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Curratum

Guest
Wolf3D was mind-blowing to me when I first played it way back when but I don't think I'd ever re-play it these days. Too simplistic and just plain slow, despite being a marvel at the time. It would be baby's first FPS these days... literally. I think I even had my 3 or 4 year old great-niece propped up on my lap in front of the monitor madly playing that game with some success. However, when I later set up Thief and asked her if she wanted to play for awhile, she fled the room when she saw her first undead groaning & moaning and slowly lumbering towards her in the mine.

I don't see where the "slow" comes from. On higher difficulties, Wolf3D has the absolute shortest / fastest "time to die from enemy fire" in any shooter ever made and you need great decisiveness and stun-locking / fire distribution skills to keep a bigger group of enemies from melting your face in the blink of an eye.

Except for some of the bosses, they all moved in that slow, diagonal side-to-side movement that screamed, "Just shoot me, I'm dead!" But if you saw it as fast, then maybe it's a matter of personal perception so I won't argue the point. Maybe they really were fast... to you.

The bosses comprise what is probably 1/20th of your time spent with the game. Almost all bosses are also placed in rooms already full of enemies, so battles are extremely frantic, as you're both trying to stay out of sight of the boss and look out for ambushes as you move around the big boss room.

Nothing about a game where an enemy can bring you from full health to 10% HP in a single shot that takes 3 frames of animation is slow. It's not about your perception, or mine.

I had to make a deliberate effort not to just flag your post as retarded and type this out. Let me ask you an equally stupid counter-question - maybe you only played the game on the first two difficulties? :BIGTHINK:
 

Quatlo

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Joined
Nov 15, 2013
Messages
941
I hate how many hitscan enemies there are, cornerpulling or just straight DPS race isnt fun for me. Just play MDK instead.
 

Jack Of Owls

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Messages
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Location
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Wolf3D was mind-blowing to me when I first played it way back when but I don't think I'd ever re-play it these days. Too simplistic and just plain slow, despite being a marvel at the time. It would be baby's first FPS these days... literally. I think I even had my 3 or 4 year old great-niece propped up on my lap in front of the monitor madly playing that game with some success. However, when I later set up Thief and asked her if she wanted to play for awhile, she fled the room when she saw her first undead groaning & moaning and slowly lumbering towards her in the mine.

I don't see where the "slow" comes from. On higher difficulties, Wolf3D has the absolute shortest / fastest "time to die from enemy fire" in any shooter ever made and you need great decisiveness and stun-locking / fire distribution skills to keep a bigger group of enemies from melting your face in the blink of an eye.

Except for some of the bosses, they all moved in that slow, diagonal side-to-side movement that screamed, "Just shoot me, I'm dead!" But if you saw it as fast, then maybe it's a matter of personal perception so I won't argue the point. Maybe they really were fast... to you.

The bosses comprise what is probably 1/20th of your time spent with the game. Almost all bosses are also placed in rooms already full of enemies, so battles are extremely frantic, as you're both trying to stay out of sight of the boss and look out for ambushes as you move around the big boss room.

Nothing about a game where an enemy can bring you from full health to 10% HP in a single shot that takes 3 frames of animation is slow. It's not about your perception, or mine.

I had to make a deliberate effort not to just flag your post as retarded and type this out. Let me ask you an equally stupid counter-question - maybe you only played the game on the first two difficulties? :BIGTHINK:

I can't even remember what difficulty I played Wolfenstein 3D at... as it's been years & years since I played it. Probably middle difficulty, whatever that was. Now if you asked me what difficulty I played the superior Doom-engine games and pwads at, I can give you a definite answer, since I still play them occasionally - Ultra Violence (unless it's a pwad that's particularly ball-busting). Wolf3D is just one of those games that I consider completely seminal but I really don't give a shit about it now. I'm happy you still go back to it and get joy from it though, but for some of us, it's sometimes time to move on.
 

