Doom Mod Review : Samsara Reincarnation

 Samsara is a mod I avoided for years due to it not having enemies in it. Turns out I was wrong... It could allow me to play as duke nukem in doom, or heretic guy or whatever, but the lack of duke or heretic enemies turned me off... Eventually I found a gigantic mod called Samsara : Extra heroes that did this, and added in tons of new classes as well, like lo wang, caleb, quake and quake 2 marine, gordon freeman and more...

But that was not the only mod do to this it turns out. It turned out that samsara : Extra heroes was the worse mod of the two mods that did this. The other mod, Samsara : Reincarnation, was actually the better one... Not only does it it add in beastiary enemies, it also adds in new wolf3d and duke3d enemies as well as well as a playable demoness class from hexen 2!  Me being a hexen 2 fan, made me immediately like this... To turn on these features, simply go to options -> samsara monster mixer options and change duke nukem enemy mode, doom enemy mode, and wolfenstein enemy mode to combined/combined all... Also turn on doom vanilla randomizer while you are at it...

The mod features enemies from the duke3d expansion duke carribean, enemies from the realm667 beastiary, and enemies from the wolf3d addon castle totenkopf... These enemies are mostly really well done but there are some minor issues... The new wolf3d addons are hard as hell, and make the wolf3d mode more like rtcw which drives me nuts, and makes it really unbalanced... The duke3d enemies aren't that great as well.. The beastiary ones however are good...

To download the mod go here.. To get the monster mod for it go here (required), and to get the music mod for it (required as well) go here... Also go here to get the texture replacers I made for it... To get the map generator to make maps go here... You'll have to use a wad manager to load the mod files though as the batch files were made for samsara : extra heroes... Just load samsara-reincarnation_vd_beta2.pk3 first then remixer_v0.95_beta2.pk3 then samsaraost070220.pk3 after it then the texture replacer and any randomly generated wad after it...

For the map theme, choose tech unless your playing duke3d in it, for that choose urban... Make sure to do indoor only tech for half life 1 and 2 maps.. This is important as some of my texture replacers do not work unless the map is set to tech... In fact most of them are tech only...  Just to make it easier for me to make a replacer...

These were tricky to track down... Keep that in mind... I found lots of people playing samsara addons on youtube I simply could not get... I saw half life 2, duke carribean, serious Sam and hexen 2 enemies in this mod and didn't know till last night how to get them... so do yourself a favor and get this mod INSTEAD of samsara : extra heroes... 

Doom Mod Review : Samsara Extra Heroes

 While looking for doom mods, it is rare you find a very good Total Conversion mod that can replicate a game really well.. Mods like Serious Doom 0.9 and Dn3doom are examples of this.  But most of the games you want to have total conversion mods based off of them don't have them... Well, at least until now.

Samsara was a mod a I skipped because a long time ago I played it and didn't like it because it didn't have enemies from the games it recreated... This mod I am  reviewing today started as a mod for Samsara then became it's own standalone mod, crossing over 16 FPS game universes into one doom mod, enemies included, one liners included, weapons included and new enemies not found in the normal games included...

The following games are included in it's roster:

Doom
Duke3d
Shadow Warrior
Blood
Rott
Wolf3d
Corridor 7
Blake Stone
Half Life
Quake
Quake 2
In Persuit of Greed
Strife
Heretic
Hexen
Dark Forces
and many more.

Each has a player class based on the main character for the game.  When you play as a character, enemies from that game become enemies you fight by default. But you can also set it up so enemies from all of these games randomly spawn, or set it up so enemies from only certain games spawn, under options ..

The enemies themselves are painstakingly recreated in decorate and many expansion pack enemies show up.  Including Opposing force enemies, wanton destruction enemies, spear of destiny expansion enemies, quake 1 and 2 mission pack enemies, and more. Unfortunately there is one major issue with this mod but it's a minor one at least...

I had so much fun with this mod, that I deleted a lot of the total conversion mods off my computer that I had, in favor of this. Gone were the quake, descent, wolfenstein, heretic/hexen and duke3d mods. It is really good for saving disk space... I now can play any of the above games in doom WITHOUT needing to find a TC for it minus quake / quake 2 and half-life (due to opengl needed for them)...

