Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Retro Games > Early FPS Megathread: the kids need to learn about TekWar sooner or later

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An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

ddraigcymraeg posted:

Hey, just a heads up guys, Scoredoom is updated to 3.0.
ScoredoomST also updated to 0.97c2R5.
Bunch of gameplay enhancements & bug fixes, and add-on pack now feels closer to Doom, enemy-wise.

more here:
http://www.scoredoom.com/

I don't think anyone in the world has as much fun with Scoredoom as I do (and the high score boards reflect that). The guy who makes it is pretty awesome, too--it started crashing after the most recent update, and he responded to my email right away to help me fix it. Thanks, BilboHicks!

# ¿ Jul 8, 2011 06:33

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 15:25

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Scoredoom has an option for hardcore mode, which is just no saving mid-level, and it makes the game a hundred times more fun. Especially with something like Alien Vendetta. And the online hi-score tables let everyone know how awesome I am! :haw:

# ¿ Jul 28, 2011 14:30

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Misri Halek was an absolute nightmare on Hardcore mode, that much is for sure. gently caress that level forever.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2011 21:47

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Chinook posted:

Oh, yeah, reminds me of PK-Unzip, a program I used in 1995 or so on my 486 Acer. So it's just used by Doom engines, I get it.

Edit: So, scoredoom. I love it, but I feel bad because I used jumping in making my first recorded score:
http://www.scoredoom.com/profile.php?playername=chinook

I forgot that I had jumping bound and hopped up to get a health pack that should've been out of my reach. Shouldn't jumping be somehow disabled in scoredoom to prevent cheesing levels? Currently, it sure isn't. I feel dirty.

Nah, I jump all the time. I don't really feel like it's cheating, since there are plenty of wads that disable jumping entirely, so other than the basic ones (Doom/2/Final) I feel that if they didn't want me to jump, they'd disable it.

http://www.scoredoom.com/profile.php?playername=Tahlkora

It's great to have some new blood! Scoredoom is one of my favorite things to happen to this game in years.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2011 14:59

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Dominic White posted:

It's part of the Delta Invasion pack for Skulltag. You can find a working mirror here.

You'll want dtinv3-m.pk3 & dtinv3c.pk3

My question stands though - other than UT&T, Armageddon and Alpha/Delta (Alpha in included in Delta invasion), any other good Invasion packs of note?

Medieval Invasion for Heretic is pretty decent, albeit not-Doom. Or maybe I'm just so starved for Invasion maps that I'll play anything!

# ¿ Aug 15, 2011 02:58

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

manero posted:

Once I finished that map, I spawned on map26, and there's no goddamn way I'm gonna finish this game on UV. It was a nice run, Alien Vendetta. Well played.

Map26 (Dark Dome) is literally one of the most fun and memorable levels I've ever played. Give it a shot, I enjoyed the hell out of working my way through it, bit by bit.

And then I did it on hardcore (no quicksaves!)

# ¿ Aug 16, 2011 03:18

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

I know the Scoredoom guy reads this thread, so if he or anyone else could answer this question, that'd be fantastic.

Is there any way to skip a level and not have it ruin the online hi-scoring? I'm running through Alien Vendetta on hardcore with the add-on pack, and Misri Halek (that pyramid level) is such a pile of terrible rear end and I'm sick of it and just want to keep going, but I want the rest of the levels to score too.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2011 07:07

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

HardDisk posted:

Take a look on the automap.

http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/MAP20:_Misri_Halek_%28Alien_Vendetta%29

I actually liked this map, it was very pretty and challenging, but it just went on for too long and it kinda slows down to a crawl by the end.

By far the worst level in AV. It's a slow, boring slog, a vast pace difference from the rest of AV, and its insane length makes hardcore runs an absolute nightmare. I've attempted this map so many times, only to die a half-hour into it, and I'm so done with it.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2011 19:48

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

^^ gently caress the Greek hub. Those archers that take ages to kill are obnoxious as hell.

Yodzilla posted:

How is Hexen 2? I remember being amazed by it in screenshots back in the day but never got a chance to play it. Maybe that'll be my next oldie.