Curratum

Guest
I hate how many hitscan enemies there are, cornerpulling or just straight DPS race isnt fun for me. Just play MDK instead.

Agree that the full-on hitscan roster is not as fun as later games, however, to me the challenge and fun are in juggling enemies and doing the stun-lock spray just right, so you can walk away without taking much damage. It could be just me that enjoys that thing, but apart from learning all enemy positions and ambushes, and being really quick on the trigger, that's the only real element of depth the game has to it.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
How though? It's got a vertically fixed viewpoint and you only turn side to side, no headbob, no looking up and down, no camera complexity.

Have you tried a sourceport with high fps, could it be the framerate?

Some motion sickness is caused by the eyes wanting to binocularly focus on objects but not being able to. I mentioned a while back in another thread that Carmack thinks of this as the last great problem to be overcome with VR.

IOW, normally in life, you focus on depth to help reckon 3-d space, but if you have a flat surface you're looking at (screen or VR goggles) your eyes can't do it, all you have is a representation on a flat surface of objects layered in 3-d space in front of you, none of the objects can be separated out in 3-d space. So your eyes are trying to differentially focus on depth as they normally do, but they can't do it. Most peoples' brains, it doesn't bother them (the "trying and failing" never connects up to the relevant nausea systems), but for some it does.

To get around this you'd need a "holotank" type of deal (or obviously a holodeck, but that's way far in the future) or (in VR) some way for a computer to monitor your eye movements so it can anticipate them, so it has an idea of what your brain is "wanting" to focus on.

People don't realize that the "visual field" is actually concocted mostly in the brain as a guessed image based on many small samples of a tiny area which the eyes actually do literally see and focus on. The eyes dart about really quickly trying to sample lots of little areas - then the brain builds the "visual field" model out of that data, as a guesstimate. Even if you're looking at a monitor, your eyes aren't actually registering the whole thing, they're focusing on the screen itself and seeing small patches here and there, with the rest of what's on the screen being guessed at, and an internal model created out of the guesses.

The "stuff" of the guessed image is the same "stuff" that hallucinations, illusions, dreams or OOBEs or "astral travel" are made of. The same internal modelling of the world, experienced as a "visual field." That's also why illusions and hallucinations blend so seamlessly into actual perceptions. Effectively, stretching the point, one could say that all experience is a hallucination, bar a few constantly-shifting, tightly focused spots here and there that are actual seeings of what's out there, which continually update the ongoing hallucination and tend to make it veridical, a perception of reality.

Furthermore, you can actually test this when under LSD. You tend to get hallucinations and illusions when you fixate, so that your eyes aren't updating and reality testing as much, so the visual-field-producing system goes apeshit with all sorts of wild guesses that are no longer being reality tested by the eyes' saccades. As soon as you shift position or look at something else, the illusion or hallucination will fade out (though there may be after-images of sorts).

(sorry, got carried away there lol)
 
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Curratum

Guest
Wolf3D was mind-blowing to me when I first played it way back when but I don't think I'd ever re-play it these days. Too simplistic and just plain slow, despite being a marvel at the time. It would be baby's first FPS these days... literally. I think I even had my 3 or 4 year old great-niece propped up on my lap in front of the monitor madly playing that game with some success. However, when I later set up Thief and asked her if she wanted to play for awhile, she fled the room when she saw her first undead groaning & moaning and slowly lumbering towards her in the mine.

I don't see where the "slow" comes from. On higher difficulties, Wolf3D has the absolute shortest / fastest "time to die from enemy fire" in any shooter ever made and you need great decisiveness and stun-locking / fire distribution skills to keep a bigger group of enemies from melting your face in the blink of an eye.

Except for some of the bosses, they all moved in that slow, diagonal side-to-side movement that screamed, "Just shoot me, I'm dead!" But if you saw it as fast, then maybe it's a matter of personal perception so I won't argue the point. Maybe they really were fast... to you.

