FATAL
June 18th, 2007, 12:12 PM
Italian DooM - Episodio 1
Authors: The Italian Team
Ismaele (sposito.lag@tin.it)
Toranaga (toranaga@email.it )
Buzzbomber (buzzbomber@tiscali.it)
itdoom1.wad 3.98MB
FTP: ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/itdoom1.zip
Required Port: ZDoom v2.0.63a
Gameplay mode: single-player (support for co-op and DM in some maps)
Released: Oct. 20, 2005
Maps: 8
Reviewer: Aliotroph?
Port used: ZDoom
Score: 6/10
The first thing anyone says when they hear of this wad seems to be "WTF is The Italian DooM?" Well, from the text:
Why the name "Italian DooM"?! Because it was made by three
Italian Doomers, grouped in the so-called "Italian Team".
But there's more: in the .WAD there are some new nice features
too, such as messages in Italian... with the literal
translation in English below, of course!
The Italian Team has set out to create a fun little megawad comprised of eight maps that look good and play well. They don't quite succeed though. I desperately wanted to love this wad, but despite excellent design and ideas it has a few things that drag it down and quickly become very frustrating. For the record, I don't even recall seeing messages in Italian. All of the messages that hinted at what I was doing were in English, albeit with a few translation quirks. The story text was also in English so I'm not sure if there's something I missed.
The level design herein is excellent. All of the levels do a good job of being non-linear (always a plus) and they look good too. The maps are mostly quite detailed, and display very creative use of textures. I'm always impressed with mappers who will use part of a texture to create an effect or piece of architecture that isn't very common and there's a lot of that here -- all sorts of custom computer panels, factory parts, generators, etc. It also impresses me when mappers understand how to use DooM's sector lighting to good effect. All of these maps include nice lighting contrasts and gradients. There is also a good number of ZDoom-specific 3D lighting and light that changes with changing map conditions. There are only a couple Hell levels but they show the same level of design ability as the tech maps. The only blemish on all this pretty design is a lack consistency. There are quite a few places with misaligned textures and a few where there are clearly wrong textures that didn't get replaced properly in a redesign. These are small but noticable. Some of the maps do look better than others but all of them look good in general. My favourite with regards to appearance is map03.
There are new sounds as well. I found myself wishing they were used for more than the odd computer panel or new monster. That may not have been worthwhile though, considering all the music is new. The music is mostly fast, and you may recognize tunes from other olde FPS games. Playing DooM to tracks from ROTT is fun!
The gameplay is where this wad becomes annoying. In lots of places the monster balance is fun and clever. Expect to be ambushed by lots of teleporting monsters and to have to use the architecture to your advantage. Running out of ammo generally wasn't a problem on UV, although running out of space to fight can be. All that said, some of the battles become ridiculously hard. At times the monsters will come in swarms (usually by teleporting) and trap you in a small room. There are also battles that really need to be avoided because they are probably no-win and you don't exactly get much, if anything, for beating them.
The low point of these levels is the scripting. All the maps make extensive use of ACS to make things happen and create puzzles. There are generators to power up, combinations of doors to unlock, and clever lighting effects, etc.
All of these are excellently designed but some of them break. At one point I wondered why I couldn't pass map03. After peeking in Doom Builder I discovered my angst-ridden switch pounding had broken a script. The script was designed so three switches needed to be found and activated in sequence to power up a generator. Instead of the code for each switch setting a number to the correct value so it indicated the ready state for the next switch, the code would just increment the number by one. This works fine until a player presses a switch more than once, thus incrememting the counter past anything the script recognizes. At this point the map can't be finished. This bug occurred on two maps for sure and I think on a third (I cheated through the second half of this wad). I wasn't willing to debug all the scripts in my copy since reading comments in Italian is tricky and the maps are big enough to make finding all the tagged secctors and linedefs a daunting task.
The Italian DooM - Episodio 1 shows great potential for fun if you like wads with challenging combat. I suppose you could also play it on an easier difficulty (could have saved me some effort here). The maps are pleasing to the eye and vary nicely in style. If you do decide to play this wad my advice is to only activate any switch once if it appears to be part of a sequence. You never know when you're going to break a script, otherwise. If you understand ACS (or really any language with syntax like C) you can try your hand at repairing the scripts so they don't break. For everyone else, perhaps the team will released a version with this problem solved. That alone would increase my score on this wad probably from a 6 to an 8.
