Laughing too much at my own joke

When I completed the construction of the mechademon, I'd just released the Mining Praxis map. I had nothing anywhere near ready to place this new monster in for testing. What I did instead was take another page from Monster Replacement Theory and did a few substitutions to the server configuration. Mechademon Madness DM has already been running for over twice as long as a Zandronum server as the original Mining Praxis map ran. At the time of this writing, Mining Praxis is only about a month old!

The first time I witnessed the dismembered leg of the mechademon actually kicking another monster, I nearly fell out of my chair laughing. You'd think a thing like that I'd get over. But I haven't. I've gone on to do my best as a player to give the mechanical leg the best opportunities I can to kick the other monster's asses. And once in awhile, I still giggle myself silly watching it happen.

The key to gaining the leg as an ally is to limit your fire to "just enough" to kill the mechademon. A little too much fire and you turn the leg into an enemy which has a pretty small hit box. Way too much fire and you simply eliminate the leg immediately after its birth.

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On the topic of monster replacement...

Bringing the sour grape back around for another drive also worked out well on the Mechademon Madness DM server. In the Dystopian Playground level, all sour grapes were generated from a player's cacolauncher weapon. So really the only time I got to watch it attack myself was if I'd exited and rejoined the server, thereby becoming "a new player". Swapping out the originally placed borg shotgunners for this recolored sour grape was a perfect monster compliment to the mechademon replacement of the rapid fire zombie marines in this server. Less hitscanner, more face gnawing to go around!

The lost soul Doom monster that sour grape is based on is not a very strong monster. Neither its attack nor its health and pain chance are very high. But apparently, those extra cells of animation with the rapidly chomping mouth induce a stronger sense of immediacy for the player to conduct its extermination. I first noticed this when inviting a long-time friend back to the world of Doom. Through my own thorough beatings I've been perpetuating on the server the way currently configured, apparently, I experience this same psychological reaction.

Having many of the sour grapes in this Mining Praxis based server, I'm damn happy with the results. Although the map is smaller than Dystopian Playground, there's still plenty of space available for the charge attack of the sour grape. There's a large variance in heights between the different tech light illuminated platforms too. This yields quite a variety of sour grape angles of attack and is most satisfying to witness when the player unknowingly sidesteps out of the attack path just in time while turning to witness this near miss.

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