Duke3d Mod Review : Alien Armageddon (v 4.31/4.5)

 Alien armageddon is a mod I've liked for a long time...Until recently, it's been fairly well balanced and does what it is supposed to do fine.. What it does is alter duke3d to add the following things into the game:

-new characters to play as besides duke
-rpg elements
-new enemies and guns introduced into any level
-weapon upgrades got through a money system
-player stat upgrades and misc player upgrades gotten through a money system
-you can save the podfems
-many more

these features up to the recent 4.5 version were done really well... you had rpg elements including levelups for your guns and your character. Each character had new guns and unique upgrades... Any user map you played this with would have the new weapons and enemies put in them... The new enemies are well done, not limited to railgun aliens, armored pigcops, laser cannon troopers, terminator ripoffs, aliens on mounted gun turrets, weird animal like aliens that zap you and leap at you, armored enforcers, grenade spamming ultra battlelords, ant like aliens armed with smgs that walk along ceilings sometimes, and more... New weapons include alien laser pistols, plasma rifles, a smg, clusterbombs, meteor shooting devastators... 

Each original gun can now be upgraded to be more powerful... Shotguns can be upgraded to be 3 times more powerful and can shoot radiation shells too... Chainguns can be upgraded to be miniguns. rocket launchers can be upgraded to shoot homing missiles. Pipebombs can be upgraded to be cluster bombs, shrinker can be upgraded in some new way, devastator can be upgraded to fire 4 barrels at once rather than 2, freezers can be upgraded to be more powerful in some new way as well... This all works well but the upgrades cost a lot of money so you barely ever have the money  to use them... you are spending most of your money to give yourself player upgrades like regenerating shields as the damage enemies do is upgraded over normal duke3d. 

The mod comes with at least 3 new episodes. 2 out of 3 are based on sunstorm interactives expansion packs duke it out in dc and duke carribean.  The other new one "new invasion" is very short but hard as hell so it's not really fun at all...  A new episode added called space gladiators is really dumb, forcing you to play multiplayer like matches against bots instead of blowing up dumb aliens so I would avoid that too... 

Luckily the new attrition mode is there to try to save the show. Based on the mod of the same name, you play through 30+ custom maps selected randomly each time.  The choices are really good but there are still some bad choices such as dogville, billy boy's awful maps and tons of maps that are bland ripoffs of the roch series that suck... To be perfect, the player should have been given infinite level tokens in this mode as a lot of duke3d maps are not as good as the original 3d realms maps and rely on stupid puzzle solving, jumping up to non obvious rooftops to get keys, multiple uses of the same key color that can break the map if you go for the wrong one, and worse. These maps needed to be stripped out of the attrition mode but unfortunately these kinds of maps are far more popular than the infinitely better "normal" duke3d maps like 3drealms maps, alejandro gavic maps, pipeline maps, james duncan maps and maps that don't involve stupid roch ripoff crap like dogville and billy boy maps.  It would be good if such maps were stripped out.

Unfortunately level tokens are hardcoded so you can't just mod in 999 tokens given at the start to skip crap maps. Issues with level difficulty in attrition also make attrition somewhat annoying as well... Some maps are clearly way too hard on peice of cake difficulty even, and even the new original episodes suffer from this. However, most of the maps chosen can be beaten, if you just use a good shield, upgrade your guns in advance and similar, until version 4.5 anyway.

Unfortunately without regen shields, and upgraded weapons,  alien armageddon tends to be an unbalanced mess.. Many enemies tend to do too much damage. Armored pigcops are a nightmare unless your shielded, terminators can be nasry, etc... Tanks are much worse...  Especially ones in episode 1. E1l2 is almost impossible for a non shielded char.  Even on peice of cake....  In my honest opinion duke boss needs to do some serious balancing fixes for this mod. Especially in 4.5

