doom city - shams young

Filename: doomcity.zip

File size: 105K

Author: Shams Young

Homepage: none to my knowledge

Other work: SLUGFEST, TORMENT

Doom City is quite a nice map -- the 'starry night' sky looks quite appropriate
in its context, there are a whole lot of new graphics placed in the various
screenshots on this page, and there's new music to boot! I don't know what the
music is, but it sounds quite good. (If anyone knows what it is, you may as well
tell me :-) The map is well constructed for the style; I read that it was
originally far more complicated than this with his original, c.f.:

On the far west side of the map, looking east,
you can see the seven - eleven, the shelves inside,
the gas pumps out front, the bank, the inside of
the bank, the front of the church, the steps in front
of the bank, the sidewalk, the lines in the road,
and other miscellaneous stuff in the distance. All
of this detail put too many walls and lines on the
screen at one time and caused the visplane overflow.

Yeah. Sad, innit? :-) This is a problem with city maps with Doom2.exe,
however, with modern source ports, this will be less of a problem.
That is the main reason I am not really criticising tht slight lack of detail
here. After all, what is there is well defined. A slight oddity is how low
the whole map is -- but city maps tend to look rather ugly when they start
scraping the sky off. :-)



The gameplay in this is a tad random - monsters are scattered about the
areas sporadically, can provide a bit of a challenge outside with the hellknight
and everything. Because it's largely an outdoor map, you can often dodge the
shots from the various projectile monsters. The insides of the buildings
provide various qualities of challenge, including the mysterious Crate Village
building (as I have named it :-) Chaingunners are a bit of a pain sometimes, but
not more than usual. This map, despite being a fair size, is strictly linear; you
have all three keys and you need one to get the next one to get the last one and
to exit. However, there aren't any clues with the first building, so you can
spend rather a lot of time hunting for the blue key. Aside from this, it's
not a bad map playwise.

There are no error zones -- the quote above from the textfile shows that this
was not the case before. No HOMs or anything, which is downright excellent.
There are a number of occasions on which my own maps have had loads of HOM for
the reason of complication...



Aesthetically, this map is not bad. The screenshots above show the best areas
in the map - in my opinion, these are the outdoor ones. The indoor areas tend
to be a bit shabby and lack any real memorability, but as you don't spend much
time indoors, this is not really a problem. I think an overall 8 is quite
reasonable, don't you?

Thing placement is a bit sparse; a number of things were scattered throughout
the map. This statement also includes ammo and health, it can detract a bit from
the experience, so that's possibly the map's weakest aspect.

verdict