#george fiffy

[wadbot]

FIFFY2.WAD: REoL TOUGH: SATAN'S CASTLE II: HIS NEW HOME IN HELL E3M1 (-2248, 3726, 40) Author: George Fiffy Date: 1995-01-24 Description: Not too long ago, you. B.J. Blazcowictz found out where Satan lived when you were wondering through Hell. As he was preparing his troops for Hell On Earth, he left his home, and wreaked havoc on Earth. You then went to his castle (FIFFY2.WAD) and got even! When he returned home a few months later, he was FURIOUS! Satan got so angry, he built a special school called Satan's School of Warfare (WAR4.WAD). On his day off, you went in and slaughtered the student body, as well as all of his staff. What you didn't know about this school was that the students were being trained to go to your New York penthouse apartment on your break and destroy you like never before! Good thing you were there early! Just think, if you didn't go there, you would be DEAD now! No wife, no children (Hmmm), and worst of all, NO 90210! (Running gag. Was in another doc to another level.) You DO want to see the one where Brandon's girlfriends take him to Bob Barker to get... Well, you get the picture! :) You hear the phone ring, and you hesitantly answer it. Colonel Sanders is on the line. Oh boy, just what you need on your day off watching the O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL! Sanders told you that Lucifer himself just bought his second home in Hell because you wrecked the first one. You shrug your sholders as the TV cameramen accidently show the face of a juror. Sanders then told you that Satan is going to pay you a visit. You then wake your family, pack, and go to MOTEL 6 to hide your family, as you go off to meet your fate, while your family watches TV with 46 channels, all but 5 carrying the O.J. SIMPSON TRIAL (That gives you more reasons to play DOOM, doesn't it?). You head to a starirway that goes to Hell and find Satan nowhere, but you do find his new home in Hell. Since you reflect back and remember that your family is now safe in a motel, you decide to take the $.50 tour of his home, and do what you've done last time, kick butt, and go on a rampage! You'll meet his bodyguard at the end, so don't say you were not warned! This is the time to get out your weponry and ask: "Who wants to be fried?" You go in, and you fight for your life, and to free the world from havoc (for now).

[tankermottind]

Woolie reviews: “REoL Tough: The Uprising” (6fiffy1.wad)

Layout: 2 | Visuals: 3 | Combat: 2 |  UV: 2 | Overall: 2/5

Time to completion: 20-45 minutes

Release date: 9/6/98

IWAD: Doom II

Format: Boom compatible

This wad made quite an impression on me when I first played it in 1999 or 2000, shortly after discovering PWADs and source ports for the very first time. Colin Phipps' Doom Underground gave it a positively glowing review, and being a cheater using the default keyboard controls, I really had no idea what made a good level and just marveled for what, at the time, seemed like incredibly detailed architecture. In the day, Fiffy was a notorious internet troll going by "King REoL" who declared himself "The MetallicA of DooM" [sic] but the only quality he shared with said band was his pathological grandiosity (versions of his website from before he embedded it inside a homebrewed Flash monstrosity can still be accessed on archive.org and make for interesting reading), and while his level-design "brand" did garner some notoriety, it was mostly a secondary effect of the drama he generated everywhere he went. So how does this map hold up over 15 years later? Not too well, I'm afraid.

"The Uprising" is a sort of fortified compound built into a cliff face; with the "back" of the fortress being a rock wall, and all approaches to the gatehouse except from the front blocked by other rock walls, the need to actually plan a coherent castle layout was obviated, and it really seemed like George Fiffy had no real plan for this map but just kind of added stuff as he went along, starting from the start across the moat and working his way in a mostly straight line back to the bailey, and then sprawled out in various directions for the various key hunts. There is a succession of five or six areas but each is its own "thing"; they don't connect together or look into one another, and correspondingly there is very little sense of place (for instance, the underground chamber you access from the moat to raise the drawbridge has no connection to the fortress at all; it’s just there, with no way to tell that they’re supposed to be part of the same structure, and a teleporter near the drawbridge switch just dumps you back at the start of the map. The color selection is very drab; almost exclusively dull greens, browns, and grays; a strongly colored sky would have added greatly to this level's eye appeal, but knowing Fiffy's taste in custom textures (the Taz-Mania yellow sky from 2fiffy4, anyone?), perhaps the drab look is for the best. On that note, there is a really ugly new status bar and a set of modified sounds; I strongly recommend opening the wad and deleting them. Fiffy also included a breakable glass texture; as usual his art looks awful but the effect was so novel in 1998 I can let it pass.