The bosses comprise what is probably 1/20th of your time spent with the game. Almost all bosses are also placed in rooms already full of enemies, so battles are extremely frantic, as you're both trying to stay out of sight of the boss and look out for ambushes as you move around the big boss room.

Nothing about a game where an enemy can bring you from full health to 10% HP in a single shot that takes 3 frames of animation is slow. It's not about your perception, or mine.

I had to make a deliberate effort not to just flag your post as retarded and type this out. Let me ask you an equally stupid counter-question - maybe you only played the game on the first two difficulties? :BIGTHINK:

I can't even remember what difficulty I played Wolfenstein 3D... as it's been years & years since I played it. Probably middle difficulty, whatever that was. Now if you asked me what difficulty I played the superior Doom-engine games and pwads at, I can give you a definite answer, since I still play them occasionally - Ultra Violence (unless it's a pwad that's particularly ball-busting). Wolf3D is just one of those games that I consider completely seminal but I really don't give a shit about it it now. I'm happy you still go back to it and get joy from it though, but for some of us, it's sometimes time to move on.

Just give it another shot. Grab the sourceport to have a smoother time with it: https://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/

Then boot the game up and go play on the highest difficulty. You may not enjoy the experience, but you'll discover the game becomes blisteringly fast when it comes to your reaction times and the need to move as fast as a bullet, in the exact right direction a lot of the time.
 

JamesDixon

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
Wolf3D wasn't my thing since I suffered from motion sickness. Only a few games do that to me with another being the Descent series.

I do give it credit for starting the FPS genre that we have today. I'm happy that people are enjoying the game all these years later.
 

gurugeorge

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Strap Yourselves In
I put forth my thesis about the "goodness" of the older forms of fps gameplay in the recent thread about how shit modern fps-es are.

It's not so much in the gameplay - that's just a preference between simple and complex gameplay. It's not in the shooter mechanics - they're exactly the same. It's in the graphics becoming more realistic, and that's in two main senses:-

1) With simple graphics with colourful icons, it's easy for the brain to distinguish quickly, on the fly, between figure and ground.

2) When graphics make no pretension to realism, the level design can be focused on gameplay, with realism as window-dressing, but the more realistic the graphics, the more realistic the layout of the virtual world the brain expects (similar to the uncanny valley effect with faces), and that somewhat interferes with designing the level around gameplay first and foremost.

I say this as a graphics whore who loves graphics realism. It's not an unsurmountable problem, it just needs extra attention to making mobs distinguishable from background on a flat surface, and ensuring that level design still has priority over realism, but without making the scenery look too "set up."
 

Curratum

Guest
Fun fact - when playing Spear of Destiny's final boss level, I kept dying in the first 30-40 seconds of the level for nearly a full day. When I finally swallowed my pride and went online to see how it should be done, I saw a random post somewhere, from a guy quoting the hint book / manual / whatever documentation came with the game or was sold separately, saying that the book suggested that you do a very specific thing - open a specific door from your spawn and run down a specific vector to another specific door.

I have been trying other options, dozens of them, for hours. When I did this, I survived and cleared the level. I am actually fairly convinced this is the single possible way to clear that level on max difficulty, which is a bit nuts.
 

Jack Of Owls

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Joined
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Messages
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Location
Massachusettes
Wolf3D was mind-blowing to me when I first played it way back when but I don't think I'd ever re-play it these days. Too simplistic and just plain slow, despite being a marvel at the time. It would be baby's first FPS these days... literally. I think I even had my 3 or 4 year old great-niece propped up on my lap in front of the monitor madly playing that game with some success. However, when I later set up Thief and asked her if she wanted to play for awhile, she fled the room when she saw her first undead groaning & moaning and slowly lumbering towards her in the mine.

I don't see where the "slow" comes from. On higher difficulties, Wolf3D has the absolute shortest / fastest "time to die from enemy fire" in any shooter ever made and you need great decisiveness and stun-locking / fire distribution skills to keep a bigger group of enemies from melting your face in the blink of an eye.

