Doom 2 In Name Only: An indepth review thread

[Devalaous]

Getsu Fune said:

perhaps, i have been losing steam lately with reviewing this, which may explain my lack of depth of things to say. or maybe it's a side effect of my new custom title.

Theres a reason why Mouldy doubts many will even get to the later maps!

[Demon of the Well]

Map 11 -- Circle of Death
Very reasonable, this, seems like a 'normal' abstract modern Doom II map with simple but very neat and clean visuals. This means that the whole 'Circle of Death' concept is rather understated; I guess there's the roughly circular center area with the turret cyberdemon that you travel around a number of times over the course of the map, but while it's perfectly serviceable as a gameplay concept it doesn't really feel like it's what defines the map, especially since it turns out that there really is no satisfying/cathartic way to dispose of him--eventually you gather up enough ammo to polish him off from the periphery (there is no setting foot on his platform), or you can just ignore him, since he's really only a threat if you forget about him while tarrying in one of the circular redstone antechambers.

What does define the map is its protracted and fairly complicated progression. I can't really say I shared the experience that some players had of being lost/befuddled for any significant length of time...I actually only got stuck after the map was essentially complete, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to actually exit, since I didn't really pay enough attention to what the two critical switches did (too busy watching the cyberdemon out of the corner of my eye, I guess). Generally speaking I was able to make consistent progress through the map without worrying too much about my heading apart from some light automap use to keep me from retreading old ground (the redstone antechambers do tend to blur together in one's mind); while fairly involved, most of the discrete paths towards an important objective (be it a key or a switch) turn out to be largely self-contained, meaning that reasonably thorough exploration should carry you through eventually. That being said, I also can't really claim that the map's overall progression is very coherent. While it's pretty easy to continuously accomplish things, what is actually being accomplished is really quite vague most of the time--there are just so many switches and so many keydoor interlocks and so much teleporting around that before long one stops thinking of the big picture and just starts focusing on putting one foot in front of the other. There's no real apparent goal other than the standard assumption that one needs to reach the exit, partially a function of the relative weakness of the centerpiece cyberdemon, I suspect.

This vague focus doesn't really damn the map, though. The environment itself is interesting enough to traverse and explore, presenting a decent variety of different scenarios over the course of the playtime, with the loose unifying theme of mostly softballed damage floor in many areas. The combat is rather low-key but competent enough (weird that the most dangerous encounters seem to all involve lost souls as the main/only threat); it's not anywhere near consistently violent or pressuring enough to really suit my taste, but there was very little that I found outright objectionable or actively boring other than a couple of questionable monster-blocking lines (mainly early on in the upper level of the rocket launcher room). Again, the main fault here is that the map never really seems to come to a climax; I think the biggest fight is the multi-angled closet reveal in the northerly blood sewers, and as luck would have it that was the part of the map I ended up exploring first, so action was on a gradual downslope for most of my playthrough. At the end of the day, I was entertained by this map and could easily point to a variety of good qualities in it, but I also suspect that its lack of real teeth and understated-yet-busy progression style will mean that I won't remember it very well in a few days' time.

Map 12 -- The Factory
Hmm, an old Cannonball map. In some ways it's just what I expected--it's comprised largely of a series of fairly spacious chambers, most of which feature some discrete action setpiece and many of which feature some prominent central feature bounded by a lot of running space on most sides--and in other ways it's not. I was surprised by the apparent amount of optional content, and of the somewhat uneven pacing. Three revenants vs. basic shotgun with you stuck in a small room is a fairly concentrated start to the action, but it quickly tapers off after that until the vile duo on the way back to the yellow door. Monster placement has always been something that Cannonball is pretty good at, and that quality is most evident here in the use of arch-viles in a variety of scenarios, such as the aforementioned. There is unevenness in this regard as well, however--the final area of the map behind the yellow door is quite dry from a gameplay standpoint, particularly the line-blocked final cyberdemon, who is deployed along with a similarly sedentary arch-vile to present an HP-laden roadblock in front of the exit, pretty questionable choice, that.

