Claustrophobia 1024 2: The Mystery of Too Many Maps (aka. just “Claustrophobia 1024 2), the direct sequel to Claustrophobia 1024 which was released on June 2009, was released today! Initially an overflow of subpar or unusable maps from the original Claustrophobia 1024 project, it has turned into a full-blown megawad. During the original project’s development cycle, we had way too many submissions. So towards the end of development, Jodwin came forward and offered to do a sequel-esque side-project featuring all of those maps. The maps that didn’t meet the quality requirement were fixed and polished up. There are also quite a few brand new maps from some of the original contributors of Claustrophobia 1024. I didn’t have anything to do with this wad, at least not directly (other than making the TITLEPIC and the rest of the graphics that were brought over from the original wad ). However, if your a fan of the 1024 theme and you were a fan of the original Claustrophobia, I highly recommend giving this a download!

Download @ Akinomori.com
Screenshots

It should be on /idgames sometime soon, so keep a look out for that link

*edit*

Here’s that /idgames link! Go give it a few downloads and ratings

I am now 23 years of age. Pretty cool, I guess. Thinking back over the years, it’s a tad depressing where I’m sitting at right now. I haven’t accomplished much since I finished up High School, other than flirting here and there with some interests of mine, hoping that they will lead me somewhere. I tried college but sort of fizzled out on that. Most of my other opportunities either never came or were pushed away because of my dag-blasted social ineptitudes. But I suppose as you get older you can’t help to think of these things and sometimes regret where your at in the present. Aside from continuing my game development interests, I’m not sure what other goals I have planned for my future. I would like to try and finish up my game design degree at the very least, and maybe even try for a degree in architecture (which I would then apply to my mapping…I find that somewhat humorous ). Aside from that, I don’t have any other major ambitions or plans on where I want to go from here. Just playing it by ear I guess. Nothing wrong with that, right? RIGHT?!

Also I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe holiday! (if you celebrate anything, that is). This time of the year we usually visit with lots of our family since it’s one of the few times everyone gets together, so it’s pretty much always busy until the new year. By the end of the festivities, I’m usually wore out; this year is certainly no exception so far . We also did the traditional Christmas thing of having a big dinner and opening presents. I’m too old to really do the presents mess these days, but I did get some new pants, some DS games, some candy, and a few other things. Neat! We also made a trip up to D.C. about a week before Christmas to just screw around and take in the sights. Unfortunately this was the same time that massive snow storm hit the eastern part of the country. We got caught in the storm while there with about 12″+ of snow and had to stay an extra day until the roads were clear enough to make it back home. I love the snow and I love it when we get LOTS of it. I do not, however, enjoy driving in it. It can wreck havoc on an overly anxious person’s brain like mine. We made it back in one piece though

By the way, cookies to anyone who gets what “Geewiz” is all about

So Doom’s 16th birthday has come and gone. I was gonna celebrate by playing some Episode 1 while eating some cake, but I was too busy most of the day (I did play a little bit…no cake though ). For you Doom-heads out there, I’m sure you caught this year’s Cacowards. It’s been a really great year for releases and quite the busy one for me. Of the wads that won awards, I really enjoyed and highly recommend Harmony by Thomas van der Velden, Mapgame by Ravage, Plutonia 2, and UDMX by UniDoom. I’ve still got to play though some of the other awarded maps, but those that I listed are definitely my favorites this year. (I’ve heard very good things about Demons of Problematique 2 and Legacy of Suffering). But the biggest surprise of all…I won the award for the year’s best mapper!! Wow…, I think it didn’t really hit me until today. It’s really a huge honor and I’m still kinda dumbstruck by all of it. Of course the irony in all of this now is that my popular nickname of “Lazyadon” is now more ironic than true, which I find hilarious! Anyways, as I said in a comment of Carn’s Vega post about my award, I realize that in the larger scheme of things, this is just an award from a community of a 16 year old game that most of the regular video game population pays no attention to these days. So maybe my shock and appreciation seems a bit out of place given that. But for me, I find it too awesome for words. Doom mapping…well, mapping in general, has become a significant activity in my life and I enjoy it very much. This award only shows that people truly do enjoy my efforts and work and it makes me want to stick around for the long haul and keep contributing to the community at large. And that’s most likely what I’ll do . So thanks to everyone who thought I deserved this award! I cannot put into words how much I appreciate it and I intended to stick around and keep mapping for a long time to come. Also congratulations to everyone who won an award and to everyone else who was nominated! I’ll be looking forward to what’s in store this coming year with much anticipation. I can’t wait to get my trophy in the mail Scuba Steve!

