Doom Mod Review : Quake Style Unbound

 When it comes to randomizer mods, I thought I had found all the good ones. It turned out I was wrong. Quake style is one of the big underrated ones and it spawned 2 more - quake style zx and quake style unbound. Quake style is interesting because it brought elements from quake games and wolfenstein games into doom.  Thankfully the wolf3d elements are limited to guns only, as killing tons of nazis in uac bases would be a tad out of place. But as you can see, the concept is cool.

Quake style unbound is the newest quake style randomizer mod of the bunch. It is actually by far the best, and it's so good, that I would call it the best randomizer mod ever. I thought infernal attack was that till I played 3 mods that blew IA out of the water, Hellstorm rebirth, Quake style zx and now this.

Like hellstorm rebirth before it, quake style unbound is a class based randomizer. Unlike hellstorm rebirth however, classes do not get weapons only they can use.  They start with different guns but that is about it. The mod has a lot of new guns, many of them are from other games, but not all. There are TONS, and I mean tons in this mod.  There is even an auto double barreled shotgun, a weapon only drla had before this.  A powerhouse of a weapon so good that if you get it you can cream slaughtermaps in seconds.

The weapons are all done well and many have altfires. A nice touch, like in the similar hellstorm rebirth mod.  The altfires I have not tested yet, but I know they exist.  Not all guns get them but a lot do.

Some of The new enemies are  ones from the beastiary, but unlike hellstorm rebirth you get tons of new ones on top of the beastiary ones. Many are actually from quake and quake 2, which is great. To see them you have to turn on the spawn quake monsters feature in options, but they are there and it makes this game great.

There are a whopping 15 playerclasses to choose from, including the quake guy, the doom guy, and many more. They all have new guns to start with and are really cool. I played the doom guy most but others exist. 

The quake 1 and 2 enemies feature makes this thing the best randomizer ever because fighting quake 1 enemies in doom is something that doesn't happen often and usually it's limited to massive AEOD style randomizers that borrow 90% of their content from other games.  This is different, they are there to make doom a little bit less doomy. Zombies are handled well, you need to gib them just like in quake to kill them. It's a nice feature.

What is not so nice however, is the one downside this mod has. The level completion screen. The thing gives you a very annoying ranking system that punishes you for not finding secrets or items. When you play randomly generated levels, finding secrets is really hard to do. Many are very well hidden. To punish you for finding them is stupid. In one map I got 80% kills but it didn't matter because I found 0% secrets and they gave me a D rank of minamalist. Like I was bad at the game or something. Let me tell you something, you don't have to go for 100% to be good at a game, it's stupid that this is in the mod! If this feature was not in the mod I would give it a 10, but as it is it's an 8.5 now. It makes no sense to punish people for not getting a perfect tally. It reminds me of the stupid score sucks BS in scoredoom and frankly should not be there. 

Anyway, if you don't mind that slight issue, I would say try out quake style unbound. It's definitely better than a lot of randomizer mods, maybe not the best but definitely a contender. Quake enemies in doom is a huge huge thing that I love.

Screenshots:

(the textures come from hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack)

Edit : I managed to cook up a little quake 1 themed texture replacer to play quake style unbound with - if you are a fan of quake 1 maps you will recognize the texture pack it uses (ikbase)

Download it here

 

here is a screenshot showing it off with randomly generated maps, make sure to generate a tech themed obaddon mapset, for it only replaces some tech textures

Doom Mod Review : Hellstorm rebirth

 I'm doing a mod review of a very good randomizer mod here.  Hellstorm rebirth (not to be confused with doom - the hellstorm), is a randomizer mod released by a guy on facebook. If you search for :"hellstorm doom mod" and find the facebook page "hellstorm: a  zdoom mod"  you can download the mod there.

Having nothing in common with the phenominal hellstorm mod I reviewed recently, or the unfinished Eric Oi/Eriance mod that was in development on doomworld in the 90's, this mod is actually a lot like Doomzone, a class  based mod that has a randomized enemy feature.  If you like randomizers and like class based gameplay where each class can use specific weapons only, this mod is for you.