Very similar to Hexen, in that's it's still 'class-based' and each class only has four weapons. However, there's a sort of level-up system, and each class gets two unique perks at levels 3 and 6. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but if you absolutely hated Hexen, you probably won't much like the sequel.

It does have some pretty rad bossfights, though.

# ¿ Aug 26, 2011 01:38

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Zeether posted:

I'm stuck in Hexen II.

First of all, I can't seem to find any of the things that open stuff like the mill and that one spell book. And then there's this:

How do I get on to that ledge? I've tried running and jumping and it wouldn't work.

It does work, I've run and jump to that ledge numerous times. Aim for the left side, I guess--I've never had trouble getting up there. You don't need to, though, there's just an item or two.

# ¿ Nov 28, 2011 22:13

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Tried going through it on UV without quicksaving and the SD addonpack, got up to map10 before a zombie with a repeater killed me.

I'll try again later. This is way more fun than it should be.

# ¿ Dec 6, 2011 17:04

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

SnipeBob posted:

I've been re-visiting Doom with the help of Brutal Doom and it's been a blast. I've downloaded some WADs that I've never got to playing. I really enjoyed Scythe and so far Scythe 2 is great.

Is anyone else greatly annoyed by Alien Vendetta? It seems that most of it's "difficulty" is putting up with cheap shots like trapped power-ups and ambushes that you have little chance of surviving unless you know ahead of time they are there. I'm only up to map 10 or so, does it continue on like this?

It doesn't get any easier, if that's what you're asking. I haven't played around much with Brutal Doom so I don't know a whole lot about it, but I've run through AV like ten times because it's one of my favorite megawads, and I never really felt like it was "unfair" or anything.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2012 20:46

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Neo Rasa posted:

The problem with Hexen II is that they made these incredibly detailed huge levels with minimal hand holding, but didn't give you any way of interacting with the environment beyond "hit thing" and "walk into switch." So it gets super tedious as you end up having to roll around destroying every object that exists in each level to figure out how to proceed.

And the loving nine tiles puzzle in the Egypt area is the worst puzzle ever because it MAKES NO SENSE.

I really liked Hexen II overall, though.

# ¿ May 3, 2012 01:08

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

I really don't like Brutal Doom, either, so as a result, I just don't use it. Problem solved! Playing all of those superhard wads on hardcore mode is enough challenge for me forever, thanks, and I'm not all that interested in the gameplay "improvements". If other people crave jumping imps and lots of gibs and blood, great for them, go for it!

# ¿ Jun 3, 2012 23:41

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Dominic White posted:

Have there been any good Skulltag invasion level packs released in the past 6-9 months? I recall that there were quite a few in the works, but many stalled out or got sank by drama. Not seen much good since Armageddon Invasion and Alpha/Delta.

There was a Heretic one that was pretty fun even in half-finished form, but I think it stalled out too. Pretty disappointing, as I really, really love Invasion.

# ¿ Jun 6, 2012 22:23

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Mak0rz posted:

I find it difficult to believe someone actually said this with sincerity.

Compared to Thy Flesh Consumed? Yeah, D2 is a hell of a lot better.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2012 19:45

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Paul Pot posted:

painkiller's better than most of the actual games from the "old school era", shame about the boring level design & lovely netcode

It really isn't. The ultra linearity absolutely ruins what could be a fun game, but it's just arena after arena after arena.

# ¿ Jul 11, 2012 19:46

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Open the walls with the little lights in front of them.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2012 16:52

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

SavageMessiah posted:

I just blew through Episode 1 on UV, brutal doom, no saves, pistol start only (using the wad I made and posted at the end of last page). I've never done that before, it's pretty fun - people should try it if they've never done it!

Playing without saves in general is the only way to play, for me--it really ramps up the difficulty and forces you to learn levels to know what items you can pick up when, or whether you might need to save them for later on.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2012 05:49

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

WHOIS John Galt posted:

So I've been doing some Doom poo poo, and some Quake II poo poo, and I decided I wanted to fight bad guys in castles. Like, with magic and poo poo. And like big sprawling hub levels, and it would be awesome if it were like, winter or fall obviously sometimes. I've never played Hexen or Heretic before, is one of those for me? Or is there some TC for them or Doom or something that fits my description better.

Or should I go play King's Quest V.