Except for some of the bosses, they all moved in that slow, diagonal side-to-side movement that screamed, "Just shoot me, I'm dead!" But if you saw it as fast, then maybe it's a matter of personal perception so I won't argue the point. Maybe they really were fast... to you.

The bosses comprise what is probably 1/20th of your time spent with the game. Almost all bosses are also placed in rooms already full of enemies, so battles are extremely frantic, as you're both trying to stay out of sight of the boss and look out for ambushes as you move around the big boss room.

Nothing about a game where an enemy can bring you from full health to 10% HP in a single shot that takes 3 frames of animation is slow. It's not about your perception, or mine.

I had to make a deliberate effort not to just flag your post as retarded and type this out. Let me ask you an equally stupid counter-question - maybe you only played the game on the first two difficulties? :BIGTHINK:

I can't even remember what difficulty I played Wolfenstein 3D... as it's been years & years since I played it. Probably middle difficulty, whatever that was. Now if you asked me what difficulty I played the superior Doom-engine games and pwads at, I can give you a definite answer, since I still play them occasionally - Ultra Violence (unless it's a pwad that's particularly ball-busting). Wolf3D is just one of those games that I consider completely seminal but I really don't give a shit about it it now. I'm happy you still go back to it and get joy from it though, but for some of us, it's sometimes time to move on.

Just give it another shot. Grab the sourceport to have a smoother time with it: https://maniacsvault.net/ecwolf/

Then boot the game up and go play on the highest difficulty. You may not enjoy the experience, but you'll discover the game becomes blisteringly fast when it comes to your reaction times and the need to move as fast as a bullet, in the exact right direction a lot of the time.

I've had that sourceport for a couple of years (now in a place of honor in my Launchbox library) but never got around to playing it. Soooo many games (please don't look at the bottom of my Launchbox screenshot), so little time... and one reason I have such severe choice paralysis and play - and complete - only about 5 or 6 games a year now. Tbh, I'd probably play Blade of Agony before I'd play Wolfenstein 3D again since it would be new & fresh to me. But thanks anyway.

4ogjx8E.jpg
 

Curratum

Guest
Blade of Agony is the herald of decline and the worst case of "modders gonna mod" navel-gazing, lost-up-your-own-asshole design and execution I've seen in probably all my life, sadly.

I'd take the original Wolfenstein 3D over this thing. It's the plastic bimbo of Doom mods - it tried so hard to be sexier than everyone else that it ended up being just a big turn-off because of being so overdone in every aspect, and such a directionless mish-mash of ideas and questionable execution.
 

schru

Arcane
Joined
Feb 27, 2015
Messages
1,131
Raven made a clone of Wolf3D as their first shooter. Wonder if it's gud.
ShadowCaster incorporated some RPG elements, so I'm not sure if it was exactly a shooter, but it's interesting that Gabe Newell singled it out in an interview at one point:

RPS: Yeah, I've been playing Hexen on Steam and remembering what it did for FPS games in terms of looking up and down and so forth.

Gabe: I wish we had Ultima Underworld on there. It's a game that I think is invisible to the current generation of game designers. Also there's a game called Shadowcaster – I seem to be the only person who has ever played it – but it was this first-person game with resources you could manage that you could transport to places, and it was really sophisticated. There's a lot of lessons to learn from that. It's a fun game to play, and there are more useful concepts than in a lot of the stuff you see coming out today.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rps-exclusive-gabe-newell-interview
There was also this (also made by Raven)


BTW Did it also use a modified Wolf3D engine?
CyClones was initially supposed to use the modified version from ShadowCaster, but since development was started at the same time as Heretic's, which was on the Doom engine, it was decided that the former was too outdated and Raven made their own for this game.
 

Jack Of Owls

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Location
Massachusettes
Wolf3D wasn't my thing since I suffered from motion sickness. Only a few games do that to me with another being the Descent series.

I do give it credit for starting the FPS genre that we have today. I'm happy that people are enjoying the game all these years later.

