The DWmegawad Club plays: Doom 2 the Way id Did

[NuMetalManiak]

i thought Crushed Spirits was a great map, even though i did find an HOM in it.

D2INO: well i posted my thoughts on it, and probably won't play it again.

what about Mayhem2048?

[mouldy]

Map25 - “Dead Sea” by Esselfortium

Intriguing map this one is, it reminds me of lots of bits of iwad maps rather than any particular one. Kind of similar to some of the other maps in this collection that feature separate buildings and non-linear progression (even has a surprise cyberdemon like that one from earlier). Pistol start was fun, not as harsh as it could have been thanks to the large amount of space to dodge everything, and it pretty much allows you to tackle the map in any order you like, as long as you picked up a decent weapon at some point. I was thankful for the invul for the cyber fight, I didn't feel in the mood for hectic rocket dodging. In fact the whole map felt chilled out in a way, like it could be as difficult as you felt like making it, but there was always a safe option. A couple of the secrets defeated me, and 10 of the enemies escaped too so I'm guessing they were hiding in one of those secrets. I did find a weird little nook behind a midtexture that maybe should have been marked secret but wasn't. A nice map to play on a sunny afternoon.

I don't have a preference for next month's wad. I'm ok with d2ino even though I feel like i've played it more times than any other person on this planet. My only concern is that all of my maps will come after the point where everyone has flaked out :)

Has anyone ever suggested either of the hell revealed wads? I've not played the first one for years, and never played the 2nd one, so dunno how suitable they would be for the club.

[Marcaek]

HR1 might be interesting, although I remember HR2 being a fair bit more grindy.

[cannonball]

In hindsight to my choice earlier, perhaps D2INO should be left a month as I am Welshing it up for a week and hence unable to do anything doom related. Mayhem2048 wouldn't be a bad choice or of course something more classic.

[dobu gabu maru]

Oh goody map choosing time again. I see a lot of good nominees this time around (along with Memfis handing out wildcards per usual), so I'll try my best to keep score. As we've been lax with our old-new-old-new routine, I think it'd be fine to include D2INO and MAYhem2048 as contenders alongside Psyren's mapsets and Requiem. I've been aching to replay Hell Revealed since forever, but I think my vote goes towards MAYhem since it is such a delightfully interesting concept (and we'd probably get plenty of author feedback!)

I also have a bonus announcement that the month of September will see us returning Back to Saturn X (er, again) for E2's public release, so I hope everyone (BtSX mappers specifically) will be ready.

[Tarnsman]

Man I was kind of hoping that would be kept secret until like the day of release. Fuck hype.

[Marcaek]

It's not hype until we get a series of gigantic countdown images and newsposts about how "It's almost done guys!"

so get to work and do that

[Marnetmar]

When you pre-order BTSX E2, you will get access to the DTWID-LE beta.

[Jaws In Space]

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 25: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

Yeah so I'll start off by saying that everything I said about open layout/city maps not belonging outside of maps 12-20 still applies here, so go back & read what I said about map 22 for my thought's on that. As for the map itself, it's pretty good, though I do agree that it felt very easy at times, almost too easy. The only time I felt challenged throughout the entire map was after I picked up the yellow key & a bunch of monster teleported in. So while an enjoyable map, it does leave one longing for the more competitive gameplay of the previous 4 maps.

dobu gabu maru said:

I also have a bonus announcement that the month of September will see us returning Back to Saturn X (er, again) for E2's public release, so I hope everyone (BtSX mappers specifically) will be ready.

So are we not going to be doing a playthrough of Doom 2 for it's 20th anniversary like we did for the Ultimate Doom? I was looking forward to a revisit.

[dobu gabu maru]

Tarnsman said:

Man I was kind of hoping that would be kept secret until like the day of release. Fuck hype.

Oop, sorry about that. If you want, we can just cancel it and have a surprise re-announcement August 31st

[Tarnsman]

Nah it's fine, now I'm going to make massive 3840 x 2160 countdown pictures and spam the thread with them each day.

