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DNF #1
Duke 3D #1
Aleks, on 28 July 2021 - 09:12 AM, said:
Hahaha, yeah, that's something that always struck me as weird/funny. But then again, it's on the same level of "OK, it's just Duke" like street with dead ends on both sides (in fact that's my biggest beef with original maps), up-open doors in regular city buildings, the general abstract way of how some city locations are when you look a bit deeper into them (Freeway with how the overpass is really... buildings?) etc.
As for Hotel Hell, it's probably one of my top 3 favourite maps in E3 (along with Flood Zone and Bank Roll), but indeed it's mostly because of gameplay. I think I've discussed even with you here sometime how that ending always felt weird for me as well as a kid, up to the point I always treated Freeway as a regular level and the waterfall as intended normal ending - but then, you get it all and the level kinda teaches you how it works from the beginning - you can see the nukebutton through a crack from the starting position, so seeing the windows open there and enforcers spawning seems after all like a very logical tie up of the progression, just a bit more original and unvonventional than in most other maps. Especially considering that both previous keycards, which can be considered focal progression points, were preceded by swarms of monsters spawning around them.
TerminX has shared some beta screenshots from Hotel Hell, mostly from the lobby area with battlelords, on Discord just a week or 2 ago. It seemed the geometry was very similar, just the textures went through a couple of complete overhauls, but the lobby area always sold it for me - it looked a bit cartoony and simplified, but I suppose it worked. A mirror would indeed be a great addition, hinting the battlelords presence and as you said, making the whole thing looked bigger. I suppose they might have dropped the idea due to the fact it would almost immediately break with all the explosions and Battlelord's mortars, but still it's a pity.
As for Hotel Hell, it's probably one of my top 3 favourite maps in E3 (along with Flood Zone and Bank Roll), but indeed it's mostly because of gameplay. I think I've discussed even with you here sometime how that ending always felt weird for me as well as a kid, up to the point I always treated Freeway as a regular level and the waterfall as intended normal ending - but then, you get it all and the level kinda teaches you how it works from the beginning - you can see the nukebutton through a crack from the starting position, so seeing the windows open there and enforcers spawning seems after all like a very logical tie up of the progression, just a bit more original and unvonventional than in most other maps. Especially considering that both previous keycards, which can be considered focal progression points, were preceded by swarms of monsters spawning around them.
TerminX has shared some beta screenshots from Hotel Hell, mostly from the lobby area with battlelords, on Discord just a week or 2 ago. It seemed the geometry was very similar, just the textures went through a couple of complete overhauls, but the lobby area always sold it for me - it looked a bit cartoony and simplified, but I suppose it worked. A mirror would indeed be a great addition, hinting the battlelords presence and as you said, making the whole thing looked bigger. I suppose they might have dropped the idea due to the fact it would almost immediately break with all the explosions and Battlelord's mortars, but still it's a pity.
I guess the retexturing purpose was because of the addition of tiles013 and its "medieval" textures which HH used excessively in the end. The original textures didn't look all that great though on those beta shots, despite my personal preference for them, it might be the lack of polish/shading at that time. However I remember an old magazine shot from the map in the streets and that looked absolutely gorgeous. Anyway, thanks for the reminder, I check the Discord now if I can find more TX jewels like these.
As for the level gimmicks, it has another weird unrealistic moment with that the pool is located on the first floor, something rarely appears in hotels as its very hard to utilize, and it even has an overlap with the ground floor's blue key corridor, I checked it now. These are the stuff that probably would never happened in Allen Blum's levels, because he was a technical mastermind, and wouldn't let something like this slip in his maps. That's why I always wondered if Richard was indeed the lead creator of Sewer, a map that has brilliant layered geometry with pitch-perfect matches of vertical connections. Something like that happens very frequently in Blum's maps (Derelict is very similar layout-wise, but also Spaceport, Fusion Station, and even Freeway to some extent), while Richard struggled with it quite often, although Flood Zone and LA Rumble did have some great 3D geometry in them, but they are still quite different and less technical.