Little Jimmy above won't see this post because he put me on Ignore this weekend (which is fine, because the important thing is that I can see them but they can't see me :lol:) but Wolfenstein 3D was the only FPS years ago that gave me motion sickness. It was weird because I played a LOT of first person shooters back then, but when I played Wolf3D on a modern Pentium system at a full 60+ FPS, I'd get nauseous as hell. Never figured out exactly why though I suspect it's because the textures were so bare. All that smoothness with fast frames per second - I probably originally played Wolf3D at well under 30 FPS on my old 286 - just made me woozy, I think. I wonder if I'd still have the issue today. Oh, and a tip for all you boys 'n' girl-things that get motion sickness playing games - chew a ginger candy (not those hard candies... the real ginger chews). Now see, if lil Jimmy Dixon didn't ignore me I would have improved the quality of his life, but... :P
 

zapotec

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Messages
1,495
How though? It's got a vertically fixed viewpoint and you only turn side to side, no headbob, no looking up and down, no camera complexity.

Have you tried a sourceport with high fps, could it be the framerate?

No idea, maybe it's the repetive enviroment and textures
 

JamesDixon

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Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut
How though? It's got a vertically fixed viewpoint and you only turn side to side, no headbob, no looking up and down, no camera complexity.

Have you tried a sourceport with high fps, could it be the framerate?

No idea, maybe it's the repetive enviroment and textures

Could be refresh rate combined with fps as well. If a games refresh rate is off combined with the fps I get motion sickness.
 

Curratum

Guest
I'm not trying to be a smart alec about the motion sickness, I just never got any of that in any extent or form, even when playing overall disorienting stuff like Descent / Overload, so I just don't expect that something as simple camera-wise can cause issues. :\

To make up for that, I feel like absolute shit and like I'm gonna fall off the face of the planet if I am not footed on solid ground. Boats, rope bridges, anything where I don't feel complete stability and immovable resistance under my feet makes me literally feel like I'm going to peel off and fly into space. :\
 

Jack Of Owls

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I almost never get motion sickness and I use to be quite puzzled by the hordes of moviegoers that would puke when they saw Blair Witch Project in the theater, but as I got older, the motion sickness thing while playing a certain few games became quite acute. Dying Light is a game that gave me such a vicious bout of nausea/headache that I'd have to take frequent breaks. Then I discovered the ginger chew trick (which may not work for everyone, btw, because there are multiple reasons for motion sickness, everything from the whirling camera thing to too low an FOV to medical problems like inner ear issues or you're nursing a brain tumor and you're going to die soon).

Bizarrely, the first time I had motion sickness and got deathly sick was playing Sid Meier's submarine sim Silent Service on my Commodore 64 so many years ago. When you'd look through the periscope you got amazing (for the 8-bit times, at least) first person views of the enemy ships in motion above the surface at about 10-15 FPS. "How on earth can you get sick from something like that?" you may ask. My theory is that it was the pink pastel skies in that game that made me sick. The Great God Motion Sickness works in mysterious ways.
 
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Cazzeris

Guest
I tried to play it a few years ago, just to see the graphics and hear the sound effects. Couldn't put the thing down, kept playing through all the six chapters and installed the sequel right afterwards.

It is quite a funny game to look at and run around. The stupid parody of nazis was addictve to me, I remember playing return to castel wolfestein at some point too. that theme acts on me like a timeless image from a legendary tale

Part of the charm must surely come from it being simple like that, so every little surprise left in by the designers felt like a recurring miracle. Even Doom developed too far to repeat the same awe
 

zerotol

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There are four types of games and the ability to distinguish them is inversely proportional to how much of a concave-headed brainlet you are:
  • Games that are actually good - either completely, as flawed gems or good-for-what-they-are (play those).
  • Games that are not really good themselves, but they have pioneered something good, so they deserve credit - either historical, or because no one has followed through and they are still the best in their category (only play those if their genre stagnated immediately or if you want to experience a bit of history).
  • Games that are obviously shit to anyone caring to take a look (don't play those, unless craving masochistic lulz).
  • Games that might have seemed good on release to press and easily manipulated morons but actually aren't (don't play those, unless craving masochistic lulz, but take care to not confuse them with #1).
Wolf3D, being very primitive, is firmly in the second category and since the genre it helped spark (note that there were earlier FPS games) became very prolific, the credit it deserves is purely historical.
:martini:
The conclusions WRT OP's intellectual capability are left as an exercise to the reader.

