Sinister Brain

Chap#	16177
Health	1500
Speed	12
PainChance	100
Projectile attack	Big Plasma balls
Melee attack	None
Appears in	Mining Praxis

This is a new version of Sinister Brain monster. Its main characteristics remain the same. Its explosion/death sequence has been vastly improved. If you downloaded this monster between April and November of 2022, you might prefer this new version. Original description follows:

The Sinister Brain is an Arachnotron whose "brain" has been recolored. It has something to do with the concept of the "Beware of the Sinister Brain Robotrons who will reprogram..." blah-blah-blah in the attract-mode instructions of the 1982 arcade game Robotron:2084. As much as I'd like to make a monster which reprograms Doomguy, I think those ambitions are way beyond my current capabilities for reprogramming Doom.

What I wanted in the Mining Praxis map level was a better boss monster. I mean, really, in Doom you have essentially four boss monsters:

• Baron of Hell as a boss in the original Doom
• Cyber Demon of Doom 2
• The Spider Mastermind of Doom 2
• Archvile

After creating the Hell Knight in Doom 2, the Hell Baron no longer has the same scariness it once had as a boss monster. The Cyber Demon is the ultimate boss monster with lots of hit points and hell-damaging rocket fire. The Spider Mastermind is also formidable but lacks in player feedback due to its invisible hitscan attack. And Archie? Well, the Archvile is just plain unique.

My thought process is "what would be better if the the Spider Mastermind wasn't such an invisible killer?" This got me thinking more about the Arachnotron and why it's so weak. All of these thoughts swirled around and mish-mashed together in my head to later be barfed out as this monster.

First step, modify the sprites. Second step, make it bigger which was achieved through the Scale property. I actually made the monster considerably larger at one point but ended up settling on a scale of 1.2x. It's large enough for my purposes and differentiation. I'd modified its Radius and Height properties to proportionally match this scale but found that the resulting bounding box was ridiculous and reverted to normal Arachnotron numbers here. Third, give it boss-level Health. Finally, I monkeyed with the Sinister Brain's plasma fire. There's some unused plasma ball sprites in Doom 2. These worked very nicely.

Finally, I had thoughts about what a ripoff it is that there's never any additional reward beyond the satisfaction of "Yay! I beat it!" in the dispatching of Doom's boss monsters. I mean, you kill a Shotgun Guy and you get a shotgun. Multiple monsters in the ZDoom Monster Pack at least give out ammo like the Former Human/Zombieman does. Why don't ya ever get shit from killing a boss?! And this part didn't even get thought of by me until I already released Pinkguy Andabrain! So, now killing the Sinister Brain yields a fun little toy I invented called the Rasmapeater. I'll do a writeup of this one like I did with the Cacolauncher later sometime.

As usual, this monster is utilizing that custom color palette that most of my work of late has used. Not sayin' ya can't use the monster without it, just you have to agree to hold me harmless for any potential side effects (such as genetic mutations to your offspring) which may, err... WILL arise.