….

Oh, did you think that was it? Well, it’s not. pcorf happened to mention that he would love to see a “WOS” style wad by me in the Cacoward thread at Doomworld. Incidentally, I’ve been planning just such a project for a really long time now (since IGPack release…maybe a little earlier). I wasn’t sure when I wanted to announce it to the public, but his comment made me want to just post a little snippet about it. The name of this project is “Supplice” and production officially started 6/14/2009 (around the same time I was having those computer issues and was unable to work on Vega). I’m planning on another post later on to discuss the overall goals of the project, but I’ll go ahead and say just a bit about it. It’s going to be a Boom compatible, singleplayer map set (possibly COOP compatible). Lots of my inspiration will likely come from wads like Scythe II, Suspended in Dusk, etc and from mapper’s such as Vader, Espi, esselfortium, Dutch Devil, Agent Spork, afterglow, and a few others. One big thing I want is for the majority of the content to be made by me and me alone. So things like new textures, monsters, graphics, music, sprites and maps (duh) will all be made by my own hands. Certain things I’ll probably have to outsource (like monsters sprites and, possibly, music). I want the general theme to follow closely to Doom’s theme but at the same time I want it to have it’s own feel and atmosphere. It may even have some sort of crudely written skeleton story that will stem from the Doom saga in some way. At the moment I’m doing ALL of the resources first; mapping will only start once that’s out of the way (I can only focus on one thing at a time). So far I’ve made some graphics, a bunch of textures, and some new monster behaviors but that’s it. I haven’t been able to work on it (or much else) since I’ve been working though. I’ll make another wordy, drawn-out post about it later on where I can go into more depth about the project’s goals. So let’s leave it at that for now.

However, if your reading this and your getting excited, then just get yourself unexcited . The biggest reason why I didn’t want to announce this was because I have no timeline set for this project. As in, I’m putting the largest majority of my free time into Project Vega first and foremost. I will only work on Supplice when I can, and I have no idea how often that will be. And given the project’s scope and size, it’s likely it will take a very long time before anything of interest is presentable. But I can atleast say this; I plan on working on it and finishing it as long as I’m able. So if you are truly interested, keep your eye’s peeled for my official announcement post sometime in the future.

Happy 16th Birthday DooM! I still find it very hard to believe that Doom still has an amazingly active community given it’s age. I’m looking forward to reading the 16th Annual Cacowards

I’m a pretty poor video game fan these days. That’s for a couple of reasons – First, most new games these days are horrible. Second, most new games these days are horrible! Third, I’m too poor to afford new games. And lastly, I’m usually too busy doing other things to really sit down and enjoy a good game. As a follow up on that last one, I had to get a temporary job since I’m living at home for free, so that just cuts my available free time down to pretty much nothing ( ). But the one exception to all of this has been, surprisingly enough, the DS. At current I own three current gen consoles – a 360, a PSP, and a DS. By a large margin, I have enjoyed my DS the most. My library of DS games is pretty huge (considering how poor I am) and I’m still looking forward to some games that are coming out. One of which was Phantasy Star 0 [zero]. My aunt bought me the game a few days after it came out as an early birthday present and I haven’t looked back since. I guess you can consider the following as a mini-review of sorts

Back in the day, when the Dreamcast still had that new console smell and when I was oblivious to most of the interwebs, Sega released a game called Phantasy Star Online, or PSO for those fans of acronyms. I can’t remember why now, but I was really looking forward to this game and I bought it on the day it came out. I do remember the concept of playing with other people on a console game over an internet connection to be very attractive…and for good reason. It was a lot of fun slashing monsters and robots, digging around for rare items, trading items and chatting away with random players! The same concept can be said for Phantasy Star 0. How Sega managed to fit this game on the DS has me amazed.

