Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (rd reviews The Iron Forge)

[Endless]

Just did a quick glance and I can't help it but think: As a Doom fan... what a time to be alive. Each single pick feels like it should be in some ''top 5''. All around a gigantic year for quality WADs.

[RonnieJamesDiner]

I really appreciate the review, and am humbled to be associated with these masterpieces (desperately trying to avoid imposter syndrome)! There's still a number of items on this list (and from the Cacowards itself) that I've yet to actually sit down and play through, but I know I'm in for a treat. Can't wait to see what everyone creates in 2021!

[Cheesewheel]

12 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

*Hellstation by @Cheesewheel (CPD map 19)

 

 

Thanks for the mention!

 

Out of interest, why did this map in particular stand out for you?

[NuMetalManiak]

Love the thousand lost soul level in Abandon, the real highlight of the set. On the other hand, no mention of Ephemeral (1000 lines 2 MAP32) makes me sad.

[Remilia Scarlet]

13 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

cursed Berserk

Funny thing... The intention from the start was "here's a very good excuse to just go wild and have fun with a berserk pack."  But it became obvious that the intention wouldn't always get across when I saw a playtester's run through they map.  They picked up the berserk, saw the imps, then switched away from the berserk even though they had invulnerability.  So I made sure that the intention came across after that.

 

Thank you for the kind words!  Glad you enjoyed it ^,_,^

[Horus]

2 hours ago, NuMetalManiak said:

On the other hand, no mention of Ephemeral (1000 lines 2 MAP32) makes me sad.

 

If I were to make the same top 20 maps of 2020 list, Ephemeral would be my #1. However, given that it's a complex puzzle map, I can see how others might not like it as much as I do.

[Not Jabba]

re: Ephemeral, it's definitely a good map, just didn't strike enough of a chord with me personally. I've been a big fan of puzzle maps like Grove and The Given where all the necessary information to beat the map is communicated in-world, whereas Ephemeral operates more from existing knowledge of Doom mechanics*; I actually didn't know that Rev rockets could trip action lines until I watched a video playthrough to try to figure out how to get out of the starting area of Ephemeral. It's also very movement-oriented, which I struggled with somewhat. It's very thought-provoking and a technical feat, but since this is a personal list I mostly followed my gut, and since I was already listing two Aurelius maps that I like more on a gut level, I didn't think too hard about whether to include it.

 

*which is also a valid way to challenge players

 

4 hours ago, Cheesewheel said:

 

Thanks for the mention!

 

Out of interest, why did this map in particular stand out for you?

 

The megawad has pretty solid gameplay in general, but I particularly liked the mood and setting of that map. I'm not sure I could say anything more specific than that offhand, but I remember jotting down the name and number of it as soon as I finished playing it to add to my possible top maps list, so it definitely made an impression. I think the coolest thing about the megawad in general is that it creates a strong sense of place with relatively little detail, through having just enough hints in just the right places and a good sense of scale. To me, that particular map was the best at it.

[Firedust]

Absolutely killer picks and awesome write-ups as usual! 2020 was one stacked year for dooming - so many megawads, episodes, magnus opus maps. Here's to more of the same quality in 2021! And more wonderful Not Jabba reviews in the months to come, too!

[A2Rob]

Very nice! I appreciate your kind words, Jabba. Funny enough, out of all the maps I made for RL2, “Overtime” ended up being my favorite.

[Steve D]

As always, Not Jabba's Top 20 List is full of wonderful write-ups and killer screenshots that leave me psyched to play all of these maps, even if I'd have to ITYTD or God Mode the Abandon slaughterfests. It'd be worth it just to walk around in those amazing environments. Usually, I end up not playing all the maps because of IRL issues, but this year I think it's going to be different. This year, I really want to set aside some time to enjoy the products of our amazing community of mappers, musicians, artists, coders and all the rest of our creative crew. 

[baja blast rd.]

On 2/29/2020 at 1:04 AM, Not Jabba said:

... The three maps I've discussed so far all feel something like musical etudes; they're all pretty small and quick (if you can stay alive), and they serve to test specific skills in contained settings. For players of rd's skill level, I imagine they must feel like short, energizing workouts. ...

 

This is something I needed to fill in because I realized that it might not be widely known.

In the discussions of slaughterwads that would crop up over and over years ago, I think the whole Doom-as-chess angle supporters would push, justifying the appeal of harder maps with abstract notions of strategy and all that, has painted a misleading image of "challenge Doom" as something just very abstract and technical and removed from actual emotion. (I think I probably ended up going with that explanation myself a couple times.) 

 

When I first got into mapping, the main appeal of hard Doom was crafting pleasurable feelings and adrenaline rushes (among other comparable things), which is a philosophy I still carry with me. The intensity was always predominantly a means of creating strong emotions, like the slow burn of oppression where you have to walk a tightrope and get to breathe cathartic release when you are done, or like the sheer thrill of chaos like a flame that consumes you, or something in between or different altogether. A hard map wasn't a wall you had to surmount to "prove yourself." I think that philosophy was why, in addition to the korens and Ribbiks and Dotws of the world, people who normally didn't play challenging maps would show up with praise in my threads. I sometimes boot up wads like Sunlust and Stardate 20x7 -- and when I do it's mostly not because I want to do something hard, or test skills, like someone doing a strenuous workout or, worse, eating their daily roughage. It's because the fights are pleasurable in themselves on a more basal level.

 

Abstract strategy and abstract skill testing ends up factoring into such things on a secondary basis, due to opportunism (the possibility for it is conveniently right there), and probably because it kind of has to at times (a super intense fight that is completely anti-strategic also likely deprives the player of agency, which is not very conducive to fun), but I wouldn't consider it the top-layer appeal for me (at best it's part of a 1a-1b tandem).

 

Imo, above all, a good Really Hard Map, to me, feels good to play. (Usually that is at least true for its target audience, or for members of the target audience that are open to the map's chosen mechanics (there is still a lot of room for subjectivity), even if isn't true for anyone else.) If one is type to enjoy modern "challenging but fair" wads (like BTSX and Vanguard), with their intensity and all the attending feelings they produce, they likely already know, by analogy, this feeling as it's created by many "super challenging and not quite ostensibly fair" wads in those who like that thing. In fact you might be part of both audiences (like I am). 

 

One of the things I haven't seen anyone do is describe a map like, let's say, Sunlust m20, purely in terms of the feelings it aims to create (and succeeds at creating). Like part of the genius of the infamous crypt fight with the cyberdemon is that the space is just perfectly sized so that you can make these slick narrow desperation jukes around the cyber if it hems you in, and the appeal is not a deliberate skill-test thing but more that it feels scary and then really good to pull off, and that this doesn't happen every time in the fight (i.e. the fight is not rigidly controlled as much as it's seemingly tested for a high likelihood of fun super-intense things happening) so that natural variability also gives it quite a bit of replay value. (Although that fight is probably a bit too variable to be as lethal as it is.) And of course that's just part of it -- the crypt area has a pretty rich psychological warfare angle. An exegesis on stuff like that could easily sound arcane, and it'll get verbose almost by necessity, which I think is why the "Doom as chess" explanation, which is far more immediately self-evident and easily packaged, became so appealing.

Edited February 23, 2021 by rd.

[Not Jabba]

1 hour ago, rd. said:

In the discussions of slaughterwads that would crop up over and over years ago, I think the whole Doom-as-chess angle supporters would push, justifying the appeal of harder maps with abstract notions of strategy and all that, has painted a misleading image of "challenge Doom" as something just very abstract and technical and removed from actual emotion. (I think I probably ended up going with that explanation myself a couple times.) 

 

For what it's worth, I don't think I ever thought it was removed from emotion. I've just thought of the emotion as being tied to the feeling of being challenged, and of being able to exercise knowledge and skill. Workouts are something I do understand, and they can feel great. It feels good to push yourself further, and it also feels good to be capable and good at what you're doing, and to feel the adrenaline that comes with that push, and so on. I imagine chess feels that good too, for people who are that good at it. So I don't intend either the notion of chess/strategy or the notion of testing your own worth to be clinical (even if, in some cases, it may call for fairly clinical analysis of what you're creating or playing). 

Thanks for posting this -- great points and an interesting read.

[Not Jabba]

Nova 3 by various

 

    

    

    

    

    

 

The 2020 Cacowards had 12 runners-up, the largest number ever, continuing a long process of expansion that began with the DTWiD-era judging panel—and of course there are still plenty of excellent projects that weren't officially listed. How do you know when to stop adding HMs? Well, probably when you can't agree on anything else! Everybody had that one project they still wanted to push for, and if we'd tried to keep going, we'd have butted heads over a four-way tie of one vote each for—if I recall correctly—Akeldama, 1000 Lines Community Project 2, The City of Damned Children, and Nova 3. That last one was my vote, which is probably the only actual point I'm making with this rambling opener.

 

Like Nova 2: New Dawn before it, Nova 3 is one of the best takes on the standard Community Chest project formula that I've seen (in my opinion, both of them are better than any of the Community Chests as a whole). Nova 3 is about the same quality as Nova 2, which is interesting because the people running and mapping for the project were...actually new, at least when they started. Nova 2 was a bit infamous for abandoning the "new mappers only" premise created for the original Nova, with veterans like dobu and Ribbiks stepping in to offer leadership and guidance as well as mapping talent (with great results!). Nova 3 took about four years to make and was passed down through three different project managers, so you can well imagine that many of the mappers involved honed their skills over the course of that time, and I think that's evident in a strong quality control phase and a ton of great maps across the board. As rd mentioned in the Cacowards, many of the people who worked on this project were big names themselves by the time it was released.

 

The resources for the megawad are primarily CC4-tex with additions, and now that the community as a whole has moved on from using CC4-tex for everything, it feels like a rare and welcome thing when a team uses it intentionally and skillfully—particularly since it seems to be so well suited for making phenomenal community megawads. Nova 3's progression gets the most out of the resources with three distinct episode themes that offer a lot of vibrant color and opportunities to build interesting settings. E1 is Hell, turning the generic IWAD episode progression on its head. E2 is wilderness and ruins, but the textures gave the option to choose between stark Egyptian desert structures and overgrown Mesoamerican jungle temples, both of which get plenty of screen time. E3 is Valiant-esque moonbases with the stylish tech textures and glowing metals and forcefields that made CC4-tex so renowned in the first place. The episodes are basically ten maps each, but since map 11 is kind of an odd slot, technically in the second third but poised before the episode end text for E1, the mapper took the opportunity to make it a bit of a techbase crawl leading into the first ruins. As usual, the two secret maps are also a departure from the standard themes and gameplay tropes. Even in a set that benefits so much from thematic cohesion, it's nice to have these types of one-off maps to break things up a bit.

 

The champion of the megawad is @Scotty, who took over halfway through development and saw it through to completion (as if his Abandon maps and Criticality weren't enough for one year). His two solo contributions are among the best in the set: "Blood Eagle" (map 05), a short and literally punchy Tyson map set in a grotesque, fleshy quarter of Hell, and "Ritual Horror" (map 20), a larger map that delivers the traditional end-of-E2 climax along with a sudden and brilliant segue into E3. Apparently filling in the role of right-hand mapper was @Paul977, creator of the Cacoward runner-up Darkest Room, who created or co-created five of the maps in Nova 3 (the same number as Scotty). Paul's style is immediately recognizable wherever it appears, a combination of micro-slaughter and atmospheric scene-setting that builds up suspense between fights and then hammers you hard with each setpiece; "Cannibal" (map 07) and "Ancestral Domain" (map 19) provide intense combat-centric challenge spikes, while the Paul/@Finakala collab "Lunatic Dais" (map 23) leans deep into the astral horror. A third prolific contributor to the set was @A2Rob, whose clean Scythe-esque style is a welcome addition to all three episodes, especially in "Armstronged" (map 26), a compact but sandboxy high-tech key hunt. All three of these mappers also collaborated on some of the major opus maps in the megawad; Scotty and Paul completed "Into the Unknown" (map 30) from what I believe was an already existing but unfinished submission by @Eris, while Scotty, Paul, A2Rob, and @Pegleg went in on "Megiddo III" (map 15). For those who don't know, Megiddo is a Nova institution where one mapper designs a hub and the rest create small challenge arenas that can be completed in any order to reach the final battle and exit (though its slot has changed each time for various pragmatic reasons, as it was map 30 of the original Nova and map 32 of Nova 2). "Megiddo III" is the smallest installment of the three, as it was meant to be treated more as a normal map instead of a huge epic, but the grab bag of tough battles still proves to be a great format, as well as a nice smaller echo of the "box of chocolates" nature of the megawad as a whole. "Into the Unknown" has a similar feel to it, but with more of a horror element as it plunges from moonbase into the dark caverns beneath the surface, where some sort of creepy Hell-tech construct lies at the heart of the invasion. It's an excellent end to the megawad, with a memorable final fight. Finally, I feel I should mention "Fireblu Palace" (map 32) by Scotty and @bemused, which is exactly what it sounds like; yes, it's memes, but I like it, and it's exactly the sort of gimmicky joke challenge that fits perfectly in the super-secret map slot (it also looks cool).

