Over the last few days I've been doing a lot of Doom stuff, and that is the subject of this update.

Firstly, concerning reviews of my levels.  Ismaele updated his site, Outpost of Doom II with some new reviews.  These are of Erik Alm's Europa 3: The Dark Side of Vrack and Scythe (about which I'll write some of my own comments a little later), and my Congestion Control 2.  My brother Varun's maps Short 'n Quick and it's sequel also got mini-reviews at his site.  Then, Kak Home sent me yet another detailed review of one of my levels: Dark Fate this time.  I've posted the review on the Dark Fate page.  Also, I've updated that page with the info that there's yet another review of the level at the Doom Wad Station, done by Eric Buck a.k.a. BluePaladin (who reviewed CCT2 also earlier).  Thanks Ismaele, Kak Home and Eric!  Also, thanks to Brad Spencer, for taking the time to do a first-try demo of Congestion Control 2.

Something strange also happened while Ismaele was playing CCT2: the two archviles that run out once you open the red key door, started fighting against each other, and one of them killed off the other one, and then proceeded to commit suicide!  Ismaele's got a couple of screenshots on his site showing this unusual phenomenon (I've never heard of this happening before).

I've also been working on my E4M3 for The Ninth Gate, and it's now 99% complete!  I just sent the map to the team members yesterday and I'm waiting for their comments.  Next I'm going to complete the new E4M1.

Recently, I also downloaded the latest version of ZDaemon.  And it was very cool to play some deathmatch with Pablo Dictter on the morning of 2 June (my time).  Actually I was intending to set up a server running my CCT2 so that I could actually play it on DM with someone, but it wasn't working (ZServ would crash whenever I queried the master server).  Anyway this time when Pablo and me met on MSN Messenger, we tried getting the thing to work but it didn't.  We later played DM on an existing server and it was fun.  It was my first DM game playing with a human (heh, until now I've only played with bots), and I took several screenshots to remember the moment!  I also managed to get a ZDaemon server with CCT2 running, but I kept seeing a message "Connection Interrupted" on the screen.  I guess I will try later with Dark Fate!

Also, after reading Ismaele's Scythe review (and his recent emails) I decided to play the maps starting from the first till the last.  Until yesterday I'd only played some of the maps on various skill levels, individually, and watched demos (thanks to Opulent's DSDA) for nearly all of them.  But last night, I started playing the whole thing, and got through 22 levels.  I played the rest today.  I played all the levels on Skill 1, and on MAP28 and MAP30 I put on IDDQD (heh).  Anyway I enjoyed playing it and I must say, it is my favourite megawad.  It's also the only megawad I've more or less played fully, till date.  Most of the levels are short and can be completed in a very short time, which is something that really appealed to me.  The gameplay is excellent and in my opinion, the looks match the standard of the gameplay.  Although to the authors (Erik Alm and secret-level author Kim "Torn" Bach) gameplay assumed a higher priority over looks, I love Erik's style in these levels, and to me the looks range from great to absolutely beautiful (MAP29 and MAP30).

And finally, there were some interesting comments regarding the voodoo doll trick (which I used in Simpler) on the Doomworld Forums, and thanks to Grazza I got some old (from 1995) WADs which used the trick too.  Also, I got a package of interesting Doom v1.2 stuff from Gokuma's site.