've been a lot more interesting. Let's say, hypothetically, that I actually had a point to make. ----------------------------------------------------------- Anyways, my first job was in tech support, my second one was working for one of the world's biggest corporations and the last few ones have been retail. I've heard stupid things every single day for the past few years. Not really something that was said, but something stupid that I have witnessed was while working in tech support. Some dude was trying to change his password but because he was on his personal computer I couldn't connect remotely to his PC to oversee him. He tried for 2 hours and 40 minutes and failed every single time despite me repeating every single step every time. It got to the point where the whole office gathered around me to hear the call, and eventually I got clearance from really high up to just connect to his PC anyway and see what's causing the issue because the dude had no other options. The problem was that he was a dumbass. I kept saying 14 characters minimum as a requirement for the password, but somehow, in some absurd logic, that meant for him 7 characters for the password field and 7 characters for the confirm password field. I wish I was joking. I've never witnessed anything that absurd, this was just too insane.

Heretic has the cooler weapons in general, I don't care about performance necessarily, but simply in terms of how it feels they outperform Doom's arsenal for me. Visually they look more impressive and colourful (even the wand, seeing that cross of light forming and fading on an enemy looks cool) and the sounds are generally more interesting. Hexen's are even better though, even the Cleric mace feels like it's crushing a few bones at least with every hit despite it being arguably the weakest weapon in the game.

I like the look and the layout of this map a lot, but I have some criticisms (keep in mind I'm not a big fan of huge maps so I'm not to be taken too seriously): the first room is too dark (at least on my display, not sure about other monitors), this hid away most of the visually interesting stuff and made it hard to navigate without automap the blue key area has some switches that are hard to find (the one below room level especially took me a while to find), so I feel like the path to get to them could stand out a little bit more (it's a huge open room with lots of action so by the end of it I was a bit confused about my surroundings) overall, the map feels a bit too grindy, there's pretty much a constant influx of enemies after the very beginning and after you get far enough into the side rooms with the yellow/ blue keys that lasts until the end, I feel like the number of enemies could match with Doom 2's style more (with its added enemies that spice up the combat a little bit), but here it gets tiring after a while (and I didn't have the patience to get 100% kills haha) As for bugs, I could only find one: the yellow key cyberdemon did not always spawn for me, but I'm not sure why (I played it on Woof with complevel 3/ vanilla Doom). This is also the first map from this WAD that I've played so far because I just got back into Doom and saw it was very, very fresh and it's a bit interesting to me, because it reminds me a lot in some ways of Eviltech, since I don't think I've played anything more recent than that from you that had such clean texture alignments or slaughter-ish gameplay. I also don't think you've ever used Alpha resources so intensely before (keys, weapons, lost souls, projectiles), so it's a very interesting shift in style for me (correct me if I'm wrong though). Amazing sky as usual too! I'm glad to get back into Doom just in time for another Nicolas Monti episode, can't wait to play the whole thing (it's not the same without the MIDIs you use).

Story: Marathon Gameplay: Hexen Soundtrack: Descent

No way, Descent AND OG Saints Row? God damn, what a track record.

The Shores of Hell. It has the best textures and atmosphere out of all the episodes. Second place goes to Knee-Deep, I don't like replaying it because of the easy difficulty and the MIDIs sound grating to me now, but I still like the textures. Inferno is underrated.

When I said "screw it, I already tried Marathon and Myth and loved them, might as well try Halo too" and actually played CE for the first time. Halo is a good game. Haven't tried the rest of the franchise (I do plan on playing through all Bungie titles, not the 343 ones).

I didn't know that, cool. Probably wouldn't have been there if Wolf 2009 wasn't developed by Raven, and most likely a *wink* *wink* from one of the few developers that worked on Heretic/ Hexen and was still working for Raven in the late 00's, kinda like all of the Marathon and Myth references in Halo. And just like in that case, a reference doesn't mean it takes place in the same universe or whatever, it's clearly just easter eggs and fan service, even if it's fun to think about.

I had to pick it, even though I also love Doom 1 and TNT

Then I must've misremembered/ got misinformed. Thank you for clarifying.

I noticed that Heretic and Hexen by default have 8 audio channels. I'm not sure if I'm misremembering but I thought that OG Heretic had already upgraded to 16 and Hexen inherited it too.

I love this megawad, thank you for revisiting it. A very welcome surprise.

No one else makes maps like you do, the architecture in them evokes such a unique feeling, it's like every building you make is pulled out of a dream or a place lost in time. The atmosphere is very strong as usual and I'm really glad to see a custom sky (and an old favorite of mine return). And as someone that played Mr. Smiley Head's Safari as a kid, I liked your joke about it so much I made it my custom title.

TNT, Tom Mustaine and L.A. Sieben have some really memorable tracks.