Like a lot of Cannonball's earlier stuff, it's visually serviceable but aesthetically unmemorable; while there's not a lot of really interesting architecture on display, nothing struck me as particularly ugly or garish (and nothing really interfered with the map's playability), and my only real aesthetic complaint is very minor: I am quite fond of 'Into Sandy's City', but it didn't feel like it suited the map to me. However, one thing the map definitely does not communicate very well is that this is 'The Factory.' Other than the blithe reference to one of the more (in)famous segments of Doom II's own map 12 (itself hidden in a secret area), it was difficult for me to decide just which feature of the architecture or progression was supposed to be redolent of industrial manufacture of some sort--eventually I decided it must be the northwestern blood area with its emergent crusher run, which is also presumably tied to the activation of the pumping skull constructs in an earlier room (I guess there's also the machine of some description in the middle of the main keyhub, but I intuitively interpreted this as a 'power station' or something). This setup functions well enough in and of itself, but it's such a small portion (and a completely optional one at that, just like the hidden IWAD reference) of what is otherwise a pragmatically abstract and mostly static map that it's hardly adequate in supporting the 'in Name Only' theme.

As I've said before, I'm not actually terribly invested in the degree to which individual maps doggedly fulfill the name-gimmick aspect of the project, and I didn't find this to be an offensive map, although it's another I reckon I'm going to forget about before long. Cannonball has made far better ones since this one was born, certainly, it clearly shows its age when compared with some of his most recent stuff.

[j4rio]

TimeOfDeath said:

j4rio, that would be funny. I'd go out of my way to give them to the underdogs and probably would get vote-banned by users.

I'm genuinely curious, who? If your point is fun ugly maps, I don't really think any were released as of lately. gggmork is currently knee deep in bitcoin and hasn't made a map, death-destiny is going through a split personality for the last half a decade and phml hasn't made anything as far as I know. That argument would make more sense in 2008.

[TimeOfDeath]

I honestly don't know, I'm just saying hypothetically, not that I'd actually volunteer to do it.

[Demon of the Well]

^None of those three guys even consistently make categorically 'ugly' maps, I'd argue (well, sometimes Mork does I guess, but not always), at least not where their major releases (read: the ones they spend more time raising and nurturing) are concerned.

Anyway, back again.

Map 13 -- Downtown
This was not as poor as one might've been led to believe. Not nearly, honestly....I would be comfortable making the assertion that this is also the work of a relatively inexperienced mapper, but it's significantly more cohesive/presentable than some of what has come before it. I would say that it's broadly similar to map 10--some of the same fundamental stylistic/gameplay choices, some of the same faults--but is a more sound execution of the general style.

Its presentation of the 'Downtown' theme is straightforward: it depicts a part of a quake-damaged city area (I suppose it's evident at this point that the recurring 'earthquake' motif is meant to be a unifying theme tying the various earth-based maps together in a narrative way), as well as a subway terminal and some underground passages, ending in a watery chine that appears designed to segue thematically into map 14. Like map 10, the overall visual style is generally representational in nature, with a more internally consistent sense of scale and articulation than that map had (important if you're going to take this type of aesthetic approach, I feel). The commitment to this style does mean that some areas naturally end up being visually uninteresting, particularly the dark earthen/rock tunnels that define most of the latter half of the map, and the presentation of the titular 'downtown' area is pretty underwhelming (if what we see here is really "downtown" then this has got to be one pisswater burg we're traipsing around in), but the visuals are generally inoffensive in terms of texture use and such, and communicate the settings of areas serviceably well. The only thing I remember really having a problem with was the sideways-glancing implementation of a simulated floor-over-floor effect in the blue key building--you look out the ground floor windows and you essentially see nothing but sky (apparently this is a coastal city, a detail that interested me for some reason and did help somewhat in realizing that ephemeral ideal of 'creating a sense of place'), then you take one of the winding twin staircases up and you're supposed to be visually fooled into thinking that the stairs have wrapped around enough to let you out on the second floor directly above where you were looking out the windows.....except this 'illusion' was pulled off pretty badly, it's very evident even if you aren't really paying attention that the stairwell extends much too far north for you to have stayed within the apparent confines of the building as seen from the ground floor, and also that there's a severe discrepancy between the apparent height of the ceiling in the blue key lobby vs. how high you seem to have climbed on the staircase. At least the mapper remembered to hide the monster closets and such from the computer map, this time.