[ella guro]

Tarnsman said:

You can easily make a map that takes 1-2 hours to beat within the blockmap limit and have it be extremely detailed. The blockmap grows more with overall map area more so than with sectors and lines so the more you compact your map the more complex it can get.

ah, i actually didn't know that. though after i said that i remembered a bunch of the longer maps from Alien Vendetta.

i still vote for D2INO, but if that doesn't get picked i vote for Requiem.

Map24 - “Crushed Spirits” by Marcaek

mouldy said something about a lot of these maps being gameplay experiments rather than being fun. i don't think he meant it as an insult, but i'm honestly all for the more concept maps. concept maps were very much part of Doom's existence from the beginning, and it's nice to see them come back in the sea of wads, past and present, that focus solely on the same few tropes of action gameplay. that was the idea behind starting D2INO anyway - to have clear concepts for everything rather than just trying to have the same action gameplay with some nice looking scenery in the background.

that said, this map had a lot of positives and a lot of negatives. as far as the layout and being a Tricks and Traps-esque map, i preferred this a bit to Tarnsman teleporter themed one earlier. The weird non-orthogonal Sandy layouts here like in the Pit are used well IMO. and i actually like the strange navigation with all the teleporters and back entrances to rooms a bunch, because of the way all the rooms ending up connecting back to each other in strange ways. so big ups to that. i'm not even sure if that's really a thing that Sandy did as effectively as it is here, but i could be wrong. the ending was particularly satisfying for that in the way it connected several areas back up to each other, though it would have been nice to get to crush that Archvile. instead i just got crushed by the troll crusher at the end. i can see how that would really piss off someone who didn't save during the level.

one thing i'd say is it's not always obvious when the crusher concept is going to be applied, or where you can use it to your benefit. that is accurate to Sandy's design, but i feel like this is an area where taking a bit more liberties would be better in the long run. i guess one example is i spent forever trying to tackle the Revenants before i realized you could just hit the damn ceiling and crush them. but even the crazy situations usually give you an easier route through them, like in the room with the Mancubi and Cacodemons. also maybe i just am really satisfied by watching monsters being crushed, particularly because it's not something you get to see a lot in Doom.

i did notice in the room with the pain elemental towards the end, the crusher won't just crush the enemies till they're dead in it. i don't know if that's a bug or i just don't understand well enough how crushers work.

Map25 - “Dead Sea” by Esselfortium

goddamn, i should really not UV pistol start these maps anymore. i'm just not up to it. mouldy said this was easier on pistol start and it's true you do have a lot of room to run around in, but even after finding the SSG i spent a lot of this map scrambling around for ammo and dying to Revenant rockets. maybe i was entering the wrong places at the wrong times, or just more irritable today and not playing well or something. the setting was at least unique - i couldn't place it to one particularly Sandy map other than the general city map/Mt. Erebus trope. i wanted to like this one more than i did because of that, but it felt like a bit of a rehash of some of the earlier Sandy maps idea-wise except not in a city setting. also i kept eating it especially at the blue armor area leading up to the Cyberdemon. i kind of wonder how you'd get back out of that if you don't have the yellow key already, since the only way i seemed to get out was by opening the door. but maybe i missed something there.

i did miss most of the secrets in general because i kinda just wanted to be done with this map and not bother with killing all the monsters. i feel like i should maybe come back to this one later and not pistol start.

[Demon of the Well]

The time between September and now should offer plenty of scope for all kinds of shocking/lurid BTSX-related scandals to come to light, which is just as it should be, I'm sure none of us would have it any other way (nothing accents a grand soiree more nicely than a subtle psychological undercurrent of sleaze and vice!).

Map 25 -- Dead Sea - 102% Kills / 100% Secrets
This was the first map in the WAD where I experienced any real uncertainty about who the target author was--was it a Sandy, or was it a sort of sunday-drive take on the Gotcha! model from a laconic Romero? All I was sure of at the outset is that it wasn't a Shawn Green, which is fine, really....in the past I've found myself acting as something of an apologist for Bloodfalls, but if I'm honest I know that apart from some interesting visual/thematic ideas it's really not a particularly good map; guess it's one of those cases where the BGM really helps to make the day ('Adrian's Asleep' is probably second only to 'Into Sandy's City' for me). Incidentally, this is one of few maps in D2TWiD where I felt the default music track actually fit the mood quite nicely.