Having three classes, the mod introduces combat against randomized demons.  Many of the demons come from the beastiary. A few are new however.  The three classes are the rifle guy, the shotgun guy, and the energy weapons guy. Each has a specialty, machineguns/rifles for the rifle guy, shotguns for the shotgun guy and energy weapons for the energy weapons guy. Not that this specification means a whole lot, as classes who don't have a specification for a certain kind of weapon can still sometimes use those weapons.

The combat is very fun, and lots of new demons fight you. Many are from the beastiary, but some are new. I saw some new ones but none of them are really  great, but the beastiary ones are fine. However, some very good ones are commented out in the spawn lists, and that is puzzling.

The weapons are great in this mod, minus 1 glaring issue which I will get to later. Each weapon has been modded a lot to add new sounds, an altfire, and more. There are weapons from many different sources, the beastiary, demon eclipse/eriguns, drla, etc.  Many have been altered to fire different projectiles however. Some have been tweaked to be less or more powerful. Many have altfires but not all.  Some are damn powerful. The default pistol rips demons to shreds in this mod with it's secondary fire which is shotgun strength.  That is nice and that will help make some maps so easy it's not funny. It could be a great mod for slaughtermaps but more testing is needed to see if that is the case.

One glaring issue remains. The game locks up the instant you try to select the redneck rampage ripsaw gun.  That cannot be fixed easily and to me the only way to really fix it is to unbind the 1 key so you don't accidentally select it. Since it's very hard to not collect it, I suggest doing this:

make a batch file to load the mod by doing this:

take the following text line and past it into a text file and save it as a txt file and rename it to a batch file (BAT) later

gzdoom -file   hellstormv6_001a.pk3 +unbind 1

always use that batch file to load the mod and be careful not to pick up the saw thrower!
It makes it so you can't use melee weapons but it's worth it!
Since weapons don't get autoselected when picked up this helps

Besides that there is no issues, I hope no more freezes happen when enemies fight eachother or such, or else this mod may be ruined

Screenshots:

(loaded with hoover1979's ultra hidef texture pack and nameless rpg lite in the screenshot)

Doom Mod Review : Alandoguns

 Alandoguns is an ancient Doom Weapon Mod I found recently that I never played ever, for some strange reason.  It is a randomizer mod, one of the first randomizer mods, with tons of new guns, and some new enemies.

This mod has the reputation of being total shittiness in the community, due to that it has bad reviews up the wazzoo on idgames.But I don't think it's quite as bad as people are saying it is, sure, it rips from known sources, like the zdoom monster resource wad, other games, weapon mods by other people, etc, but to me compilation mods like this or infernal attack are fine.

I played a set of randomly generated maps in it and right away, I liked the guns. At first my favorite was the uzi, it did tons of damage for an uzi and even though it has a small clip size, it was fun to use. The weapons in this mod are the stars of the show, many many guns exist in this mod and they all have reloading built into them, which is amazing for it's time. They range from machineguns, chainguns, uzi's, shotguns of many kinds, including the riot gun from shadow warrior (not the new shadow warrior, the old one), an ice gun, and more. You will be swamped with guns in this mod, something lots of people don't like, but I don't mind it. I didn't mind infernal attacks 200 guns and I surely don't mind a mod that has tons of guns. 

The enemies however is where this mod starts to be not quite as good. Some are cool, like the new zombies, the rocket soldier, the new imps, the robots that replace arachnotrons, but a LOT of monsters in this mod come from Heretic and Hexen and other games like Duke3d. I simply don't think they fit at all, so that takes some points away. I managed to patch out the heretic/hexen enemies, and that made it much better, but a patched version simply cannot be released due to technical reasons now (me running out of space on pcloud).

For some reason the mod contains a lot of new textures and has some new maps in it, it's no big deal if you load randomly generated maps after the mod and use a high-def texture pack, but I would avoid playing the original doom 2 game in this for that reason. Map04 and map05 are totally replaced and they should not be.