You needed a Pentium II for this?! And this is the best-looking room in the whole map. Presented in 4K instead of my usual 320x200 just so you don’t interpret the aliasing as any additional detail that isn’t actually there.

The infamous detail that old Socket 7 machines struggled with back in the day manages to be both elementary and gratuitous; almost the entire map is made of rectangular areas with straight walls, connected by long straight corridors and dotted with pilasters, sector furniture, and (very ugly) rows of stepped sectors to give the impression of sloped or vaulted ceilings. The only area that aspires to more than “a room” is the bailey in the center of the map, a walled courtyard with some buildings (the keep included, which doesn’t actually fit inside the wall but just kind of splatters outward in a diarrhea of nondescript birds and trees and rocks and rooms and corridors and things) which conjures memories of "Industrial Zone" from the original campaign but is more orderly and, consequently, less fun to play. Everything here is simple, regular shapes, with no overlapping geometry or structural complexity; all the detail is just ornaments tacked onto floor plans that look like the work of a novice, not an adult who had been making levels for five years. The lighting is very basic, with little contrast between lighting and shadow with none of the complex chiaroscuro gradients employed by contemporary "extreme detail" wads like 99 Ways to Die, GothicDM, or Caverns of Darkness. Fiffy's lazy lighting combine with his ill-chosen graphic and sound replacements to give a slapdash, amateur look and feel to nearly all of his work, but the sheer laboriousness of this level undermines any naive outsider aesthetic such art might cultivate in say, a 1994 wad.

The gameplay is very much what someone who can't beat a difficult map thinks a good difficult map is; lots of monsters (431 after PE spawns) placed in blocks directly in front of the player or to one side on a flat plane, but not even the most perfunctory attempts at choreography or pressure. Furthermore, a lot of these monsters are shotgunners or chaingunners, which brutally punish any attempts to rampage through areas and sow infighting. The result is a festival of corner-camping, chain-sniping, and pie-slicing that some might call "tactical" but I'd rather just call a slow, tedious grind. Making this worse is that the plasma rifle and most of the rocket ammo are tucked away in secrets, so if you don't find any, you just have to grind, grind, grind away with the SSG. A few revenants and archviles are placed throughout the map in situations where they cannot possibly pose any threat; one of the switches required to access the red key had the first two-archvile pincer I've ever seen with literally no difficulty because you can slice the pie to draw them down a narrow corridor one at a time and casually butcher them.

From where I was standing, these monsters were completely unable to reach me and all their fireballs hit the steps, rendering them harmless.

Fiffy's love of narrow doors doesn't help; there must be a hundred of the things, usually with some monsters right behind it to serve as a "door with health" to retard your progress. Most egregious is one small room, which, when opened, disgorges four Barons of Hell clown car-style to waste your time and your shells. They file out into a long L-shaped corridor with plenty of room to dodge them, but there's not quite enough room to move around them without risking melee, so you just have to stand, dodge a few fireballs, and occasionally move back a bit while firing your SSG over and over until they're all dead. A solid minute of your time wasted. It took me 37 minutes to complete this map (I got turned around a few times; I expect a player good at FDAs could manage a thorough exploration in 20) but because the layout was so incohesive and the combat so dull, there was no "epic" feeling to any of it. It's long, bombastic, and superficially violent, but simplistic, rote, and soulless...just like a bad Metallica song, come to think of it.

Also, instead of a proper /idgames/ text file, the documentation is in a batch file full of echo commands called !!READ!!.bat, the relevant information being interspersed with bragging and grandstanding and force-fed to you screen by screen, because King REoL is just that kind of guy.