Gameplay is not particularly artful, and suffers from some of the same problems as map 10 did. The reason for this is simply that, at heart, it's really a very similar type of layout--lots of box-rooms connected by lots of hallways. This is disguised much better here, however, and generally the whole is executed in a significantly more complex/nuanced way; the simplistically nonlinear aspect of the 'downtown' portion of the map seems more natural and incidental to the setting than the 'which box of meat should I open first?' flavor of the fuel-storage field in map 10, height variation is used a little more often in the combat (though a lot of it is still rather flat-plane, fair enough), and perhaps most importantly, it's generally more consistently bloody. Lots of chunks of weak monsters are spammed about throughout the duration of the map; while many of these are faced directly, that they can be mown down en masse with relative alacrity lends the action some body without bogging it down constantly (a big part of map 10's problem was persistently poor placement of mid/high-HP monsters). Some folks could probably argue that a lot of this monster density is pointless on a practical/tactical level, and they aren't really wrong about that, but some degree of senseless violence is something I can appreciate in Doom--there's something inherently satisfying about wracking up 30 kills in about as many seconds using only basic weaponry, I think. Finally, the map also gains a few points for its berserk-based start, and for the way it responds more organically to different playstyles (e.g. aggressive/rushing vs. methodical/camping, and so on), at least in its first half.

Incidentally, that cyberdemon room underground walloped me upside the head with deja vu, it really reminded me of something very specific from some other WAD, but I can't seem to put my finger on just what it was (I mostly mention this in vague hopes that someone else will know exactly what I'm talking about and tell me what that 'something' is, it's going to bug me until I remember). Unfortunately, I didn't find the last two secrets (which have the two plasma weapons in them) until after killing everything in the map, but I don't really mind SSGing a relatively nonthreatening cyb to death once in a while. As to that IWAD homage in the last secret, well...I'm not going to say anything, at least it wasn't forced on me by dint of being optional/well-hidden.

[Jaws In Space]

Map 8 - 2/5
Is this Tricks & Traps - To an extent yes, this map has Tricks & Traps. There are a few instances where the author of this map went out of the way for tricks & traps to happen at the same time. Now on the other hand, traps do seem to vastly outweigh the number of tricks, in fact there are hardly any tricks in this map. The bigger issue though is the lack of both Tricks & Traps, there are a few in here, but it seems that there is a bit of a gap in between each & the majority them are pretty standard, this map really could have gone into any megawad & the first thing to cross my mind about the map wouldn't be that it represents Tricks & Traps. I would have liked to have seen a map almost entirely composed of tricks & traps, even mapping tricks such as fake 3d floors & whatnot would have been a good idea to put in here.

What did I think of the map - This map started off decent enough, with some standard gameplay in an open room full of steps. Once I cleared out that area we come to the first trick of the map, how to get past the double set of bars. It took me a bit to figure this one out, but I did eventually get it without too much trouble, I thought that this one was pretty well executed. After getting past the bars I'm teleported back to the main area & then grab the blue key. Now even though there are 2 blue doors you are forced to go through the one that's not near the red door to progress through the map. Upon fighting your way through the area behind the first blue door a door behind the second blue door opens & now you can make more progress to finish the map. Personally I felt that one of the 2 blue doors should have been an optional area, because once I got done with the first one I was starting to get board with the map. Luckily if you go the right direction you can get the red key fairly quickly & skip most of that area behind the second blue door. The area behind the red door is pretty short just a few enemies & a teleporter that takes you to the yellow key room...damn, I forgot that there was a yellow key door to get through the exit. Here's where my interest in the map faded away, I was still having a bit of fun up until this point & I just didn't want to get that yellow key, but I pushed on pretty much rushing my way through the rest of the map to the exit.