I don't mind this mod, and if it weren't for one feature, I would probably call it decent to bad. But this  one feature saves it. Your max health can be upgraded! Pickups that look like heretic/hexen health vials/flasks are there, and they boost your max health at the same time as healing you. This makes this mod a great choice to play with super hard maps! This mod to me then is actually quite good, just not great.  It could have been much better if it didn't have heretic/hexen enemies in it, but besides that one issue and the map04-05 replacements  it's actually not that bad.



Screenshots:

(the textures from this screenshot are from the excellent hoover 1979 ultra hi-def texture pack)

Doom Mod Review : Doom - The Hellstorm

One thing doom really lacks is a good doom horror mod.  A mod that plays with any level and introduces horror gameplay into the game. While some people classify the original doom as horror, I don't.  The game has horror elements sure, but actual horror gameplay is not found in the original doom at all. What doom needed bad was a horror mod that introduces horror elements into the gameplay.

Well recently a doom mod entitled Doom - the hellstorm (which you can find by googling "doom hellstorm mod") was released on moddb.  This mod introduces horror elements into classic doom and does a pretty damn good job with it. After playing 2 levels that were obaddon generated with the mod, I definitely felt terror from the mod.

The first thing you will notice when playing the mod is how dark it is.  This thing is practically pitch black.  There is a flashlight, but it is not recommended to use it with obaddon maps due to the slowdown it creates.  To use the flashlight, you must unequip a gun like in doom 3 so it actually doesn't help that much.  This goes really well with the doom 3 texture replacer I found and released on the last review, the review of ultimate super doom 3.

The creepiness is brought out by the soundtrack, which is similar to the udv ambient soundtrack feature. That feature replaces the music with a quiet creepy droning in the background.  It makes the game way scarier. 

Healing is handled a lot differently than in normal doom mods. Picking up a healthkit does not automatically heal you in this mod.  You have to select the healthkit by hitting the 8 key on your keyboard and that will select it and allow you to heal, but when you heal you are totally defenseless, so choose wisely when you will try to heal yourself. It takes about 15 seconds to heal yourself from 50 health so be careful.  This adds to the horror elements.

Creepy apparitions will stalk you in this mod, not limited to an alma-like one and one from the movie scream.  Every once and awhile they show up. They don't make a noise when you see them, which would have made them scarier.  Strangely missing is youtube styled screamers in the mod, but that is a bit too scary maybe.

Adding to the horror elements are respawning monsters, throughout the levels, zombies will resurrect and demons will teleport in periodically, even in maps where they should not. It gives you a lot of tension while playing, which is great. It is also quite scary, as the chanting from doom 3 that happens when monsters teleport also is played in this mod when the same thing happens.

The mod has many guns, and all of them are original guns not found in other mods, which is a plus. They include 2 or 3 new pistols,  a magnum with a glowstick selected in the other hand to light things up, several shotguns, including the doom 3 one, the doom eternal supertshotgun with a built in grapple hook,  and an automatic one, a very good assault rifle, the plasma rifle, a chaingun, the rocket launcher and more.

The mod uses mostly beastiary enemies, and that is good and all, but the lack of doom eternal enemies kind of set it back a little bit. It isn't a huge issue but it could have made it way better if dread knights, doom hunters, marauders and carcasses were in this mod.  It actually lacks a lot of enemies from doom games besides doom 3 and 64 and custom doom ones. There are doom 3 alpha zombies, complete with their "you will not escape", "hell awaits you" screamed lines recorded by Trent Reznor, and doom 3, and doom 64 imps, but a few more from doom 2016 and eternal would have helped.

Another issue is the menu, it is TERRIBLE! You cannot see what menu item is selected at all, and have to use mouse driven menu controls, when keyboard ones are far easier to use but won't work in the mod.  It kind of sucks. At first it made me annoyed. Besides that and the lack of doom eternal enemies, this thing is actually pretty good though. If you want a good doom horror mod, you really cannot go wrong with hellstorm.


Screenshots:
(textures from the screenshot come from a doom 3 texture replacer I found on youtube, they do not come with the mod)

Doom Mod Review : Ultimate Super Doom 3

Ultimate Super Doom 3 is one of the best total conversion gameplay mods ever made for classic doom.  It faithfully recreates the mechanics, enemies, guns and feel of Doom 3 perfectly.  Now a lot of people don't like doom 3 much, but I don't mind it, especially considering all newer doom games have stupid jumping crap thrown in.

