baja blast rd. Posted April 30, 2021 Spoiler What is the DWMiniwad Club? It's like the DWMegawad Club, but we'll focus on single maps and smaller mapsets. "Smaller" refers to the amount of content, not necessarily the map count. The DWMegawad Club fills most of its days, but this club won't, so that you can maintain other Doom obligations. How will maps be selected? Through user suggestions and my own picks. My goal is to maintain some diversity along vectors like difficulty and art style, so selections won't always default to whatever got the most votes. How do I participate? Play along and post write-ups and share videos. Whatever you prefer. You can play any or all of the month's wads, in any order and at any time. When a set has more than one map, you can do a single write-up for the whole thing or one for each map. No Quarter one limit-removing Doom 1 map (e1m3) by Will Hackney Northern Powerhouse one Boom-format map by Zan-zan-zawa-veia No Chance one Boom-format map by Death-Destiny Notes: - I would highly suggest playing Northern Powerhouse for the first time on HNTR or HMP -- UV can end up practically unwinnable if you don't know what is coming. - No Chance is very hard on UV but a more accessible slaughter-lite experience on HMP. I do hope many people play on HNTR or HMP. There are video playthroughs on UV by koren and Decino. - It is coincidental that all three maps begin with "No." Previous Threads Hide contents Violence, Swim with the Whales, Waterlab GZD, Warphouse, and Vaporware Remnant, Mercury Rain, Breach, Ray Mohawk's Manic Monday, Grime, and Return to Daro Lunatic, Boom-Stick in the Mud, Abyssion, Syringe, The Sky May Be, and The Iron Forge Suspended in Dusk, The Unholy Trinity, Port Glacia, Bauhaus, Castle of Evil, and Village of Rotten Bones Uplink, Woodcraft, Crossing Acheron, The Eye, and Oberon Base Kurogane, Technicolor Antichrist Box, The Mean Green, Exalt Not the Wicked, L'agonie Finale, and (theoretically) Dead.air Tech Gone Bad, Phobos Mission Control, Doom City, Skyewood, and Hanging Gardens Pumpkin Hell, CABIN, Tartarus, Terminal, OiTL, ChordG, and Waist-High in the Damned Steep Town, Concrete Rage, Demonastery, Saturnine Chapel, McDoomalds 2: Burger Baron, Order of the Odonata, Drought, and ??? Rocketeer, Cold Front, Frozen Time, XMas Doom, Icebound, Mothership, and Glaive 2 Barbie Girl, Running Late, Kuchitsu, Fruit Salad, Thunderpeak, Skepland, Hoover Dam, Reliving the End, Kingpin's Lair Brigandine, Miasma, Big Woodchip, Criticality, A Hidden Mountain Factory, Decimate, Dark Tide 12 Quote Share this post Link to post
galileo31dos01 Posted May 1, 2021 A thing to note in No Quarter: past the initial zombiemen clandestine party there's an elevator at the end in the middle. There is a hole in the centre of this elevator, which can't be seen in the automap but you can certainly get very stuck in it, presumably something broken in the nodebuilder. Simple solution would be to use idclip if that's your case, or stay as close as possible to the walls to avoid falling. I don't know if this broke thing appears in zdoom though. Thanks for picking the map btw. I'm glad this is still going 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
Grain of Salt Posted May 2, 2021 On 4/30/2021 at 11:25 PM, rd. said: I like your unofficial(?) running gag of having a screenshot where stuff is broken :3 5 Quote Share this post Link to post
LadyMistDragon Posted May 2, 2021 (edited) No Quarter So whaaaaaaaat. I walk.....wait, you meant the map "No Quarter" and not the Fuel song that shares the same name. And I know Led Zepplin also has a song by that name, I'm just not certain they ever say no quarter in the case of the latter song...but in either case. Wow, that's some incredibly creepy Doom-esque music. Almost transitions the limits of Doom's mood. Wait, what's this? An aggressive, emotional, horn-heavy rhythm? Was this in Xenotrigger? Chrono Saga? Dragon Fantasy? Nah, it's a track by Mark Klem called "The Wind." To a large degree, his songs make mediocre maps in Memento Mori playable, far more so than whatever Bobby Prince composed for Map 06 and 12 in OG Doom II. But this map is far from mediocre. See, I'm actually a huge fan of detail-oriented maps containing locations bearing a resemblance to real-world counterparts. And Will Hackney packed in such details in spades. This was actually intended as part of a much larger megawad project titled "Doomed Once More" that was meant to comprise the events of Doom and Doom II in modified form. Unfortunately, you'll probably have as much luck contacting Hackney these days as Christopher Buteau, so I don't think we'll be able to ask him if RL just took his priorities from him(wow, I'm a native English