[dmvisbot]

war3.wad Author: George Fiffy Date: 08/20/94 Description: ABOUT THE TOTAL WAR III EXPERIENCE: To play the new level, type REoLDOOM to start total chaos! This is probably one of the weirdest DOOM levels you may ever had played! There are soooo many weird effects and illusions you may have thought would be IMPOSSIBLE to do (if you're a DOOM level maker your- self)! The effects you will see start right in the beginning! A door in the middle of the starting area! You'll also see doors coming out of the sky, dark rooms you can see fine in (it doesn't make sense at all, doesn't it? Well, it was done. You'll be suprised!), and get this, INVISABLE BUILDINGS! You may see the doors (sometimes), and maybe the windows, but you don't see a building attatched! The "pancake syndrome" is also cleared up (flat outer retaining walls, and unflattened entry- ways can be seen BEYOND the walls, to show thickness, unlike E3M1). Some "flatness" is around, but that's because there are invisable buildings around. Invisable doors leave "slices" or voids in the wall, or the top of the wall. One neat DOOM effect is the Hall Of Mirrors. One room has this effect in it's windows. This is NO screw-up. It's done on PURPOSE! The "teleporting theory" found in the real E3M7 is also in here, but with a different twist. All I'm going to say is that it's harder to do (heh, heh, heh!). Also, be carefull of a few nasty areas! There are five areas where you'll be fighting very hard! You won't be fighting as hard as in TOTAL WAR II, E1M2, but it's quite a nasty brawl!MULTI-PLAYER: This is an adventure for up to four of your friends. Each can grab a shotgun and a backpack at the start, so don't be greedy!DEATHMATCH: You'll start off with a shotgun, shells, and an energy pack next to you. Why the energy pack? SOMEWHERE (not in a secret area) in this world is a BFG9000! Two of you will be very close! The other two people are also in good position to get it as well!

[wadbot]

war3.wad: REoL TOUGH: TOTAL WAR III: Land of Weirdness E3M7 (-1325, 1084, 64) Author: George Fiffy Date: 1994-08-20 Description: ABOUT THE TOTAL WAR III EXPERIENCE: To play the new level, type REoLDOOM to start total chaos! This is probably one of the weirdest DOOM levels you may ever had played! There are soooo many weird effects and illusions you may have thought would be IMPOSSIBLE to do (if you're a DOOM level maker your- self)! The effects you will see start right in the beginning! A door in the middle of the starting area! You'll also see doors coming out of the sky, dark rooms you can see fine in (it doesn't make sense at all, doesn't it? Well, it was done. You'll be suprised!), and get this, INVISABLE BUILDINGS! You may see the doors (sometimes), and maybe the windows, but you don't see a building attatched! The "pancake syndrome" is also cleared up (flat outer retaining walls, and unflattened entry- ways can be seen BEYOND the walls, to show thickness, unlike E3M1). Some "flatness" is around, but that's because there are invisable buildings around. Invisable doors leave "slices" or voids in the wall, or the top of the wall. One neat DOOM effect is the Hall Of Mirrors. One room has this effect in it's windows. This is NO screw-up. It's done on PURPOSE! The "teleporting theory" found in the real E3M7 is also in here, but with a different twist. All I'm going to say is that it's harder to do (heh, heh, heh!). Also, be carefull of a few nasty areas! There are five areas where you'll be fighting very hard! You won't be fighting as hard as in TOTAL WAR II, E1M2, but it's quite a nasty brawl! MULTI-PLAYER: This is an adventure for up to four of your friends. Each can grab a shotgun and a backpack at the start, so don't be greedy! DEATHMATCH: You'll start off with a shotgun, shells, and an energy pack next to you. Why the energy pack? SOMEWHERE (not in a secret area) in this world is a BFG9000! Two of you will be very close! The other two people are also in good position to get it as well!

[wadbot]

SB72.WAD: Guerilla Warfare III: Starbase 7, Hell on Mars MAP01 (-3760, 576, -192) Author: George Fiffy Date: 1997-11-10 Description: The start of your mission to save the known universe, as well as Nick's friend, is once again officially underway! It seems the Military Base is well guarded! I hope you don't mind your mission starting a little hard, do you? If so, you're the big CHICKEN I have thought you were, and you're not worthy of living! GO GET 'EM! KICK @$$!