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Authors: The Italian Team
Ismaele (sposito.lag@tin.it)
Toranaga (toranaga@email.it )
Buzzbomber (buzzbomber@tiscali.it)
itdoom1.wad 3.98MB
FTP: ftp://ftp.sunet.se/pub/pc/games/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/itdoom1.zip
Required Port: ZDoom v2.0.63a
Gameplay mode: single-player (support for co-op and DM in some maps)
Released: Oct. 20, 2005
Maps: 8
Reviewer: Aliotroph?
Port used: ZDoom
Score: 6/10
The first thing anyone says when they hear of this wad seems to be "WTF is The Italian DooM?" Well, from the text:
Why the name "Italian DooM"?! Because it was made by three
Italian Doomers, grouped in the so-called "Italian Team".
But there's more: in the .WAD there are some new nice features
too, such as messages in Italian... with the literal
translation in English below, of course!
The Italian Team has set out to create a fun little megawad comprised of eight maps that look good and play well. They don't quite succeed though. I desperately wanted to love this wad, but despite excellent design and ideas it has a few things that drag it down and quickly become very frustrating. For the record, I don't even recall seeing messages in Italian. All of the messages that hinted at what I was doing were in English, albeit with a few translation quirks. The story text was also in English so I'm not sure if there's something I missed.
The level design herein is excellent. All of the levels do a good job of being non-linear (always a plus) and they look good too. The maps are mostly quite detailed, and display very creative use of textures. I'm always impressed with mappers who will use part of a texture to create an effect or piece of architecture that isn't very common and there's a lot of that here -- all sorts of custom computer panels, factory parts, generators, etc. It also impresses me when mappers understand how to use DooM's sector lighting to good effect. All of these maps include nice lighting contrasts and gradients. There is also a good number of ZDoom-specific 3D lighting and light that changes with changing map conditions. There are only a couple Hell levels but they show the same level of design ability as the tech maps. The only blemish on all this pretty design is a lack consistency. There are quite a few places with misaligned textures and a few where there are clearly wrong textures that didn't get replaced properly in a redesign. These are small but noticable. Some of the maps do look better than others but all of them look good in general. My favourite with regards to appearance is map03.
There are new sounds as well. I found myself wishing they were used for more than the odd computer panel or new monster. That may not have been worthwhile though, considering all the music is new. The music is mostly fast, and you may recognize tunes from other olde FPS games. Playing DooM to tracks from ROTT is fun!
The gameplay is where this wad becomes annoying. In lots of places the monster balance is fun and clever. Expect to be ambushed by lots of teleporting monsters and to have to use the architecture to your advantage. Running out of ammo generally wasn't a problem on UV, although running out of space to fight can be. All that said, some of the battles become ridiculously hard. At times the monsters will come in swarms (usually by teleporting) and trap you in a small room. There are also battles that really need to be avoided because they are probably no-win and you don't exactly get much, if anything, for beating them.
The low point of these levels is the scripting. All the maps make extensive use of ACS to make things happen and create puzzles. There are generators to power up, combinations of doors to unlock, and clever lighting effects, etc.
All of these are excellently designed but some of them break. At one point I wondered why I couldn't pass map03. After peeking in Doom Builder I discovered my angst-ridden switch pounding had broken a script. The script was designed so three switches needed to be found and activated in sequence to power up a generator. Instead of the code for each switch setting a number to the correct value so it indicated the ready state for the next switch, the code would just increment the number by one. This works fine until a player presses a switch more than once, thus incrememting the counter past anything the script recognizes. At this point the map can't be finished. This bug occurred on two maps for sure and I think on a third (I cheated through the second half of this wad). I wasn't willing to debug all the scripts in my copy since reading comments in Italian is tricky and the maps are big enough to make finding all the tagged secctors and linedefs a daunting task.
The Italian DooM - Episodio 1 shows great potential for fun if you like wads with challenging combat. I suppose you could also play it on an easier difficulty (could have saved me some effort here). The maps are pleasing to the eye and vary nicely in style. If you do decide to play this wad my advice is to only activate any switch once if it appears to be part of a sequence. You never know when you're going to break a script, otherwise. If you understand ACS (or really any language with syntax like C) you can try your hand at repairing the scripts so they don't break. For everyone else, perhaps the team will released a version with this problem solved. That alone would increase my score on this wad probably from a 6 to an 8.
<a href=" http://img231.imageshack.us/my.php?image=doom00018wu.png" target="_blank"><img src="http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/1107/doom00018wu.th.png " border="0" alt="Free Image Hosting at www.ImageShack.us" /></a>
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