 

One of the mappers I was most surprised by was @dt_, who has apparently been around since Community Chest 1 and has made plenty of solid maps before this, but really knocked it out of the park for Nova 3. Their first map in the set is "Tomb of Solitude" (map 13), a deliberately paced tomb raider map where every detail feels just right to build a realistic sense of adventure as the map loops back through areas repeatedly. Their other map, "Beta Three" (map 27), applies a very similar approach to the lunar theme, and is also a treat. Nearly every other mapper contributed a single map, which helps add more variety as a counterbalance to the relatively consistent team-project feel of the maps from Scotty and the other core team members. "A Partner of the 49th Day" by @Kurashiki (map 10) is my favorite map in the whole set, a playful but also intense finale to the Hell episode. "Alpha Scorpii Supercluster" by @antares031 (map 25), which also appears in modded form in Antaresian Reliquary, is a grand power trip through a gleaming and beautiful moonbase in a similar style to Struggle. "Solar Powered" by @Big Ol Billy (map 31) has a bit of a puzzle feel to it and revolves around reflecting beams of light, a really clever mechanic for a Boom megawad (you'll also have to solve a few other mysteries to get to map 32). "Deep Space 9mm" by @amok (map 29) is another longer adventure map that's just a ton of fun and very cinematic. The lone techbase map, "Terramin" by @P1NKAC1D (map 11), has been criticized for having a lot of stringy hallways, but I actually like it way more than I should on paper (much like the author's solo mapset, Chainworm Kommando) due to its gutsy dedication to Doomcute and its sense of place; it reminds me a bit of TVR!. Rounding out the highlights of the Hell episode are @Angry Saint's "The Crow Comes Last" (map 08), a looping map that feels as metal as its title, and @Xyzzy01's "Scarlet Syzygy" (map 09), a very short but somewhat daunting mood piece with tough monsers. For the ruins episode, I want to give a nod to @Albertoni's "El Dorado" (map 14), which may not be the most polished map in the set, but has a great narrative surrounding a boat in a sea of liquid gold, and similarly "Dregs of a Bitter Cup" by @obake (map 16), which isn't the strongest layout but has some great atmosphere. And in the lunar episode, there's "Lunar Comms Station" (map 22), a particularly Valiant effort by @DMPhobos, who's gone on to contribute great maps to quite a few other community projects.

 

There were a few maps in Nova 3 that I didn't care for, but your mileage may vary; all in all, it's a great megawad with a lot of heart and memorable submissions at almost every turn, and it's got a lot of variety when it comes to map length, pacing, setting, and style. 2020 was full of megawads, and with so much competition, only a handful of them received award recognition. Nova 3 is easily my favorite of those that were snubbed. You really can't go wrong with it.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

Realms of Cronos by @whirledtsar et al.

 

    

    

 

Hexen community projects were considered a pipe dream for a long time. I've seen a few of them come and go, barely getting past the conception stage, as people realize how difficult it is to coordinate an entire hub in a project where each mapper is working independently and control over the final product is limited. How do you deal with progression scripts and puzzle items in your map that affect someone else's map? How do you arrange the sequence of events across the entire hub without knowing how many maps will be in it? Who even decides which mapper gets to use Clock Gear #3? But like all Doom-engine pipe dreams, someone was bound to figure out a plan and make it happen sooner or later.

 

Every time anyone talks about Realms of Cronos, they invariably mention "Felstoy Abbey" and "Path of Hei'an" and not much else. I myself have written about both already, and they're certainly the most impressive maps in the set. "Felstoy Abbey" is a huge epic, and I've stated that it's the best map ever made for Hexen. "Path of Hei'an" captivates everyone who plays it with its unusual and detailed setting, an ancient Chinese mountain village. There's probably no need to lavish more attention on them than they've already gotten, but I certainly recommend playing them.

 

The unsung hero of Realms of Cronos is project leader whirledtsar, the person who made the pipe dream a reality. As you might expect, it was mainly a matter of planning from the ground up, and holding firm about how different maps are allowed to affect each other, which requires a project lead who knows what they're doing. In Realms of Cronos, all progression hinges around the hub map. Each spoke map has a required switch (and sometimes also a custom key item) that opens up a new section of the hub map; in this way, the whole progression becomes dynamically variable, as every choice you make about which map to visit affects the order that other maps become available to you in a nonlinear/branching way. It also means that simpler maps (for instance, ones in which the player is only intended to have the first two weapons) are available first, while ones intended for more powerful weapons are guaranteed to be accessible after you have those relevant weapons. As for other puzzle items, mappers could claim them and use them as long as they were self-contained, i.e., the puzzle item and its receptacle appear in the same map. Most boss enemies had to be claimed as well, and the final Korax fight is integrated into the hub map. Whirledtsar even asked mappers to state their texture themes/settings in advance so that each hub exit could be designed in a way that fits the theme of the map it leads to. 

 

Whirledtsar also compiled a set of resources, which includes not only a strong selection of edited textures, but also a bunch of textures from Hexen 2 that allowed for themes like Mezoamerican ruins and, most notably, the Tulku resources that lay the foundation for "Path of Hei'an." It was nice to see my waterfalls and some other textures and decorations created for The Wayfarer used in this project as well. The best thing about the resource compilation is the new monsters, though. I've always maintained that Hexen is a difficult IWAD to make maps for because the range of the existing monsters just isn't that flexible. RoC's Possessed Scimitar, Wolfman, and Acolyte of Korax add their own distinctive behaviors (dodging, charging, jumping) that expand the range of gameplay but also feel really natural alongside the stock bestiary. There's also a lava Wendigo, which isn't that different from the ice one, but can be used more comfortably in warmer settings (addressing the main limitation of one of the most interesting monsters in Hexen). The last new monster is a cute little zombie piranha—like Quake's Rotfish, it's less a monster and more a shootable decoration that swims toward you menacingly, but it's pretty fun to have something populating the waters. It makes the game world feel just that little bit deeper and more complex, which is what Hexen thrives on.

 

The hub map itself is well crafted, with a nice open layout and each area having a memorable themed look that sets you up for each spoke map. It's got its own set of challenges, including some canyon abyss platforming and a few setpiece fights as you face the defenders of the later portals, and it introduces many of the new monsters as isolated roamers to prepare you for later encounters where you face them more seriously. The final Korax fight is surprisingly complex and very challenging as well. Whirledtsar's other map in the project is "Arcanum Labs," which has a great setting that's just what it sounds like: a combination of magical and mechanical. It feels similar to a well-designed classic Hexen map (maybe something a high-profile '90s/'00s mapper would have made if they'd turned their attention to the IWAD), but with a lot of moving parts and little micro-puzzles, including a Porkulator machine.

 

Although the rest of the maps in the set are simpler, and most are made by less experienced mappers, they aren't bland; each one has something interesting going on in it. A swamp village with eerie fog? Ok! A gigantic guillotine made to sever the heads of gods? Hell yeah! A showdown with a Death Wyvern amid ziggurats, or a mage duel in a lava temple? Sure, let's roll! I'm sure most people will find a few maps they enjoy (even if it's just the obvious ones), but to me, the most interesting thing about Realms of Cronos is that it exists at all. And besides its own sequel that is currently in development, hopefully it may inspire other people to attempt some team Hexen projects.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

Pantheon Ark by Team ForgetMeNaut

 

 

By the time you arrive on Pantheon, the world is already dead, its surface life cut off almost as abruptly as the panic signal they sent to the station at Celesta. The only heat signature you find is slowly circling the planet's stratosphere: a massive and indescribable construct of tech and bone, its conduits pumping something the exact temperature of living blood. Everyone's heard the stories of the weapons project on Pantheon, a secret orbit that pulled in the quadrant's best minds for ten years, never to be heard from again. Judging from the stellar array along its glistening back, the godship's work on Pantheon is done; it will only be a few days before it has the capability to leave the atmosphere and reach Celesta and beyond. You don't think there's time to call anyone else, and you know of no higher level of crisis response than the one that's already been engaged. You are the cavalry. A docking bay in the rear of the ship lies open and empty, like a waiting maw.

 

Thus begins Pantheon Ark, a full-length Metroidvania in the Doom engine using the monsters, weapons, and items from Amuscaria's Hell-Forged. As you can tell from the quoted bit above, the story is similar to most Doom plotlines; an experiment by people seeking greater power goes horribly wrong, and now the godship is crewed by the dead scientists and soldiers who created it alongside the demonic creatures they spawned to serve them. But like any story, its quality is measured by how well it's told, and Pantheon Ark's narrative keeps it minimalist while serving as an atmospheric backdrop that allows the grungy, creepy setting and awesome spritework to shine.

 

The Doom engine is a really fascinating playground for a Metroidvania, given that it's 3D but still has enough cartoony abstraction to accommodate classic genre tropes. The first time I saw hints of this idea was in Ryath's experimental (and very cool) Bury My Heart Knee-Deep, a huge single map that somehow accomplishes the open-world feel and item-unlockable progression in vanilla format. Pantheon Ark fleshes out the concept much more fully with UDMF features, ACS, and ZScript, allowing for not only a larger range of actors and narrative events, but most importantly a greatly expanded set of movement mechanics. The resulting mix of complexity and Doomy pixelation feels much more like the classic 2D Metroid games (Super Metroid, Fusion, and Zero Mission in particular) rather than a more modern sort of 3D open-world game—which is to say, it nails the feeling of being both an homage and something fresh and new.

 

Did I mention movement mechanics? Yeah. The amazing thing about this project is that it is so completely built around movement. Maps are designed as fully 3D with multiple tiers, using both portals and 3D floors. Nearly every map in the game has at least 4-5 entrances and exits; you can progress to other maps both horizontally through conventional doors or passages and vertically by climbing/jumping up shafts or taking lifts—or just falling. As a result, the whole thing plays as a single gigantic hub, and although the early sections are carefully controlled, it soon opens up into basically a free-for-all where you can go anywhere at any time, including by accident (missing a jump and falling to the next level below). This feels both chaotic and intensely terrifying—though as you gradually learn the layout of the whole ship and gain more mobility, it essentially becomes an excuse to find cool shortcuts. 

 

As with any good Metroidvania, your ability to progress gradually opens up as you find permanently equipped items that give you new movement abilities. Naturally you get a high jump, a dash jump, and a double high jump, as well as an attachment that lets you climb up certain specific texture surfaces as though they were ladders. My favorite, however, is a hookshot that lets you grab onto "grip nodes" (a set of specific floor/ceiling/wall decorations) and pull yourself to them, which sometimes allows you to cross an entire level in just a few shots. Obviously this enormous level of freedom lets you do all kinds of unexpected things, and the dev team has made sure that every instance of "thinking outside the box" leads to some secret area, hidden item cache, back-door entrance to another map, or—in the most extreme cases—a silly easter egg.

 

That's the beauty of Pantheon Ark. You can do practically anything, but a lot of it requires skill and lateral thinking. Tons of areas are optional or hidden, but harder to get to than the mandatory sections. The entire game is a single expanded hub composed of about 40 maps, but the majority of them are relatively small, you can get to each of them a bunch of different ways and take different paths through them, and there's always something in them that you haven't tried yet as you gain new progression items and develop your movement and combat skills. Maps with a lot of entrances are super well landmarked, so you gradually build up a sense of orientation, and the most important paths always have easy access to a network of unlockable cross-hub teleporters (i.e., after you have found each teleporter for the first time, you can always go back to it from any other teleporter).