One issue it has that irks me is that the enemies and weapons for quake 1, 2 and half-life are all 3d models instead of sprite rips. This makes it so I can't play these modes due to my system locking up with looping sounds whenever I try to load doom in Opengl, whiich is required, unfortunately. I tried finding a zdoom port that allows models in software but no luck... This is not a huge issue but still bothers me a bit...

Anyway, if you like the idea of crossing over universes of many FPS games this mod is for you. I did a mod like this for doom years ago called TUC but this mod is much better than it... It only has minor issues which are unique to my computer setup only and not flaws of the mod itself...

Screenshots: (textures are from my texture packs for the games)

New texture Packs for Samsara : Extra heroes made....

I found this really neat mod for doom on the net last night... Called Samsara : Extra Heroes, it allows you to play as 16 different characters from various different FPS games... The games list is quite good and on top of that, the enemies from the games get placed in the maps if you use a bonus addon included with it called EXmixer.... This mod makes this thing amazing... All it needs is texture packs to play levels with enemies, weapons and the look of a specific game...

That's where I came in and made texture packs for duke3d/shadow warrior/blood, blake stone, heretic/hexen, and wolf3d for the mod... You can download  the texture packs and the batch files to run each one here...

New enemies show up in many of these games, as well as new weapons..  Duke gets a 2 new enemies, shadow warrior gets 6-7 new ones, wolf3d gets 7 new ones, many of the others get new ones but I could not test a few due to my issues with opengl causing the game to lock up my system with a looping sound if I try to run in opengl...  In some of these cases models are used for enemies and weapons, so they can't be tested by me.... That includes quake 1 and 2, and half life...

the textures for the games are from the following authors:
wolf3d : dbthanotos/areyep
duke3d/shadow warrior/blood : pixelWAD
heretic/hexen : dbthanotos/raven
blake stone : dark textures pack makers

To play with a new level that is randomly generated make sure to download OBSIDIAN here and use it to generate new maps for doom with the required theme.... Duke3d/shadow warrior/blood use urban, the rest use tech...  Make the wad, put it in your doom 2 folder, and go to a dos prompt and type the following:

cd C:\doom2
Then type the batch file to play the level followed by  a space and your wad without the extension
so to play the duke3d mode type
loadssd3d.bat random
to play random.wad in it...
Other batch files include:
loadssw3d.bat (wolf3d)
loadssbld.bat (blood)
loadsssw.bat (shadow warrior)
loadssbs.bat (blake stone)
loadsshtic.bat (heretic/hexen)
loadssrott.bat (ROTT)
loadssd64.bat (Doom 64)
loadsshl.bat (half-life : requires opengl)
loadssqk2.bat (quake 2 - rrequires opengl)
loadssqk.bat (quake 1 - requires opengl or software with poly renderer)
loadsstech.bat (marathon/strife/corridor 7)


Screenshots:

Edit : New version made with improved shadow warrior and blood textures that require a tech map to use right... So don't use urban with them anymore...

Onslaught : Extreme Combat Reborn is now on Itch.io!

 

 I finally have a good home for Onslaught, my free FPS game with a metal theme...  I put it on itch.io last night...  It got a good response and got a lot of downloads last night, which is great. But I think the fans on this blog might like it... It has  has fast paced gameplay with cybernetic powers you can bind to keys.  It also has a lot of nasty enemies, and they come in hordes..

The story goes like this:

 

In the 1800's a mad cult formed to exterminate humanity. They took over governments worldwide over the next few hundred years and eventually in 2142 they nuke Washington DC and Paris by using the US government against them. Then they start bombing various cities worldwide, turning the world into a post apocalyptic wasteland.  They send mutations after people to kill off survivors... The only person who can stop them is you.