Anyway, despite the original uncertainty, looking at the surroundings after things have quieted down a bit pretty strongly suggests it's a Sandy, especially as far as the texturing goes--it's sort of an E3 take on his general city-sandbox template, still featuring disparate and sometimes concept-based buildings situated casually in an open field, but here the different buildings tend to connect with one another a little more naturally/sinuously, which is something I tend to think of as an E3 trait. Oddly, I hardly thought of Mount Erebus at all while playing, I guess the Sea being non-damaging probably had a lot to do with that. Whereas map 24 was, to coin a phrase, 'aggressively homely' in appearance, this one is actually quite easy on the eyes; naturally there are a lot of different textures at work, but the combos themselves (as seen on/in the individual buildings) are generally quite reasonable, with a hint of some basic degree of color coordination in evidence. As in several of the other D2TWiD maps I reckon it might look just a little too neat to carry the full ring of authenticity, but I'm not really complaining; the extra care and little details (like the candles in the cyberdemon area, the basic shadowing effects here and there, etc.) significantly add to the mood of the map, and the mood here appeals to me in way similar to that of 'Passage to Exile'--nice impression of a number of gloomy little shrines floating in a sanguine sea under a vast crimson sky.

As in most of Essel's other maps in the set, the play is generally quite leisurely; there's a fairly high number of monsters, but there's plenty of room to run around in and most of them are consigned to the buildings, at least initially. I don't think the more open, exploratory 'Sandybox' style suffers from the somewhat sedate pace nearly as much as the Romero-style maps did, simply because the more catch-as-catch-can combat style this kind of layout tends to engender doesn't require nearly as much minute-by-minute intensity to feel relevant. Naturally for Sandy, there are some boobytraps at play here as well, but the primary value in most of these is cinematic (ala the cool cyberdemon setup in the basement) more than anything. The most dangerous is actually in a secret, which I think is fine and dandy--I always say that the best reward you can give a player for unraveling secrets is not ammo or powerups or whatnot, but fun optional battles and/or cool hidden vistas or scenery. I do quite like the large wave of monsters that teleports into the Sea near the end, as well--they aren't very threatening (you can probably ignore 90% of them entirely with little trouble), but they do make for a pleasant, undemanding climax well in line with a generally laid-back map.

Good work, Essel, you do Sandy pretty well, even though his is so far away from your own personal style (although Sandy's is rather far away from most folks' personal style these days, I guess).

[Magnusblitz]

MAP24: Crushed Spirits
89% kills, 4/6 secrets

This is definitely madcap Sandy at it's finest and most extreme - both in terms of the amount of traps, and the crazy abstractness of the design. Very Tricks and Traps, even though the layout is completely different. Textures appear to have almost been chosen at random, in a way that I would almost want to call ugly if it wasn't so whimsical. Lots of blind and invisible teleports, falling floors, and crushers, so the player never really knows what's coming next. Navigating the map can be a little difficult at points but nothing too frustrating. Meh, what more can I say, I really enjoyed it (and had to laugh at the last crusher, made my day). My only complaint is that the first patch of lavarock is non-harmful, but later patches (in the revenant hallway) are - I don't really like maps to be internally non-consistent, even in a "trap" map like this one.