 

And in addition to the variances in map sizes and gameplay, the whole ship is just interesting to explore. The "typical" setting is a sort of cyber-organic ship interior, usually more blood and bone than flesh (as described in the story text), but since the game world is both a living being and a functional spaceship, it also has quite a few unusual diversions. One of my favorites was the unapologetically icy "Cryocore"—it takes some serious gonads to create a map that slippery, but the various permanent items really help make it genuinely enjoyable because of how frequently you have the option to not be on the floor. Other setting highlights include "Eden," which literally revolves around an inexplicable gigantic tree; "Heartforge," a hazardous counterpart to "Cryocore" with lava pouring out all over the place; the gleaming "Power Convergence" and utterly frantic "Weapons System"; and the gloriously bizarre "Zoo," which I'll let you figure out for yourself. To hammer home the idea that you are actually on a ship, it also has a clear front, back, sides, top, and bottom where you can either look out windows and see the wide open sky and the sides of the structure or crawl out onto balconies/ledges/landing pads to reach other areas (watch out for the wind!). "Stellar Array," which takes place entirely on top of the ship, is one of the most gorgeous maps in the game thanks to its towering, vivid structures. Much of the lowest section of the ship has an open bottom; some of the toughest platforming is down there, and if you fall, it's out into the atmosphere to your death, not to the next level down—though of course it's also quite fun to kill enemies by knocking them off of their perches.

 

But what about all the backtracking? Well, you've played these types of games before, right? Though I often dislike respawning enemies in games, it works well for something that plays like a Metroidvania or classic Zelda game. In Pantheon Ark, everything that's not a boss/miniboss, weapon, permanent progression item, or secret item respawns every time you re-enter a map. This can be particularly cool in light of the multiple paths through each map. Your first time through, you may be harassed by a distant Scientist or Cybervile the entire time you're trying to cross it horizontally, forcing you to seek cover along the way; the second time, you may drop from above right into the middle and have to scramble for a better vantage point as you come under fire; the third, you may appear right behind your hated foe and get to fry its unsuspecting ass with the Basilisk, Soultaker, or Vorpal Blade (or god forbid the Reaper, once you finally have it).

 

Because Pantheon Ark seeks to be its own thing, it uses no stock Doom actors whatsoever; the monsters it draws from Hell-Forged are only the ones freshly sprited and coded by Amuscaria, the augmented versions of the Imp, Demon, Spectre, Cacodemon, Revenant, Mancubus, and Arachnotron, along with the flying Guardians and the various boss-tier monstrosities. Amuscaria was kind enough to get in on the project briefly and contributed new variants of the Lost Soul, Pain Elemental, and Arch-Vile as well (all of which are critically important for PA's movement-based gameplay), while the classic Cybruiser and Terminator (among the best of the community's older custom monsters) pull their weight alongside Amuscaria's sprites as replacements for the Hell Knight and Baron. The team even found a place for HF's shark-themed enemies (which are meant to be a joke but also happen to look really good) deep in the bowels of "Lost Hydroponics" and "Eden," echoing the common Metroidvania concept of having environments with unique enemies. The rest of the bestiary (including most of the glass cannon roles) is filled out with a set of zombies, but they're not much like Doom's. The only two hitscanners in the game—an SS-type light machinegunner and a heavy shrapnel shotgunner (technically not a hitscanner at all, just hyperfast projectiles) are relatively uncommon and used with caution. The rest of them are quite a bit more interesting, especially in combination with architecture and gameplay that are designed around spatial skills. The Worker and Buzzsaw are both melee-only but have lunging/jumping attacks, while the Engineer does one better; like the Strongman from Adventures of Square, it uses a grappling chain to grab you and pull you to it, then pummels you with powerful close-range attacks. The Grenadier zombie from Supercharge also makes an appearance with its arcing, bouncing grenade attack, while the Technician and Scientist zombies each have multiple chaotic ranged attacks (you really have to see them to believe them; words will do no justice). Though the set mostly relies on Hell-Forged's boss/miniboss enemies, it does have a few unique surprises in store as well. And although I'm sure no one will be actually surprised by the final boss encounter with the enormous, stationary Mother Brain-esque pilot of the godship, it is a hell of a neat fight regardless.

 

Of course the game also has HF's items, including a health system that makes breadcrumb pickups more useful and the modular suit of armor, as well as powerups for regeneration, speed, damage reduction, unlimited ammo, weapon enhancement, etc. More importantly, it has all 10 of those amazing, juicy, versatile weapons. Because the majority of them are very powerful—and so are the majority of enemies—the best gameplay tends to fall into two distinct modes: either frantic glass-cannon vs. glass cannon scrambles over challenging platform terrain, or (if you have the right armor and powerups) something that feels more like a mechwar game where you can both tank and dish out tons of damage and are potentially up against big enemies that can do the same. Add to all of this the permanent progression items, and you have a recipe for some amazing chaos—do a midair strafe of a turreted enemy while being pulled by the hookshot, jump over an enemy's head as it tries to hit you, wall-jump from side to side as you ascend a shaft while monsters are firing down on you from above, or take the height advantage and get the drop on them. Many of the boss battles take place in platforming arenas where you have to figure out good movement patterns with the new mechanics in order to survive.

 

Needless to say, it must have taken an incredible amount of dedication and hard work to make a project of this scope and complexity work at all, let alone feel so consistent and seamlessly interconnected. Aside from Amuscaria's Hell-Forged resources and his three new monsters, the entire project was handled by a small, hand-picked team of four people (Clib, Zengo, Lord Crumb, and project leader East) and took several years to make, but it was definitely worth the wait. Whether you're leaping across swaying bone platforms in "Expulsion Depths," rocketing masses of gibbed enemies out into the open sky in "Aft Propulsion," jump-dashing from branch to branch in "Eden," or dropping the "invincible" Hellsmith into his own vat of molten metal in "Heartforge," the entire experience of playing Pantheon Ark is absolutely sublime.

 

 

 

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Note: In case it's not clear, the project covered in this review is fictitious. I thought about posting it on April 1, but I don't want to give the impression that I'm actually trying to trick anyone into believing it's real. This is just a cool thought exercise (or, if you've got the interest/dedication/skills, perhaps a proposal for a project you will make in the future). The idea came from a discussion with @rd., who proposed writing a review of a nonexistent product as either a good process for someone to start planning out their own project or a way to brainstorm cool things that would be possible with Doom mapping/modding, and how to go about designing them effectively. Maybe it'll give people some interesting ideas, and hopefully it's fun to read too!

Edited April 25, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

There are (at least) two types of Heretic episodes in this world. There are the action-adventure kind, where the fantasy setting is used as a backdrop for a light, rollicking Doom-like experience with plenty of monsters and plenty of equipment to compensate. Then there are the ones that embrace the full weirdness of Heretic, exploring its many eyebrow-furrowingly specific mechanical quirks to create riddles and progression puzzles that test the player's critical thinking, all while making you pray for extra random ammo drops as you're forced to use every Time Bomb, Tome, and exploding pod at your disposal just to make it through. Today, we'll be looking at one of each.

 

 

Heretic: Quest for the Crystal Skulls by @Captain Toenail

 

    

    

 

I mostly think of Captain Toenail as a sprite artist, so this episode was a pleasant surprise—certainly one of the most fun and lighthearted Heretic episodes I've played, though the sheer volume of Doom releases does make it harder for Heretic projects to find an audience. Quest for the Crystal Skulls is laid out as a hub, but it's a bit different from Faithless Trilogy. While the hubs in FT are more of a single extended journey, QftCS is more like a conventional episode where you can complete the maps in a flexible order. Beating the first map gives you access to the main hub, where you're able to approach the rest of the maps in a branching, semi-gated fashion. You can choose to beat each map in one go, or you can return to the hub and try a different one at any time (though I found the map design to be flowy and intuitive, so I never got stuck and chose to beat them one at a time). You're prevented from playing the hardest maps first, and you can't get to the secret map or boss map until you've beaten everything else, but there's still a lot of freedom. 

 

The result is that each map feels like its own vignette, and the episode offers a variety of settings, both tried-and-true classics and more creative concepts. The hub itself is a shimmering ethereal/astral pocket plane, and quite beautiful. The other maps are mostly the towns, dockside fortresses, and monasteries that you expect from Heretic's texture themes, while the formidable M7 ("The Undercrypt") is a gloomy dungeon filled with traps and puzzles. All of these settings are rendered with great conceptual detail—less reliant on aesthetic sector detailing and more on representative ideas (aka Doomcute) and fleshing out the setting as a whole. This is something that Heretic is good at in general, but it seems to be one of Captain Toenail's strengths as a mapper as well, and I particularly liked the look and layout of the urban maps. My favorite map in the episode is "Dark Coast" (technically M4 or M5), which takes place in a dark, claustrophobic fishing village that happens to be contained entirely in a sunless underground cavern on the shore of a deadly toxic sea. I've never seen anything quite like it before, and I love it.

 

The majority of the episode is fast-moving and friendly enough for me to play aggressively without many saves, though it had enough challenge at most points to keep me alert. It's somewhat like Elf Gets Pissed in that the challenge comes from a moderate number of enemies placed to attack you from lots of angles, rather than trying to press you with large numbers of monsters at once. The 3-4 maps that you will most likely play last are significantly tougher, though I don't think it's anything most people won't be able to handle with saves. "Undercrypt," as I already mentioned, is a tricky, hazard-filled map in general but presents some pretty deadly combat scenarios on top of that. The secret map, "Realm of Chaos," could perhaps be considered a slaughtermap, but it sets you up to have Tomes active almost nonstop, and is basically designed around reaping through hordes of weaker enemies with spammy Tomed weapons—though the last half of the map boxes you in and can be a bit brutal, and if there's anything in the episode that will be too difficult for some people on Smitemeister, it will be that.

 

Similar to many other recent Heretic releases, Quest for the Crystal Skulls adds both new monsters and mechanics. I think this is almost always a net positive for Heretic, since it lends itself so strongly to maps that are roleplay/world-oriented rather than abstract/mechanical (which is probably one of the reasons I'm attracted to it). Conventional wisdom is that Heretic needs more popcorn enemies that will go down very easily, which is true-ish, but I don't think it's the most important gap in the bestiary. What Heretic already has is essentially several Imps or Hell Knights that all have the health of a Pinky or Revenant; what's missing is the threat—the Mancubi, the Arachnotrons, the Cybruisers, the Arch-Viles. Like Sold Soul and The Wayfarer, QftCS focuses its additions on mid- to high-tier enemies that are designed to be dangerous and have enough health to stick around so that they pose a threat. There's a snakelike flying enemy that breaths fire and comes in small packs, a red Disciple that teleports around and shoots rocket-like projectiles, and a Chaos Serpent miniboss. What I find interesting is that although these enemies all shoot basic straight-firing projectiles (just like many of Heretic's stock monsters), the main thing that makes them challenging and distinctive is their movement behavior. The flying snake is fast and dodgy, and it has a long tail that creates something like a motion blur effect and adds confusion as you aim for the head, the only part you can damage. The Disciple has its teleportation, and the Chaos Serpent inherits the aggressive, jittery charging behavior from D'Sparil's mount. All three are surprisingly versatile as a result. I noticed something similar with the new monsters in Realms of Cronos, and I think it is still a relatively unexplored way of designing enemy niches.

 

The episode also has a custom final boss, perhaps not surprisingly a Heresiarch variant. I found this battle pretty tough, mainly because there was a lot of extra stuff going on in it (lava, lots of volcano shooters, minion spawns, and deflected projectiles in addition to the boss's six or seven regular attacks). This adds a fair amount of random chaos, and in both my playthroughs I died a couple of times without understanding what had actually hit me. This didn't bother me too much, though; the boss serves its purpose as a big epic end fight, and a handful of attempts and a thumb on the Quartz Flasks is all it really took to survive the storm and beat him. The other added UDMF mechanics are small things that fit well alongside the classic aesthetic: rain, atmospheric sparkle effects in the hub map, Hexen's magic light bridges, and the occasional unobtrusive piece of breakable furniture. Oh, and it has those purple gem turrets you see in Heretic maps sometimes—I actually kind of like these because they are easy to see and react to, and don't have the "gotcha" effect of a stationary, camouflaged hitscan turret. In QftCS, they're just another part of the combat.

 

I've now played Quest for the Crystal Skulls both with and without Wayfarer's Tome, and I enjoyed it both ways, although as with most things, I slightly prefer it with the mod (If you want to play it with Wayfarer's Tome, make sure to also load the included patch, wtome_qcs.wad). It's a nice adventure episode with a strong focus on worldbuilding, but also with some good challenge at all the right times.