So overall I didn't really enjoy this map for the same reasons I didn't like map 7, just to a lesser extent, it just went on too long & didn't keep my interest. Many of the areas that could have been optional were mandatory. Then there was the lack of Tricks & Traps in a map called Tricks & Traps.

[TimeOfDeath]

Here's a first exit max for map15 in 18:19.

[Demon of the Well]

Map 14 -- The Inmost Dens
Another Brucemap. That says most of what there is to say, really....most of what I have to say about the nuts and bolts of this map could pretty much be copy-pasted from my earlier comments on maps 02 and 03--interesting freehand shapes, generally underwhelming combat, some enjoyable secrets that seem a lot more articulated/thought-out than the main map progression (or basically-hidden-yet-non-secret optional areas in this one's case), blah blah blah. I guess it's worth mentioning that I do think this is the best of his three maps in the set, however, not only because the abstract subterranean ruins/marble hell-pit theme of the map seems like a far more natural fit for Bruce's characteristic architectural style (granted, I'm more personally partial to this theme in the first instance), but also because the nonlinearity/interconnectivity engendered by the whimsical shapeliness is more relevant to the actual play in this one, as opposed to being a pleasant yet largely inconsequential background aesthetic nicety--e.g. there's the side-route that you can use to bypass the second, trickier crusher partition near the arachnatron later on (Bruce used at least one slow-crusher in map 03, I didn't want to chance it with this one), to name one example. I suppose it could be said that the pitch of the action troughs out more noticeably in the later parts of this one than it did in those two earlier maps, but it had enough little quirks here and there that I didn't really get bored--I liked rocketslapping the fatty in the opening seconds, and the strangely pronounced concentrations of zombies behind each of the key-locked doors, etc.

[plums]

TimeOfDeath said:

Here's a first exit max for map15 in 18:19.

That was pretty cool. Recorded without sound still? I thought it was funny how you kept switching to the SSG at the end, you certainly could've been a bit more wasteful with rockets and cells, no big deal tho :)

[j4rio]

Yey, tod demo not of his map. I agree it's a pretty cool map. Can't say anything about the rest as I haven't played it.

[TimeOfDeath]

Yeah, been a while eh. Really liked this map.

plums, yeah I didn't do much planning, just tried to play fast without optimizing a route/ammo. All my demos for the last ~2 years are no sound (on my internet computer), except my SF13-castleofthedamned max (on my old doom computer) because Quake and Quark are on that computer. IMO, no sound only really makes a difference for FDAs because you don't know where anything is.

[cannonball]

TimeOfDeath said:

Here's a first exit max for map15 in 18:19.

Sweet, nice to see a demo for that map.

[elic]

kraflab said:

I enjoyed map 6 because it's a broken map and I skipped the first 2 keys :^)

Mind explaining how you managed to do that?

[Magnusblitz]

I assume there's a glide possible past either of the red/blue key barriers since they're at right angles with the wall and the gap is 32 units.

[TimeOfDeath]

MAP27 is broken in vanilla compatibility because imps are overlapping sector 115.

btw, more FDAs: D2INO-2ndHalf-fda-TOD.zip

map32-19
map20-22
map23
map24
map25-27
map28-29

[Demon of the Well]

There's apparently potential for a horrible malfunction in map 31's Hitler fight, as well--if you kill all of the Keens ringing the throne while Hitler is still alive, the double doorways to the exit open up (which is cool in a way, because you can run and get the BFG at the very end and then come back and use it on Hitler, somewhat cathartic), but then if you kill Hitler they instantaneously slam shut again. The same seems to happen if you do things the other way around, as well (that is, kill Hitler, then kill the Keens), although on one occasion when I did this the doorways only came halfway down and could still be passed. Sometimes the Keens seem to blink out of existence when they're hit, as well, although from what I've seen the game still usually registers this as a kill.