MAP25: Dead Sea
93% kills, 4/6 secrets

If the last map was instantly recognizable as a Sandy (albeit bordering on caricature) this one is... yeah, I have no idea who this is. Looking at the minimap, it kinda has the shape of a Mt. Erebus, and there's definitely a number of different ways to go like a Sandy map, and finding the blue key/door area felt like I found a secret, but... I dunno, there's not enough here to really make it feel like a Sandy map to me. The texturing is too cohesive/detailed in many areas, and there's a number of things that feel quite PWAD-y instead of Sandy, such as pushing down the "buttons" near the blue key, or the water/mud baron marble face area, and the huge teleport ambush after the yellow key. Speaking of which, that ambush is pretty dangerous, I'm glad I came into the map with full BFG ammo to quickly thin out the herds. Not a bad map overall, it's got its memorable charms, but probably the least "id" map IMO (though I'm also sure someone will be able to come in here and prove me wrong and point to areas in the IWAD all those exist)

[Demon of the Well]

It occurs to me that the big generalized (as opposed to localized) monster teleport at the end does seem like a particularly PWAD-esque feature, yeah....or am I forgetting something obvious?

[mouldy]

ella guro said:

mouldy said something about a lot of these maps being gameplay experiments rather than being fun. i don't think he meant it as an insult, but i'm honestly all for the more concept maps. concept maps were very much part of Doom's existence from the beginning, and it's nice to see them come back in the sea of wads, past and present, that focus solely on the same few tropes of action gameplay. that was the idea behind starting D2INO anyway - to have clear concepts for everything rather than just trying to have the same action gameplay with some nice looking scenery in the background.

yeah, I was talking about the original doom 2 maps. With doom 2 it almost felt like they were just showing off what was possible with the game, rather than crafting a coherent adventure, as if they knew that people would be making their own maps and were illustrating the variety of possibilities for people to take further. I think that is one aspect that is the most difficult for this wad to recreate, since so much evolution in gameplay has happened since then. Unfair or unintuitive elements almost feel like they have to be reverse engineered now.

Map26 - “Damned Strait!” by Tarnsman

The old circle around the pit of goo is revisited, this one reminds me of abandoned mines a bit for some reason. Some meaty fighting going on here, lots of think-fast situations and naughty chaingunners. Man that cyberdemon though, that would have slaughtered me back in the day. Even now I'm not sure how I would have coped without the secret bfg, maybe I missed a plasma rifle along the way... I certainly didn't have enough rockets, and didn't fancy my chances with SSG, so would have probably just dodged around it and run away. Very nicely put together this map, although it gave me a bit of deja vu with the general theme.

[Alfonzo]

Developer's Notes:

Jeepers, July is looking super close. I'd better get a move on and finish up these notes before the final straggler crosses the finish line. Hope you've all gotten something out of these blurbs, 'cause I've certainly enjoyed reading all of your responses and critiques!

...
MAP20: Leap of Faith
Essel's first Romero map, and although I have poor memory of its early development there is this sneaking suspicion that he manipulated it into the MAP20 slot to snag that delicious D_MESSAG tune. Can't blame him - it seems cater-made for a Romero venture even when one leaves aside the constantly reinforced Gotcha association.* The familiar trope of circumnavigating a central expanse ala Living End is once again at play in this map, and together with MAP06 and MAP26 it would go on to fuel a large discussion about what type of Romero map we needed for the penultimate level in the set, and whether we could get away with using the slot to explore a more ill-expressed avenue of Romero's design (more on that in the dueness of course!). On this point of design choice, however, it does very well, and needed comparatively little tune-ups as development time ticked over. There was some meddling with the shape and height of the overall structure of the map in the middle, if I recall correctly, but for any more particulars beyond that you'd have to ask Captain Cumulonimbus himself.

*Or Abandoned Mines! I honestly can't decide which map better complements the track's character - one of the reasons I like hearing them reused in a megawad multiple times.

...
MAP21: Passage to Exile
Megalyth gets the (not very coveted) distinction of being the first person to start his map and the last to get it finished, and while the colder part of me would have liked to quote the illustrious Malcolm Tucker at this juncture in his railing against the Omnishambles Nicola Murray ("You're like that coffee machine, you know: from bean to cup, you fuck up."), I think the map is rather good... so bugger it, I can't.