I found this mod a long time ago searching for a doom 3 gameplay mod for zdoom. I was working on something similar but far worse.  This mod is amazing. It imports all of the enemies from doom 3 into doom/doom 2 and does the same thing with guns. Even better, it takes the stuff from the doom 3 expansion, resurrection of evil and imports them too. Being a huge fan of ROE I loved this. I got to fight bruisers and vulgars again.  And the quality of the work is quite insane considering all the sprite ripping he had to do to get the mod working right, as the mod uses sprite rips, not models to draw the new graphics.

It's one of the best mods but to really enjoy it you will need some other mods. I recommend Ultimate Doom visor for it's outdoor damage effects and darker lighting settings. I also recommend this texture replacer I found on youtube that replaces all doom 1 and 2 textures with doom 3 ones.  I also recommend some kind of ambient music pack as well. To find this mod search for it on google and click the link to moddb and download the file in files named volume 4.5

Overall this is fun as all hell.

Screenshots:

(This screenshots was taken using an obaddon map and retexturing it with the above texture replacer, the mod itself doesn't have new textures)

 

 

 

 

Doom mod review : Doom EXP

 Doom EXP or Doom Eternal EXP as it's sometimes called, is an awesome gameplay mod for classic doom made by OfficerD82.  It started as a mod where you could level up as you killed enemies and would get rewards for your levelups. But it soon morphed away from that.

Doom EXP is one of the 2 major mods for zdoom that takes features from Doom Eternal and ports them to doom 2.  Thankfully it's a gameplay mod only, so there are no pre-requisites of the mod requiring you to play specific levels to see it's features, which strips out any stupid platforming sections from gameplay (a feature that ruined doom eternal).

As you levelup, you get XP and power nodes. Your power nodes are used for buying upgrades and so is your XP. Some upgrades require power nodes, others require XP, others require both. You can upgrade your guns with altfires, get a grappling hook attached to your shotgun, install a shoulder cannon on doom guy, get the crucible.and more. You get to glory kill enemies as they stagger just like doom 2016 and eternal, and you get to finish off enemies with the doom blade from doom eternal, a nice touch.

All these feratures were set up in a way to make it obvious that this is a classic doom mod at heart. You won't see sprite rips of stuff from doom eternal for instance, it's like this was made to import ideas from doom eternal into classic doom. Besides the doom blade, the sprites for the other features are totally original.  

Joining this impressive list of features are new enemies. There are several new enemies, mostly coming from the beastiary this time. But as of doom exp 2.3 there is one doom eternal enemy in the mod, the marauder. which behaves just like he did in doom eternal. This will make this mod damn challenging to some people, as marauders were the most difficult non boss enemy in that game. A lot of upgrades may be required to be purchased first before you run into this and survive!

I like this mod, it has a lot of features from doom eternal, and since my pile of crap PC can't play doom eternal, this mod will. have to do.

Screenshots:

(textures come from dark textures, a high res texture pack)

Doom Mod Review : Infernal Attack

 Infernal Attack is a MASSIVE Doom Randomizer mod released on moddb a few years ago. It boasts 600 new enemies to fight, 200 guns, and more.  I regularly play doom with it and often mix it with nameless rpg lite so that I can enjoy tons of new enemies/guns plus rpg mechanics.

Infernal attack is quite the controversial mod, thanks to the fact that it borrowed some stuff from other mods.  The amount of mods it "steals" from is quite large, coming down to it ripping stuff from brutal doom, project brutality, Doom the roguelike arsenal, Complex Doom, Shades of Doom, Realm 667 shuffle and many others.

Despite that and despite the obvious bugginess the mod has, which I will get to later, the mod is still quite good. Not phenominal, but definitely one of the better randomizer mods out there.  There are a lot of new unique guns and enemies in it and they help make it a fresh experience, and stuff such as the complex doom guns, the drla guns, the shades of doom, hxrtc, and ream667 enemies put in one mod together, help to make it feel like a really nice compilation of great stuff in one mod,  which is needed in this day and age, where a lot of mods have unique stuff only.