 

 

Serpent's Wake by @hervoheebo

 

     

     

 

The central idea behind Serpent's Wake is the ways that different thing placement can completely change the feel of a map. Rather than being used as skill settings, Yellowbellies, Bringest Them Oneth, and Smitemeister are instead framed as three different "quests," each of which is thing-placed from scratch to feel like a totally different experience from the other two. I've seen people discuss this idea as a thought-experiment for Doom, but I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone do it until Serpent's Wake. It's easy to imagine how different monsters and weapon loadouts would craft a different style of gameplay. But in the wonky but lovable basement-dwelling stepchild that is Heretic, you can play these differences to even more dramatic effect. How different would a level be if you do or don't add infinite pod spawners? A Wings of Wrath? A dozen Chaos Devices? A ton of those little volcano shooters? Walkable barrels to avoid a lava floor vs. extra armor to tank the damage? A huge abundance of ammo vs. stingy ammo but lots of Tomes and other combat items? Seven Iron Liches and a Maulotaur vs. forty Ghost Nitrogolems? Serpent's Wake doesn't necessarily have all of the above, but regardless, hervoheebo has used the differences in thing placement in a wide variety of very creative ways, combining UnBeliever-esque equipment/mechanics setpieces with unique and surprising ideas for level design/flow. There are even some changes in map geometry between different skill settings, which I believe are handled with voodoo doll scripting.

 

The episode appears to require ZDoom or GZDoom for reasons that are basically technical (and largely because Heretic has very little non-vanilla support outside of the Z-ports). However, it's very vanilla in spirit. The architecture is classic and abstract despite having a strong overall sense of place, and the author really wants you to get down and dirty with the challenges posed by Heretic's vanilla weapon/monster balance. It's a very, very different beast from the many modern GZ-based Heretic releases like Faithless Trilogy and Quest for the Crystal Skulls; there's something a lot more primeval about it, and given the setting and enigmatic design, I'm certain that's intentional.

 

I've played this episode 1.5 times, both using "Quest B" (skill 3) because at a glance it looked like it might have the most unusual gameplay. In my initial unmodded playthrough (which I did not finish), I had a really rough time with the extremely tight resource balance and puzzly gameplay—I loved the idea but had a hard time getting into it. My second playthrough, using Wayfarer's Tome, felt more approachable and enjoyable to me. It's hard to say whether I would have enjoyed Quest A or C more than B, since there's no documentation on the philosophy behind each quest, and I'm not sure whether there *is* an overarching concept for each one; I think you're probably meant to play all three and be surprised at every turn. This is obviously one of the joys of Serpent's Wake, though to me it's also the great difficulty of the way it's designed—if you want to get the full experience, or even to know which of the three experiences you prefer, you likely have to play the whole episode three times. That said, I know there are people who would devour all three quests back to back like candy, and if you're one of those people, please add Serpent's Wake to your playlist.

 

The aesthetics/setting are very distinct and are one of the most enchanting things about the episode. A large portion of the graphics are custom and done in a consistent, slightly painterly style, and I suspect they were all made by the mapper. The game world is imagined as an exploded planet, a realm torn apart by magic that's now nothing but clusters of islands floating fragmented in a starry void, barely sustained by the remnants of atmosphere and gravity. The edges of almost every map fall off into this void, making it dangerous to fall, slip, or be blown, carried, or blasted off. Chunks of ragged rock hang suspended everywhere, and the geometry itself is sharp and rough, creating that feeling of primeval abstraction but at the same time representing the setting very literally; the entire world is torn to shreds. The pieces of the world are still very much clinging to life, though—the bright, beautiful greenery, blooming flowers, flowing water, and colorful starry sky are a magnificent contrast to the violent broken-world imagery. Although the bestiary and items are completely stock (the better to focus in on what makes Heretic unique), the texture set does a huge amount of worldbuilding/storytelling on its own, with occasional whimsical details like giant seahorse hieroglyphs or frothing water effects at the base of a huge waterfall, or a forest of dead, towering trees that have human-made pillars balanced on top of them for some unknowable reason. The episode includes a full suite of extra graphics to go along with all this worldbuilding, too—the custom sky, the fantastic title and endgame screens, and most rare and welcome of all, a custom intermission map (I've almost never seen these in PWADs—the only other one I can think of is Hell-Forged).

 

In a way, the gameplay of the quest I played felt very fitting for this aesthetic. Everything is in chaos, you're scrounging around for whatever you can find, and the whole world is hostile, but in a scattered, fragmented way, like you're dealing with the angry, trapped remnants of an invasion force rather than an organized army. As you've probably begun to gather by now, the gameplay was quite challenging, even grueling at times, though the monster counts were generally low to moderate. Quite a few maps in the quest I played (in fact, all but two of them, as I recall), used resource starvation in some form. Resource starvation throughout the map, resource starvation until the midpoint of the map, resource starvation until the end of the map, resource starvation to push you into using a specific weapon, resource starvation to make you move extra quickly to keep from dying, resource starvation as a strategic pressure for understanding when to engage with a final boss who appears right at the start of the map...it comes in many flavors. The biggest kick in the ass I encountered was "Silent River" (E3M5), where off-map voodoo dolls continuously take damage and are fed clusters of Crystal Vials by turns, turning every fight you encounter into a hazardous roulette; there are no health pickups in the entire playable space, but there are scattered megaarmors that you can juggle to try to take as much of the edge off as possible. Those sorts of striking contrasts and interplays are what the episode is all about. "The Crypt" (E3M3) puts you toe to toe in cramped spaces with powerful monsters you can't kill for most of its runtime, but when you get access to the equipment caches at the end, it becomes a cathartic free-for-all. "The Wilderness" (E3M4) is the most sprawling, epically sandboxy map in the episode, but it revolves around close-quarters combat with the Tomed Staff, of all things. "Menhir Lands" (E3M6) is a beautiful, serene landscape marked by tranquil standing stones and reflective pools along the riverbed you drained in the previous map, but it's also high-action, packed with gear and enemies. "Fortress of Arrogance" (E3M7) is the most atmospherically- and combat-intense map in the set (and busts out the Face Shrine music to make sure you know it, too), but the end of it is a peaceful and seemingly endless climb up an icy summit that makes you feel like you're ascending into the stars. "Ternion Sea" (E3M9) is a completely open sandbox in an archipelago that grew from the bones of a fallen dragon, but you spend most of your time in the air rather than on the ground or in the water (How did the mapper fill all that open space with threat? Not to be clickbaity, but the answer literally made me yell "What the fuck!?" out loud). As for the final map, "Zodiac Hold," you face D'Sparil immediately but are forced to bypass him, carving your way through a final exam of ice and wind and fire and every enemy in the bestiary until you've snagged whatever subset of the map's equipment you feel comfortable facing him with.

 

And all of that is just Quest B. In a sense, there are still two whole episodes I haven't played yet—and I think that's precisely how the mapper views it, as 27 maps rather than just 9. There are a lot of experiences to be had here, and a lot of fun in seeing how each version of each map is spun totally different from the others. Overall, Serpent's Wake is harder for me to recommend unconditionally than Quest for the Crystal Skulls. Some people are going to enjoy it, and some people aren't. I myself am both of those people, but I lean toward thinking it's very cool and being fascinated that it exists. As I said, I had a smoother, less stressful time playing it with Wayfarer's Tome, but the intended experience is closely tied to Heretic's vanilla behavior, and people who want the deepest version of what the three quests have to offer should probably play them unmodded. If a "best of both worlds" approach appeals to you, you might try Wayfarer's Tome with Wand starts.

 

 

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Needless to say, the contrast I made at the beginning of this writeup between Action-Adventure Heretic and Weirdo Puzzle Heretic is an overgeneralization. Quest for the Crystal Skulls uses Heretic's mechanics (most notably pod-walking) as a way of solving progression puzzles and gaining advantages in combat, while Serpent's Wake has plenty of high-energy moments where you're blasting through your opposition with Tomed weapons. All the same, I think these two episodes represent opposite ends of the spectrum in terms of the way mappers have approached the IWAD. Heretic is the perfect game for people who want zippy, lighthearted adventure romps with a narrative tone similar to silly fantasy B-movies like Beastmaster or a tabletop sword-and-sorcery session with friends. It's also the perfect game for people who want the strangest, most mind-bending skeins of mystery to unravel. My hope is that new Heretic fans will seek out and enjoy both.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Captain Toenail]

Thank you for the kind review @Not Jabba

 

I can also highly recommend Serpent's Wake, a very creative wad.

[hervoheebo]

Nice write-up on SWake, I appreciate it. I'll follow up on some of the points raised (interested or not ;))

 

-Dolls are indeed very central to the 'scripting'. The wad was reluctantly classified as semi-ZDoom only because it was the only practical port I found that allows dolls to be moved by scrollers which I only found about very late when testing on every port I could find. ZDoom format mapinfo is used because there is no dehacked equivalent for Heretic, afaik, and the lump's presence doesn't seem to affect other ports, if you must use them. Otherwise it is intended for generic limit-removing ports. (plural might be overdoing it for Heretic)

 

-You are right that there are no overall themes to the quests, which is intended.  The idea was to mimic the random element that is very emblematic to the fantasy genre, likely because of D&D as well as stuff like Rogue and Diablo. It becomes hard to remember which quest had which version of each level which is also fully intended since it makes you have to react on the fly; I consider so-called emergent gameplay an important factor in Doom and Heretic especially. It might be interesting to have a frontend that chooses a random skill level from 1-3 for a truly random experience but I don't know if such a program exists (yet)...

 

-The new graphics were done by myself in GIMP with a Wacom tablet. The world is similar to "Outland" in the Warcraft 3 expansion, in which it appears as an alien red Orcish world that was exploded by magic. (Not the only Warcraft reference in this or TJ ;)) The main difference here is that in SWake it's presented to be a Human world instead, to contrast the classical fantasy aesthetic with the destruction, floatiness & such. That way the typical fantasy trappings serve as a familiar entry point while opening some new possibilities for wackier stuff.

 

-The aesthetic and function tries to balance between representative and abstract. Not so detailed and smoothed-out everywhere that the player feels suffocated by the detail (ala Gothic99). The environments should also feel dynamic instead of static: if you have a hugely detailed floor pattern in a room done with sectors, you can probably bet on that area not becoming a lift. As for comparisons to other wads I'm afraid I can't comment because the last time I downloaded pwads was over 10 years ago or something, so in general the structures and aesthetics are (d)evolutions of those of the iwads which are my sacred cows.

 

-Gimmicks and small areas that are more aesthetic than functional were included in amounts that intend to spice the meat of the levels in a positive manner. For example the bellows in E3M2 that push down and back up when you jump on them, producing a metal item in the furnace inside the smithy. Small Duke3d-style gimmicks that make you smile a bit when you use them but without being so commonplace that you only play the levels to see the tricks ;)

 

-Resource starvation is my preferred style of gameplay in the Doom games although I think this was still toned down for my tastes :) In Heretic I feel that much of the potential in the gameplay lies in those hairy situations where the player has to get creative. There is even more potential for off-rails fighting than in Doom because of the inventory items, and effort was taken to let the player exploit creative use of the mechanics. In other words sequence breaking was not often intended, but left in if noticed unless the shortcut was too easy and powerful.

 

-That variation of "Silent River" seems to be the most shocking gimmick to be found here :) Originally all 3 versions were to be 'stealth' levels but I felt the concept wore out its possibilities in just one take.

 

-The secret level is tricky. The player's movement speed in Doom is very fast as is, but when he can fly endlessly, even the largest map seems small and there is little reason to engage enemies instead of running to the exit, if you know where it is. The back-and-forth pattern forced in "Ternion Sea" is one of those nutty ideas that went from conception to release without being seen or contested by anyone else... a lot of those really!

 

-"I lean toward thinking it's very cool and being fascinated that it exists." This I'm glad to hear, since I have similar notions about some works even if I disagree with their execution at times. Things that can succinctly be described as 'strange' or 'unique' like "Majora's Mask" or "The Last Unicorn". Myself I call the phenomenon 'I'm glad it exists'. If the particular work really resonates with you, then it becomes something special that no 'by-the-book' or 'safe' product can match. SWake was really a sort of concept project to realize a "Dangerous Dave moment" I had many years prior. Some unusual design choices went with the territory, with the driving argument for inclusion being "if not now, when?"

