Lord Rocket
Erudite
- Joined
- Feb 6, 2008
- Messages
- 1,089
Well those few of you sensible enough to follow my awesome Star Command LP will be aware that's going on hiatus due to the fact I am a thicko, and that I will be playing an exciting MYSTERY GAME instead. Well Cyberdreams is the mystery game - mod - in question.
Cyberdreams is reasonably famous in the Doom community for changing Doom's gameplay about as fundamentally as humanly possible, all within the confines of the vanilla game. Essentially it streamlines the run 'n' gun gameplay just down to 'run' - you'll have nothing but your fists to protect you (for most of the game anyway) but our old friend the Cyberdemon and his rockets are out to get you. The quickwitted among you (ie. not me) won't have too many problems though, as the level designers have kindly provided us with tools in the form of crushers, teleporters, and various other Doom-isms in order to deal to our cybernetically enhanced friends. The main thrust of the gameplay is working out how to use said tools in order to destroy the Cyberdemons - while the text file notes that you can escape some levels without killing all of them, it also points out that this is doing it wrong. Not in those exact words, obviously, since this came out in 1998 and faggy memes had not yet been invented.
Without further ado, though, I bring you...
Fortunately we have no lame chargen to wade through, since this is Doom, so we'll just get started on the first level.
For those interested, I'm playing with PRBoom, keyboard only (although a non-standard control layout), default complevel. I'll change this to Doom 1.9's complevel at some point in the future since this is the sort of wad that is likely to rely on vanilla behaviour, although that said I haven't heard of any specific bugs caused by playing this with a source port instead.
(No correspondence about Chocolate Doom will be entered into)
Anyway level one is super simple although I never would have finished it in 1998 due to the fact I had never heard of telefragging back then (no LAN/modem stunts a boy's growth). You see these pillars?
Pass between them (or their duplicates around the room) and you'll be teleported to where that marine gib is in the first shot. The problem, of course, is ensuring Cybie is in the right spot for killin'. As you can see, he roams freely around the water and has to be goaded back to the killing area:
For experienced Doomers, it isn't exactly hard to dodge dickface's rockets in a large, open area like this one. The problem is, of course, when you miss telefragging the demon and then it shoots you in the face at point blank range.
OK we respawn and try again.
NB the weapon is set automatically to the fist by the simple expedient of setting your starting bullets to 0. It also sets other kinds of ammo to be 0 at most (as you can see in the status bar there). While I was perusing the Dehacked file I also noticed that the cheat codes were changed, which revealed these guys as a bunch of Speccy owners (iddqd is now 'manic', idkfa is now 'miner'). Hail Britsoft!
There he is...
Goad him into position (slow and steady wins the race)...
I am terrible at this.
And, so on.
However, perseverance does pay off, and eventually...
SUCK IT MOTHERFUCKER
(when I playtested this level I managed to ice him the first time without even bothering to check where he was standing before I went through the teleporters. Sigh)
Anyway now that we're done we can just go through the exit. The level designers, being jerks, don't want you hiding in there so they do a couple of things to stop you from just going in and flicking the switch.
First of all there's these bars that pop up when you enter the cavity. Even if you're some sort of danmaku (Doomaku?) motherfucker you'll still get chomped by the Cyberdemon's splash damage after not very long.
Next you have to wait a good long while for the exit 'door' to lower and let you into the teleporter room.
http://img714.imageshack.us/img714/5932/doom18.png
Groan.
Alright yeah I admit it, this takes a while and is pretty boring.
Soon we are out of there though:
Ohh, a 1 point health bonus! Very generous.
(Actually a fun way to play this mod would be to see how far you can get on your one life - naturally you're likely to suffer a bit of splash damage here and there and medkits etc. aren't especially plentiful from what I can remember).
And it's the intermission screen:
Triple 100% is the way I roll, motherfuckers.
Next time - level 02.