speaker, and I spit out a sentence like that?). It's not exactly surprising that Will never got far with his larger project with all the effort he out into this map though. You start out in what the text file tells you in an elevator shaft. After entering a door to the left and pressing against a fairly obvious section of discolored wall, you'll be able to access the first secret of the map and obtain a shotgun. Believe me, this makes the much section much easier. Because when you go out into the hallway and open the door at the end, you'll find yourself in a cafeteria seemingly filled to the brim with enemies, many of them being hitscanners. If you somehow clear the room with over 60 percent health, than you must have some incredible luck. There are Pepsi and Coke machines in the corners and an order counter with Imps on the left. Already, I'm starting to see shades of Chris Lutz's work with Phobos: Anomaly Reborn, though I think Chris has a better sense of detail placing. That's just one of many real-world locations populated to such an extent that you'd think the base had never been attacked if it weren't for the fact there are still plenty of marinje bodies in certain locations. It's just that you're now finding much of the personnel seems to now have crimson eyes and spikes on their skin. There's a certain amount of humor in this naturally. The first floor that you can access through the large elevator that seems to be glitched in PrBoom+ and Eternity will greet you with an Imp receptionist when you step outside onto the third floor. The women's restroom is entirely occupied by Imps, which has some rather...uncomfortable implications. Elsewhere, you can see Imps partying with the zombified humans in such locations as a chapel, officer's quarters, pool hall, gym with an indoor sports field bar, food vendor booth, and theatre where some nature doc of Phobos seems to be playing. One person has on a horror movie still that probably has some inspiration in Little Shop of Horrors with vines shooting around and visual style meant to convey horror. There's also some outside gardens containing pinkies, because, of course. All the encounters are incidental, of course, but that doesn't mean you can get careless at any point. Unfortunately, Sergeants will probably end up wrecking you on more than one occasion. There was one point, before I found the first piece of combat armor when one of them took me down from 52 to 12 health. Ouch.... I did end up suffering my only death to one of them near the locker rooms. This map is going to take time to complete, no matter what you do. So don't be worried if you don't seem to be finding many secrets. There's one located in a weight room adjacent to the gym behind the blue shelf, as well as the one mentioned above with the shotgun and perhaps 1 more but you can't really access most of them until you pass through the blue door and activate the monorail (surprisingly, for me, I found them all, though I found the backpack surrounded by bars and brown textures to be a little trick). However, try to press every console and computer you can find, because some of them open critical secrets, such as the passage to the secret exit. When you find a radiation suit that's really more of an electricity-repellance suit in this case, you can access a number of areas located to the east of the exit monorail, including a passageway consisting of maintenance and sewer tunnels, as well as a few outside courtyard areas with some stiff opposition that shouldn't be a problem if you've found the chaingun already until you end up in a laundry room you've been able to access since the map's beginning. Hit the vent texture and you'll find another passage that'll take you to....a room with laundry dye? I'm not sure, but there's a chute downwards that'll take you to the secret exit, which you might want to take because there's no other way back to this particular room than where you came from. That's a shame because many of the secret areas you find link quite well to other areas of the map. Anyways, don't drop down the chute and you'll end up in the food vendor area on Floor 2. There are a number of apertures behind the counter. One of them has a duller color AND a body in front of it. Head over to this one but don't press it and just wait a second and it'll lower, revealing a small flesh-covered room with a Demon and a Yellow Key. I actually did not realize this at first, and no-clipped it. I know I haven't spoke too much about the combat, and that's because even though much of the map is packed to the brim with enemies, there's just the same Doom 1 variety of enemies, and I can't say anything else beyond 'Shotgun guys are cheap, avoid.' But it still keeps you on your toes, so don't think of it as just another E1 replacement map. The amount of detail is astounding, and while I think many Doomers these days would bitch about the design, it actually makes far more sense when taken within the context of the larger project proposed. Still, this sort of exploratory map is not for everyone, and the low enemy variety is probably one of the main reasons some will hate on Doom E1 remakes as boring. P.S. Just curious on one little thing: how much of the enemy total do those hitscanners that teleport into your starting location when you've basically reached the other end of Northern Powerhouse comprise? 