 

Also I agree on Heretic having that fun 80s-fantasy feel, what with the synth string amid the exotic music, bright colors and slightly campy tone. It gives an opportunity for some whimsical aesthetics and gameplay that would probably be considered not grim and dark enough for Hexen or Doom :)

[maulosiarch]

Hmmm, I seem to have different feelings to projects that people usually do, so I'm grateful to see maps I've never heard of, and am definitely going to check out, since you have gone to the effort to highlight them. The majority of wads honoured with Cacos usually don't appeal to me, these suggestions I'm hoping will be more my style.

 

 With the Quest for the Crystal Skulls, I actually found the end boss easy - however, since it has hub-style progression, I just horde all my inventory items and use it at the end. I was expecting (and hoping, to amp up the difficulty) more of those creepy floating snakes to come into the battle. As for Serpent's Wake, wow - I did not like this at all (so far)! I'm sure many people like this, but the music seemed to be so much louder than it is for other wads; I turned it down to about 50% and it was still incredibly loud. I can't say I personally was a fan of the music either after just two maps. I can't seem to find a way out of the second map either.

 

With the screenshots of those really epic-proportioned maps, I have to ask, does other people's computers struggle more with these levels/megawads than they do with modern games? I just look at those levels and think - "Oh boy, my laptop is definitely going to overheat with this one!"

[Not Jabba]

Doom: Annihilation (2019 film)

 

     

     

 

 

I: The Joy of Schlocking

 

One thing you should probably know before you read this review is that I love B-movies. I've munched popcorn to The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and Them. I've watched around half of the 50-ish Toho/Godzilla movies made to date, and Son of Godzilla is one of my favorite movies. I have seen, and loved, both Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter and The Velocipastor. I've had the pleasure of yelling at the screen while watching Manos and Teenagers From Outer Space, and, on the flip side, have genuinely fond memories of the likes of Zardoz, Street Fighter, Hausu, Six-String Samurai, and Lair of the White Worm. Because with B-movies, there's a whole spectrum. There are movies that are so bad they're good, movies that are so bad they're bad but are fun to watch anyway, movies that are so bad they're just plain bad, movies that are intentional parodies of bad movies, movies that try to be great but fail, movies that have very little thought put into them and are pure fun...and, rarest of all, there are good B-movies. However you slice it, I have no taste. And neither do you, because you're here in a fan community for a cheesy '90s pixel shooter rather than dissecting Anna Karenina in a book club or joining a film society that exclusively watches Sundance winners.

 

So perhaps that will shed some light on why I think the latest Doom movie is worth watching.

 

The synopsis of Doom: Annihilation begins, "On the darkest moon of Mars...," which already makes no sense. There's only one other Martian moon for it to be darker than, and presumably they are both equally lit. They just wrote it that way to make the movie sound dark. And to make sure you know exactly how dark the movie is, the protagonist is also named Joan Dark. It's a totally ridiculous name. I love this movie already.

 

Doom: Annihilation is most assuredly a B-movie, complete with close-up shots of people fake screaming as unseen monsters are coming for them. It's got the whole nine yards. It's cheaply made, it has a handful of characters and even less character development, and it's more mindless action than substance. What's not to like? But even going into it with that expectation, I ended up liking it more than I thought I would. It's not one of the great B-movies of all time, but it's a good one. It's everything I asked of it but has hints of something more as well.

 

II: The Legacy of Doom

 

Predictably, the film is absolutely peppered with references to Doom and related games, including dead bodies named William Blazkowicz and John Carmack, a ship's computer named Daisy, and a marine who shouts "I'm too young to die" as he flees from attacking zombies. I'm certain most of my readers will consider this a turn-off. Hell, even I consider it to be a turn-off, though at the same time, I have to admit that it was pretty fun to sit next to the non-Doomer I live with and explain those references as they popped up. I suspect the main audience for this movie is broadly self-identified gamers who have memories of the series and have picked up various bits of trivia through the years, rather than those who are neck-deep in Doom community lore—and frankly, that's okay, because millions of people have played and enjoyed these games.

 

Ok, but here's the real question that's inevitably on everyone's mind: is it "really Doom"? Is Joan's dialogue consistent with Doomguy as a character? Well, clearly not, since it includes actual words instead of just monosyllabic grunts and the Morse-code click of reloading shotguns. That entire question is preposterous, of course. Who is Doomguy? The silent HUD face from the original games? Lorelei Chen, John Pietrovich, Dimitri Paramo, and Thi Barrett? Flynn Taggart and Arlene Sanders? Doom Comic Guy? Doom 3 Guy? Doom and Crash? John Grimm? John Stalvern? Doom Slayer? This guy? Did he sacrifice himself to stay in Hell at the end of Doom 64, or did he go on to fight eighty bazillion more demons in megawads throughout the last 28 years? Is he a total hardass, or does he exist outside of time and space in a memetic love triangle with his SSG and pet bunny? Everyone will naturally have their own version of the story that works for them—I myself am a 1993-96 purist when it comes to """Doom canon"""—but I sure hope no one is going to sit there and try to tell me with a straight face that there's only ever been one interpretation of the character, or the mythos.

 

And Joan Dark is Doomguy, not just some minor side character within the same universe. Doom: Annihilation is a retelling, not a gaiden story. The UAC finds teleportation devices left by an ancient civilization on Phobos, sets up a techbase around them, and proceeds to conduct experiments that brutally fuck up the expendables who participate, until at last they open the gate and the base is immediately overrun by what comes through it. The protagonist is sent to Phobos, which is considered a death trap by fellow marines, as a punishment for disobeying orders. Said protagonist has a personality that's basically deadpan, but is tough enough, right enough, and just charismatic enough to stick as a likeable hero—essentially, a character carried more by attitude than dialogue. It's a movie in which space marines shoot their way through the corpse-strewn, interconnected hallways of a moon base using a variety of weapons that includes pistols, a chaingun, a double-barreled shotgun, a chainsaw, and a weapon that is named the BFG-9000 and looks like the BFG-9000 but is admittedly more of a plasma rifle. They fight zombie UAC personnel (albeit ones that behave like modern movie zombies), creatures that are clearly Imps (albeit with roughly the health of Hell Knights), and an honestly pretty cool reinterpretation of an Arch-Vile. The protagonist seemingly kills everything but then is ultimately thrust through a portal into Hell for the final battle and then dumped back onto her home planet, where we are set up for a sequel that could easily be titled Hell on Earth. It's not perfect, but when you add it all up, it does remind me an awful lot of a video game I like, and it's not Sim Ant. It's by far the most Doomy commercial adaptation of classic Doom I've seen, or likely ever will see, outside of 2016, and significantly truer to the spirit of the original games than most of the Doom novels, the 2005 movie, the Doom Comic, Doom 3, or even the Doom Bible. 

 

III. Why I Like It

 

All that said, it is fundamentally a sci-fi B-movie (again, not unlike the spirit of the original games), and it will make or break on whether you're willing to watch it as a sci-fi B-movie, rather than whatever impossible balance of individualized perfection any given Doom fan is no doubt prepared to demand from it. It didn't have the budget to be a AAA blockbuster, and it didn't have the clout to draw big-name actors, writers, or directors. And if it had, people would just hate it more, with the same special rancor they reserve for new Star Wars, Star Trek, or Ghostbusters media. The original Doom games were created by a team of people so small that their names could all fit on a 300x200-pixel title screen and still have room to include the independent contractor who made their monster models. Doom: Annihilation is a small studio film, and it has the heart of a small studio film. 

 

The best result of this is that most of the effects are practical, rather than CGI. All of the zombies and demons in the film except for the Arch-Vile thing are costumed actors, and there aren't a lot of effects that appear to be computer-generated, though the energy projectiles definitely are and the final Hellscape is clearly a green screen. Sets are also very limited, which has the side effect of making the movie feel very tightly confined, both intimate and claustrophobic.

 

As a B-movie, Doom: Annihilation is everything I wanted it to be and more. It's silly, it's fun, it's violent and gory but not overly gruesome and not earnestly grim. It takes itself seriously enough at the few times when it needs to but not very seriously the rest of the time. It is basically a movie that's meant to be watched mindlessly, but it comports itself well, balancing on the knife edge of not being deep in the slightest, but still being likeable and relatable in addition to simply fun to watch.

 

The actors provide a lot of that. Joan Dark is a riot of cold stares and set jaws, the darkest space marine that ever darked. Her mother died when she was a little girl, but passed down her cross necklace to Joan as her final act; Joan lost her faith with her mother's death but wears the necklace always. Her entire squad was (inexplicably) sent to Phobos (and thus doomed) as punishment for her insubordination, and she bears the burden of that too. She's capable of shedding just a single womanly tear while facing down everything that comes at her like a boss. The actor, Amy Manson, somehow manages to play all that with a straight face nearly all of the time, but also occasionally with the barest hint of a knowing half-smirk—I'm still not even sure if she ever actually did it, but she definitely implied it. The rest of the cast is similar; none of them are playing characters who should be taken too seriously, so they don't. As with most true B-movies, they're no one I've ever heard of before or will probably ever hear of again, but they do well enough to carry their odd assortment of colorful, sometimes borderline ridiculous roles—which is to say, I think they all knew exactly what kind of movie they were in, and they had fun with it. For me, the most important thing was that I actually didn't want most of their characters to die (but most of them do anyway), which is a mark of a good B-movie. The only character who really hammed it up to the point of being overwrought^[1] was the movie's version of Malcolm Betruger, but since he's the villain, that seems on point.

 

The other thing that actually surprised me was the pacing. About the first 30 minutes is character and plot setup and buildup of suspense, and even the last 10 minutes of that seems constantly on the verge of something happening; the entire remaining 1 hour 10 minutes is basically weaving in and out of action sequences. The movie's "gameplay" is mostly what you could call the cinematic equivalent of run and gun, but is punctuated by stealth sequences, more suspense, and occasional brief lulls to allow for minimalistic character and plot development. It's really hard to argue with it; it's the exact thing that essentially everyone has always wanted from video game movies but almost never received.

 

All in all, the film is a bit of a hybrid. In some ways, it plays out like a generic alien action movie, but laid over all of that is the fact that it is Doom; it was easy to go in with the idea that I would appreciate it as its own totally different thing, but in reality, it never stopped being Doom long enough for me to forget what it was, and appreciate it for that. The Doominess of it is applied with a relatively light touch—perhaps mainly due to budget constraints—but it is persistent and clear. To me, it seems to draw the most from the classic Doom games in terms of plot and attitude. The storyline covers the basic elements common to all three boots of the Doom universe, but follows the Doom 1 manual almost to the letter (the one thing truly missing is that the protagonist's insubordination was refusing to fire on civilians, which I wish they'd kept). At the same time, the set design pulls more from Doom 3, which makes a fair amount of sense, because they couldn't make everything out of pixels and STARTAN wallpaper is hard to come by. As previously mentioned, they also borrowed the character of Betruger from Doom 3, for the sake of having a villain. As a Doom character, I could take him or leave him, but the choice was probably appropriate given the limited CGI and the design of Doom's boss monsters. As a B-movie villain, on the other hand, he's more or less what he's supposed to be.

 

The ending teases a sequel that would be loosely based on Doom 2, and as of this February, the director of Doom: Annihilation had been given the greenlight to make it. Apparently, they exceeded their annual sales estimates for the movie in a single month; at the same time, Wikipedia notes that the movie grossed $75,000. That juxtaposition of facts is remarkable, and I kind of did a double-take. I'm sure I don't need to tell you that in movie terms, $75,000 is comically small, one thousandth of what a big-budget failure like Doom 2005 makes, and yet it vastly exceeded the studio's expectations. So I'd like you to think about that number for a moment as you take a break from compiling textures out of frankensteined Blood resources in order to create fan maps for a video game that was a big deal 28 years ago. Doom: Annihilation was not an ambitious business endeavor, and Universal Pictures had no interest in putting big money behind it. It was merely a labor of love for the people involved in it, who did what they could with what they had to work with. If you, proud celebrator of free Doom mods, get your jiggles from spitting on a $75,000 movie, then we are neither of us whole, you and I: I have no taste, and you have no perspective. Because ultimately, the best thing about the movie is that it feels like a cheap fan-made production, and we of all people are the ones who should be able to get behind that.