[wadbot]

EUTH.WAD, map01 (704.000, 112.000, 32.000) Author: George Fiffy Date: 11/11/97 Description: You, B.J. Blazkowicz, have done it! (Don't all the REoL TOUGH stories begin with that line?) You have flushed out the evil demon scum inside Castle Solarge in the Rockies! Since your trip back home from this torture, you sit with your Rotisserie Gold chicken and Bon-Bons to see what terrific buys the Home Shopping Club has. You turn on your TV, and to your disappointment, all you see and hear is static. You flip through all the channels, but nothing comes in. You then called the cable company to see if anything is wrong, but, the phone seems to be dead. "This is too weird", you say to yourself. You then got dressed in your classy black tank-top and stained shorts to go down to City Hall to see if they have any insight on what was happening. So you walk out of your apartment complex, and head to the safe N.Y.C. subway system to go there.After waiting 10 minutes for a train, you get on and sit next to a weird-looking fellow, and one of NYPD's finest, a drunk cop. As the train is about to make it's next stop, the power goes out! Once that happened, the weird person attacked everyone in sight. The easiest prey for him was the cop. He then claws at you with his sharp claws.This beast clings onto you like spaghetti sauce on light clothing, and smashes out the subway doors. As he took you down the tunnel, letting you walk on the 3rd rail, You saw a blasted out portion of the tunnel ahead. In this hole, was a teleporter. The beast removed his clothing to reveal his true identity. He was a CYBER-DEMON! "I am SICK of how you treat us when you're around" Cyber said: "Now you are going to pay the ULTIMATE price for your actions! This teleport takes you to to a retreat for Cyber-Demons, called Euthanasia." As he talks, you try to get out of his grasp, but he clenches you harder. "Euthanasia is a "funhouse" for disgruntled Cyber-Demons that want to kill Space Marines with a rocket blast that will kill people like you, being such a blast, you may not feel the pain, or scream from it. Now, YOU'RE our new prey." He then throws you into the teleport into Euthanasia, and all I can say is, Are you feeling MIGHTY LUCKY? You better, or else!

[dmvisbot]

6FIFFY2.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 01/27/99 Description: After the amazing battle in The Uprising, you head into another demension in Hell, and it's very tough, in spite of a drastically reduced headcount of baddies.

[dmvisbot]

6FIFFY5.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 05/23/00 Description: Another UAC base has been invaded by the demonic beasts from Hell! This time, it's a Nuclear Power Facility, sprawling in size, which is about to be sabotaged to ruin other bases!Stop the demons before they can get their hands on the nucular waste before they take it and contaminate every base on the mountain!You won't get there in time to save them all, but hopefully you will save many of them, or just a few, or just...SOMETHING!

[dmvisbot]

FINAL_DM.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 04/30/99 Description: REoL TOUGH has been the biggest thing to hit DooM since the id Team made the Ultimate DooM patch for DooM 1. Just like the DooM story, it started out on the moon Phobos, one of Mars's few moons. The story went to Hell, and suddenly spread to Earth itself in DooM II.Over the nearly 2 years REoL TOUGH has been big in the DooM world, the legacy has finally come to a close with this DooM II (v1.9) add-on simply known as THE FINAL DooM. The REoL TOUGH DooM series ends the way DooM began, inside a UAC Moon Base on the Phobos moon. Sadly, I never could make a good moon base, and this is no exception. Not quite the way to go out, but that's the way it is. I hope the details I added near the end (in plain areas) help make it look...mediocre. BUT, REoL TOUGH is now moving onto HeXeN, and soon Quake. There's already a COTD2 add-on for HeXeN out there, ergo the delay on this level. All I can simply say is: It's time to move on.Hope to see you all when the big Quake hits! I AM READY!

[dmvisbot]

6FIFFY4.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 10/02/99 Description: This starts where Future Unveiled left off, at the entryway to where four angry Cyberdemons are about to blow you away, and you must rely on more than rockets or any weapons to get out alive!At the end is a teleport to which you'll warp to their Detention Center (next release).Can you find it? Try and find out!

