That’s one thing, secrets are often a big deal here. From getting weapons much earlier, to E1 style mega health stashed away in almost every level to direct situational aid like the invincibility in the crusher level that protects you from the surprise ones.
I also kinda feel like its not that hard? At least not as much as I see people talking it up. It’s above the challenge level of the classic 3 episodes to be sure, but so far I haven’t hit anything on the level of E4’s worst really, to say nothing of all the stuff in various and sundry wads over the years. Or maybe it’s just more my kind of hard, not beign a big fan of the gargantuan hordes that many seem to go for now.
Its definitely not as hard as the best megawads but its also not as good as scythe ii or btsx. Most of the difficulty comes from straightforward “chasm” style catwalks over nukage or lava, some of the difficulty comes from waves of enemies in very small spaces where they are hard to dodge. I think that relative to the scale of the maps, these are gargantuan hordes. 150 enemies on a map thats comparable in scale to everything in vanilla doom feels like a horde!
My biggest mixed feeling about this is how tightfisted romero is with ammo placement on UV. While I like that it forces me to use my chainsaw and forced infighting more often than in vanilla doom, I would have loved to not be constantly worried about low ammo count. Too many barons of hell and cyberdemons on UV!
the cyberdemons are more environmental hazards than things you’re actually supposed to fight. I mean that is broadly true of enemies in doom in general, I guess, but very deliberately so here. at least so far, I’ve done like 6 maps or something. I’m usually low on ammo for all the non shotgun weapons, but I kinda like that. the shotgun is always the default weapon, but that’s really true here.
Oh, I know that, and they’re good as environmental hazards. Even leaving aside them I still ran out of ammo near constantly and I really don’t care for that in doom maps, it feels like fake challenge.
I do want to be clear, I think sigil is very good, but I feel compelled to nitpick because of who I am as a person
The MIDI soundtrack doesn’t do too much for me. The composition is nice but the MIDI voices are a little grating. I do still like most of the MIDI songs on the original Doom’s soundtrack but I’m not sure how much of that is familiarity/nostalgia.
It does work better in context, though. Felt natural when I was watching Tulpa’s playthrough, where the Buckethead soundtrack is more attention grabbing and out of place.
I don’t know if I mentioned this on the stream, but I found the voices grating when I played the first few levels by myself, so I set up crispy doom to play the music over midi and got it piped through an MT32 emulator
It improved the sound quality so much. modern sourceports have such crummy midi emulation that I’m glad this work around existed.
could you elaborate on this? is it the midi implementation or the fact that they default to the very very old Microsoft GS Wavetable Synth for instruments? which source ports? as far as i can tell at least chocolate doom and zdoom have pretty robust midi support
Crispy Doom is a fork of Chocolate Doom that has the exact same sound config. The only good option is Native MIDI, because then you can use MUNT (the MT32 Emulator) as your midi interface or install a music pack recorded from a hardware sc55. The other options? Timidity and GS wavetable synth have both always sounded wrong, and GUS is just a Timidity backend with a GUS soundfont. The default, which is an OPL emulator, sounds bad even by the standards of OPL. Its not noticeable on the standard doom midi tracks but on Sigil’s midi tracks there are sounds that are just painful or annoying to hear and they’re clearly just reflective of the shortcomings of the OPL emulation
Even then most things don’t sound quite right on the MT-32, it’s like gilding on a chocolate bar left in the sun
I have nostalgia for it but I mostly end up thinking PC MIDI is just kind of sorry next to consoles and dictated hardware like PC-98; I think it’s too much to ask musicians to write not knowing what the instruments will be