 

So when the sequel comes out, I will gladly watch it, both because I enjoyed Doom: Annihilation and because I want to see Joanguy do more—honestly, she was great. Never in my life did I think I would get to watch a Doom movie that I actually liked—and while Doom: Annihilation isn't exactly what I would have expected in my wildest dreams of some grand blockbuster, I can finally say that one exists.

 

 

[1] Well, okay, maybe also the medical doctor.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[ketmar]

yay! thank you for this review! Doom: Annihilation is a good B-movie. but some people seem to expect some high-budget blockbuster instead, and hit the movie hard when they found that it isn't. i really hope that the sequel will happen.

[TeK (⌐■_■)]

5 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

 

The best result of this is that most of the effects are practical, rather than CGI.

 

Spoken like a true b-movie fan heh (though I tend to like practical effects whether b-movie or big budget). 

 

Enjoyable write-up, I'll have to give it watch based on your review. 

[Not Jabba]

Isolation by @Jimmy et al.

 

    

    

    

    

    

 

The Covid-19 pandemic has plagued the whole planet, and to whatever extent we're all connected as a global digital civilization, we've all gone through the various stages of pandemic isolation together. As you all know, we are now in Stage 5, where our brains have fully liquified like the zombies from 28 Days Later and our only remaining instinct is to destroy. But remember Stage 1, where we still had hope and were all learning how to bake? Jimmy launched Isolation back in March 2020, in the first weeks of quarantine, and it captures the essence of how we all felt back then: feeling alone but looking toward a return to social interaction, fearful of our entirely correct predictions about what was going to happen as the years went on, but inspired to create and to seek connection through creation as we all shared the same hardship.

 

Isolation is a limitation project, but that only scratches the surface of it. Jimmy encouraged participants to make short, fast maps, an idea that was enforced by the 12-hour mapping time limit and the one-week deadline. This ensured that the project worked as a shared experience that didn't get drawn out too long or procrastinated on, and also that the megawad(s) would be pretty quick to play, without any particularly long maps to bog down the overall flow. You've seen all this before. What I find much more interesting is the conceptual requirements:

• No sky allowed, only ceilings.
• All maps must have damaging nukage.
• Health items may only be placed on water.

And, a bit more subtly, no custom assets were allowed, ensuring that maps would all have a fairly homogenous look, and coop starts were also not allowed—the maps can only be played alone. The last bit of added conceptual unity is the custom palette, which intensifies the bright blues and greens but washes out every other color.

 

So let's unpack all that. I've always loved maps that are entirely enclosed and have no exit to the outside world, not even a glimpse of sky. The feeling dates all the way back to my preteen playthrough of Ultima Underworld. Interior maps are claustrophobic; they make you feel trapped and alone. It's dark, there's no way out, and the hostilities and hazards of the game world are trapped in there with you, somewhere, sharing the gloomy darkness. Building that set of feelings into the basic requirements for a pandemic-themed mapset is a perfect fit, especially in the early weeks when quarantine was a new idea, although I think Isolation's tone has remained relevant as those feelings have become more familiar and taken for granted. Similarly, the prevalence of damaging floors degrades any feeling of safety and reinforces the sense of constant threat, forcing you to use the limited resource of radsuits in order to survive (of course, you can always just choose not to wear them, right?). Putting the health pickups in water loosely ties in with the then-standard message of washing your hands, but more importantly serves to keep health in limited areas, often isolated from the most dangerous parts of the map. The washed-out palette is gloomy and homogenous, further enhancing the dismal, trapped mood of the mapset as a whole, but the bright greens and blues, aside from adding attractive contrast, bring out the two most important environmental elements in every single map: the damaging nukage and the health-bearing water. Add all that together, and what you have is a mapset that emphasizes safe vs. unsafe spaces and creates an inherent, easily visible division between the two, fostering a gameplay dichotomy where the player has to manage movement between spaces where they are harmed and spaces where they are healed. Naturally, the hazardous and neutral spaces tend to take up the vast majority of each map, with the safe spaces treated as isolated pockets of much-needed salvation. That said, since this is an all-comers community project about the joy of mapping, the difficulty of combat isn't particularly high across most of the set, with the safe/unsafe dichotomy usually providing the bulk of the challenge. There are a handful of very challenging maps, however, and looking at the map author list will generally tell you which ones they are (also, they're kept toward the end, a la Scythe).

 

Isolation was a hugely popular project and netted a total of 65 completed submissions—so many maps that Jimmy ended up dividing it into two full-length megawads called Strain 1 and Strain 2. This is where I awkwardly admit that I have only played Strain 1, with all respect to the mappers whose work is featured in Strain 2, so this review only covers that half of the project. 65 maps is a lot of maps to play.

 

Strain 1 alone has a lot of great stuff in it though, and proves how much room there is for variety even within a set of specific artistic requirements. @an_mutt's "Feeling Run Down (map 23), which is my favorite in the megawad, captures the atmosphere of a haunted dungeon within the trappings of a dim techbase. The first part of the map unlocks a tiny hub room filled with most of the health and radsuits, which then becomes your homebase as you make forays deeper into the toxic depths, which are full of traps and deadly fights. The other map I remember being a favorite among the Cacowards team was "The Lonely Deceased" by @AD_79 (map 29), which taps into a similar energy and atmosphere despite looking completely different. AD_79 nearly avoids the ceiling requirement; the map is essentially constructed as outdoor spaces, but takes place in a void with pitch black ceiling and outer reaches, and feels dour and confined regardless of its openness. The only health is five Soulspheres in a fountain at the center, and it's up to the player when to come back and use them to avoid running out of life. The dead really do seem lonely there, and you wouldn't want to join them.

 

Though those are two of the best, they give a pretty good idea of the tone and artistry to expect from the entire set. There's a sense of hardship in Isolation that doesn't necessarily have anything to do with difficulty; rather, it's because the maps are steeped in the feeling of being alone within a hostile world. Not every map is challenging, but all of them have atmosphere, both because they're based on resources that are designed for atmosphere and because the mappers responded well to those resources. @Breezeep's map, "Nuclear Twilight" (map 18) has some of the strongest atmosphere in the set, using crossed bridgeways, cage-like midbars, and drops into the unknown to create an "Abandoned Mines" vibe that's further enhanced by the palette and empty black ceiling. @RonnieJamesDiner's "Bad Day for the Subway" (map 16) taps into the unease of mid-pandemic public transportation as the player guns their way across multiple trains whose tracks are swamped in toxic slime. "Death in the Wind" by @MidnightMage (map 21) uses darkness and narrow confines to particularly powerful effect, juggling the player between tight catwalks and open spaces but not allowing them to be safe in either. 

 

Short and atmospheric as the maps may be, they offer up a wide range of action. There are several tight little combat puzzles, including two clever and astonishingly dangerous secret maps with 50 monsters or less ("AAAAA" by @Big Ol Billy and "The Close Encounter" by @A2Rob), as well as @Obsidian's aptly titled "Pools of Unmaking" (map 11). @Roofi has two maps in Strain 1, a small slaughterfest and a more TimeofDeath-esque journey through a series of small but lethal fights, the latter of which also features the most malicious use of a radsuit I've ever seen. The megawad includes some very fast-paced maps as well, including @Tarnsman's "Alfonzo Allows Himself to Be Mugged..." (map 25), in which demons will mug you not once but many times; @Guardsoul's "Exiled" (map 22), which wraps poisonous caverns around frenetic techbase combat; @SiMpLeToNiUm's "Mutagen Rapidem" (map 26), a full-on slaugher scramble that lets you know what you're in for immediately; and @Scotty's appropriately climactic "Stir Crazy" (map 30), which thankfully has no Icon of Sin, just a lot of really tense fighting. Mappers found quite a few ways to mix up the concept of health vs. toxin as well. "Squared Aqua" by @Worm318 (map 06) has a raised network of watery paths running through it but always makes you drop into the deep toxic caverns to progress; "Demonic Phlegm Usurpation" by @boris (map 10) has a ring of toxic platform-running challenges with pockets of limited health as a reward for completing each segment and a bit of a punishment for anyone who falls off and has to do it multiple times; and "Depurify" by @Dragonfly (map 17) seems to have an abundance of water everywhere but then transforms almost all of it into nukage for the finale.

 

The thing I like best about Isolation as a community project is that it's built around an artistic concept, rather than a technical limitation or a blank slate. The requirements of the project were impressively well designed to capture the mood of isolation and disease, the feeling of widespread contamination and rare safety, and the anxiety and shared burden that we had awakened to in those first couple of months of Covid. Despite how topical it is, Isolation doesn't really feel like a political statement; if it's metaphorical at all, then it's just about individual people's experiences and emotions. But beyond that, it's a concept that transfers beautifully to Doom mapping. The feelings of oppressive confinement, of much-needed resources amid hostility, of being trapped in darkness, work purely as level design concepts, and they make for some great gameplay. Isolation is about how the maps make you feel, and the overarching atmosphere of the set creates an incredibly strong sense of unity. But it's still a community project, which means that you somehow get your box-of-chocolates variety pack and that sense of overarching unity at the same time. It's rare, perhaps still almost unheard of, to see a large group of people pull something like that off, though Isolation isn't entirely alone. National community projects like Sacrament and JPCP sometimes manage to achieve something similar through the shared cultural identity of the mappers, while the more recent Hellevator and Skulltiverse combine traditional spatial limitations with rules for the entrance/exit of every map that help to create the same type of overall narrative that you might expect from a one-person megawad. Then there's Boaty McBoatwad, which tackles the important political issue of how many different things you can do with boats and is every bit as good as you would dream it would be. Personally, I hope to see more of this. If every year had a community project or two with as strong (and meaningful) of a core concept as Isolation has, then our collective muse would be swimming in inspiration.

 

 

 

Clock Out by @Afterglow

 

   

After you're done with one or both strains of Isolation, make sure to play Clock Out as well. This map was originally intended as a submission for Isolation, but ultimately became too ambitious to be completed in time. It also happens to be the only solo mapping effort released by the legendary Afterglow since 2006.

 

Clock Out is a neat map. It has a little of everything, but nothing is quite what you expect. The architecture is clean and solid-looking, but nothing quite prepares you for the striking sense of scale, the expansiveness that seems to creep up on you and the way the ceilings tower over you; the tiny alcove you start in is almost a tease, a brief pretense of a totally different map. But within that expansiveness are many small, surprising details that combine with the massive spaces to build a deeper setting. Part of that is material texturing; every little nook seems perfectly placed, a floor grate may have every negative space cut out of it to show a different texture underneath, and tech panels are constructed with an attention to detail that feels almost tender. Another part of it is Doomcute sector details, from the wrench and empty coffee mug you're facing at the start to a spilled thermos of water placed within a secret just so that a Berserk pack can rest there per Isolation's mapping restrictions. And although I'm very much a setting/world-building person, it's actually the monster placement that makes this map feel the strongest and most interesting. This isn't a map that fills its large spaces with tons of monsters and feels like it has to throw things at you nonstop. Instead, it's a map with varied pacing and quirky design. A good map is tense, but a great map is one where you're shown a rocket launcher and harassed by Mancubus turrets but then have to take the long way around to get the weapon and engage them, then approach a switch that seems to be your reward but suddenly have Cacodemons catapulted out of the walls at you via high-speed conveyors; or where the largest space seems almost empty but the smaller room at the back of it is crammed with ferocious opposition, and then as you return, you're dodging rockets from the opposite end of the gigantic cavern as more Cacodemons pile up around you. I won't spoil everything that happens, but suffice to say the only thing that feels clear-cut is the pillars. It's a lovely map, on par with the best individual map in Isolation and well worth about 20 minutes of your time.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Roofi]

Thanks for the review ! It's fun you said my map "Le petit chaperon rouge" was ribbikesque whereas It's totally inspired from TimeOfDeath's gameplay and texturing. ;)

 

Also this map was initially built for the slot 32 of the 2020 megawad "180 minutes pour vivre" but I eventually removed it due to its very controversial gameplay.

 

Trentenaire en quarantaine was a silly map I created for Franckfrag's 30 birthday.