30 percent? Edited July 16, 2021 by LadyMistDragon 5 Quote Share this post Link to post
Maribo Posted May 2, 2021 No Quarter I played this through on UV, but it honestly doesn't matter in anyway. I would actually recommend playing this on whatever one or two levels lower than your standard difficulty is, or even turning monsters completely off, because it's an architectural spectacle more than anything. This kind of feels like a holy grail for office-style doomcute aesthetics, along with the architecture of an Actual Real Building You Could Walk Around In If You Went Outside And Found One. It brings to mind a bit more how the scale of modeling objects in doom is kind of fucked, see chairs and toilets and computer monitors and all for the obvious examples, especially because they're stock Doom textures and get the message across on what they're supposed to be, rather than fully appearing as the thing they're emulating. That's not a "This Wad"-specific issue, it's just brought out more given the context of its creation. It's a cool map, not entirely to my tastes though. I respect the goal. other notes i made: throwing spectres into areas with vines you can walk through actually makes them harder to pick out, which was cool all imps in the womens' restroom is...... certainly a choice that was made by somebody.... the main elevator is almost broken in PrBoom+, it's like there's a big invisible square in the center that you have to walk around jumping down onto the monorail line and dying is actually how i died in my first run, because i wanted to see if they made it kill you press use on everything possible 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
NeilForshaw Posted May 3, 2021 LOL at "Northern Powerhouse" wad description. Obviously a fellow Northener. Also Quote Additional Credits to : the factory worker who deliberately puts too many bags of Nik-naks in the multipacks :D When I get chance I'll have to play these maps. :) 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
LadyMistDragon Posted May 8, 2021 (edited) Northern Powerhouse I tried looking up the author and was surprised to find out that they're actually fairly prolific, in addition to having created the incredibly frustrating Testing Pool (such a shit name). In any case ZZZV displays an artistic vision that is just as unique as BPRD in its own way, if the texture choices and focus on highly visual and dangerous maps are any indication. The choice to use the slightly-rearranged version of an X-Com track during gameplay is rather curious. I can remember hearing when I played some of it seven years ago. Very creepy, and perhaps not well-suited to anything but slow-paced action, but still makes a nice complement to the visuals. Because as the text file tells you, there was an accident which caused the release of buckets upon buckets of purple goo. Exactly why anyone would have tanks of purple goo at a power station is quite besides the point. Because you're going to be seeing LOTS of purple, set amongst an environment seeming to consist of hill-like shapes and structures on the outside with interior architecture showing some resemblance to what you'd find in a massive power station. Initial navigation is going to be incredibly difficult because of the hilly countryside containing only a limited number of ways to move around. I played on UV for roughly 5 minutes before realizing it wasn't going to be worth playing if I had to dodge around an Arch-vile with a near-complete lack of cover. Which is fine, because who needs all the hitscanners anyway? Can't we just call in a raid and carpet-bomb the wankers? So anyways, you climb the knoll nearest to you, hit the switch to open a path into the station and step onto the nearby ledge, causing some platforms to lower. You'll have access to a couple of different areas. Firstly, there's the eponymous powerhouse, which you'll need a yellow key for the switch that opens the doors. Some of the floor detailing is soo cool The guard is quite minimal (a few Imps and I think either a Hell Knight or a