A very nice implementation of these good looking sprites. Good fun.
I may as well mention a pet peeve of mine here. Shotguns and slow reloading. I'm a fan of the Doom single shotgun and I know that shotguns are not high on a number of weapon modders favourites lists but there is, IMO, a nice balance between the two shotguns in vanilla Doom.
The SSG is a very powerful weapon (especially close up) and many people consider the single shotgun redundant once they have picked up the SSG. I beg to differ, I really like the standard shotgun and I feel that it very much has its place in the arsenal. It doesn't have the stopping power of its double barrelled brother but its quicker rate of fire makes it far more useful against groups of low HP (possibly rapid-firing) enemies IMO. Even against some of the bigger bad guys, the rate of fire is sufficient that the single shotgun can put the enemy into its pain state frequently enough that the weapon is still sometimes worth considering over the more powerful SSG. (And, of course, the tighter spread makes it a little more useful at longer distances too, but that's not the point of this rant-ette.) The single shotgun is my "go to" weapon of choice, primarily because of the rate of fire aspect of this balance.
So, why am I mentioning this? Because, almost without exception, weapon mods that feature reloading destroy this balance. Most of the time, a SSG-like weapon is featured and, much like the original, after firing the player quickly slams in a couple of replacement shells and the weapon has a similar rate of fire to the original combined with the awesome stopping power of two shells at once. The single shotgun, however, gets saddled with an annoyingly slow "fill the weapon with shells one by one every few shots" reload. It's not too terrible in this mod because the shotgun only has a 5 shell capacity versus the usual 8 (though this does mean reloading needs to happen more frequently). This type of reloading system reduces the average rate of fire of the single shotgun by making it so that for a number of seconds each "clip", the weapon is unable to fire. If you can't do the job in 5 (or 8) shots, then you are going to need to plan for some way of withdrawing for a few seconds while you wait for the weapon to be refilled. Compare this to the not-crippled-at-all-by-the-reloading-system SSG and, as a single shotgun fan, I can see little reason to use the single shotgun for any fight unless shotgun ammo is particularly scarce.
Surely there has to be some way of allowing shotgun reloads without removing the main thing that normally makes the shotgun a viable choice even when you are carrying a SSG? As I said, systems like the one in this mod leave the SSG almost unscathed yet cripple the single shotgun and thereby ruin a fine balance and make the single shotty virtually redundant.
Right, peeve aired. Back to appreciating this rather nice little mod.