[dmvisbot]

EUTH.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 11/11/97 Description: You, B.J. Blazkowicz, have done it! (Don't all the REoL TOUGH stories begin with that line?) You have flushed out the evil demon scum inside Castle Solarge in the Rockies! Since your trip back home from this torture, you sit with your Rotisserie Gold chicken and Bon-Bons to see what terrific buys the Home Shopping Club has. You turn on your TV, and to your disappointment, all you see and hear is static. You flip through all the channels, but nothing comes in. You then called the cable company to see if anything is wrong, but, the phone seems to be dead. "This is too weird", you say to yourself. You then got dressed in your classy black tank-top and stained shorts to go down to City Hall to see if they have any insight on what was happening. So you walk out of your apartment complex, and head to the safe N.Y.C. subway system to go there.After waiting 10 minutes for a train, you get on and sit next to a weird-looking fellow, and one of NYPD's finest, a drunk cop. As the train is about to make it's next stop, the power goes out! Once that happened, the weird person attacked everyone in sight. The easiest prey for him was the cop. He then claws at you with his sharp claws.This beast clings onto you like spaghetti sauce on light clothing, and smashes out the subway doors. As he took you down the tunnel, letting you walk on the 3rd rail, You saw a blasted out portion of the tunnel ahead. In this hole, was a teleporter. The beast removed his clothing to reveal his true identity. He was a CYBER-DEMON! "I am SICK of how you treat us when you're around" Cyber said: "Now you are going to pay the ULTIMATE price for your actions! This teleport takes you to to a retreat for Cyber-Demons, called Euthanasia." As he talks, you try to get out of his grasp, but he clenches you harder. "Euthanasia is a "funhouse" for disgruntled Cyber-Demons that want to kill Space Marines with a rocket blast that will kill people like you, being such a blast, you may not feel the pain, or scream from it. Now, YOU'RE our new prey." He then throws you into the teleport into Euthanasia, and all I can say is, Are you feeling MIGHTY LUCKY? You better, or else!

[dmvisbot]

6FIFFY3.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 04/30/99 Description: A long time ago, after fighting the Cybers in their own world, you are sent back to find the den of the Cyberdemons!In this first installmaent, you try to work your way through mineshafts and old world cyberworld archetecture to get to the gates of the Cyberdemons (future release). To think, if UAC didn't overstep their boundries and decide to mine the Cyber world as well, this whole thing could've been avoided!WARNING: EXTREME DETAIL IN THIS LEVEL! YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!

[dmvisbot]

EUTH.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 11/11/97 Description: You, B.J. Blazkowicz, have done it! (Don't all the REoL TOUGH stories begin with that line?) You have flushed out the evil demon scum inside Castle Solarge in the Rockies! Since your trip back home from this torture, you sit with your Rotisserie Gold chicken and Bon-Bons to see what terrific buys the Home Shopping Club has. You turn on your TV, and to your disappointment, all you see and hear is static. You flip through all the channels, but nothing comes in. You then called the cable company to see if anything is wrong, but, the phone seems to be dead. "This is too weird", you say to yourself. You then got dressed in your classy black tank-top and stained shorts to go down to City Hall to see if they have any insight on what was happening. So you walk out of your apartment complex, and head to the safe N.Y.C. subway system to go there.After waiting 10 minutes for a train, you get on and sit next to a weird-looking fellow, and one of NYPD's finest, a drunk cop. As the train is about to make it's next stop, the power goes out! Once that happened, the weird person attacked everyone in sight. The easiest prey for him was the cop. He then claws at you with his sharp claws.This beast clings onto you like spaghetti sauce on light clothing, and smashes out the subway doors. As he took you down the tunnel, letting you walk on the 3rd rail, You saw a blasted out portion of the tunnel ahead. In this hole, was a teleporter. The beast removed his clothing to reveal his true identity. He was a CYBER-DEMON! "I am SICK of how you treat us when you're around" Cyber said: "Now you are going to pay the ULTIMATE price for your actions! This teleport takes you to to a retreat for Cyber-Demons, called Euthanasia." As he talks, you try to get out of his grasp, but he clenches you harder. "Euthanasia is a "funhouse" for disgruntled Cyber-Demons that want to kill Space Marines with a rocket blast that will kill people like you, being such a blast, you may not feel the pain, or scream from it. Now, YOU'RE our new prey." He then throws you into the teleport into Euthanasia, and all I can say is, Are you feeling MIGHTY LUCKY? You better, or else!

[dmvisbot]

MINES.WAD Author: George Fiffy Date: 11/11/97 Description: In either SINGLE or CO-OP play, you and up to three other warriors will go around an infested compound kicking butt wherever you can, but some areas can be quite tricky, so you got to keep on your toes!In DEATHMATCH, you and up to 3 other DooMheaDs will hunt each other down as many times as possible. Some will have a better starting point than others...