Rasmapeater

The Rasmapeater was first introduced in my Mining Praxis map and was the beginning of my desire to reward players for killing off higher tier Doom enemies. The map featured the Sinister Brain, an Arachnotron scaled up slightly larger and with brains recolored to a color scheme strangely reminiscent of Doom's FIREBLU. Upon its death, it drops the Rasmapeater weapon, which also has some nod to the FIREBLU texture...

So what does it do? Well, as originally released, the intention was to give the player the kind of fire that the Sinister Brain had. Sinister Brain fires plasma shots at a very fast metered rate, just like its Arachnotron cousin. The sprites I chose for its fire are some unused sprites from Doom II. Where this plasma repeater is different though is the player gets off three shots per pull of the trigger using the same amount of cell ammo a single shot takes from the normal Doom II player's plasma repeater. The shots fired begin to spin off in different directions which get more wild the further they are from the point of firing. The idea here was to show the player they can't handle advanced alien weapons or something along that line.

In practice, I've found this random direction disadvantage for the player becomes an advantage in some situations. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only Doom weapon which can fire around corners. True; the player doesn't have complete control over whether the shots angle left, right, up or down, but since there's so much fire coming off the weapon at once, does it really matter?

I only ever put the Sinister Brain demi-boss in that one map, Mining Praxis. Since that time, I've handed the duties of distributing the Rasmapeater to a few full-boss Spider Mastermind variants, one of which is called Bubblehead, named so because of its alternate firing sequence.