 

You are "bastard" a metalhead cyborg mercenary with super powers.  Throughout the game you go around fighting hordes of enemies, and need to use cyborg powers to fight them...  You get 34 new guns, not limited to the basic ones found in every FPS.  Some are really unique... Here is a list of guns!

plasma pistol/lever action shotgun/semi auto double shotgun/autoshotgun/spread rifle (a bullet weapon that shoots a spread of bullets)/overkill cannon (a full auto 4 barrel shotgun)/spike rifle (a nailgun/shotgun hybrid)/assault rifle/3 barrel chaingun/lg80 homing bullet battle rifle/nailbomb/turdbomb/asskicker double rocket launcher backpack/rocket chaingun/nuclear waste gusher/nailgun/skewer (a gun that shoots a dart on a chain that gibs enemies)/stun gun/laser rifle/laser cannon/plasma cannon/flamethrower/napalm cannon (a shotgun/flamethrower hybrid)/gasoline can (can set the ground on fire with this)/seismic disruptor (kills enemies with earthquakes)/black hole gun

Throught the game you fight through 31 levels all with a mission objective. Each level gets harder than the previous one... Minus a few..  You end up going through cities all around the US in this, but they are all post apocalyptic.  There are also a few Cult bases...   Including one in death valley.

Here are screenshots...

Download the game here : https://vicious-games.itch.io/onslaught

Total Conversion Mods to play Obsidian generated doom 2 Maps with...

 The Obsidian Map Generator for doom 2 is out...   Here is a list of doom TC's to play it with that are fun to play... I have played all of these so far and I can voutch for them so far... If you need to play them with an optional texture pack you need to find on the internet they will be marked with a *, if it's not marked with an * then the texture pack is included. The difficulty is measured on the easiest  skill...

Mod                            Game it's based on                   Level theme          Difficulty

half-doomed              Half-Life 1:                             tech                       hard

Xim's star wars*          Jedi Knight                               tech                      medium/hard

ww-nazis                    Wolfenstein  3d                          tech                      hard
Dn3doom                     Duke Nukem 3D                      urban or tech       very easy
Quake style unbound   Quake 1/2/4                             tech                      easy
Serious Doom Plus      Serious Sam                             tech                     very very hard
Wrath of Cronos          Heretic/hexen                           tech                     hard


When generating maps for the mods, make sure obsidian texture pack is TURNED OFF...  Also don't do super hard maps that obsidian sometimes defaults to by setting lower bound to none and upper bound to merciless, and quantity set to mix it up. If it's set that way and your mod is anything above easy you should change quantity to easy before generating, trust me.  

Also it's important to not download the mods from the official sites, always always download from these links because the official sites lack the  texture packs 90% of the time due to me making them...  Load the mods with the batch files included and put a space after calling the batch file in a dos prompt and fill the level name in there but make sure to not include  the wad extension...

All texture packs minus dn3doom and xim's star wars doom were made by me  The wolfenstein one is a patched version of the hexen 2 texture disguise and has been bug fixed and has spear resurrection textures put in. The serious sam one is based on the texture disguise but has had high tech textures put in that are really serious sam textures.. They were gotten from some serious sam to doom texture pack.  The quake style unbound texture packs were made from scratch based on the quake 1, quake 2, and ikbase textures found on the realm667 beastiary to replace doom textures with quake 1, quake 2 or ikbase textures...

Screenshots:

I recently moved all my game modding files to dropbox...

 Due to limits of disk space being imposed on my pcloud drive, I decided to delete all my mods from the pcloud... Instead I moved them to dropbox...   Where They fit fine... I did this because I am uploading a lot of albums to pcloud now to host tons of albums by 7 solo artists...  That takes up a LOT of space...

Anyway the following mods are available now:

open world doom - here
Quake style unbound texture mods - here
Serious Doom Plus - Here

The open world doom mod is a rpg mod that turns doom into an open world rpg... It loads a randomly generated oblige/obaddon wad to play it...  Extract all the files to your doom 2 folder and run loadrpgow.bat to play it...  Bind keys to open menu and weapon zoom (to drop weapons with it)... That drop weapon key can be found in action the rest is in the normal bind keys...  Keep in mind their are limits to how many guns you can carry at once and the same is true for mods... Use mods to mod your guns or make new ones.... Mods are inventory items that allow you increase weapons firerate, damage, or accuracy... Using certain weapon mods on weapons selected you can make new guns...   Here are some formulas...