I know the wad's target platform is vanilla/Chocolate Doom, but I've tried this in -cl 1, -cl 9, and -cl -1 for shits and grins (with and without d2ino.deh manually loaded, on the off chance it had something to do with that) and it's always the same dysfunction (in -cl -1 I also experienced an error where the wall that rises to block off the exit to the throne room didn't come up when it should, maybe I skipped the linedef or something?). This seems like enough of an obvious error that I more than half suspect that I'm missing something painfully obvious and making a fool of myself in posting this, but if that's the case being called a fool is the only way I'm going to learn better, and if I'm NOT mistaken, it seems like the kind of thing that'd warrant a hotfix or reupload or the like.

[Xaser]

Wait, there's both keens and Hitler in the final room? There's only ever supposed to be one or the other.

If this is the case, the DEHACKED in the final wad is broken or out of date. The keens are only supposed to show up if Hitler doesn't (i.e. someone forgets to load the .deh in Choco or some other port that doesn't support embedded DEHACKED lumps) so the player can exit the map.

[Magnusblitz]

Okay good, I was reading Demon's post thinking "WTF, there were Keen dolls there?"

[Demon of the Well]

Yeah, looks like it's some conflict with embedded DEHacked info. In ZDoom (which I generally only use for WADs that require it) I always get Hitler and no Keens, but in the other ports I've tried (PrBooM+, Eternity) I always get both Hitler and Keens, regardless of whether or not I manually load the .deh file.

[TimeOfDeath]

Why didn't hitler just replace the keen instead of the nazi?

[Demon of the Well]

Just for the sake of thoroughness, I downloaded choco-Doom and tested it in that just now (haven't seen Doom at a resolution that low in what feels like a few centuries!), and it's definitely the .deh file (and presumably its embedded copy) that's the problem. Running choco-Doom with the file loaded leads to the Keens + Hitler scenario, while running it without the .deh file loaded leads to the scenario Xaser described where you get Keens, and just a regular SS nazi instead of Hitler.

[plums]

Weird, I'm fairly certain that wasn't the case in the beta. Maybe it just got missed somehow...

TimeOfDeath said:

btw, more FDAs

Cool, I think the later maps are definitely the better ones for the most part, nice to see some more demos. Maybe people should play this wad backwards?

Thanks for replying to my other post btw, I would miss having sound even on maps that I know, but you seem to do ok without it!

[TimeOfDeath]

I do miss the sound, but I'd rather just download wads and play them right away on the same comp. Might be weird at first, but you'd get used to nosound for sure. :)

[Demon of the Well]

Anyway, I played a good-sized chunk of this today, guess I'll continue on with the windbaggery.

Map 15 -- Industrial Zone
Again, very identifiably an older Cannonball map. In some sense you could say it's the extreme evolution of the particular form: Cannonball's earlier stuff is defined by a lot of boxy rooms with various doodads or platforms in their centers, all wrought in chunky, broadstroke architecture, and this map is essentially just a huge box where the aforementioned doodads are entire buildings that fit the general pattern. As before, the big boxy architecture isn't offensive to the eye, but is not particularly interesting either. The sandbox element to the progression is present but fairly subdued, in that half of the main buildings are key-locked, and keys come in sequential order; the exploratory aspect to the play is mostly only a factor in the early going, where you're running around looking for weapons and armor while absorbing constant chip damage from the initial crowda of zombies milling about in the streets. Choose well and you can have things under control in short order; choose badly (as I did initially) and you'll be in a lot of pain for a while until infight attrition eventually overtakes the vigor of the undead.