It's an interesting affair. For about 2 weeks after Megalyth tried and failed (by his own admission) to "fix" the map into a convincingly Sandy state that wasn't totally pants, the map was bandied about between folks and tinkered with to varying degrees. First I had a go at it, trying to fuse the two routes together in an altogether simplistic manner that was finally deemed shithouse, and then it went back to Megalyth for a bit, and then to Marcaek, who somehow managed to make it all work by drawing upon one of the map's earliest versions. Don't read into this the wrong way, though, it's still very much Megalyth's map, right down to the indelible stamp of his thematic concept which was to depict the fusing together of Hell and Earth by way of strategically mashed textures. It has a wonderfully chaotic vibe about it, and an appropriate ugliness that suggests the map might have once found itself at the bottom of a waste paper basket, heaped upon with other rejects and stamped into a single entity by a shiny pair of Doc Martens. Megalyth's Doc Martens! Cool.

TRIVIA:

• MAP21 used to feature a heavy duty slaughter encounter, where the player would spawn on top of an invul and BFG and go helter-skelter with truck-tons of plasma for 30 seconds. Cool, in concept, but a little ham-fisted in the end. It was also my idea, I think.
  
  Figures.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP26: Damned Strait!
99% kills, 4/4 secrets

Yeah, this map doesn't even try to hide the textual and thematic similarity to The Abandoned Mines, with the metal cages and wood floors, white stone floors, mancubus on a outdoor ledge overlooking the caged area, large lowering lifts, etc. It uses a different tan rock texture, but it's still a tan rock. Not necessarily a bad thing, though... it's another "wrap around the big pit" trope level. I took a lot of damage throughout due to the amount of hitscanners around. Ended up killing the Cyberdemon no problem on the first try, absurdly enough... ran away when he was revealed, then just banzaied him in the face with the BFG while running across the bridge, heh.

[Jaws In Space]

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 26: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

So once again we revisit the all too familiar Romero layout where we traverse around a pit of acid as seen previously in map 6 & 20. The overuse of metal is still present, but it actually didn't bother me this time, I guess I've grown numb to it's potent effects. Visually I actually got the vibe of an E4 Romero map, probably due to the use of Wood5 & marble textures, & that exit room with the cyber definitely has a similar shape to the exit of E4M2. Gameplay wise this one is pretty tame for Tarnsman & I wasn't overly challenged until that exit Cyber, I didn't kill him on his way across the bridge, but after a few death's I was able to squeeze past him & killed him as he followed me toward the exit. So overall it is one of the better Romero maps, but not quite as good as map 20.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 26 -- Damned Strait! - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Yes, it's this same song and dance again. Fortunately, though, it's probably the strongest iteration of this particular subgenre of Romero map, at least from a raw gameplay perspective--as per usual, Tarnsman serves up a hitscanner-heavy running start to get the blood flowing. As a generality the action isn't too pressing until perhaps the very end, although I was badly hurt on the secret ledge with the rocket launcher--no SSG + tighly-packed hitscan cluster + close-range fatso. On that point, the little dropdown to the sawn-off/berserk pack at the very start was a nice callback to map 20, though I lacked the presence of mind to acquire it right away--didn't see it until leaping down from the aforementioned secret ledge. Unlike most of the other Romero maps it also comes to a genuine climax, with the cyberdemon stomping his way across the narrow bridge while the gasbag gallery busies itself with belching out lightning/farting out flaming skulls--this might've been genuinely problematic if I hadn't had the fortune to find the BFG earlier--I was able to hurl Cybie's corpse from the bridge with the force from the final BFG blast, 10,000 bonus points. There's more action in between these two high points--I distantly remember an area vaguely redolent of the cage section near the end of Industrial Zone and the first part of Abandoned Mines in general--but it's all very much overshadowed by the marquee stuff.