4.5 is flat out unplayable at times... In e3l4 one armored pigcop killed a 150 health, shielded character in one shot on peice of cake, even though I modded the aauser.con to make it easier..  Dukeboss must be trying to make this thing "hrrrgghhh hard as fuck hurrgggh" because it seems every version is harder than the previous, and if you keep doing that it becomes an unbalanced pile of crap.  The modding of aauser.con didn't prevent  the now unbalanced as terminators from grabbing me and taking off 75 points of health on peice of cake...  It's flat out unbeatable on easy now... And to make things worse, dodging enemies are there now to infuriate you. Assault troopers are now so hard to kill as they fly and dodge around that they become as hard as newbeasts on peice of cake. I am not making that up.  This mod now needs a SERIOUS rebalance! Ditch the dodging enemies dukeboss, make the terminators do less damage, shielded players need to take way less damage to an armored picgop, an enemy I can take out with the pistol in 4.31 but not in 4.5. And before fuckers start bringing up the whole "git gud" bullshit, I've beaten tons of duke3d usermaps that are far harder than the original maps like lrwb, when scum returns, duke plus maps and more. Enough of the unbalanced crap dukeboss! People should seriously stop trying to over difficulty push mods now and delete old versions... By now the far better balanced 4.31 is gone off moddb and people will get pwned in 4.5 trying to play normal duke3d maps. It needs to be fized. "Rebalancing" something by making it unbearably hard needs to stop. Too many game mods do this. It was already hard enough dukeboss!

For this reason I can't give the mod a good score. This thing USED to be good people. Not anymore. This thing now is so bad that I would avoid it till it gets fixed... If ever. And avoid that new character, fuck characters you can't play unless you play some ultra uber unbalanced addon episode. You don't over advertise this character and then lock it like that dukeboss, that is a dick move.

If any of you could provide a perminant 4.31 download It would be good. That was balanced, unlike 4.5.  But due to moddb's stupid policy of only having the latest version on there and dukebossses compliance with that, this mod has now become terrible.... Avoid... Play my mom instead... At least that is balanced and has bearable fun levels and infinite randomly generated maps.

I made a gameplay mod for duke nukem 3d...

I've been busy lately... This all stems from recent activities.... I reinstalled duke3d and tried to find an old map generator I made for the game in 2017 and found it luckily...  After playing 2 new mods for duke3d that I didn't like (Alien armageddon and kickass duke3d), I decided to make my own randomizer mod for duke3d... 

Now duke3d modding is something I have barely done... But I know enough con programming tricks to do what I needed to do to make this mod, which I called xtreme duke3d... Xduke3d  is a mod taking things I modded into duke plus, another duke mod, when I extended that mod and made a new mod based on it called duke plus plus. What xduke3d does, is take those features from duke plus plus added into duke plus and puts them into a totally new mod not based on duke plus.  these features are:

-randomoized enemy types... So now you might see a rocket cop in the place of a normal pigcop, or might see a mortar or freezer liztroop in the place of a normal liztroop... This works with ANY usermap..
-More gore, even when shooting with bullet weapons
-Stronger guns
-more ammo for guns
-Have sex with strippers for health - press use to do so

to run the mod, unzip this exe to your duke3d folder and run the xduke3d.bat. Make sure your duke3d is version 1.4

To make this even better, I have included my random map generator for duke3d, randuke... I have some old blog posts on other old blogs talking about this and they have all broken links thanks to 4shared deleting files stupidly... Install dosbox and mount the randuke folder in your duke3d folder by typing "mount C:\duke3d\randuke" in your dosbox... Then hit ctrl-f12 over and over again till cycles becomes 50000 or so... then run randuke.bat and put the following values into the program... 

number of structures from start to finish : 5
number of structures randomly added : 1
factor : 1
number of maps to make : 1
start numbering maps at : 1

then hit enter.... then load xduke3d and play a usermap and navigate to your C:\duke3d\randuke folder and play the map called fin-1.map...

Have fun...

Screenshots:

Doom Sourceport Review : Autodoom

 Okay... We are now going to briefly do a series of sourceport reviews... This is the first and will be the only one done this month...  I am picking this particular one first to highlight one of the best doom community achievements ever... Namely, Autodoom...

Autodoom as a modded Eternity Based Sourceport that uses a bot to try to beat the map by itself, without player input. It mimicks the player, has a system of pre-generated bot nodes it uses to navigate any map on the fly, and for the most part can beat many of the "normal" (aka not ultra hard) maps it gets put in, provided you play it on easy..  It is not really good at Ultraviolence yet, but hopefully that will change soon.