Once you've got your foothold, though, you're on the road to easy-street....piles and piles of ammo abound, soulspheres show up more often than they really need to, and the overall monster density is actually surprisingly low, eventually shifting to focus more on pockets of mid-tier monsters than on large quantities of anything. The big open spaces mean that avoiding fire is usually a snap, as epitomized by the somewhat underwhelming first cyberdemon fight--there's so much free space on that side of the 'river' that the crowd of monsters that ports in is really helpless to corral you and mostly end up turning on each other in frustration, especially with the cyberdemon relegated to his platform in the square. On that point, I did feel that the map started to get pretty sloggy and dull after a while, largely a consequence of so many of the monsters in so many of the areas being grouped as sniper-clumps on platforms on the peripheries of rooms, mostly nonthreatening and tedious to clear out given the large amount of running room. Things try to come alive a bit again in the western section of the northern blood area--the cyberdemon encounter there feels (and looks) like a more softballed version of the first part of Cannonball's segment from 'Meggido' (map 30 of NOVA), but it's too little too late. Lots of frontal monster assaults in the red key building, but their staggered deployment, the player's likely status as a 200/200 100/600 walking tank, and some bafflingly-placed monster-block lines mean that they don't amount to much. I found the secret exit fairly straightforward, but I didn't understand the purpose of crisscrossing the weird little redrock room with the Hitler portraits while hitting the skull megaswitches.....seemed like I could've taken the exit before then. Maybe it was a failsafe for people hamfistedly hammering on random switches despite the obvious clues in the red key room?

Anyway, this isn't a very offensive map, but it's probably too long for its own good (I'd agree that the northern blood area seemed tacked-on), and perhaps a mite too generous with the player.

Edit: Oh yeah, random tardy bug-report. In the secret wood/lava/bars homage-room, one section of the bars is flagged as passable, meaning that you can end up dying a comically senseless death in the inescapable decorative lava in that room.

Map 31 -- Wolfenstein
Dungeons. Spirals. Fountains. Towers! Hitler......Xaser.

Now we're talking, this (and some other hi-def Wolf3D-themed map 31s I can think of) is really the kind of thing that I'd rather Doom II's map 31 had been (that is, a proper map that winks/nods to days of yore, as opposed to an extended paper-thin easter egg). Very aesthetically attractive with a baseline dour grey stone/green grass/water theme, accented at key points by blood-red Nazi iconography (and a rather outre swastika-shaped fountain in the inner courtyard), and a consistent dynamic between the ground-level yards and the lofty battlements and towers. Hitler's great colonnaded throne room was my favorite part, with the throne itself highlighted by the tall north-facing windows filled with Hell's screaming red sky.

Gameplay here is consistently fairly undemanding but offers a solid variety of fight types over the map's deceptively concise length--big yard brawls with distracting fire coming down from on high are the dominant element, but there's some CQC in the inner reaches, and of course the battle with Der Führer and his party-crashing lackeys has a bit of a different flavor. I most liked the teleporter-snare trap that drops you in the middle of a bad situation when you first dash for the rocket launcher in the inner courtyard, but the Hitler fight, while not really dangerous given the amount of running room, was entertaining as well, amusing to see him grumpily make mincemeat out of every other fell thing in the room, including his arch-vile advisors (I'll bet he could go toe-to-toe with a cyb and come out on top, no sweat). There are some small faults here and there in the play, however. I think the setup with the premade corpses and the arch-viles is a damned cool idea in theory, but I've yet to see it actually pan out very well here or in any other map where it occurs, seems the viles are inevitably placed too far away from the center of the carnage to be effective (no doubt so they aren't killed by the barrels). Similarly, the imps that dot many of the battlements and the upper shelves of the spiral water-tower are pretty damned useless, and tedious to pick off without mouselook; a minor issue, but obnoxious for anyone who might want to demo the map, if nothing else. On the plus side, the map flows smoothly and feeds back into itself periodically, so it's probably viable to tear ass all around the castle getting everything all stirred up before beginning to actively deal with most of it. Incidentally, I had no problems getting the yellow key--given the large number of pathways off of the spiral tower, I figured I just needed to look around for a second switch after finding the first one that brought the key halfway down.

Cool map. easily one of the highlights of the first half of the WAD.

Map 32 -- Große
Ah, a map by Adam Windsor, didn't realize he'd made a map for this set. I assume that the 'in name only' thematic aspect of this level is supposed to be based on a layered pun--it's full of big scary monsters, big manly guns, and is also a mite icky-looking, courtesy of the classic marble + flesh Hell theme. Not too hard on the eyes, incidentally, although it does look markedly minimalist (possibly speedmapped?) in style in some places, particularly the yard with the two cyberdemons.

