Fun, challenging platforming. Minimal cutscenes. No talking.
It even has multiplayer!
20XX is a rogue-lite and the random levels aren’t very good at giving you a strong sense of place, but it sure is fun to jump around. 20XX has tight, challenging platforming.
It’s time to play Quake’s second expansion.
It dives into the
action faster than Scourge. There’s no warm-up techbase to get you
started. You’re thrown straight into one of two episodes: a mainly
medieval fortress, or a time travel themed episode. Episode 2 is the
more interesting of the two, with a much greater diversity of levels
offered by its’ theme.
Monster placement is suspect: shamblers
in clear rooms, fiends in tight corridors, and ‘let’s spawn a scrag in
front of that wind tunnel just as you jump in, so you fall into the lava
and die’). The new weapons are minimum effort re-skins and lack oomph
but they do make combat feel faster and more exciting.
The new monsters are introduced slowly. Some of the design choices strike me as baffling.
Who thought it was a good idea to make a Spawn the same colour as the wall textures?
I wish I could just click my fingers…
Dissolution is marred by designs like that. Slip ups that make some sections far more frustrating than they should be.
“Well-coordinated and heavily armed group of eldritch abominations beaten by a ranger with the genre’s weakest shotgun and a grenade launcher with 14 foot max range.”
This morning I finished my Scourge of Armagon run.
Scourge of Armagon is good fun and worth playing after finishing the ‘main’ campaign of Quake, but I don’t think it was worth full asking price. The new ideas are forgettable and (most) of the levels indistinct. I like the idea of Ranger (and possibly his homeworld?) continuing the war against ‘Quake’ which now seems to be the codename for all the Lovecraftian entities that want to attack Earth.
Scourge doesn’t seem to have had a
lasting impact on Quake multiplayer, and its’ new features and weapons
aren’t found in later Quake mods. It has this feeling of not being
‘canon’ as it introduced nothing iconic, and I doubt Id Software will
ever care to reference it.
It’s just a new set of levels with a
couple of new weapons, some new power-ups and a very small amount of
new enemies. The new laser gun is great, and much preferred over the
charge-eating lightning gun, while mjölnir
went largely unused.
It starts fairly strong but the levels started to feel bland by the halfway point. They’re all fairly well put together but progression feels disjointed, even for Quake. Armagon having 0 personality and impact certainly doesn’t help things. He’s just an enemy fought in the last level (even Shub had some text at the end of each episode). There’s no sense of an evil plan, no feeling that you’ve invaded his home. The boss fight against Armagon himself is pretty lame; I had him dead in about half a minute.
The later
levels feel samey. There is a noticeable overuse of Vores – while it is
nice that the designers wanted to escalate Quake’s challenge, the lack
of a new high-tier monster on the level of the Shambler / Vore hurts the
encounters.
Scourge of Armagon is a competently put together expansion pack, but it is just a retreading. Good but forgettable. More Quake is always nice though.
Time for Dissolution of Eternity. Widely said to be the inferior expansion but which seems to get remembered more.
Not so keen on the ‘Imps’ (Mantic’s Tortured Souls on the right of the last picture), I think I’ll re-do them. Perhaps a lighter blue for their loin clothes.
I’m currently playing through some Call of Doom. It’s a Doom mod by Arrowood (possibly the only Japanese person alive who likes both Call of Duty and Doom*)
and it’s great fun. Sadly the coding is all over the place. This isn’t
entirely the author’s fault as CODoom requires Brutal Doom** to run.
Both of those mods have seen a lot of development since I last played them. Unfortunately, changes to both mods and GZDoom are making it harder to play the most up-to-date versions. I wish both mod creators would just focus on making optimized, error-free versions of their works which only require one file placed into the launcher.
Oh well. Call of Doom is good fun all the same. It has ear ruining sound effects, requires about six mods in a specific load order, and it runs like ass, but it’s still able to give a visceral thrill every time you blast an imp to pieces from across the room. You have to respect that.
* There must be other Japanese FPS fans given that JPCP.wad is a thing, but the possibility exists that they’re all just Arrowood wearing several different combinations of hats and false beards.
** A legendary mod whose code perfectly resembles an enormous plate of spaghetti.
Below is some information and pictures from my 2012 Tomorrow’s War
campaign. I might have shared some of these before. Most of my
collection is quite blurry and so only a few are suitable for public
consumption.
The Pictures
The Campaign – Phase 1
The campaign was set during a civil war in a distant, far-future world called Hypolossia. The majority of the (strongly Greco-Roman) planet is controlled by an aristocratic caste of psychic mutants. Most of these ‘aristos’ are fairly unremarkable, but the two most powerful are the twin sisters Eos and Selene who together rule the theocratic Solar Empire.
When a lunar prison colony rebels, the twins disagree and Selene sides with the (nominally) democratic Lunar Republic, becoming a sort of constitutional monarch. Lunar forces land and quickly secure major port cities, but the heartlands of the Solar Empire stay loyal to the God-Empress Eos.
At the start of the campaign the two opposing armies were functionally identical. The Solar Empire had a more robust supply chain, and so benefited from an extra shooting dice (due to their Abundant Supplies) but the Lunar Republic was more enthusiastic with higher morale (rolling a d10 instead of a d8). The two were evenly matched, with an equal tally of wins and losses, and very similar amounts of killed, wounded and captured.
As the campaign progress, the two forces started to diverge. The Solar Empire began to develop new walker technologies, and fielded fanatical two-man groups of flame-thrower infantry (nicknamed “Warcrimes Division” and always targeted first by Republic soldiers due to how devastating they were).
Meanwhile the Lunar Republic began to field units of jump pack equipped special forces (Selene’s Shadows), and a special group of psychics known as the Menae. The Menae were able to phase through terrain and had a terror aura. Despite having no weapons, they were absolutely brutal to face in close combat. Their models looked like the girl from The Ring.
In addition to this, heroes began to emerge. The Solar Empire had a special officer and the Lunar Republic had a particularly deadly Shadow operator as ‘hero’ characters. Both Goddesses were also statted but not put into play.
At the conclusion of Phase 1, the two armies had an equal number of wins and losses. The Solar Empire’s special officer was captured, but managed to escape. The battle had become a near stalemate. Something was needed to tip the balance of power…
We had to conclude the campaign after Phase 1 because I needed to move away for education/work reasons. The plan for Phase 2 was to introduce some new armies but sadly, we never got a chance to play with them.
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
The Halloween level was never publicly released, so here it is.
It’s been a busy few months. Wish I could say I spent all of it making levels but no. I’d love to make another one tied to this. It was a good learning experience.
Halloween.wad, by Rolo
http://www.mediafire.com/file/0uit0i22xgoii4g/Halloween%20by%20Rolo.wad
The
map is built in Boom format but uses decorate to replace a monster, so
you’ll need a source port that can support that. I used GZ Doom.
Still painting these guys. John Wick in particular needs some more love, I must have diluted his matt finish a little too much.
On an unrelated note, I’m having way too much fun writing special characters for my miniatures game.
The Nephrite Games Blog 