WAD Review of ZZONE.REV (ocf.unt.edu /pub/doom/wads/newwads2/zzone.zip) ====================================================================== Title : ZZONE.WAD Authors : Ari Koivisto Email Address : k139925@ee.tut.fi Misc. Author Info : additional credits to: my friends for playtesting and suggestions. Description: "It's a room full of obstacles, lifts, ambush places and rocket launchers." Well, Ari's description of his e1m1 deathmatch wad is part true. Rocket launchers and ambush places? Yes--tons of them. Full of obstacles and lifts? No. I really didn't see any obstacles to mention, unless you count pillars or some- thing. And lifts? Well, there's two of them, and I have yet to figure out why someone would want to use them. ZZONE.WAD is an interesting deathmatch pwad. It's basically a one room level, and nearly the whole level is _dark_. With monsters, it loads up eight cacodemons and one cyberdemon. Two, players can play a relatively active game, but, as always, four players will keep the game much more alive. * * * The first thing you'll see about zzone.wad--the name--brings up an interesting point. zzone.wad--two lowercase z's--will vir- tually show up last on any FTP directory list. And when you're searching through a list of files, do you remember the b's and the m's? No. You'll look at the last part of the list and ex- claim, "zzone! what a nice looking little wad." Well, maybe I'm wrong on this. It could stand for something. Zebra Zone, maybe. Or Zima Zone? As I've already mentioned, zzone is a dark pwad. There are a good deal of ambush spots, though most of them are in the open and just very dark. And although it's dark, there isn't much that makes it stand out from the crowd of deathmatch levels. Zzone is packed with boxes of rockets. As many of you DOOMers might know, rockets and _dark_ areas don't mix very well. So if you should decide to play this level, a word of wisdom: if you want a frag instead of the mushing sound you get as your body blows to bits, aim _carefully_ before launching that roc- ket. There are about one hundred boxes of rockets in the area, but they end up getting used up rather quickly. So after a few minutes you'll be limited to weapons 1 - 5 (chainsaw to rocket launcher). Zzone is nice and small, but it's very ordinary and plain. It doesn't have very much special about it. And the weapons are not layed out very well. Walk over a three foot area in the middle and you'll pick up a shotgun, chaingun and chainsaw. Move fifteen feet in any random direction and you'll probably snatch a rocket launcher from somewhere. Zzone can be an interesting level, but you'll have to make it one. On scales of 0 to 10: Layout: 6 Textures: 7 Difficulty: 5 Huntability: 6 Funness: 7 On a Cameron overall scale of 0 to 10, ZZONE.WAD scores a 6.2. Level Hint: Strafe like a rabbit in a fox-coop for the first few fights (it will RAIN ROCKETS). In a few minutes the boxes of rockets will be gone and you can go back to fighting normally. Daniel. dmccarty@sitvax.stevens-tech.edu