Aesthetically/structurally it's most reminiscent of the titular area from Essel's 'The Gorge', but the wider space plus the bridge setup at the end highlight the concept a bit more. Very cleanly-textured and polished for the most part, must've been Romero on one of his especially dynamic days. Oddly, though, I don't think I'd say I get the feeling from this map that it looks too clean to seem authentic--apart from some alignment issues on the wood w/metal braces textures, it's especially neat on a concourse level, it's true, but despite this I think it maintains that ineffable quality of Doom II homeliness that was cleaned up/civilized perhaps a mite too much in some of the prior maps. For example, the choice to use green toxin as the damaging liquid in the main area results in a somewhat garish contrast with the day-level lighting and the glaring red sky--kind of looks "like Christmas", if you know what I mean. Still, that's the IWAD for you....id never adopted any sort of guideline that kept lava in Hell and toxic waste in the techbases, after all. Despite the relative silliness of the scene (as contrasted with the scenery from map 20, which I felt was rather attractive by the standards of the day), it does have some neat touches, ala the blinking light effects on the various overlooks in the distance--adds some extra depth to the scene, sort of makes one realizes that the blinking is a fairly rare effect (at least as applied to sizable sectors) these days.

Not a bad map by any means, but I think map 20's still the pick of the litter for me amongst these ooze-chasm Romero maps--it comes together a bit better aesthetically (though arguably is less authentic for it), and while the play's more sedate in it, I can remember the whole thing days later, whereas I played this this morning and now I can only remember the first three minutes and the nifty cyberdemon/bridge setup (perhaps a pitfall to which Romero's consistently self-referencing design model is more susceptible?).

[Magnusblitz]

MAP27: The Bloodwash
96% kills, 4/4 secrets

I suppose the inspiration here is supposed to be The Spirit World, with its large underground caverns, bloodfalls and bullshit progression. Visually, it's actually a bit underwhelming - large parts of the map are quite blocky, and the central cavern isn't anything amazing - compared to the central cavern of Spirit World, which must've been Sandy's baby given how nice it looks and detailed it is. On the positive note, the bullshitty progression isn't nearly as ridiculous as Spirit World (which requires a secret to complete the level, plus shooting an ordinary wall texture). I admit that I ran through the lava a few times before finally figuring out I was supposed to just fall into the holes in the dark teleport area. Once I had that, it wasn't too bad. The amount of secrets hidden at the end is certainly interesting.

Overall, not bad, but lacks any real punch IMO... almost seems a bit too afraid to go above and beyond (except maybe for that red key room).

[Jaws In Space]

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 27: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

Well this map was pretty underwhelming. It seems to be going for the underground hell as seen in The Spirit World, but this map looks extremely ugly in comparison. Gameplay is either nothing or everything at once, you drop off the ledge & your surrounded by specters & an Arch-Vile, grab the RL & your surrounded by chaingunners, grab the Megasphere & your up against Revenants & an Arch-Vile, fall down the pit & your surrounded by revenants & mancubus, try to escape that area & then your surrounded by hell knights, grab the blue key & your surrounded by demons & and Arch-Vile, & there's really not much in between these sudden traps to take your health away, except for that run through the lava. Speaking of health, this map is very stingy with handing it out considering the amount of sudden traps that appear. All of the secrets were pretty easy to find after the map was pretty much over.

[Jaws In Space]

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 28: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

Oh hello Chasm, so glad to see you here! -said no one ever. Yeah this for me is by far the worst map in this wad, bullshit platforming & bullshit monster placement. That's all I have to say about that.

[ella guro]

Jaws In Space said:

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 28: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

Oh hello Chasm, so glad to see you here! -said no one ever. Yeah this for me is by far the worst map in this wad, bullshit platforming & bullshit monster placement.

said me! i love The Chasm, and that map is great. sorry you can't deal with creativity. was really hoping i could get to it before the end of the month.

[Demon of the Well]

Hell, I really like The Chasm, myself. Haven't played map 28 yet, but it sounds like it's going to be an interesting one.