I’ve been told that Phantasy Star 0 is a bit of a mixing of Phantasy Star Online and Phantasy Star Universe’s gameplay and mechanics. Seeing as how I’ve never played PSU before, I can only assume this to be the case. For certain though, it has many similarities and concepts taken straight from PSO. You can pick from 3 different classes and 3 different races, with a total of 14 different characters you can choose from. You can have 3 separate characters per cart, which makes my mind boggle. Also, just like in PSO, you can customize your characters with different colors, hair styles, etc, so the customization is fairly deep (as it should be). There is also a Mag system (again, ala PSO) which allows you even more customization. The game, for lack of a better word, looks f’ing incredible for a 3D DS game. I would have to say that this game just might have some of the best 3D graphics for a DS title to date. The environments are varied and colorful, which is to be expected given it’s anime art style. I almost think that the game would look even better if it were cel-shaded given how well that style seems to do on the DS and anime-styled games. Maybe I’m just saying that because Vega is going to be cel-shaded?

As far as playing the game goes, again, it’s very similar to how PSO plays. There are three separate ways to play the game – Story Solo Mode, DS Wireless Play, and Nintendo WFC. Story mode, as you might have guessed, let’s you go through the game’s main story line with a number of NPC’s to help you along the way. You can also do side-quests and gain access to certain parts of the game that you wouldn’t otherwise be able to do in online games. As far as the story goes…well, it’s nothing to write home about and I’m not going to leave any spoilers here. Depending on which race you pick for you character, the story will be slightly different (there are 3 different races and 3 different takes on the story). But from what I can tell, the story is pretty much the same from race to race. I guess DS Wireless Play is pretty much getting two or more DSs together to play the game that way. And the Nintendo WFC is where the meat of the game is; this is where you get to play with people all over the world! More on that in a bit. Let’s get on with how the game handles. I thought that maybe navigating around in a 3D area might be a pain to do with the D-Pad (see: Mario 64 DS), but it wasn’t at all. Although if you hated the camera in PSO then your not going to be much happier here. The L button resets the camera behind the player, just like it does in PSO. I personally don’t have a problem with it because I’ve played many MANY hours of PSO and I’m use to it. The action palette is, yet again, just like it is in PSO; you’ve got 3 slots and 3 more slots while holding down the R button. I personally would have liked to have a 8 slot palette…and I’ll explain why in a bit. There’s also the addition of the roll action which is actually really handy (and I would have loved to have it in PSO). It allows you to dash in any direction quickly to dodge an attack. Your options of attack are pretty much taken directly from PSO; you’ve got your normal attack, hard attack, and then all of the techniques like Zonde, Foie, Barta, etc. However in loo of a special attack like in PSO, all of your attacks can now be “powered up” by holding down the action button. For normal/hard attack, this powered up attack is known as the Photon Art. The photon art varies from weapon to weapon and it usually does lots of extra damage over a shorter period of time. Techniques also work in a similar way. Instead of having 3 different versions of each attack technique (eg Zonde, Gizonde, Razonde), the base technique can be powered up to unleash it’s more powerful form (eg Zonde powered up will be like Razonde). However, a BIG annoyance so far is that, for techniques atleast, your can only use them if they are in your palette. Force users are going to have a hard time with this since there are many different techs that you will want to use but you’ll be limited to a small number of palette to which you can append those techs. There’s not even a way to use a tech in the menu; atleast in PSO you could go to the technique sub-menu to use Reverser or Buff/DeBuffs. An additional set of slots for the X button would have helped, but Sega reserved that slots for picking up items and talking with NPCs. Needless to say, limited techs like that is a big negative for me, but I digress. Weapons are much more dynamic in PS0 than they were in PSO. Aside from grinding weapons, you can also apply all sorts of different special effects to any weapon in the game. Remember stuff like Arrest and Dark on weapons in PSO? Well you can get different sorts of elements that you can apply to a weapon, such as Freeze, Burn, Dark, etc, which add a whole new layer of depth. And hey, they even managed to fit a Mag system in here somehow! Mags work pretty much the same way they do in PSO, except this time it’s even better. You aren’t limited to just consumables to feed your mag this time; you can feed it pretty much anything you want; weapons, armor, disks, photon drops, grinders, consumables, etc. You can also feed your mag 5 things at a time instead of 3, and I think the time inbetween feedings is shorter than it was in PSO. Mags also have new traits called “natures” which can affects their Photon Blasts and what they do to you given certain situations. However this time around, Mags can only have 1 Photon Blast instead of 3. And I believe there are 4 different Photon Blasts in the game.