Hexen is definitely big and sprawling and magic and castles. It gets a lot of hate for being a switch-hunt (which is definitely is) as well as the lack of weapons, but it's still a lot of fun to me. Especially if you can find someone to play co-op.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2012 20:38

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

0 rows returned posted:

Edit: Stop after level 11, skip straight to No Rest For the Living.

But then you miss out on Barrels o' Fun and if you don't like that level you're literally stupid.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2012 01:09

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

I personally love Kama Sutra but I haven't tried it with brutal doom because that poo poo is unfun. Try KS though it owns.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2012 22:08

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Jordan7hm posted:

And Barrels of Fun was loving stupid. Oh yay, a level where I get to reload a dozen times because I entered with only half health.

How on earth did you take any damage at all before hitting the berserk pack in the second room?

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 09:16

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Jordan7hm posted:

Maybe I was doing it wrong. I ended up avoiding damage by shooting out barrels at the far end of the room and then running there. The thing was having the exploding barrels not cascade across the entire room and instakill me. I guess I could have just run for it? I dunno. I'll replay the level and see what other options there were, but I just didn't enjoy it at all.

You just run for it, you don't shoot until you're past the barrels completely.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2012 20:23

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Some levels are sorta impossible to do without some saving, and yet are still really good. Sunder is a prime example.

I'm a huge advocate for never saving in the middle of a level (i think it makes the game way more fun) but free saving shouldn't just be up and removed, either.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2013 18:41

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Serious Sam isn't a modern day Doom, but that doesn't stop it from being fun as gently caress.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2013 16:18

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

xanthan posted:

So is Hexen 2 fair game here? If so I have a question. Is it MEANT to be so hard to figure anything out? Was there some list in the manual listing everything to do I missed out on by going digital with it? I can't tell what I'm doing.

This is super vague, so if you have any actual, specific questions, feel free to pose them. Hexen II is one of my favorite games, despite its numerous flaws, and I basically know it inside and out at this point. Like its predecessor, it's a hell of a switch/key/item hunt, and you're still limited to only four weapons per class, but there's something about the enemies, environment, and faux-levelup system that really grabbed me.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2013 03:06

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Fergus Mac Roich posted:

They're livable, many of them are even fun, but if you're comparing them to Doom 1 a bunch of them suck pretty hard.

I really disagree with this. Knee Deep in the Dead has generally fantastic levels, but I really feel the level design takes a hell of a nosedive in the rest of the episodes, for the most part. I know I'm in the minority, but for the most part, Doom 2 is such a vastly better game, if only for the fleshed-out monster hierarchy. People complain about the city levels (The Factory through...what, Gotcha?) but I never really thought them terrible.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2013 06:26

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Zero Star posted:

[*]No Icon of Sin

So what's the end?

# ¿ Mar 19, 2013 18:32

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Sunder.

# ¿ May 7, 2013 15:25

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Carecat posted:

How can we play Heretic/Hexen online in co-op? The source ports don't have campaign co-op in mind. The best we have found is that you can relaunch the game with the command line to load a save game any time you die as you lose all your inventory.

In the OP:

Blazing Ownager posted:

I'd like to suggest that the HeXeN section gets some more information put into it. Mostly because a few friends and I decided to replay Hexen recently, and found out that every single port has it's own problems if you plan on playing it co-op.

jDoom was the first choice as it's what we used years ago, only to find it's developed a new bug: The clients always use multiple items hitting the use key once, regardless of key repeat settings. This makes HeXeN, unfortunately, unplayable.

Skull Tag worked great.. until we realized we couldn't save or load.

zDoom was having it's own set of connection issues every level load attempt.

... so ultimately, here's what we found works best:

To run HeXeN in co-op:

1) Get GZDoom and setup a command line for hosting or clients. I'd recommend you add -extratic to help stability. Some examples:
gzdoom.exe -host X (number of players) -netmode 1 -port xxxx -extratic -skill 5 +playerclass Cleric
gzdoom.exe -join xx.xxx.xxx.xxx:xxxx +playerclass Cleric -extratic

Also every single client and the host will need to add -loadgame saveX.zds to their path if you plan on loading a game, and make sure to load the same save game.