[dew]

I love Chasm. I also love Xaser's map, but I have to say it goes a little overboard into advanced PWAD territory. I got a MM vibe out of it instead of pure Doom2. But who in their right mind would rain on that parade.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 27 -- The Bloodwash - 106% Kills / 100% Secrets
Most certainly a tale of two halves, this one. As has been discussed previously, starting out in a dangerous situation and then having the action taper off severely as the player becomes more and more powerful is a progression seen in a lot of maps from Doom II, and it's very much the case here. This also evinces the previously discussed tendency of Sandymaps to freely offer you a number of route choices that you'll be pretty well and truly fucked if you explore too early (or in some cases if you explore them at all, at least by the standards of average player skill back in the 90s)--go to the rocket launcher area first and you'll have a solid foundation upon which to build, but if you go into the lava tunnel like I did at first, you're in for a world of hurt--my Doomguy had his body melted away up to the knees, then he was accosted by fatsos and a herd of specters in a dark bloody room, then he stumbles into an imp nest, THEN he teleports back to the start, burns off some more of his body (including certain bits he'll probably miss more than his feet) running through the lava a second time, miraculously doesn't get infinitely-talled to death falling back into the blood room, stumbles into a pit which is apparently a teleporter, and gets tetra-raped by revenants and mancubi in a little marble yard. While invisible. And holding nothing but a chainsaw. It's bullshit heaped upon bullshit heaped upon bullshit, and that is the main thing I liked about it--its madcap lack of regard for modern standards of 'fairness.' Had me laughing, for real.

That's all if you go the wrong way, of course. Go and get the rocket launcher first, and it's much easier to take the map at your own pace, which handily neuters most of its mandatory challenges, although the red key setpiece can still be kind of dangerous (perhaps that was due to my shocking inability to learn from past mistakes, though--for some reason I was invisible AGAIN when I went in there for the second time, which is not at all helpful in that scenario). Part of this is just balance variance, but it's also due in part to the way some encounters are designed--there are a lot of hefty groups of monsters, including more than one cluster of meat protecting an arch-vile, and most of the ammo is quite limited except for shells, and no SSG in sight. Further, a lot of these attacks trigger while the player is standing in a position of relative safety (like the blue key ambush); the combination of these two factors and some suspiciously-placed monster-blocking lines amount to a map that just begs for most of its encounters to be cheesed to hell. Granted, the aspect of player agency can't be ignored--you don't have to cheese them if you don't want to--but I don't think enough was done to discourage it in this case (whether that's a Sandy trait or not), considering that 90% of the map's actual combat takes place in these contrived encounters....makes the action feel insincere, somehow.

At least we have the optional point-blank spidernest near the end, good times, good times....for once I was glad I was invisible! It does help the map go out on a higher note (if you visit it, that is), but I think the map would've worked better if it had been tweaked to present the player with bullshit (e.g. fun) from start to finish rather than 90% of it being predicated on making the wrong choice at the start, like a more monster-centric version of Marcaek's map 24, perhaps. As it is, it's a map where the initial route choice impacts the whole experience in a day/night way, and while this is a Sandy trait (and something I normally like about his style), I think it's so over-pronounced here that it misfires a bit.

Heh, oh yeah, and it's ugly....but it's ugly in that cool Sandy way--big rooms, expressive shapes, bold (and sometimes rather daft, ala the scrolling flesh-panels) texturing, some neat lighting effects (I really like the bloody sinkholes that lead to the red key, and also the strangely glowing tree beyond the first two knights); I continue to maintain that Alfonzo has some kind of knack for oddly compelling texture selections.

[joe-ilya]

MAP29
The megawads most normal map, just basic marble stuff with heavy gameplay, map's annoying at times and there's not enough health so I used saves like I did with all the health lacking maps, not very fun but it got some cool monster usage like that archvile with BOHs traps and probably even more!


Will you do 1024abc with some other wad? The maps will take you 20 minutes at the maximum.(The whole megawad can be beaten in 3 and a half hours)

[mouldy]

Catch up time...

