[Fox]

> Did Death Row kill DN3D's momentum?

Does the 3rd level kill the momentum of a 30 levels game.....?

No

[oasiz]

Duke Nukem 3D died by electrocution and everything that happens afterwards is just purgatory

[lllllllllllllll]

Every time I finished Duke Burger or Gun Crazy on 64 I did hate losing all weapons at the start of Death Row

[MetHy]

I remember getting stuck finding the red card in E1L2 as well. I got stuck in Death Row as well but at least in Death Row it's sort of expected of the player to find something in the cells area considering he just came off an elaborate setup that did nothing but unlock those cells. In Red Light District you're expected to find something in the entire building, and figuring out that a small texture next to ground level in a dark area looks different, that it can be interacted with and that it requires crouching (back when crouching wasn't a reflex), all that when playing in 320*200 seems less obvious than the lit wall in Death Row at the player's eye level. In fact, I remember finding the hidden path behind the poster in Death Row but I got stuck after that, because I hadn't noticed the crack in the wall in the darkness and probably picked up the pipebombs without paying much attention.

I always assumed that the reason why you lose all weapons in E1L3 is because you can get them all (by shareware standard) in E1L1, that they wanted to show off as much as possible in E1L1 and had to make it up afterwards. I don't think it's a big deal considering it was just 2 levels and as far as I'm concerned I've been pistol starting each level for a while anyway.

The other thing that irked me about Red Light District is having to progress through a vent marked as "secret". For a long while I wondered if there was supposed to be a more obvious path that I missed, now my theory is that the curtains were planned to open by themselves after/while the women appear and if the switch in the back was to raise the platforms and nothing else, which they would have changed due to too many enemies spawning at once.

[Aleks]

Quote

The other thing that irked me about Red Light District is having to progress through a vent marked as "secret". For a long while I wondered if there was supposed to be a more obvious path that I missed, now my theory is that the curtains were planned to open by themselves after/while the women appear and if the switch in the back was to raise the platforms and nothing else, which they would have changed due to too many enemies spawning at once.

As a kid and after figuring out this is a secret place, I thought I kept missing something more obvious and that there is another path there. I've seen someone here (probably Watchtower) mentioning it might have been a forced way to introduce the player to the idea of secret places, of course Hollywood Holocaust has a lot of secrets and some of them seem to have always been quite easy to come by, but putting a mandatory secret in the 2nd level which isn't super concealed (since most people should already have an idea about the vents being accessible) kinda pushed the players to interact with them and thus see the "mechanic" of unlocking a secret place.

[MetHy]

Aleks, on 27 September 2022 - 08:48 AM, said:

As a kid and after figuring out this is a secret place, I thought I kept missing something more obvious and that there is another path there. I've seen someone here (probably Watchtower) mentioning it might have been a forced way to introduce the player to the idea of secret places, of course Hollywood Holocaust has a lot of secrets and some of them seem to have always been quite easy to come by, but putting a mandatory secret in the 2nd level which isn't super concealed (since most people should already have an idea about the vents being accessible) kinda pushed the players to interact with them and thus see the "mechanic" of unlocking a secret place.

I hadn't thought about that but I don't believe that's the case here. Unlike other things like crouching or fall damage, secrets and secret places weren't a novel concept they should have had to explain besides the end level stat screen giving a secret count. Besides, the start of Hollywood Holocaust already does everything in its power to make sure the player is introduced to the idea, between the Liztroop on the crate and the one shooting through the window telling the player "You can go where I stand", and even if the player doesn't go through the window, he will still find the secret RPG, which has a light source pointing to it. A forced secret sorts of goes against the idea of introducing what a secret is.