2) Make sure all players connect in the same order. If players connect in a different order when picking up a load game, the classes will get scrambled and you'll end up with an odd mess of people who look like Mages, but have mixed weapon sets. Also whoever is hosting will have to host for the rest of the campaign, since they will always be player 0, unless you want to shuffle classes - even then, I am not 100% sure you'll be problem free. It's better to designate a host.

3) When one player saves, no matter what they name the save file, it will save on everyone's system in the exact same slot. When you want to load a save game, everyone will need to add -loadgame save#.zds and make sure that they are all loading the same save to their command line, client and host. Otherwise it will not function.

4) Dying fixes positional desyncs generally. This most importantly includes every single time you go through to another hub. Fortunately you can enter the gameplay options and disable losing anything when you die - so set this (and team damage) and kill your partners to resync them with the host if you get this.

5) I'd recommend each player pick a save slot and save frequently, insuring you have a backup if something goes wrong. This can be a really long game and restarting via map warps annoyingly wipes out your inventory, which is key to Hexen.

... anyway, that's the guide we found to play the game. We're about halfway through and finally have the kinks ironed out. I'll note that we found all this through very, very long and painful trial & error which is why I wanted to share it here, because Hexen is an awesome game to play in c-op but man these issues were annoying. In particular, the connection order one, since we saved after we broke it, and had to restart the game.

It's pretty easy to get going if you know those tricks though, so you don't find yourself trying 50 things to simply enter new hubs, or try tons of combinations to figuring out why your mage suddenly looks like a cleric that is packing the Mage's first weapon and Cleric's second. I highly endorse checking HeXeN out, it's a ton of fun (and if you never played co-op before, it adds co-op specific team support scrolls to help your allies, which is pretty neat!) and can actually be pretty drat difficult in nightmare.. if you play with all three classes you'll notice each class gets specific counter-enemies, so a lot of strategy is involved you just don't see in most Doom FPS or 2.5D games in general.

I hope this helps somebody try it out.

# ¿ May 15, 2013 15:52

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Zero Star posted:

The Maximum Doom CD was pretty bad in this regard as well. It did have some great WADs on it, but you had to dig through an utter mountain of poo poo (CEREALS.WAD, anyone?) to find them. Plus they lied about the number of WADs - the box said 3,000+, but the disc held just over half that.

yourded.wad is an utter treasure.

# ¿ May 29, 2013 05:35

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Sunder is pretty much the king of slaughter WADs, I can't recommend it enough (but holy gently caress, it's pretty difficult). Map03 (The Dreaming Garden) and map08 (Pale Monument) are great standouts, both for their slaughter qualities and for the level design and detail.

# ¿ Jun 10, 2013 21:12

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Wrack?

# ¿ Jun 21, 2013 01:43

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

an_mutt posted:

Hey guys, just going to do a bit of Doom wad-related (somewhat self) promotion:

Doom 2 In Name Only is a community MegaWAD that I've contributed a few maps towards - its first beta was released earlier this evening, so if anybody's looking for new Doom material to have a go at, check this out!

Yo this didn't get much attention here but I just want to tell you that it's because it's really really not good. Every single map is bland as balls.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2013 02:32

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

AV is still stellar, I don't know why anyone would say it hasn't aged well. It's still by far my favorite megawad, and has my single favorite level of all time in it (Map 26, Dark Dome).

Not that I'd recommend playing Brutal Doom with it, of course.

eta: on the other hand, it does have the awful Misri Halek, so it's certainly not all gold.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 15:31

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

You don't want to take any chances when it comes to that map.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 16:36

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

maev posted:

Misri Halek is often touted as one of the best Doom maps ever made.

By who?

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 15:11

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

I mean like, just look at this.

Yeah, it's technically competent, but even the map doesn't reflect how loving frustrating it is to wander through the same hallway after the same hallway and trigger invisible switches that maybe opened up that wall back there??? oh nope actually it opened a wall near the beginning of the goddamn level but guiding you in that direction would be WAY too much work so gently caress that, wander around for an hour, have fun!

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 18:35

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# ¿ May 17, 2024 15:25

An Actual Princess: Dec 23, 2006

Chinese Tony Danza posted:

and nobody should expect otherwise.

And yet people bitch about it all the time.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2013 03:23

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