Thread:Vorknkx/@comment-3547390-20150204202730/@comment-1496755-20150327203938

Hmmm, maybe they shared ideas then. "Hey, how about two rooms with a Grunt between them? I'll do it with metal textures, you do it with wood!"

Yeah, the cash-ins of the 1990's. Not exactly the best thing to remember, but still an important part of the overall nostalgic picture. The earliest of these products were probably the map packs for Wolf 3D and Spear of Destiny. They even had random level generators included (so that you can "cook" your own random sprite mazes for free, yay!).

The SoD cash-in was developed by FormGen (it was a distributor of some of id Software's games in the early 1990's) and is actually fairly decent - it consists of two standalone mission packs with new textures, sprites and sound effects, each providing 21 new levels (connected logically, not just thrown together). They even have manuals with some sort of background story (plus some intriguing Nazi-related trivia). Not bad at all... The game itself and its two mission packs are still sold on Steam nowadays.

Wolf's map pack, on the other hand, was more like a bunch of various fan-made maps that you select from a menu (like Aftershock's standalone maps). It also included a map editor and the random map generator. Developed by Apogee (another of id's distributors at the time). It was eventually released as freeware.

So yeah, quality varied a lot. But as you see, some of the cash-ins were worthy and deserved attention. Others were simply horrible.

My first impressions of Gregory Macmartin came from playing Radix: Beyond the Void. I like it - it's something like a marriage of Doom and Descent. An FPS with flight sim elements (I guess that means you'd totally suck at this game) and objective-driven levels. The story has quite a few similarities to Doom's, but that was no surprise back then :P