Edited September 28, 2021 by Roofi

[Not Jabba]

On 9/28/2021 at 5:43 AM, Roofi said:

Thanks for the review ! It's fun you said my map "Le petit chaperon rouge" was ribbikesque whereas It's totally inspired from TimeOfDeath's gameplay and texturing. ;)

Yeah, I'm honestly not sure what I was going for there. I think I was just tired and trying to figure out what to say. I meant it more in contrast to the pure slaughter of the other map and the fact it was laid out as a series of events (which some Ribbiks maps are and some aren't), but it was a pretty bad description. I've edited it to at least name the correct inspiration.

[Not Jabba]

I've been hoping (increasingly desperately) for the last few months, the last few weeks, the last few days, to get my final major NtC review for 2020 published before the 2021 Cacowards. And lo, I have very narrowly succeeded.

 

 

 

Alpha Centauri by @nicolas monti

 

    

    

  

 

There are mapsets that some people love and some people hate. Then there are mapsets that some people love and other people just look at them and go "What the fuck!?" and then go out and buy themselves a smoothie and a teddy bear in an attempt to cope with the images seared into their soul. I'm happy to report that I enjoyed Alpha Centauri, but you may not.

 

Nicolas Monti has always been sort of a surrealist. His maps tend to move back and forth with strange ease between eerily quiet and whimsically aggressive, between the sensible, everyday details of interstellar techbase life and the cosmic unease of the uncanny. It's not so much outright horror as it is the feeling of "wait, what is that doing here?", like if you were to be walking down a clean, dim hallway and you turned around to find a perfectly ordinary stack of crates sitting there behind you that hadn't been there ten seconds ago, casting a shadow toward you and seeming to smile pleasantly at you. Sure, they may seem to be smiling, but how do you trust a smiling stack of crates? That's what playing most of Monti's pre-Alpha Centauri mapsets feels like. His earlier releases (my favorite of which is approximately the middle half of Eviltech) combine shades of the classic Doom 1 and 2 IWADs across large, rambling spaces, backed by Monti's seemingly inexhaustible supply of obscure pop tunes and other weird MIDIs from the shadowed, bone-strewn closets of the early internet. The maps seem most normal at this period of his career, but you can never quite be fooled; the unreal feeling is an icing here, an echo in the hallway—but sometimes more than that, like when you suddenly traipse into a honeycomb cavern in the middle of a techbase, concrete-floored but with rivers running through it, hexagonal pillars of BROWN96 stretching ever onward like a parody of trees but the ceiling bearing down on you a hand's breadth above your head. Later, mid-2010s Monti is the mind behind Erkattanne, notably beloved by kmx; a more carefree sort of spirit whose work embodies the basement-dwelling maps of the '90s and a more cheesy, friendly sort of abstraction. Of late, the mapper has worked his way toward something more monstrous and unwelcoming, his works an inscrutable labyrinth of deathtraps, the atmosphere teetering into the void of cosmic horror at all times, but with any given decaying, crumbling pocket universe still cheerfully backed by some unheard-of MIDI that appears to be a mashup of KD Lang's "Constant Craving" with god knows what else. Each map, all the while, still seeming to smile pleasantly at you as it gazes into your soul with dead eyes.

 

There was more than one person on the Cacoward team last year who opened up Alpha Centauri, looked around at the visual design, and decided it was not the sort of thing any reasonable Doomer could bear to play. Taken at face value, the texturing makes no sense at all. There is no alignment; the mapper appears to have let the texturing cards fall where they may. The textures themselves are a jumble of stock resources, the cartoony realism of the Doom Alpha textures (which Monti loves and uses in almost everything), and some other stuff that is dark, grainy, and doesn't really look like anything. It's all mostly a grungy mass of brown and gray without a lot of visual contrast, and before your eyes adjust to it, it's quite ugly. However, once you do adjust, the effect becomes more interesting. Rather than simple ugliness, I prefer to think of it as rot. The walls of each map are like a putrid corpse, the flesh sagging and running together. Both the materials of the walls and the formerly ordinary shapes of the rooms themselves are melting, deteriorating, settling into pools of their own juices as the lights gradually go off and the stuff of reality falls irretrievably into darkness—and there is you, the player, adrift in the middle of it and clawing for solid ground. Crumbling reality has been the stuff of Doom maps for literally as long as Doom has existed, but Alpha Centauri takes it a bit farther, and grosser, than normal. I've compared it to Lilith.pk3 before, simply because it's the closest comparison I can find, though that comparison isn't perfect. Lilith is a complete scrambling of reality at the level of quantum physics, while Alpha Centauri shows its unraveling through much simpler, more classic methods. But both have that same adjustment period before you realize, "Oh, I see what this is really about!", and both take an overtly destructive approach toward classic ideas of aesthetics in the name of a broader artistic vision. I should also note, however, that the lighting in these maps is a whole separate layer of aesthetics. It is quite moody, and provides the sharp, classical visual contrast that the textures themselves lack. It's easier to recognize Monti's competent hand here, and you can see some nice examples in the screenshots above.

 

In a sense, Alpha Centauri's setting is the opposite of Eviltech's. Where Eviltech has very familiar, Doomlike techbase trappings overlaying hints of something deeper and stranger, Alpha Centauri's maps are mostly constructed out of the gibbering, nonsense froth of a rotting universe, but still contain tiny islands of sanity and realism—not so much glimmers of hope, but more like the last pieces of thin driftwood you try to cling to before the ocean inevitably takes you under. And so "Forgotten Colony" (map 04) may be largely unrecognizable in its general shape from what you can imagine it used to be, but sitting placidly within it like the dog in the "everything is fine" meme are an immediately recognizable monorail track and an almost pristine dining hall with benches for every table. "Photosynthesis" is stretched into only the vaguest resemblance of human-made shapes, but it also has areas that appear to have once been the base's hydroponics section—or perhaps it's the materials of the base themselves that have formed into the shape of the trees for some unknowable reason; who can say? The later maps share a network of train tracks, another trope Monti seems to enjoy and use a lot, and they reach their nexus in "Rigel Kentaurus" (map 09), where dead commuter platforms line a circle of track that encloses several deformed areas that could once have been anything but are now molded around a final set of combat trials.

 

And I guess that brings me to the subject of gameplay, wherein I must acknowledge that even if the aesthetics don't drive you off in a fit of rage, the gameplay still might. Alpha Centauri is a hard set of maps, but it's not hard in the way Doom maps are usually hard. It's heavy-handed and often cruel. There are many fights where you have to know what's coming in advance to beat them, and even a few where foreknowledge alone isn't a perfect solution, and luck plays a major role. The truly rude fights in Alpha Centauri are relatively few, I believe, but the two I remember distinctly are 1) being teleported into a tight hallway with Hell Knights where the only reliable way to kill them before being overwhelmed is with the rocket launcher but you don't have time to switch if you aren't already carrying it, and 2) a few Arch-Viles in the open square dining hall with the doors locked and no cover whatsoever. Doomers as a whole tend to define good combat as needing to be fair and purely skill-based, for reasons that I probably do not need to explain. It's entirely legitimate to feel cheated when a fight pulls something on you that you simply could not have outwitted. It's entirely legitimate to criticize the mapper's work as incomplete and unpolished for this. That said, if the universe is literally melting and I am clinging to pockets of sanity like driftwood, do I really expect the monsters to follow the rules and treat me as the center of the game's existence? I don't have a perfect answer to that question, but my instinct says, "not necessarily."

 

But a few awkward moments aside, I did find most of the combat in Alpha Centauri to be both fun and interesting. It more often toes the line than crosses it (though it does cross it); most of what it pulls on you feels evil but also ultimately beatable and exciting when you beat it. Those of use who liked the episode best last year compared it to Dark Souls, in that you don't really expect to beat a fight on the first try, and that's just part of the game, because the fun is in learning the lay and patterns of each encounter and developing the strategies to win them. They're a bit tighter and harsher, with less proven solutions, than established styles of combat puzzles, which will likely make them annoying for many less skilled players and players who normally play hard maps alike—but for my part, I really found it rewarding to unravel them and find the way to the next piece of monstrous wickedness. It just felt right to me. There was something about the questionably punishing nature of the combat that felt like a fitting complement to the unsettling, madness-fringed mood of the mapset as a whole—but I also had so many moments where I finally emerged victorious and was truly, cathartically thrilled by what I had accomplished. "Take that, rotting eldritch universe!" I would say as I took my next step and the terrors began to close around me again. And even as you take out the star of two-shot Cyberdemons at the pinnacle of the final map and make your exit, it's hard to feel like it's really over in the sense of winning, like you haven't simply reached the last tiny piece of land, laughing crazily as the dark sea of the cosmos swells up over you. I'll wager not many mapsets will make you feel quite like that. 

 

So in the end, I'm grateful for everything this mapset does that is bizarre, confusing, and unpleasant, both aesthetics and gameplay, although I will not say that it is perfectly executed or that it's an entirely smooth experience, even taking its own apparent design goals into account. Alpha Centauri is an Experience with a capital E, like Lilith or Three Is a Crowd or Alpha Accident or FCFF, the sort of thing that any long-time Doomer ought to seek out on occasion as a counterpoint to the more obvious and easily digestible flavors of brilliance and craft that we're so often blessed with. As a final caveat, I would not under any circumstances suggest that you try to play it without saves (though I don't play anything without saves, so take that how you will). But by all means, gaze into this abyss—it won't be long before you are unable to look away. 

Edited April 27, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Noise]

Nice idea this reviews you should open a free website in github (or something like that) to keep your reviews organized.

[baja blast rd.]

Boaty McBoatwad by @Scotty, @Walter confetti, @Dunn (& Dunn), @Egg Boy, @punch you in the face man, @jerrysheppy, @waciej, @AconyX, @A2Rob, @Ar_e_en, @DFF, @muumi, @wydoomer

 

 

Doomcute -- toilets, beds, couches -- can be uniquely delightful because of the tonal dissonance involved: the way comfy, familiar objects are rendered, often at great pains, in an engine far more associated with otherworldly abstraction. Among the most popular types of Doomcute, boats work especially well as the subject of a large vista or even a whole map, since they are very flexible in form, and can be a whole lot larger than even the biggest toilets. 

 

This is part of why boats have such a rich history as thematic centerpieces in Doom, enough to fuel Jimmy's 2020 rundown of his 25 favorite idtech1 sector ships.

 

On the very same day, Jimmy's list inspired Scotty to kick off the community project Boaty McBoatwad, which gave contributors a simple directive: using the OTEX resources, make a map with a boat. 

 

You don't need to think hard to see why this might be enticing. Boats are a construct with a clear identity but also boundless flexibility; as a contributor, you have a clear prompt, but also pretty much a free pass.

 

Accordingly, the boats in Boaty McBoatwad run the gamut along just about every vector: those include size, ranging from tiny rafts and tugboats to Scotty's gargantuan "Gangbang Galleon" (that is what it's called); they include material and condition, with derelict wooden wrecks and rusted iron shells and sleek chrome-plated spacecraft all found within; they include ostensible purpose, and stages include peaceful freighters to blood-soaked war vessels to things yet more disturbing in intent and origin. Sometimes the boats are a final destination, an orienting lodestar towering over the environment; sometimes, with the interiors hollowed out into intricate networks of halls and chambers, the boats are very much the journey. 

That's all well and good, but if this in-game boat tour were all Boaty McBoatwad offered, it would have been an amusing idea, but not a project that reached the level it ultimately settles into, which is more like "hey, definitely try this out!"

 

So now let's talk about why it's good beyond the immediate hook.

 

MAP16: "Beacon of the Endless Piss Void"

 

What becomes apparent after a few maps is that the premise didn't simply inspire the authors to craft boats of all different types. Instead, Boaty McBoatwad feels as much like a megawad about nautical associations -- like the crushing melancholy of the ocean, the silly boisterousness of pirates, the soothing coziness of your own personal getaway -- as it is about boats as an object of craft. Those associations, and all the natural ideas that tag along with them, explain why Boaty McBoatwad is loaded with creative energy despite the tight submission deadline of three weeks. It's almost as if all the seafaring vibes were already fresh in the heads of every author motivated to throw their name into the hat...and simply needed to be enlivened in a tangible form, rather than dreamed up completely anew. 

 

So along with the palpable mood and atmosphere of different types, there is also a high amount of "conceptual density" -- the feeling that constructs you come across have a defined identity of some sort. Those include some very expected features like harbors and (obviously) boats, some that are less given but still implied like cargo hangars and mess halls and observation towers, as well as some lurking in the depths that you'd probably rather experience first than be spoiled on, but if you insist. The authors who preferred abstraction weren't left out either; they seemed to use mood as their paint brush, for example in the peaceful autumnal wasteland of Egg Boy's "Pestilent Plagueship" -- which gives the impression that the beautiful earthen ship you start underneath bled into and informed the orange trees and mossy rocks that the main setting consists of.

