[Marphy Black]

Over these past couple of decades, you may have noticed the Cultists in Blood sound a little hissy and low quality whenever they "Maranax pallex!" in your general direction. Their cabal language lines are compressed at a paltry sample rate of 11,025hz, which is actually lower than their pain and death cries, creating a conspicuous disparity in quality. However, as you may or may not know, Blood 2's expansion The Nightmare Levels brought back our beloved robed pals, and with them came (most of) their original Blood 1 lines now sampled at a much clearer sample rate of 22,050hz! That's right, Blood 2's Retro Cultists can "Crudox Cruo!" in stunning clarity you've never heard before! That's all good and well for Blood 2, though, but who wants to play Blood 2 to enjoy this upgrade? Hence, I have backported these high quality Cultist lines so that they may be enjoyed in the original Blood, where they belong.

I provide this sound pack in two installation methods:

• DOS Installer (331 KB) - Smaller download, but you'll have to mess with DOSBox to perform the actual BARF.EXE installation.
  
• Drag and Drop (18 MB) - The simple method if you don't want to mess with DOSBox. Just download, drag, drop, and overwrite. Be sure to make a backup of SOUNDS.RFF first.

This sound pack is compatible in both the original DOS version and all source ports.

As a bit of a sidenote, you'll notice a few lines are missing, and couple of the lines are actually different takes from what was finally used in Blood 1. I suspect that these missing/different lines could be the result of them being from a different recording session, possibly of someone other than Stephen Weyte himself. This notion is supported by the fact that these differing lines have a "Z" suffix in their filenames. Any other theories to offer here?

I will be updating this sound pack soon to also backport Blood 2's high quality Tchernobog BloodBath lines. These are used quite often in Blood 1 custom maps, and you may have noticed the obvious drop in sound quality whenever Tchernobog used any of these BloodBath lines in Death Wish and the like.

And just for fun, here's a YouTube upload of these high quality Blood 2 Cultist lines:


You can compare the quality here to this.

[MrFlibble]

Cool!

I wonder what bitrate were the sounds originally recorded in?

It's always a pity when game assets get downgraded in quality because of contemporary hardware limitations, and always good when better quality may be found in other official sources.

[Doom64hunter]

It seems that all the shouted lines are not present in Blood 2, or replaced with more mellow ones. Maybe these were really done by someone else.

[randir14]

-edit, nevermind

[Avoozl]

Strangely I never noticed.