Map27 - “The Bloodwash” by Alfonzo

Man, this map is well confusing from pistol start. First there is a lift that doesn't do anything (and seems to activate a sector you can hear behind the scenes, some secret thing perhaps?) So, grab a chainsaw, and a fat lot of use it is against 2 hellknights, so run past them, bunch of imps? nah, lets jump down into that cluster of shotgun guys and get a weapon I can use. Took a lot of hitscan damage doing that though, whats this switch on the wall do? Nothing? Does anything work around here? Well, at least I have a chainsaw for these spectres, oh wait there's an archvile, run away! Into this tunnel of damaging lava, dead end and random teleport somewhere, fall down a hole into a shitstorm of mancs and pain elementals, still only a shotgun and chainsaw, run away! fall into another hole and teleport somewhere else entirely surrounded by more mancs and revenants, the end. Ok, so this map is a bastard, and seems proud of it. Things get a little easier once you have died a few times sussing the place out, but there are still some lovely moments, particularly involving archviles. No SSG that I could find, so dealing with a vile behind a pack of revs with only chaingun ammo was a joy. I can't think of any iwad maps that this reminds me of, but has that old school flavour of fuck you and deal with it.

Map28 - “Abyss” by Xaser

Scary map, that pistol start is a doozy. Not sure I ever got around to finishing off those pain elementals. In fact I got to the exit with zero secrets and 35 enemies left to kill, and even with a computer map to tempt me back I was still happy to leave that place. Actually the going wasn't that bad, I was scraping by on ammo at a few points, but health was never really a problem after the initial scramble. It was just so damn confusing to navigate I felt like the map itself was a malevolent presence trying to get me lost it's own maze. I can't complain about that of course, since I managed to get out. Nice concept and well executed. Seemed like there were nods to a few doom 2 maps in there.

Map29 - “The Mortal Coil” by Esselfortium

Love the way this map snakes around on its journey into the bowels of hell. The difficulty of the first half feels a bit inflated by luck, there's no armour for a lot of it, and plenty of opportunity to pick up arbitrary damage, so I found myself hobbling along on low health and not able to make a single mistake, saving my way through each encounter just to avoid the unlucky fireball that kills me. There's a mandatory skip through some damaging floor, so good luck with that if you are already near death. After getting the armour (and a secret SSG thank christ) nothing was near as hard. I'm not too fussed about difficulty dipping in maps when you finally get tooled up, but that first section felt hard for the wrong reasons somehow. Anyway, loved the mastermind fight with the double threat of archvile gradually making his way towards you as you hide from the bullets. Very uncomplicated layout despite the complex twisting and turning and wrapping around going on (I guess thats a nice way of saying linear), but I had enough to deal with just staying alive through most of it. Cool stuff.

[Jaws In Space]

Doom 2 The Way ID Did- MAP 29: HMP, Continuous, Keyboard Only

Look at this! This one, this map, this map right here. Why couldn't there have been more Romero maps like this one? "But Jaws we did have maps like this one maps 6, 11, & 26 had the same setup of a trip around a slime pit just like this one" Yes that is true, but this map does a fine job of disguising that fact, which when it comes down to it is exactly what Romero does. All throughout Doom 2 Romero constantly rips off of himself, but he does it in a way that a person may not notice it on a first time play through giving each map a distinct feel to it. Which is very unlike how I felt that D2TWID handled the Romero maps, with each map blending into one another, especially the early maps. So while each Romero map here is a success from the perspective of a standalone map, when all 7 come together in the wad you start to see an overuse of certain textures & repeating a similar layout over & over again, & then you realize that no this is not how Romero did Doom 2 as a whole. Anyways onto the map itself, starts off pretty good with a slow trek through an empty hallway & then you take a drop down a pit for an awesome reveal of the things yet to come, I was so interested in looking at the architecture that I let the chaingunners snipe me to death from afar. Following that it a fun & fast paced run around the edge of the map & it doesn't slow down until you enter the caves. This area was the low point for me because I wanted to keep fighting where I could see into the pit, but this area was still very fun to play & I constantly had to watch out for crossfire from across the room. The Spider Mastermind fight was particularly good as I had to try & kill him before that Arch-Vile ran around to kill me. I laughed at the exit room as I thought that there would be 1 baron hiding behind the exit structure, but it turns out that there were a ton of Barons hiding back there, much ammo was wasted dealing with them. So yes after playing through 6 Romero maps to get here I can finally say that I not only found a good Romero map, I found a great one.