Caution:
Trying too hard may result in
:butthurt:!
 

alighieri

Educated
Joined
Jan 15, 2020
Messages
89
I've had fun with Wolf3D but would never call it better than newer FPS. Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the other hand ...
 

Lemming42

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I've just played through the first three episodes of Wolfenstein 3D using Wolfenstein 3D TC, which puts the whole thing on the zdoom engine. It's an interesting new way to play the game - smoother controls and your bullets actually registering mean that the game is laughably easy for the most part, and the Doom-style map is a lifesaver in some of those shitty mazes.

Definitely worth checking out. It reveals the weakness of the map design in parts, but it's also probably the most enjoyable way to play the game. A lot of Episode 3 in particular is good fun, since it ditches pointless mazes and instead goes for shorter levels with more combat. You need to run it on zdoom, not gzdoom. gzdoom just causes weird visual glitches.
 

ferratilis

Magister
Joined
Oct 23, 2019
Messages
2,224
:necro:

Happy 30th birthday. Someone made a set of 30 levels for the occasion.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/wolfenstein-3d-30th-anniversary-edition
= = Wolfenstein 3D - 30th Anniversary Edition = =

On 1992,May 05, the first shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D was released. Now, the game that formed an entire game genre, that still (mostly) holds up, just turned 30 years old, thanks to the community, the modders, and the players for keeping this game alive, hopefully for decades to come.

Let's celebrate this event with a mod release for both DOS and SDL -- Wolfenstein 3D - 30th Anniversary Edition -- an unofficial mod that features an exclusive new trilogy set through three episodes, 10 levels each. Featuring two new guns and items you haven't seen before in the original game, they will help you on your journey through dangerous caves, dark torture chambers, even appear in Castle Wolfenstein, that's right! Such release must include the original levels too, however, they are locked by default, pick the "Read This!" option to know how to unlock them! Also featuring some quality of life improvements and engine enhancements, bringing back features that never made it into the original game, such as the automap! But hey, now! Let's not spoil all the fun, shall we? Let's explore the rest all by yourself!
 

Alan

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Joined
Apr 11, 2022
Messages
46
Location
Spain
I got addicted to this game a few years ago. Finished all the episodes, took the spear of destiny. Then I got Doom, played only through the main campaign

There's something about it
 

Curratum

Guest
:necro:

Happy 30th birthday. Someone made a set of 30 levels for the occasion.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/wolfenstein-3d-30th-anniversary-edition
= = Wolfenstein 3D - 30th Anniversary Edition = =

On 1992,May 05, the first shareware version of Wolfenstein 3D was released. Now, the game that formed an entire game genre, that still (mostly) holds up, just turned 30 years old, thanks to the community, the modders, and the players for keeping this game alive, hopefully for decades to come.

Let's celebrate this event with a mod release for both DOS and SDL -- Wolfenstein 3D - 30th Anniversary Edition -- an unofficial mod that features an exclusive new trilogy set through three episodes, 10 levels each. Featuring two new guns and items you haven't seen before in the original game, they will help you on your journey through dangerous caves, dark torture chambers, even appear in Castle Wolfenstein, that's right! Such release must include the original levels too, however, they are locked by default, pick the "Read This!" option to know how to unlock them! Also featuring some quality of life improvements and engine enhancements, bringing back features that never made it into the original game, such as the automap! But hey, now! Let's not spoil all the fun, shall we? Let's explore the rest all by yourself!

Can you play this in a modern engine? I expected a .pk3.
 

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