How Many People Care About Maximum Doom?

[Rudolph]

On 6/5/2023 at 8:08 AM, Captain POLAND said:

Has anyone taken 32 of the best maps in there and made them into a megaWAD?

To quote my earlier comment:

 

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/1994_Tune-up_Community_Project

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Heroes

https://doomwiki.org/wiki/Heroes_2

Edited June 7, 2023 by Rudolph

[Midway64]

There is some good shit in Maximum Doom.

Is there lots of it? No.

 

However I like to play some of these once in a while on DOSBox.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

It's interesting in the way that shovelware compilations are generally interesting, but the only thing special about it is being tied to an official id Software product.  And it's not like anyone at id Software actually vetted the WADs and picked what they thought was good, they just took a huge dump of WADs and put it on a CD like all the others.  Overall it's not that different from D!ZONE/Demon Gate (pretty sure there's a fair bit of overlap in WAD selection) and has probably been picked over pretty thoroughly for any "buried treasure" by now.

 

I get a bit more excited for the weird discs originating from outside the US that seem like they're slightly more likely to have files that dropped off the face of the Internet (or at least have funny jewel case covers).

[Halfblind]

The "Maximum" amount of people!

 

I don't know. I don't have any reference to judge, because I've never played any of those levels. There might be some good maps in there, but I probably will never know. There are most likely worse levels in the archive. If this package is indeed 'shovelware', how much people care about D!Zone, D!Zone 2, H!Zone and Magic and Mayhem then. The last of which has some deplorable levels, but there were still worse maps uploaded to /idgames. M&M claimed to have over 1500 levels, but many of the wads included were carbon copies of one another and/or had many, many reused levels. H!Zone had a couple of good maps in a wad called "Destiny's Children" though. I've never attempted to play D!Zone nor Maximum Doom, So I can't judge.

 

   

[dizzy]

I remember Tarnsman streaming it on twitch a long time ago. BIGMAZE.WAD was my personal favourite.

[Maximum Matt]

^^Was that one with a big maze?  And no exit?

9 hours ago, Halfblind said:

 

I love the action-packed screengrabs of the player shooting at the goddamn walls.

Okay, I'm getting curious, where do I get lists of the levels in these collections?

[betabox]

Check out these threads/links:

 

-I'm not sure if @Wadmodder Shalton covered most of the available shovelware collections, but there is a lot here: 

 

 

-Old lists from Greyghost: 

 

Edited June 8, 2023 by betabox

[Devalaous]

This all reminds me, there was a full 1994 style one-man megawad on Maximum Doom for Registered Doom, with so much jank I had to manually patch it to get it completable in source ports. 'Illusions of Home' I beleive. Brightmaps, Doom Expanded and the Ultimate Midi Pack made the whole thing a guilty pleasure in 'this is so bad, but I guess im having some fun'

Edited June 8, 2023 by Devalaous

[Koko Ricky]

On 6/3/2023 at 8:10 PM, Devalaous said:

The most egregious is pornographic content is on the disc in the form of at least one wad having naked women on the walls, which would have gotten them in huge legal trouble...if anyone even cared about Maximum Doom enough to find it and get id in trouble over it.

I want to say at least two of those wads had PG-13 textures of partially nude women, and yeah, it was fairly shocking back in the day for pubescent me (maybe a bit hot, too). Maximum Doom is such a clusterfuck of often banal, ugly and poorly designed maps. I wonder if, given the occasionally questionable content, id just downloaded maps willy nilly and didn't even playtest most of them. I seem to remember a mall themed map that looked really promising, but would never load. 

[mrthejoshmon]

I own a file that contains every single map from the shovelware discs and what I do is just randomly drag and drop one onto ZDoom every now and then to play some quick shite.

 

Whilst on average it would be better if I did the same for /idgames, I actually really like playing the awful bizzaro underdeveloped jank that is on that disc.

[Doomlover77]

@mrthejoshmon what’s the name of this file you supposedly own ? @Doomlover77  

[mrthejoshmon]

19 minutes ago, Doomlover77 said:

@mrthejoshmon what’s the name of this file you supposedly own ? @Doomlover77  

It's quite literally a file containing all the wads, lifted directly off of the discs, plopped into my Doom Directory.

 

When I say file, I mean this:

 

I just opened the disc directory and manually copied every .wad file and organised them.

Edited June 12, 2023 by mrthejoshmon

[Doomlover77]

@mrthejoshmon I’ve done the same thing for all the Doom shovelware CDs I own as you have done. @Doomlover77 

[Maximum Matt]

Who was actually responsible for Max Doom? Did Jay Wilbur collect all the levels? 

[doomlayman]

On 6/3/2023 at 10:39 PM, Kwisior said:

Not all maps are possible to beat, however Tarnsman and (I think) a few others have completed all the possible ones.

I'm sure speedrunners care about it, some of them love table-filling (that is, filling out the leaderboard of records for a particular WAD).

As for me, I don't think I'll ever try it out. I don't even know how to get it.

 

What are the unplayable or unpassable (without cheat codes) maps? I'd be glad to stay away from these...

[doomlayman]

Is here a "Techbase cut" only of techbase maps?

[No-Man Baugh]

10 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

Who was actually responsible for Max Doom? Did Jay Wilbur collect all the levels? 

"The Un-official Master Levels for Doom II FAQ" is probably the best resource for questions regarding Max Doom's development, as it has some interviews with former id employees
https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/docs/faqs/mlevsfaq

 

The FAQ doesn't specify one person who came up with the idea for either The Master Levels or Maximum Doom, and none of the interviews given seem to clarify. However Shaw Green's interview reveals that he was the guy who sifted thru the net for both talent to recruit onto Master Levels and for levels to put on Max Doom.

 

Quote

 

Henrik: How was the designer team recruited and what did you tell the members about the project?

 

Shawn: The Master Levels design team was hand picked from the authors of around 500 or so levels I downloaded from the Internet and various on-line services like Compuserve and AOL. (There were many more than 500 levels at the time, but I didn't want to spend a month looking over all of them!)

 

 

Quote

Henrik: How were the wads for Maximum DOOM selected?

 

Shawn: I saw that coming :)...  The wads for maximum were basically grabbed from the net (if you couldn't tell).  The decision to put maximum DOOM on the CD was kind of last minute, so it wasn't something we raised the price for :) We just basically wanted to give everyone a little bit more.  At that time, not everyone had access to the net and on-line services were pretty expensive, so downloading a ton of wads wasn't feasible for everyone...

 

Edited July 22, 2023 by No-Man Baugh

[Maximum Matt]

Behold, the face of Maximum Doom.....

[SMG_Man]

While I've never been equal to the task of playing through *all* of Maximum Doom, the Master and Maximum levels both hold a special place in my heart. When I was younger, the Master Levels served the role of "more (real) Doom 2 levels" that Final Doom did for most others at the time, and the Maximum Levels showed me the broader realm of possibilities with Doom levels (cool maps with custom music like in #1DWANGO.WAD, or goofy maps with custom sound effects and textures like in YAKWORLD.WAD, or even just shameless copies of E1M1 with Cyberdemons and Spidermasterminds thrown all over the place).

 

Although I was definitely aware of the internet at the time (and used it to play games on Chevron's website while my dad worked on computers), the ability to just "download more Doom" never even occurred to 5-6 year old me (let alone actually make maps myself), so the Master and Maximum levels alike were something I would go to when I wanted to play something a little different from shareware Doom or Doom 2.

Edited July 23, 2023 by SMG_Man