Bye Ubermutant, hello Cacodemon news

Yes, we're doomed.

There's a whole story behind Doomenstein, and only Josh Mills' Castle Wolfenstein exceeds it in terms of various versions available to play. To put it briefly, as far as I know, Doomenstein was initially put together in a modified Wolfensteinn 3D application, allowing for customized screens. MacPlay didn't appreciate this move and, after negotiations, WolfAddict promised they're going to be neat siblings and never, ever do that again. Other than that false start, there are five distinct releases of Doomenstein available. They are (as copied from Dermuda's explanation received by mail):

1. ‘DOOMenstein Demo’: 5 levels. The final boss is a modified Gretel Grosse. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because her armour is in the red part of the spectrum?

2. ‘DOOMenstein Episode 1’: 5 levels. The final boss is now a DOOM enemy. More DOOM enemies and objects have been added, including the unused Cacodemon.

3. ‘DOOMenstein Episode 1e’: 5 levels. No changes have been made to the levels, or to in-game sprites. However, a new title screen, status bar and intermission screen have been added.

4. ‘DOOMenstein Episode’: 7 levels. The enemy graphics have been completely reworked, resulting in much better quality sprites. The DOOM enemy used for the boss in the two previous versions has been relegated to the SS position. The boss enemy sprites have been replaced by those for the Mancubus. A new music track has been added. Note that map 7 (1-6) is a modified WolfMaker level.

5. ‘DOOMenstein (Dermuda)’: 7 levels. Identical to the version above, but bundled into a DOOMenstein application.

As you can see, the scenario had undergone non-stop evolution, or in the case of the fourth one, a revolution. New graphics, new walls, new maps. There's a few caveats in here. For one thing, while Dermuda says a new music track has been added (which is true), the game doesn't seem to be set up to actually play the new tune anywhere, so I neglected porting it. If anyone can prove me wrong here, I'll meekly go back and record the dang thing.

The second caveat is bigger and relates to the application restored by Dermuda. While merging the fourth and fifth release, I simply wasn't able to recreate it in full. For one thing, game end messages aren't supported in MacenWolf. Second is the difficulty selection screen, which I had to scale down and place above the background of the vanilla selection screen, and behind the actual icons. Both issues could in theory have been solved in a smarter way, but I don't want to push Nexion into tediously reworking a big piece of code (again) just to accommodate a single scenario. He's sacrificed a non-trivial part of his life to make MacenWolf possible, so let's appreciate that instead of picking nits. Oh, and one of the new sounds (there's a few) in the application release refused to work with every sound converter I had on hand (they all said that converting compressed sounds is beyond their capabilities). It is what it is. Everything else should be fine, so go ahead and download Doomenstein, as even with some flaws plaguing some of these releases (I hear that early on in the mod's history, Doom sprites had been extracted from photos, and then screenshots, of Doom gameplay), the mod is certainly worth experiencing. I keep having the feeling that something's wrong with these ports, but oh well... Over and out...