It does have a big downside, it's buggy as hell. Some enemies break, others have badly set up sprites, and more. It is not too noticeable at first, but play 30 or so maps in it and you will notice it eventually. However, the whole thing being a massive ripoff, to me is quite a moot point.

Lots of people are trashing this mod.  It isn't that bad. It does take stuff from other mods but most mods do! In fact the total amount of guns I could find that I recognized from other mods, is really small compared to the total amount of guns in the mod. Only 19 or so. guns are based on other mods the rest are either realm667 stuff or original material.  Now for the enemies. Many are from other mods but not all. A lot out of that 600 are original enemies not found anywhere else, so that makes this mod less of a ripoff.

Overall infernal attack is a very cool mod, worthy of an 8/10

(offtopic) The Curse of Johan Hegg is real!

 While watching the Boston Red Sox go through the playoffs 2 years ago, I decided to listen to the metal. band Amon Amarth. Not thinking of it much at the time, I just went for it and soon saw something strange happen.

While I listened to bands other than amon amarth or no bands at all, the red sox were DEAD at the plate. No hits whatsoever, or very few, at least. Such is the case of ALCS game 1 in Boston.  I wasn't listening to any bands that day and the red sox lost horribly. Then on the next night they came back and won, and I decided to try listening to Amon Amarth again. It worked in the final game of the ALDS against the Yankees, so why not I thought.

 Weirdly this whole thing actually somehow affected the series. I would go through 5 albums of amon Amarth and switch over to 2 Hypocrisy cds afterward. During the Amon Cd's the red sox were total hitting machines and slaughtered their way through the opposition. During the Hypocrisy ones they did not. I jokingly called this the Curse of Johan Hegg. It was fucking weird.

I continued to Listen to Amon Amarth for all of the games in the Series and they managed to Win them all on days I listened to Amon. However It got really weird in the World Series vs the dodgers.

Against the dodgers in Game 3 of the World Series in LA, something weird happened. I was listening to Amon Amarth but it didn't work.  They lost the game in 19 innings. Next game I did the same thing and they won. Same thing the next night.Then they won the title.   I think SOMEHOW (god knows how) Amon Amarth influenced those games. It came down to such intricacy where not listening to Amon lead to them not doing well, and listening to Amon suddenly made them hitting machines most of the time.

So the next time you hear the Red Sox cheated in 2018, Blame it on Amon Amarth instead! For the curse of Johan Hegg is real!

I think some guy associated with the community is trying to troll me....

 Ok, this blog post is going to get controversial, I warn you.  

A long time ago some assholes from the doom community decided to try to troll me, and it was for a wad I made that they thought was terrible but the wad in question wasn't. Pretty soon hundreds of people tried to troll me over it, not limited to ones on doom community sites, but also on youtube on my old youtube channel (that I chose to shut down due to trolling), and more places like wadsinprogress and similar.

That was a long time ago. Since then I have released countless projects and tc's and things for doom.  While searching for youtube videos on a certain doom mod I didn't make that everyone else trolled as well for stealing shit, I ended up  running into a youtube channel playing one of my old, long forgotten about doom mods, a mod called "serious sam : the ultimate encounter" and I think the people in question (the channel owner and his followers) were trying to troll me.

The guy is a fucking idiot people. He actually at first tried to defend the mod I was searching for then later on shat all over it, while stuttering countless times like porky pig.  Bdeep-bdeep-bdeep that-that-that's all folks type stuttering, not minor stuttering but serious stuttering. Then he and his followers try to troll me for a mod I made that wasn't that bad.

Now the weird thing is that more people  LIKED this mod in the videos he did on it than disliked it but one person dared to say that "MOST" weapons were misaligned and the guns bullets came from the head of the character, which cannot be true, that is total BS if you ask me, yet another lame attempt by the doom community to troll my stuff. This time it was a minor thing THANK GOD, but this just shows you how stupid the doom community has become, some channel owner decides to play a mod I made that has no FUCKING DOWNLOAD LINK ANYMORE (because I deleted it due to the fact that I thought it sucked too!), and then they troll me over it even though no. one should be playing it in the first place!
It's not like I've done bad mods, I've done some damn good ones since then. But still......... 

