Endless Random /idgames WAD Adventures #073

[Endless]

Funk! | Derek Waters | 1995

 

 

Funk! is a medium-sized level with a slightly above average monster count and difficulty that seems to employ interesting and creative ideas, but lacks the proper execution and polish to fully enjoy them. There's a variety of neat rooms that follow a very strange and confusing pathing, with little cohesion and terrible gameplay balance, the enjoyable weirdness of the scenery soon becomes a grueling test to your patience.

[ICID]

I didn't get on the Internet all day yesterday, what did I miss?

 

(looks around)

 

Oh.

 

Well instead of playing any of that cool shit, let's slog through some random crap, shall we?

 

 

Fred (1994) by Jeff Blank

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: dsda-doom, complevel 3}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

E2M1 is my favorite intro to any episode or game in the IWADs. The way it starts as the techbase you're used to, albeit darker, before quickly showing you the big flaming hurtcross and forcing you to run over platforms that melt into lava, doors opening within doors as hell itself starts to spill into our world...it's awesome. Frankly the subtle hints of madness you get in E2 are much cooler than the actual hell levels themselves, which are ugly and full of teleporter puzzles. But I'll never forget how cool that first taste of post-shareware Doom was.

 

Anyway, I thought about this because Fred here is ALSO in the E2M1 slot and has none of that. It's full of ideas and even full room concepts ripped straight from Knee-Deep in the Dead - note Hangar's famous zigzag floor in the screenshot above. The one sorta-interesting idea here is that the exit room is available to you pretty early on, but so packed with monsters that you'll have to run around finding all the secrets to collect enough weaponry and health to survive it. Other than that, the definition of "nothing you haven't seen before."

 

I do also like that way back in 1994, in the 38th file ever uploaded to /idgames, Jeff was still bragging about how UV was the only difficulty worth playing on. Wherever you are now, Jeff, you would have loved YouTube.

 

Grade: 2/10

 

 

Shrike (1995) by Carlos Dwa

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: dsda-doom, complevel 2}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

Good lord this thing is jank. Monsters stuck in walls or each other, missing textures both intentional and not, jagged corridors that make Doom's spotty collision detection go sicko mode, random lines on the automap, mistagged blue key doors and secrets, doors that are smaller than their texture - you name it, we got it. There were also several areas I couldn't walk through, that I seemingly should have been able to, due to high or low props or monsters and a misunderstanding of how infinite height actors behave in Doom.

 

If you can put up with all that, there's plenty of questionable gameplay decisions to make you scratch your head too. Teleporter puzzles, ammo mostly all hidden in the initial room, random monster placement that seems to think arachnotrons are a bigger, scarier threat than arch-viles...I actually kinda had fun with this just from a "seeing is believing" perspective; you want to get to the next room just to see what's gonna happen next. I appreciate the unbridled creativity (and the one teleporting arch-vile fight, which cleverly forces you to use chaingunner infighting and resurrection to get a shot in) but even just a little bit of QA testing would have really made this sing.

 

Grade: 2/10

 

 

CROSST (1994) by Terry Henning

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: dsda-doom, complevel 3}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

Turing 3 looked like a pain to get running so I've opted to just skip it. Instead I found this very early magnum opus-y work by University of Wisconsin student Terry Henning. For only being the 244th file ever uploaded to /idgames, this thing honestly rules. As the name implies the map is broadly shaped like a large cross (the "T" was added to avoid confusion with Alistair Brown's c-coded CROSS.WAD, which was either the first or second PWAD ever made depending on who you asked at the time) and progression is often confusing and requires a lot of backtracking and switch hunting, as was the style at the time. But combat is fresh and fun with lots of nifty traps to catch you off guard.

 

More importantly, this thing looks great. Early rooms of simple grey and green give way to highly saturated, hellish pillars of red and blue. The main aesthetic idea here seems to be making the player feel small - stairways are absolutely gigantic, sniper imps are placed a million miles away and even simple ledges with health often require you to jump down on them from above. Whether this was an intentional choice or an accidental effect of an early mapper not fully understanding scale yet, the effects are often breathtaking.

 

So as long as you have a lot of patience for getting lost, I definitely recommend CROSST.

