/vr/ - Retro Games

>>8309386
It's a mixed bag in a different sense.

I played it a few years back, and the first thing that struck me was that the readme promised CBT difficulty and the help screen lists the cheat codes for you. I thought "Woah, shit, better pick HMP so I don't get overwhelmed."
In actuality, the CBT consisted of blueballing me, where combat encounters and level design feeling like I'm being handled with kid gloves more often than not. I actually got pissed at numerous points; "What, that's IT?"
It's probably more fun on UV, at least, it would be more fun for me.

Where I think it falters pretty hard is in its level design. Perdition's Gate was originally a small mapset which Tom Mustaine and his dad had been tinkering with, and during the Final Doom thing, was offered to iD Software as yet another part of Final Doom, but they were told "the window of opportunity had closed" and the offer rejected.
Shopping it around, they offer it to Wraith Corporation, which were making a 32 level megawad as a commercial product, Hell 2 Pay, they thought "Great, let's fill it out into 32 levels and publish it as dual megawad bundle, just like Final Doom!"

Wraith Co.'s mappers goes to town on filling in map slots, and it ends up being some pretty uninspired stuff, a staggering amount of levels look, feel, and play the same, which is frustrating because some levels are actually pretty novel and interesting, but once you see them the first time their themes never return, so together with the VERY low difficulty on HMP, it was a big tease of a mapset for me, which left me very unsatisfied. It's not awful, there's some great glimmers in there, but I think you could cut out about half of all the levels from perdgate.wad and it would be a much better mapset for it.

Perhaps if iD had taken the deal and Mustaine instead completed it together with some other Team TNT mappers, it could have been something much greater.

>>6994986
It was offered to iD Software as an additional megawad for the Final Doom deal, but Jay Wilbur told them "the window of opportunity had closed", so they probably never even looked at it. It wasn't finished by then, so I doubt they could have gotten it finished in time.

I'd almost say, good riddance, because I've never been blueballed so hard by a megawad before. Plutonia puts the thumbscrews on you, and even TNT gives it a good shot, but Perdition's Gate was underwhelming as hell in combat (which I wouldn't mind if it didn't tell me that it was supposed to be super difficult), and for that matter in general level design and concept. You start playing it, and it gives you some impressions that it's going to go to novel and interesting places, but then it pretty much never does, you see glimpses of it, but it's abandoned as soon as you see it. About half of the 32 levels are completely fucking boring and don't need to exist, they're *extremely* bland cookie cutters shoveled into the .wad when Wraith Co bought the rights to it after iD turned it down.

Perhaps if iD had accepted, and the .wad got worked on by some of the Team TNT people instead (mind, Dario and Milo were busy as fuck making Plutonia), perhaps something decent could have come out of it. I can't say I outright hate Perdition's Gate, because it has a bunch of glimmers of some really cool stuff, but at the same time I can never really recommend it either. People say that TNT Evilution has a weak third cour, and it does, but Perdition's Gate just plains gives the fuck up harder than any megawad I've ever seen.

I didn't even check the help screen for Perdition's Gate, but going through the .wad this is what I see.
What the shit am I looking at? And how little confidence do you have in your game to list the cheats in the help screen?