Finally!

Gosh, has it really been a month since my last post?! Final Doom is done and dusted. I actually finished it last week, but haven't got around to writing this yet. The game consisted of two self-contained parts, both 30-level Doom map packs, so it's been 60 levels of pure Doom overall. That's a lot of Doom. There's a few different graphics sprinkled here and there, but essentially these are just new maps built upon the old Doom 2 engine...but what maps. These are excellent in design and execution, and I'd probably put The Plutonia Experiment maps above those in the original Doom 2. They're harder, for sure, but have an amazing depth of innovation  and confidence in the engine. Never unfair (...okay, sometimes unfair), but always surprising, the levels build in difficulty, piling on traps, monsters and masterful scripting techniques to produce some of the best Doom levels I've ever played. Too many chain gunners, though. I hate chain gunners.

Of course, that's not the end of Doom yet, there's plenty more to come. Next up is Doom 2D, which I think is a homebrew 2D platformer take on Doom. No idea what it'll be like. I should really do a bit more of Challenge of the 5 realms first, though. I've made a start on it and have finished the first town and made my way out onto the world map.

In other news, I've also done with another couple of PS3 games. Snakeball and Sky Fighter.

Snakeball is some kind of futuristic sports game based on, you guessed it, the old mobile phone game Snake. You zip around the arena picking up coloured pods that are added to the tail end of your ship, making it more difficult to control without hitting things. You score by taking (or firing) these pods into the goals and score more points the more pods in your tail, so a little bit of a risk/reward strategy. There's more to it than that, but that covers the basics. To be honest, I didn't really enjoy it at all - it was hard to control and hard to see what your next target should be. It would be better with ore familiarity and more players, but my patience only lasts so long. Sky Fighter was a little better, and I actually finished the

campaign missions. It's a 2D arcade flight game set in a roughly WW2 era. You fly your little plane about, shooting down enemy pilots and bombing ground targets. You fly different planes depending on the mission, but I think there were only 3 or so planes in total - a light fighter, a heavy bomber, and a multi-role plane in the middle. There was nothing that exciting about it, but the game was fun enough and the missions were short enough that it was easy to fit in a quick blast every now and then, and to just about hit that "one more go" sweetspot.