High powered weapon (for almost any basic weak weapon) - blue + red
Tactical shotgun (for combat shotguns only) - red + brown non striped

The quake texture pack mod allows you to play quake style unbound, a randomizer mod with lots of quake 1/2 enemies and guns, with quake textures.. There are 3 versions. A quake 1 texture version, a quake 2 version, and an ikbase version... To play the quake 1 version run the loadrpgqk with the wad after it in a dos prompt like this (loadrpgqk wad) (wad should not have an extension)..  Do the same for loadrpgq2 and loadrpgik...   Each loads the right music.... These texture packs are designed to be run with oblige/obaddon and obsidian maps that happen to be high tech themed.

Serious doom Plus is an altered serious Doom mod that takes serious doom, and loads music and textures from serious sam on top of it into tech randomly generated obaddon/obsidian maps and adds new enemies and altfires on top of that plus an rpg system. the rpg system uses credits to upgrade your character, which includes buying movement speed, damage resistance and max health upgrades for money per levelup... It also has 5 cyborg powers to use which you should bind to f1-f5. The selected item to buy should be bound to q and the buy item should be bound to e..  Have fun...

Obaddon is dead, but there is a oblige modification to replace it....

For the last few years, my eyes have been glued to obaddon, a project to create an expansion for the doom map generator oblige that introduces new prefabs, new features, and more... This addon is good enough to take the default oblige levels and add serious improvements to them, both detail wise and feature wise... Features such as sloped floors, extra detail, ambient sounds, colored lighting, city streets, and more... It added in a lot of new features... And a lot of new prefabs on top of that, so many I can't describe them all, but most are great, minus a few annoying ones, anyway...

Now obaddon has been in development limbo since 2020... It got one release released in 2020 after doing a release per month almost every release... Now it's dead... The people behind it have decided to quit making it... I am shocked honestly.. They turned oblige into a beast of map design that no one else could even come cloee to doing...  But that isn't as bad as it looks because a new map generator has been designed to replace it...

Obsidian (Available here), is a new modified version of oblige that is in beta now.. Featuring 90% of the features obaddon had, it is a little bit different... For one the shape rules are drastically improved, being far less symmetrical.  There are new textures being put into the maps that can be put in when you enable "Zdoom : obsidian textures".  Like Armaetus textures in obaddon, that introduces new prefabs and foliage too...  And those textures are SICK looking... Here are screenies of a few:

While these textures look like they came from doom 3, they still look good.  Some other features obsidian has that obaddon lacks are the ability to shut off almost all gameplay features that had no gui option on obaddon, like the damaging hallways (I HATED them), crushers, etc...  There are also some new prefabs only found in obsidian that are not in obaddon...  And installation is easy compared to obaddon, which involved downloading a zip, extracting it to a new folder, zipping up subfolders found in a subfolder of that folder, and renaming the zip to a pk3 file to put it in oblige's addon folder...  With obsidian all you need to do is install it to an obsidian folder to replace an older version after deleting that folder first... MUCH simpler...

One feature however will save obsidian... Obaddon seems to be lacking in enemy counts compared to obsidian... With default obaddon settings, the enemy count rarely went higher than 30 per room. Now with default obsidian settings the enemy count sometimes jumps to hundreds per room, making me salivate over the slaughtermap potential of this oblige mod...   This could make it possible to do a sunder killer in it easily... That impresses me..  It impresses me because a lot of people like oblige developers and obaddon developers have been trying to CUT BACK the enemy count! This is like a big middle finger to them I think, And I approve... 
 Anyway, I highly suggest trying this map generator out... It takes a lot of setting changes to make it make proper levels, like turning off barrels, turning off dark outdoors, turning off damaging hallways, and more, but it's worth it... It even makes heretic and hexen maps... But I don't know how good they are compared to obaddon heretic maps... I don't have hexen to test it so I can't say if it does hubs or hexen styled traps but we'll see... New features that might make it later on I heard are randomly generated acs scripting and acs compiling by the generator, I hope that happens, because randomly generated ACS would be sick.... Anyway, check this out... And if it turns out that the levels end up becoming unbearably unfair or something later on, I'll let you know...

One thing, make sure you download beta 19 preview 3, not 4... 4 is buggy as hell and crashes every time you try to make a map... Go for 3 instead....