I played the game in Solo mode first so I could get a feel for the controls and so I could unlock as much stuff as possible. Once you get around to trying out the wi-fi play, you are given three options: Play with friends, Free play, and Play alone. Ugh, this is where I feel like ranting a bit. If your just starting out and you don’t know anyone to play with, your pretty much left with one option; Free play. Free play is basically a matchmaking service which pairs you with 1-3 different players based on a filter which you set. You can pick from the 3 different difficulties and the 8 different areas and then have it find you players with the same choices. Then you wait about 5 minutes (depending on how many players there are to choose from) and then it’ll throw you into the game with whomever it picked. This is where things start to make no sense to me. In PSO, communication was very important in order to play the game properly. However in Free play, Sega decided that it would be a good idea to limit all of the players to a pre-determined selection of chat messages instead of having free chat or a mixing of both. WTF. Seriously? It’s not that the preset chats aren’t good, but restricting to only THOSE messages totally takes away one aspect I loved in the original PSO; chatting away with random people. Not to mention how awkward it feels when everyone is using the same stupid messages . AGH SEGA WHYYYYYKDDOIN LAKJLSAJDLASKDJ….ahem. And that brings me to another annoyance, although this time it has more to do with Nintendo than Sega. Friend codes. Well, ok then. If you want to play the game as it should be (with free chatting and without the rigid structure of free play) then the only way to do it is to grab some FCs and hope to find someone online when you are. You can store a pretty large number of FCs in the game and it will show when any of those friends are online and playing. However, the only way you can obtain any FCs is to get them from somewhere online (like here or here); forget about trying to get a FC from someone in a Free play game as Sega does not provide a way to do that. So unless you know someone who plays when you do at some PSO community, it’s going to be hard to find someone to play with. The whole system is just too restrictive for me when you compare how easy it was to do in PSO. PSO was join a lobby, make a room and wait for someone to join or join a room with players already in it, play and chat with said players. Then…”hey, that was fun! wanna trade guild cards and play again sometime?” “Sure!”. It was quick, easy, and painless to just grab someone, play the game, and if they weren’t retarded, trade info. For PS0, it’s either find and enter a bunch of 12-digit codes one by one and hope that some of them will actually be playing when you do OR go play Free play and pretty much have your hopes of enjoying the game to it’s fullest destroyed. Yuck

Overall though, the game is a pretty dang good time. I hate that the online play was such a big flop for me as that is where I would be spending a significant portion of my time playing (and it was pretty much the biggest draw for me when I saw it for the first time). But for a DS game, it’s got so much packed into it, especially for it being in full 3D. It still boggles my mind when I go through the game’s 8 different areas and bazillion different weapons and monsters. And it looks great too! If you were a fan of PSO in the least, then I would recommend finding yourself a copy of this game. And then after you do that, send me your FC so we can play the game properly

By the way, my FC: 3180-6197-2239. Add me up! I haven’t had much time to play since my job, but once things slow down for me I hope to be playing some more.