How this bot is trained is a mystery to me, but the guy who made this thing did such a good thing with this that it destroys all other bots for doom by miles...  I tried several zdoom bots, as zdoom mods don't work in this port, and many of them simply could not navigate a simple randomly generated map or even the original doom maps.  And many of the above mentioned zdoom bots (I tried Zcajun, Doombot, TDBots and Zetabot) simply could not handle a randomizer mod and died a lot in the beginning of the first map..

This bot CREAMS its way through the same map and many others, provided you play on easy and use a dehacked patch... The one I provided makes the doom weapons faster,  makes it so you start with 150 health, and makes it easier...  But doesn't make it insanely easy either... It's not superwep.deh but it is less difficult to beat a map. With this dehacked patch, this bot destroys maps... I saw it pistol 2 revenants to death at the start of  a map, failing to die, when its health dropped below 40.  I saw it kick hell knight ASS in the next map and fight hordes of them with a chaingun and nothing else... This thing pwns enemies with plasma and the chaingun, as it's aim is perfect... It's knowledge of the map is also perfect, knowing where every secret is without having to research that crap.  It often maxes levels on the first try.

It does have a few downsides. The first is that this bot is an eternity based bot. It simply will NOT lead ANY zdoom mod. None work, not even omgwpns that supposedly works in eternity, works in this. I  got lucky and found a patch that adds in custom enemies/weapons in the place of original ones that works in vanilla and it works here well, but it sucks that this thing wasn't coded based on lzdoom or something better like that.

Another downside is based on this bots struggles with randomly generated maps. A lot of the time it beats them... But there are things it can't do and those things annoy me. Sometimes a pickup is put on the end of a narrow bridge with lava on either side... This messes up the bot and the bot falls in and can't get out 100% of the time.  It also messes up with lifts a lot and god forbid it runs into switch triggered elevators that require keys. It will obsessively flip ALL switches on these elevators till the elevator fucks up and blocks the player 90% of the time... It aso messes up randomly on top of that and can't jump across chasms in any map... So forget about it doing map02 or map11 of doom 2 due to that... Besides these issues, it is amazing...

Doom Mod Review(s) : dehacked attack/dehacked defense

 Randomizer mods are everywhere... And a lot of them are not that good... Many borrow the same enemies from other mods or realm667...  Many use hexen/heretic enemies.... Many simply don't have high quality enemies and weapons in them...

Luckily good ones exist... Thanks to the author of dehacked defense and dehacked attack we now can enjoy randomizer mods with dehacked patch enemies in them.. Dehacked Patch enemies found in wads such as strain, obtic, valiant, eviternity, etc... These dehacked patch enemies make their way into the mod dehacked attack... And dehacked patch weapons are now part of a similar made mod called dehacked defense, both made by the same person...

Dehacked attack comes with randomized enemies from various sources, not limited to the 4 ones listed above... Many dehacked enemies exist in megawads, and thanks to the author of dehacked attack we can play against these enemies in a randomizer mod now...  The option exists to enable or disable enemies from any source you want, so lets say you want to get rid of strain enemies, you can.  However, I found that that really is annoying, as obtic enemies come pre-disabled... I suggest you turn them on...  Similar options exist for weapons... There is also the feature to "level scale" the placement of new enemies and weapons by what map number you are playing, so that harder enemies are guaranteed to show up later in a mapset...  This feature is fun but I usually turn it off for max challenge... 

If you want a randomizer mod for Doom that has stuff not found in any other randomizer mod, these 2 mods are definitely a good choice to play. One issue however, that I had, is that these mods are hard as hell.. On easy, it felt like ultra violence... I died a lot in early maps and got lucky and beat a map03 that had tons of hell knights in it... It got really frustrating... besides that I can't even say anything is wrong with these mods... Download them and play them because honestly, no one is playing these mods on youtube and that needs to change. Part of the problem is that modded playthroughs are not preferred over vanilla ones due to the retarded vanilla obsession people have, and the other problem is that most modded playthroughs use crappy mainstream'/popular mods like complex doom/lca/ClusterFuck/Brutal Doom/Project Brutality and others.. People need to play OTHER mods... This one needs to be played more by people who play modded playthroughs as NO playthroughs exist for it on youtube... It's a shame, such a mod had plenty of time to gather playthroughs as it was released last year, but apparently the doom fans would rather play shit mods like brutal doom.