Baron). If you went east in the starting area as far as you could go, you would have eventually come upon a ruined area with the yellow key, which you could then use, make your way through the darkened corridors to the exit, whilst shooting some Pain Elementals. Pain Elementals are stupidly prolific in this map, to the extent you'll be confronted by two of them on UV when you start, and they normally appear in pairs anyway. Chances are you'll want to explore the rest of the map anyway though. Among the things you can find is a hidden BFG you access through a teleporter that's basically invisible. After this is another outside hilly area (at the eastern end of the map) that has some cool-ass purple symbols on the side and some enemies you don't initially have the firepower for. If you see the invulnerability sphere, wait until you find the rocket launcher and return to this area if you want to have a much easier time of it. Unfortunately, I never found the red key, but you don't need it to finish the map really, so it's fine. So anyways, enter the exit room with some computers in front of you and several corpses and realize you can't exit. Shoot the computers, unleash some blood and the platform you're on will drop halfway, revealing a Romero head below the skull wall on your right. You may want to keep the BFG around because shooting through quite a narrow space to shoot the head is a serious pain in the ass, though you'll certainly have enough ammo if you find all the secrets if not much more. Shoot the head, end the map, get some sweet-sounding victory music. This map is probably best experience on UV where the 2300+ human enemies teleport in. It adds an element of danger that wouldn't be there otherwise, but I was never going to deal with that Arch-vile I mentioned above without adequate weaponry. All that said, this was incredibly well-designed, though optimization could've been a touch better as your computer will likely lag on UV. It's a little weird to call the encounters not much to speak off. I may not have been in the mood not to scrounge for weapons but it just seemed like there were a few too many Hell Knights/Barons. All that being said, this map was massively gorgeous, had some good ideas and I'm not sure how it didn't end up a Cacoward runner-up. Unlike the two other "No" maps, I'd never heard of this whatsoever. I guess the particularly small indoor areas are pretty meh-ish, but even those have some cool secrets. Edited May 8, 2021 by LadyMistDragon 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
Maribo Posted May 8, 2021 (edited) No Chance I'd seen the recent decino UV-Max video on this one recently, and it really piqued my interest in this map. I'm not a Doom god or anything close, but I do consider myself somewhere above average, and its inclusion in the club this iteration gave me the final push I needed to start giving it a go. I decided against UV because I'm not that nuts at Doom stuff, and I don't have as much free time as I wish I had right now so dedicating to a UV grind would probably end up being a lot more time consuming. I really, really love this wad, I think, or at least like it enough that it pushed me to play it over and over again on HMP saveless going for a Max (after beating it with saves initially). I ended up re-watching the decino video, watching the koren video, looking at ancalagon's demo on dsda, and Bloodite Krypto's skill 3 Max run on dsda because I grew a bit of infatuation with this map, seeing people tear something apart that gave me a lot of trouble... I guess that's what the core of things like high score and speedrunning (+ maxing in Doom's case) appeal, and my brain ended up latching onto this map as one of my favorite exhibitions of skill, I think. I still haven't beat this on HMP saveless, though I did get to the very end and die to an unfortunate cyberdemon rocket with only two of them left, which was heartbreaking. I don't know if I'll continue this effort since I got so close that I might as well have done it, because I have other things I want to spend time on as well, but I'll say that it's an extremely satisfying map to get good at. None of my runs were near as elegant as the best runs on dsda, but it was a really nice experience to try and master this map because despite being called No Chance, you actually have a chance (ironic................ truly). You can make a lot of mistakes, my saveless run made TONS of mistakes and still only lost in the end because I made one mistake too many and didn't pay attention to one of the cyberdemons. I ended up experimenting a lot with routing in this, the placement of things like the secret megasphere stash + the berserk pack and the three different paths you can do in any order make it an experience in and of itself. I initially was doing the yellow key section but I found that I was dying to the red key section a lot more on average, so I ended up rearranging it so that I did the red key section first just to become more proficient at it and to save time on getting through the easier section just to die to the more difficult one. Lovely experience, very tough, I really need to learn to two-shot cyberdemons, I've always been horrible at it and it saves a lot of time and cells to be able to do. demo of that saveless hmp run, for posterity: maribo_nochance_almost_max.zip Edited May 8, 2021 by Maribo words 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
LadyMistDragon Posted May 13, 2021 (edited) No Chance No Chance is one of those maps I feel like were probably as much of a game changer as Sunder. Italo Doom and Dimensions are among the considerably larger WADs that essentially follow the same formula as this: minimally invasive architecture, a map with a structure making maneuverability particularly difficult, and a map space packed to the seemingly absolute brim with monsters(unless perhaps Scythe 2 did that first? idk, I'm not really interested in looking into it, so correct me if I'm wrong). Granted, No Chance has1058 monsters on UV, but it's hard to see something like Okuplok existing if it wasn't for this. Unfortunately, I am NOT a fan of these kinds of abstract monster playgrounds where exploration goes completely or almost completely out the window in favor of the combating of overwhelming odds. So I ended up completing this on HNTR. Side note: the Symphony X track used was quite excellent. I'm not a fan of symphonic metal at all (it all sounds the same to me) and they're far from the best at power metal as well, but there's a bit of a stylistical difference I very much appreciate. Now the map itself is a very abstract-hell themed setting, largely located in caverns containing a fair amount of yellow lava flows, although there is an outdoor area filled with yellow-streaked obsidian walkways leading to the red and blue keys (eventually) and containing pop-up Revenants to harry you. I fell over so many times while trying to shoot the Manicubi and I never bothered to find out if any part of the walkways/platforms lowered so I was as miserable as you'd expect. Intesting story: it took me five minutes to find the hallway with the yellow key at the end after hitting the switch which opens it because the area's design is such that you're unlikely to come across it and spot the Cacodemon bodyguard inside. Speaking of, the linedef you cross near the yellow key triggers what ends up being quite the nasty trap. So when you use all three keys to open up the area which leads to the exit, you're greeted with a large room with a wide lava fall plunging down enough feet to make you realize the worst is truly yet to come. You can probably handle the opposition if you can weave around the pillars, but the last room is very much oh dear god (you may well die instantly if your luck is awful). Ok, that's all of it. Watz next?? Edited May 13, 2021 by LadyMistDragon 1 Quote Share this post Link to post
Roofi Posted May 28, 2021 No Chance Despite being released in 2008 , No Chance stays the chad of Ultra-hard maps : Still extremly difficult 13 years after its release date, a menacing red cavern with (unharmful) lava but with a huge deadly pit , one of the most badass Symphony X midis which explicitly tells you will get roasted in less than 5 seconds and of course extremly violent ambushes. A lot of people qualifiy "No Chance" as a slaughtermap. I don't agree with this except at some specific places : the end , and the blue key fight. Ammo and health balance are really tight so that you can't mindlessy rush and spam with your guns. Also , there are a lot of very far sniping enemies which force you to go slowly and taking profit of infighting is one of the keys of the success. All weapons are useful , your BFG will not be practical in a lot of situations , especially about killing all the monsters near the long crevassE; What I like the most in No chance , is the almost total absence of arenas with timed combats. You theorically can go where you want but the more you explore , the more you trigger deadly ambushes. However , the level become a lot more easy when you managed to securize some areas. Also there is a "all or nothing" kind of secret. You get a megasphere but you have to survive in a very brutal fight involving revenants and a cyber in counterparts. Here is my UV demo (not max nor speedrun) I recorded 2 years ago . DEMO 2 Quote Share this post Link to post
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