I'm starting to sound like a broken record here, but again I'd say that while this map isn't really offensive on any one level, as a whole experience I found it to be pretty underwhelming. In terms of gameplay and style, it somehow struck me as being rather old-fashioned in a way that none of the other maps so far have been--you look at the monster placement here, and you get the sense that it wants to be a difficult map, and indeed, this is the kind of map that many Doom players might have found quite difficult many years ago. These days, though, it's piss-easy given the generous armament, available movement space, freedom to retreat unchallenged at any time, most of the monsters in the final area being unable to physically reach the player, ammo starts out fairly tight in the first couple of encounters but rapidly becomes excessive, etc.; in the end, the skew towards mid/high-HP monsters that are mostly not placed in very threatening ways makes the map run longer than it needs to, fortunate that it's quite concise, as is Adam's wont. Most of what I see as flaws in the gameplay here I would attribute to Adam's lack of prior experience setting up this particular type of action; several of the earlier maps have been significantly more dangerous by dint of hitscan attrition alone, and I suspect that he'd have made a more formidable map if he'd stuck with his old standbys (see: the moderate attrition factor in his CC4 map), whereas this one is almost all bark, almost no bite.

[Demon of the Well]

Drown in my murky pool of tawdry words....

Map 16 -- Suburbs
Hmm, there are a number of things I like about this, and a few I don't. Unfortunately, the things I like are somewhat frontloaded and sometimes secondary or even tertiary to the core experience, and the things I don't dominate the later parts of the map and are very, to use a pop neologism, 'insistent upon themselves', meaning it ends on a sour note.

Alright, well, as to things I like, the first part of the map (a rather straightforward representation of the 'Suburbs' theme, incidentally) is fairly atmospheric, and contains a number of memorable aesthetic setpieces--the shadowy 'ritual apartment' with the two phasing Barons, the ruined balcony with blood pouring down through saturated points in the ceiling, hinting at an abattoir on the upper floor, the UAC (or generic law enforcement) precinct station that was clearly the site of a final desperate struggle, etc. Speaking of the precinct, I quite like the liberal usage of dead bodies and gore props and other accompanying effects (the pool of sector blood, etc.) to add a sense of grim narrative to the proceedings. The mostly dim lighting and dingy plaster/mortar/wood texture selection work fairly well (as does the stock music track); the inside of the precinct building and the visibly brighter/differently textured exit area are visually weaker, but not deal-breaking. The earlier parts of the map also field some surprisingly nasty smallscale traps, including two legitimately threatening uses of hell nobles (the Baron + teleporting HKs, and then the aforementioned Baron duo and their brutal pincer attack in the ritual apartment). There's some more iffy stuff going on, too, e.g. the chaingunner + burning barrel maze (basically encourages inching along and chaingun-tapping commandos behind trees and whatnot), but most of it doesn't really bother me too much.

Where the map faceplants is the painfully dull series of dark metal hallways behind the yellow door. Apart from being aesthetically monotonous and very simplistic/tedious from a play perspective (open a door, shoot a revenant, open a door, shoot a revenant, open a door, there's nothing inside, open a door, shoot a revenant, and so on and so forth), this area of the map is also surprisingly prolonged. I get the sense that the author realized this was probably going to get old fast, and so eventually introduced a twist--at some point while you're checking the many identical rooms, you suddenly find that unseen monsters are able to shoot at you through false walls that appear perfectly ordinary/solid...until you get tired of the bullshit and just leave the room in question. Man, it's like I'm in playing something from D!Zone here, I really don't understand this decision at all. It makes so little effective impact on the action (you eventually meet the arachnatrons on the other side some of these fake walls during normal progression, while you only meet the revenants in the other section if you find a secret) yet also destroys the representational immersion that most of the map seems to be aiming to create. The only way I can make any kind of sense out of the decision to include this section of the map (and this kind of silly shit within it) is to fall back on a thematic interpretation that I remember seeing Antroid posit at some point: that this dank, dour, prison-like environment is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for suburban disillusionment and isolation....and, uh....maybe....the monsters attacking through the walls represent.....demons of the mortal mind? The deleterious effects of withdrawing too far into the self? Bad karma? Offensive flatulence resulting from a poor quality lower-middleclass diet?