 

 

Although Boaty McBoatwad is definitely a lot about boats as an object of craft too…

 

Throughout, you'll notice the layouts pay a lot of attention to spatial relations. A lot of maps did a cool thing to render their vessel of choice more realistically than Doom's basic architecture might allow. Faux 3D is common, whether through sky hacks to present centerpiece boats as very grand and tall among the rest of the scenery, through midtexture trickery to carve sophisticated hull facades and complex arrays of flags, or through silent teleporters to depict multiple floors of a given boat (usually one floor inside the hull, and one above deck). 

 

 

Another thing that is easy to love about Boaty McBoatwad is how lighthearted it can be: on top of the silly intermission MIDI, there's the roster of map names that includes some of the most boldly awful puns of the year ("Ship Ping"?), and a consistent recurrence of Doomcute beyond just the boats. That feels logical, because certain types of Doomcute do feel inextricably linked to maritime settings. All the resting quarters, boiler rooms, control rooms and more are home to all kinds of furniture and equipment and even refreshments. In one control room, you get to watch actual TV. (Reception is terrible, and it's a very brief clip -- but demons rarely have Netflix subscriptions.) Cargo too sometimes takes on creative forms, and one of my favorite examples is in Muumi's "Ferrytale," as the massive toothy haul of a heavy-duty fishing boat.

 

 

Muumi's other map, which I think of as the set's overall conceptual highlight for just how far-out it is, is a yet grander take on that impulse, set around and then completely within the foul, rotting husk of a ship that is made of flesh and very alive. What makes it especially cool is the framing: you aren't just within a flesh- and bone-themed map the whole time: you start with an exterior view of the massive creature gazing at you in its awful splendor, blinking. Inside, there's an uncanny sense that you're inhabiting the innards of an entity that is half whale and half ship, as if there was some demented transmogrification that went horribly awry.

 

 

It's in the immense scale of maps like this that the choice of OTEX feels prescient; OTEX's grittier assets are a great fit for the broad brush "texture as detail" design of these larger spaces. I'd guess that Scotty himself might have had this in the back of his mind, because his own "Gangbang Galleon" is among the best at showcasing this. 

 

 

And OTEX contains no shortage of midtextures like chains and banners that make the boat depictions even more natural. (I'm sure ukiro considers it a great honor to have designed the best general-purpose boat texture pack yet.)

 

Community projects do have a luck-of-the-draw element, and another key link in Boaty McBoatwad's success is how it ended up solid in that always uncertain department: gameplay. Some contributors -- such as A2Rob, DFF, Muumi, Egg Boy, and Scotty himself -- had proven strengths in combat design, and the roster picked up talented fresh faces such as Ar_e_en. A few authors I didn't think of as gameplay-focused authors stepped up with strong contributions, such as jerryshippy's jerrysheppy's "Miss Susie's Stemboat," which culminates in a memorable tomb showdown with a cyberdemon and a great horde of imps and spectres, and loops and builds elegantly through a more gloomy seafaring setting before and after this. And though it might have been tempting for authors to treat the gameplay as window dressing and pour their focus into the boats, most acknowledged combat as an important way of enlivening their unusual settings' topographical quirks. For example, Ar_e_en's "The Blood Trailer" starts with tricky parkour in despoiled ruins as you're tormented by imps and pinkies and revenants who try to corral you into the rocket salvos of a central cyberdemon. (Yes, the cyberdemon is on a boat.) There are a handful of rough maps, but it helps that they were universally brief. When focused QA and oversight isn't in the cards, brevity steps in as the next best safeguard against the potential pitfalls of inconsistency. If you are inclined to, you could get through the 16 maps of Boaty McBoatwad in a single sitting -- even playing at a very leisurely pace, it lasts only a couple of hours.

 

If there are any lessons to take away about community projects, the main one is the untapped potential of "concept" itself -- rather than limitations or assets -- as a primary guide. Even though Boaty McBoatwad was a low-maintenance project, its simple prompt acted as a jumping off point that could be followed along a ridiculous range of paths while everything remained tied to the core idea. If there came along a Boaty McBoatwad 2 and 3 … and 7 … (or ideally a different name with another silly boat pun), I bet it would take a while for the general idea to grow stale, if it ever does. Because there are so many nautical settings, real or fantastical, that were not explored in this iteration, simply because there are so many that might exist.

 

So. Boat appétit.

 

[baja blast rd.]

Dereliction Derby by @PinkKittyRose

 

    

 

It's no secret that this year, like almost every year since 2017, was loaded with good standalone maps. Between the more well known ones like Unhallowed and (PCGamer darling) Lullaby, and also the Tarnsman and Jimmy contests, I was expecting my favorites to be saturated with higher-profile works by more experienced authors. But I enjoyed Dereliction Derby -- PinkKittyRose's very first release -- as much as many more heralded maps, even if it was rougher around the edges. So let's take a look at it.

 

Early, Dereliction Derby's baseline aesthetic approach isn't too hard to pick up on. The interior design scheme is a lot like a visually active Community Chest 2 map: rectangular floorplans, trim along walls, insets and consoles galore, all in a palette of very conventional Doom 2 textures. A trip to the green armor room offers a strong taste of where Dereliction Derby's heart lies: microdetailing. Things here are in a highly ramshackle state: coolant and waste is leaking through the pipes; crates are scattered askew and casting little directional shadows, yes even the tiny crates (the lighting throughout is very active, even if it's not always consistent); floors and ceilings are chipped and battered (although here and throughout, the rotting mostly left the windows and consoles and strip lights alone -- maybe it wanted to admire the lighting). 

 

Rather than providing backstory, the unique detailing tends to solely establish the identity of an area, differentiating it from the other areas with similar beveled-corner rectangle geometry. So what you get is an high-octane exploratory lark with many charming scenes along the way, like work stations, conference chambers, and sick rooms with sector-crafted operating gear -- as you navigate a layout that cleanly loops through regions both unexpected and long-ago teased. Unlike some works that treat Doomcute more as localized one-offs, which is most of them, PinkKittyRose also mixes it into the sprawling complex's more systematic design scheme. Many features -- like utility boxes with color-coded cables; sinks and wrenches and water coolers; and a great deal of debris and targeted destruction -- resurface just about everywhere, playing the role of consistent visual motifs that an abstract modern map would traditionally offload fully to its texturing scheme. So while it's true that I was hoping for a deeper overarching story to all the damage and disrepair, for hints of how things got this way; it's also fair that this isn't quite that kind of map. 

 

Surgical gear notwithstanding, many of the design motifs will be expected if you've played a few maps like this -- things like helipads, barrel conveyors, and all the computer hardware -- but in this sort of design, a lot of the novelty lies in the quirks of the author's "penmanship" and vision. This map is full of the sort of unbounded enthusiasm for linework that results in a large sector-crafted UAC insignia being plastered on the ceiling to overlap with an already complicated floor scene, and that type of diligence consistently inflects the smaller bits too. In this style, effort can be its own low boil source of novelty. 

 

 

 

One big way Dereliction Derby defies the expectations of its form is the action, which hardly resembles the rote room clearing of Community Chest vintage. Instead, it's heavily focused on traps and brawls that can be rude but stop short of obnoxious. Down the stretch, thanks to all the setups that use a handful of precisely situated warp-in or closet monsters, there were times it felt like I was playing something like Cydonia, just with a very unexpected visual backdrop. This degree of intensity is not the smoothest fit for all the protruding details and pockmarked floors, but I wouldn't have had it any other way; these encounters were consistently exciting, were varied enough in their atomic composition to stay fresh, and were a lot of what drew me into a replay.

 

Wait, the monster count is over a thousand; how can smaller setups be so prominent? You must be a slaughterslut. First, thank you. But second, that is the other neat thing Dereliction Derby does. Once in a while, PinkKittyRose veers into pure insanity with these boisterous encounters that dump small fry at you in the dozens, along with craftily used larger bullies -- ridiculous encounters that start fast and don't know when to stop. There are certain types of smaller highlights I wished were more common, like at a certain key pickup where the entire room, equipped with consoles and terminals, plummets to the ground and exposes you to an enforcer gang in the area you just cleared. But by the time you reach the end -- past the theme shift to a large parking garage that contains the biggest show yet (no cars though), then into an ominous hellish epilogue with pentagrams, brimstone, taunting SP_FACE…and a computer with a sector-crafted mouse -- it's hard to say that Dereliction Derby really lacked for surprises. 

 

There is something distinctly post-2017 in this approach, despite the oldschool stylings. The way I can sum it up is that by now, the roster of classics people think of as "canon" has grown to encompass so many philosophies of design, and so many works that fluently blend approaches, that flexibility of skillset is picked up as naturally as any specific cog in that skillset. Even if your heart is in one aspect of design, you probably had a wild fling with another along the way. 

[baja blast rd.]

Glaive 2 by @EANB

 

    

 

Glaive 2 spent most of 2020 in obscurity -- its Doomworld thread was active for under a week total, with about 15 replies, and no one who enjoyed it a bunch went on to "mentionate" it.

 

Even before scoping out screenshots or author commentary, looking up the name would tip off the relevant heritage: a "glaive" is a weapon that is a close relative to…a scythe. 

 

The core look of Alm's classic is there in the redrock, ash, marble, wood, blood, lava, and Inferno sky, although the subtleties of lighting have been mostly left behind. The brevity remains though; even after the short opener, everything falls into the 75-150 monster range.

 

EANB's preoccupations in combat give a distinct, well-thought-out character to his lively battles. The first recurring "move," or the spirit of it, is introduced in the very first room. Creep around a bit and you'll see a shotgun yards away to the right; nearby towards the left, there is a chaingunner in a cubby, whose size suggests another lurking unseen. Rushing for the shotgun is the clean way to handle this, but things get a bit more complicated when you do.

 

These "push forward" fights resurface sometimes, and one of the best is in MAP03, where after a drop-off you're greeted by an in-your-face cacoswarm, which chases you through a twisting strip of land, bordering a blood pit, blocked by imps you need to blast out of your way. There is an urgency to flee quickly enough to safely start chipping away at the cacoswarm, which soon enough washes like a wave over the lip of a platform, catching up -- and all the while an archvile is lurking out there. 

 

In this way, encounters are often staged with a clear picture of what might happen during different phases -- even as they aren't "scripted" through timing devices. This allows EANB to get fresh ideas out of setups that, just based on monster composition and arrangement, would look very conventional. Sometimes a phase has a specific goal attached: for example MAP04's clever final fight pits you against an even larger cacoswarm, which needs to be maneuvered into a good spot to infight with two hemmed-in cyberdemons, while you cling precariously to the high ground circling the map.

 

That all fits another tendency of traps in Glaive 2 to spring up not just at the expected keys and weapons, but more often in neutral space at dangerous parts of the layout, like the narrow point of a valley where you might be sandwiched by two groups. But it's not always obvious when this might happen, so your choice is to be constantly vigilant, or to be caught at some point with your combat trousers down.

 

The layouts are also structured well to relay you efficiently from fight to fight: they are fluidly connected, with objectives and important areas clearly broadcast. Some of my favorite moments are the few big transformations that are sprinkled in: like an extensive vat of lava rising, or an early set of platforms cleverly rearranging itself for later reuse.

 

If I had to pick a favorite map, it would be either the aforesaid MAP03, which has some of the best encounters and a very slick overall flow to it; or MAP06, which is kind of a mini Dark Dome, a big, open cauldron of chaos over catwalks and slabs of stone. It has enjoyably messy fights whether you're taking it bit by bit or, with some foreknowledge, rushing through -- and the best thing about rushing through is getting the later cyber to lob rockets all the way over the immense pool of lava, down to the hordes left behind, which is quite a sight. 

 

If there are knocks in the gameplay, it's that some parts can be crudely abrasive: MAP05's squads of coverless hitscanners for instance are not so fun (the rest of the map is, however). I also wasn't as much a fan of MAP07, a microslaughter closer that lacks the fine-tuned choreography of everything to come before it while not excelling at the fun, mindless big gun spam alternative either. But all in all, Glaive 2 is good stuff and fans of combat-oriented mapsets should happily check it out for an hour of fun.