praxis

Mindless Minutia (My Created Pages)

107 items in list • Created Mar 27, 2011

Serious Sadists I Secretly Support

24 items in list • Created Dec 27, 2010

Doom Travelogues 10: DoomRL

Jul 21, 2014

In the absence of a QuakeRL, I suppose this cameo will have to do. I can’t really tell you when I first came to be aware of Kornel Kisielewicz’s Doom, the Roguelike. It most certainly wasn’t in 2002, when the initial version was released, but it was definitely prior to the addition of Derek Yu’s non-ASCII graphics in 2012. Somewhere in that ten year window. Not that it matters. More to the poin...

Doom Travelogues 09: Deus Vult

Jul 14, 2014

2004 was a pretty solid year for Doom WADs, which is not exactly a surprising development given the state of things. With years of mapmaking experience to draw from, design sensibilities were, by and large, pretty sophisticated by this point in time, and many authors were producing levels one might call professional… if one was inclined to use such words to describe hobbyist pursuits. Furthermo...

Doom Travelogues 08: Hell Revealed 2, Part 3

Jul 5, 2014

Another week, another set of levels. Or in this case another subset of the same group of levels I’ve been playing for the past two. Let’s start that again. Hello and welcome to the third and final week of my in-depth look at Hell Revealed 2. Having now finished the damned thing I’m finally in a position to say something about the product as a whole. It is in fact… wait for it... a Doom WAD. Yup...

Doom Travelogues 07: Hell Revealed 2, Part 2

Jun 29, 2014

Welcome to week two of my ongoing misadventures in playing WADs that may or may not be too hard for me. Last week you may recall that I started playing Hell Revealed 2, the sequel to probably the most trying WAD in my map-playing career. To my great surprise and mild disappointment I’ve been making steady progress with it, which means I’ll most likely have to finish it come hell or high water n...

Doom Travelogues 06: Hell Revealed 2, Part 1

Jun 23, 2014

1997’s Hell Revealed is one of the few Doom fan creations that you could honestly argue has been as influential within the community as any of the original IWADs. It is not hyperbolic to claim that many of the super-hard WADs that have been released in the years following owe their very existence to Hell Revealed, which legitimized a brutal, take-no-prisoners approach toward gameplay that, more...

Doom Travelogues 05: Everything Old is Still Old

Jun 17, 2014

It’s not hard to understand why there are so many Episode 1 replacements out there. It was the shareware episode. It was played more than any other, and it has the most nostalgia attached to it. I’ve played more than a few E1 replacements, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone try what ReX Claussen has tried with 2004’s Phobos Revisited . More than an homage, it’s an attempt to create something ne...