This thing was far from current, it was released around 2014 or so.  I've done tons more since then, and to see some idiot community try to troll me over it on youtube is stupid and sickening. Why do the community have to resort to such lame trolling excuses on sites associated with doom or channels Associated with doom? It boggles the mind......

Why Toonforce is Overrated, and why Bugs Bunny is not ultra powerful.

 I am going to preface this blog post with this : I am writing this post not to bash Bugs Bunny. Despite what this blog post reveals to the world and what I found out about various fictional characters fighting others, Bugs is still the funniest cartoon character ever. That doesn't change at all. This was only written to try to tell people that "Toon Force" is overrated.

Toon Force, a description of the kind of super powers Cartoon Characters have that people don't, has become a point of contention in the Comic Book Fanbase. Many people are arguing that toon force is more powerful than comic book super powers, and that someone like Bugs could wipe the floor with anyone else in a 1 on 1 fight and no one can beat him.

That to me is not true. 

I was actually very skeptical on this toon force thing. Toon force to me was limited to characters who might not be able to handle something as powerful as a very powerful Marvel Universe Supervillian like Beyonder, Thanos, Galactus, Etc. What I found out is that Bugs is very powerful, yet not powerful enough to be able to fight some very powerful characters from other works of fiction like Star Wars, Marvel Comics and Cthulhu Mythos.  

What did I use to judge this?

Unlike others, I was not content with the idea that one character is superior and there was no way to prove that. I wanted to take it step further and test it somehow. So when I found out about this fighting game called MUGEN that allowed me to import characters from tons of works of fictions, including comic books, movies, video games, cartoons, horror novels, and more, I had to try it with that.  Soon I downloaded Mugen, and within a few hours I had setup 11-12 characters I could use to test it with.

I went with this roster.

Xenomorph from Aiien
Luke Skywalker
Bugs Bunny
Galactus from marvel comics
Iron Man from Marvel Comics
Daffy Duck
Cyberdemon and Doom Guy from Doom
Mr Spock

Soon I had changed it to:

Xenomorph from Alien
Luke Skywalker
Bugs Bunny
Galactus
Iron Man
Daffy Duck
Doom Guy
Cyberdemon
Darth Vader
Emporer Palpatine
Cthulhu
Superman

What I found out completely debunked the idea that Bugs Bunny would wipe the floor with every other character in Comic Books, etc. He did well but he still was not powerful enough to beat certain characters.

He was able to beat most of the characters he fought, including a suprise Victory over Galactus.  He had no trouble with a doom Cyberdemon, which is expected. He could beat Xenomorphs, Mr Spock, The thing, Daffy Duck, etc. But other characters gave him trouble.

Luke Skywalker gave him trouble.  Maybe it's the force, or luke's jedi fighting stance or the lightsaber combat, but something made Luke Beat Bugs easily. Next Came 2 characters who both wiped the floor with Bugs Bunny, Iron Man and Cthulhu.

Iron Man is so overpowered that bugs bunny simply never wins against him and other characters can't beat him either.  His suits missiles and laser do so much damage that they rip Bugs to shreds. His huge explosive blast is so OP that it sucks almost all of Bugs health away quickly. Bugs simply cannot win here.

And Cthulhu, turned out to be so powerful that NOTHING could beat him.

I thought it was weird that cthulhu would beat Galactus, but when I saw Cthulhu wipe the floor with Bugs Bunny, I knew something was off, but then I realized it. Cthulhu must be making his opponent go mad as he fights him! That must be it. Because Not even a team of Bugs Bunny and Iron Man could beat Cthulhu. Not even Iron Man and Galactus could do it either!

Now I don't know how much of this is badly, incorrectly or biased design of the characters that I downloaded. It could be that whoever made Iron Man, Luke Skywalker, or Cthulhu made them too powerful becasue their fanboys, but Somehow I doubt that.

Either way, this is really weird to see, and maybe it will make people who try to proclaim Bugs Bunny as an unstoppable force who roflstomps everyone think a little.