Yeah, I wasn't going to be the first.
I'm refusing to be nitpicky about DROD3D regarding canon - the game doesn't adhere to the canon material, sure, but it's the developer's right to deviate from the source if they want. Especially if they decide that part of the canon was decided due to hardware limitations, like Beethro's grey skin (which seems to have become much more pink colour as time and video cards have moved on.) Especially since I'm actively making
up canon, adhering to it ends up seeming overly trivial. Why, that could be Beethro going through Clearing School, before he got his garish yellow top.
However, there's a few things that seriously detract from the product. For the amount of threat they pose to the player, and to show off the beautiful work done with the roaches on the title screen, the roaches really shouldn't be as small as they are.
Beethro's sword is basically unworkable as it is - it should at the least cast a shadow, and even better, should be horizontal, in order to make it nice and easy to tell which way Beethro is facing.
The keys don't remap as you rotate the camera, so you get the absurd situation of having to press 'down' to move upwards if you rotate the camera around. Other games have used this as a
punishment. It would really make the game much more useful to tie control to the camera rather than Beethro.
Some better animation would have been really nice. Beethro always walks forward, no matter which way he seems to be facing. It looks really weird. Beethro's smiting animation is also really distracting, and what would be ideal is
two animations - one for swinging and one for stepping, taking into account killing multiple enemies at once. At the moment, it's a downward thrust on the roaches, which doesn't flow well when you run across a room or on large QWQWQWs.
The documentation, in places, will leave sentences hanging. This is most notable in the description of Living Tar - preserving the original descriptions from Webfoot and Caravel probably would have been best.
As noted, you can't remap keys. I lived because I didn't try.
What would have been really good is if TLK had gone into the original DROD gameplay and addressed the weaknesses of a 2D approach - building a new dungeon with 3-dimensional levels, with special rules for going up and down different heights; having more than one room at a time visible, essentially allowing huge rooms; some actual architecture, like underground mountains, stalactites, the roof and so on; the possibilities are endless, and what's even better is that there's room in the DROD canon for all of this. Most of you have seen the ending map for Caravel DROD - Level 24 is in a huge cavern. Dungeon levels don't have to be of uniform height, and a specially built dungeon would have been able to take advantage of that where a 2D version wouldn't. As it turns out, the 2D version ends up being superior because the 3D one had its wings clipped.
Matt
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×Lost.
[Last edited by Mattcrampy at 09-14-2005 06:50 AM : Someone linked to this. I read it and realised I couldn't write. This has been fixed.]
/dy
but now im like 
