Attack of the Mutant Munchkins of Doom is a mod for registered Wolfenstein, made by Tricob. It was originally released on September 27, 2007 in DOS with an SDL version following seven years later.
The mod is a tongue-in-cheek TC by Tricob, and it exists in DOS and SDL versions. Originally planned to have 128x128 graphics before being abandoned, the player appears in a surreal universe where he's bombarded with killer mutant Munchkins and vanishing/reappearing robots. There are "hint bubbles" which provide hints to the player, and the player accesses these bubbles by picking them up.
The DOS version has a "VDM Sound screen" which allows the VDM Sound utility to start working before the game begins using in-game music. The VDM Sound utility had a tendency to temporarily play the music "too fast" when the sound driver started working. This was Tricob's workaround for the problem.
Author's editorial
Tricob is credited with providing the voice of the Munchkins in the mod. He reported:
"The game was inspired by inept sci-fi flims from the 1950s. The game was supposed to end with you waking up and finding out the whole thing was a dream ... a dream spawned by going back to sleep after having pizza and vodka for a midnight snack.
"The 'spinning cube' animation was as close to professional animation as I've ever done. I didn't have any 'perfect' cubes in my house, so I made a cube out of Playdoh. I then drew each image according to what I saw when looking at the rotated cube. There were also lights shooting out of the bottom and top of the cube's mechanism, but every time I drew them, they kept appearing as though they were attached to the cube. So I just ditched the 'inside lights' while leaving everything else intact.
"There's more than one reason I pulled the plug on the Munchkins project. But it can be summed up in '3 strikes and you're out'. The green Munchkin was supposed to be pushed back by the force of the gun every time he shot at you (inspired by the arcade game R-Type). At the time however, I didn't know how to code that in, and the map's design usually prevented the effect from showing up very well; walls and solid objects would too often prevent him from being pushed back very far before a wall or obstacle halted his backwards movement altogether. Although I wasn't counting them at the time, this was Strike One.
"Then came the idea for the 'floating floor gun'. This was a little circular object that ran around the screen, and when it was ready to attack, this gun made its way out of the circle and fired a shot at you. The problem is, the floor was a different color than the ceiling, so I'd have to keep changing the colors as it moved from the bottom half of the screen to the top half ... just to make it visible. There was no way to do the color changes without it looking ... 'strange'. Of course, if I had just enabled the floor/ceiling feature, this would've solved all the problems. But being stuck with DOS Box and a 8000 CPU Cycles limit, I didn't want to sacrifice the game's performance with that feature. So, this was Strike Two.
"Then came the 'Fat Albert' final boss. I had my heart set on making a finale where you had to beat him to win the game. I had even recorded my own impersonation for the boss, where he says "Hey hey hey" when he spots you, and when you kill him, he says, "Hey!!!!!". By that point, I was moving all the sprites from 64x64 to 128x128. All of a sudden, my "perfect" final boss was now the size of a Munchkin. That was Strike Three for me. Of course, the Bill Cosby allegations came about some years afterward, so maybe it's good that I abandoned the Fat Albert idea when I did.
"Not knowing that I had unconsciously decided to pull the plug on my own project, I was looking over how to expand the game's palette and ditch all the colors I'd never use anyway. But I found myself unable to touch the palette at all. Then I realized why, and I knew it was time to abandon the mod and leave it in more capable hands.
"One last note I think you'll find interesting - each enemy was supposed to have his own method of attack. The Munchkin fired his gun at you, the robots attacked with destructive flashes of light, the SS replacement would be a witch in a black dress blasting you with a magic wand, and there would be this floating eye named 'One-eyed William' who popped his eyeball out of his socket and rammed into you with it. IIRC, the witch actually still has her voice samples intact if you have the game spawn the SS enemy. Her 'alert' sound is a sound clip from the Internet, and I recorded her 'death scream'."
External links
- Source code at WolfSource
- News at the Dome: 2014 NOV/DEC 2007 SEP/OCT 2007