 

Grade: 6/10

 

 

Night of the Living Dead part ? (1996) by Robert Oberlander

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: dsda-doom, complevel 2}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

An ugly brown deathmatch map containing the chainsaw, chaingun, SG, and SSG as well as a few monsters. By "a few" I actually mean 160 monsters, all of whom are hitscanners. Based on the title I'm guessing the idea was to imitate the film Night of the Living Dead by trapping you in a house surrounded by a true horde of zombies but good lord the actual implementation is unhinged.

 

Grade: 2/10

 

Stuck in Hell (2013) by "R.Belly"

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: GZDoom}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

Yep, it's a terry trap. Starts you off in a cute little spaceship (with a mandatory jump to make sure you're playing a Zdoom derivative) and then as soon as you hit the first switch you start hearing fart noises in a room full of the usual swill. As terry traps go it's honestly not that bad - it's over with quickly and doesn't blow out your headphones, though it did attempt to run some console commands that I'm very glad GZDoom blocked.

 

Grade: 1/10

 

 

C'mon bro, I got tigerblood! (2013) by Chris Hansen

 

^{Play Settings}

^{Source Port: dsda-doom, complevel 2}

^{Difficulty: Ultra-Violence}

 

I think I'll end the day's wadventures on this supremely enjoyable one-off by the one and only Christian Hansen (whose unfinished 2023 release, Hell's Bane, is well worth your time by the way.) The gimmick here is that the level constantly changes with walls and floors moving and vast new areas opening almost every time you cross a linedef or hit a switch - an old trick at this point, but one I never get tired of. Most of the early bestiary is a bit too tough to deal with without the SSG (which is visible early on) so I kept hitting switches and letting out monsters until I was able to grab it, leaving me in a slaughtermap of my own making - perfect.

 

According to the textfile, Chris' sole ambition here was "to create a no-bullshit map that is fun to play." I feel strongly that all Doom mappers should aspire to exactly this, and no more.

 

Grade: 8/10

[Walter confetti]

Pan.wad by Paolo de Carolis, Nicola Tracanella and Andrea Tracanella- Vanilla Doom 2, SP, 15 maps, 1995, played with DSDA-Doom 0.27.4 and TNT for a change.

Spoiler

 

 

A long episode of short, fast paced maps made by a trio of Italian (or Italian descendents but i don't think so) mappers including maps from a previous project and metallica midis soundtrack, cool but the maps are too short to fully enjoy the new BGM.

Maps are all sets in this brown/marble places with fast gameplay but not that fun to play. Reached MAP07 so far.

Edited December 12, 2023 by Walter confetti

[LadyMistDragon]

Snake Doom (2000) by Miffe (GZ Doom)

 

Oh hey, it's the classic phone game Snake. In Doom! I'm not sure if it works correctly in newer version of ZDoom and to be honest, it's about as deep as Minesweeper when you get down to it. I just know the movement of the 'snake' is too stiff for me rn.

 

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Wartest1 (1997) by Stephen Huff (Crispy Doom)

 

Several deathmatch maps with rather unexciting visuals but simple and understandable square-ish layouts and occasionally some rather nice architecture. Well, other than making the player starts in some of them horrible claustrophobic. Being trapped actually stinks, who knew. And so does that stupid nailed sandstone texture. ,NEVER make an entire map of it. The darkness in the very last map also makes no sense at all.

 

 

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[Roofi]

Year 2 Month 09 Day 17

 

I play until I die or intentionally stop. I don't comment the wad where I died/stopped.

 

[1] Ambush by MrBlonde from Dallas (1996)

 

Forgot to take screens sorry.

 

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Deathmatch level with some cool visual effects.

 

The visuals of this symmetrical base made of gray bricks are a bit ahead of their time as the aligmnent of those textures look pretty clean and corners are rounded in order to make the level look smoother. I also love how the bricks blend with the cloudy gray sky. The addition of a custom STATBAR and a new music also demonstrate a certain rigour of its author.

 

Got ambushed by a gang of revenants in a small cavern from map 05 of The Authoritive T_DUNNxx.WAD Series - For Doom2

 

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[ICID]

Thanks for playing, everyone! Here's the new thread: