====================================================================== Title : Childe Nukem to the Darke Tower Came... Filename : Childe.map Author : Robbie Langton E-mail : Robbie@roblang.demon.co.uk Web Page : http://www.roblang.demon.co.uk/dukesolo/index.html A website devoted to level maps for the solo game Misc. Author Info : Robbie Langton of Derby, UK. - writer, composer, website designer and general layabout! A lot older than you'd think, but nowhere near as old as I look... Other Levels : Among others are Relaxpad, Henge Six, Heptobol and AlCarib. Description : Duke starts on a very dark night upon rocky, windswept moorland, and eventually finds a sinister mediaeval tower. It is, of course, haunted, apart from anything else. It also contains portals through which we enter new towers and different time zones, ending in a space station. Or you can go down to the dungeons. Puzzles abound, and there are some decidedly hairy situations in which Duke finds himself, before eventually reaching that big exit button. Additional Credits To : Adam Richards, for dying nobly in a very good cause. Without his play testing and additional ideas, it wouldn't be half the level it is. ====================================================================== * Play Information * Episode and Level # : Stand alone map. Single Player : Yes. It was specifically designed for the single player. DukeMatch 2-8 Player : No Cooperative 2-8 Player : No Difficulty Settings : Difficult enough as it is - (ask Adam!) Plutonium Pak Required : Yes New Art : No - finding new ways to use the existing sprites and textures is half the fun! New Music : Yes - optional: A file called Dethtoll.mid is included. This contains my own composition, intended to help create the mediaeval feel of the level. Copy this into your main Duke directory (first removing any other Dethtoll.mid variants that you may have there), and it will be played. New Sound Effects : No New .CON Files : No Demos Replaced : No ===================================================================== * Construction * Base : New level from scratch Level Editor(s) Used : BUILD Art Editor(s) Used : None Construction Time : If you can remember, you didn't spend enough time on it! It took something like a week's intensive work, with quite a few other hours perfecting it, Known Bugs/Problems : None known, except a tendency of the Space Station Boss's head to come through the corridor floor occasionally. This seems to be a problem with the game engine and is nothing I can fix. * Where to get this MAP file * File location : http://www.roblang.demon.co.uk/dukesolo/index.html, plus anywhere else it has been copied to. ===================================================================== *Important Information* Installation : Just copy the map into the Duke directory and play as normal for a user map. If you want the special music, copy the Dethtoll.mid file to there also (see note above). Important Notes : I find I need a theme to build a Duke level around. In this case it was "Thrones and Towers". There are areas of the map you can't get into, needed to create the illusion of landscape extending into the distance, but anything that looks like a door is indeed a door and there will be some way to open it. (Actually, there two exceptions to that - the magic portals in the first tower - you'll see what I mean when you get there. They don't open, but they do take you places.) I hope you enjoy the level. Play it in good health! (It was mainly written by me as occupational therapy during a bad attack of sciatica, so I mean that most sincerely!) By a most curious coincidence, in the middle of my writing this level about towers the WTC Twin Towers in New York were attacked. My heart goes out to all those who suffered as a result of that despicable atrocity. Let's hope the spirit of Duke Nukem inspires those charged with the task of bringing to book the monsters who were responsible for that vile crime against humanity. This may make one ponder for a moment about the validity of playing games like Duke Nukem in moral and psychological terms. Personally I find no difficulty with this. Although Duke may seem to be glorifying violence, it is a cartoon violence - and Duke is the only remotely "real" person in it. He is the Jerry to the Moggie-guards' Tom. But cartoon violence or not, it is still violence, When I am playing Duke I am setting out to kill things. How am I affected by this? Does it make me more likely to commit real acts of violence in the real world? Does it make me callous about acts of violence in the real world? I think it does neither. For one thing, the game is cathartic. We all have our dark sides, our ingrained hunter instincts. Being civilised means learning to control those. By playing Duke I am burning off those dark urges. I am ridding myself of those frustrations which inevitably build up inside oneself. I'm getting an adrenalin kick in complete safety and in a way which involves no harm to others. And if I don't learn to control that adrenalin, I will fail in playing the game. I believe that at the end of a session in Duke-world, I am far less likely to be anti-social in the real world. I've got it out of my system. As for making me callous - I don't think it does that either. Maybe it even has the opposite effect. Although I will throw a pipe bomb gleefully at a crowd of pig-cops and chortle as their body parts explode all over the landscape, in the real world the thought of some terrorists using pipe bombs against real people (as they do in Northern Ireland) fills me with extreme horror. Maybe that is because playing out the effects of such an action in the unreality of Duke-land gives me a greater understanding of how terrible such an action would really be when translated into actuality. So, although I can sympathise with the misgivings some people may have about shoot-em-up games - and in the case of those which give realistic representations of other human beings as targets I may have some misgivings myself - in the case of Duke Nukem I do not have any worries. Which is why I was able to go on working at preparing this map, while truly horrific things were going on in the real world outside of my computer. ======================================================================