.......Yeah, to be honest, I really don't buy that this was the intention (my interpretation is that this part of the map is the way it is because it represents some of the author's earliest 'finished' stuff working with a level editor). And even if it was, I'd put forth that the metaphor was not worth the sacrifice in fun and immersion that was made to achieve it (and then to hammer it into the fucking ground), this section is awful, even the baffling 'climactic' arch-vile + lineblocked HK meatshield that can't actually do anything because they have almost no line of sight from their tiny closet. The downslope that the section represents tries to follow you when you leave the area, too....the positively demented zombie-wall + vile fight in the little blue-locked building is the very definition of 'hold down fire to clear the screen' gameplay.

I was sincere in my praise of several of the design decisions earlier in the map, and I am equally sincere in my disapproval of the direction the map eventually takes. Some things are better left on the cutting-room floor, and when this isn't done, maps that might otherwise have potential are bogged down by so much useless necrotic tissue.

Map 17 -- Tenements
Again, I doubt I'd have figured this for an an_mutt map if the textfile didn't tell me otherwise. The interpretation of the 'Tenements' theme is pretty straightforward, the setting does appear to be a small part of a shabbily-maintained housing project of some sort, with the attendant 'myhouse' representational trappings (beds, toilets, that sort of thing), with some infernal incursion in some of the interior areas. Aesthetically, a lot of the map's a bit of an eyesore; the seldom-seen red bricks and stucco dominate, with some strange zimmer-based trim, and lighting vacillates from flat fullbright (a light level generally not complementary to many of the textures used) to occasional strips of deep shadow, looks fairly artificial in this case. I think I could actually buy the argument that on some levels the map looks as tacky as it does in terms of texture combos and the like as a result of adhering to the sleazy 'tenements' theme, but some areas go beyond the realm of 'aesthetically unorthodox' into the waters of 'this looks like the map's not finished', ala the large eastern courtyard that houses the Big Dumb Arena Fight (TM).

Aesthetic tackiness aside, I reckon I found the play a little more interesting than an_mutt's earlier map 05. Some parts are rather questionable (e.g. the aforementioned group of random monsters vomited into a big square box, which mostly infights itself to death with very little effort from the player), but there are some interesting ideas as well, ala the first perched arch-vile that complicates one's opening moves (from a pistol-start, anyway), or the way an_mutt found ways to just keep piling more and more monster pollution into the diminutive blue skull Hell-shrine. I guess if you've read my ramblings in this thread up to this point you know what I'm about to say next....the map doesn't actively offend my sensibilities, but its relative strengths aren't pronounced enough and its gameplay scenarios not well-articulated enough for me to remember it very well after I've finished the WAD, I suspect. Again, I won't cry foul about the interpretation of the 'Tenements' theme (it's another one of those map names that seems kind of hard to make anything but a literal interpretation of), but the expression of that theme isn't complete or convincing enough to sustain the map on the basis of atmosphere or setting alone (nowhere close).

[mouldy]

TimeOfDeath said:

more FDAs: D2INO-2ndHalf-fda-TOD.zip

map32-19
map20-22
map23
map24
map25-27
map28-29

Excellent cheers for those. Especially enjoyed your run through map28.

Also thanks DOTW for the extensive write-ups. Hope you can keep it up.

[TimeOfDeath]

No problem, map28 sure was neat.

Here's a max for map20 in 7:09

[Xaser]

TimeOfDeath said:

Why didn't hitler just replace the keen instead of the nazi?

I just sorta picked the nazi at random because I'm replacing the nazi with a nazi, so it fit. It was kept that way (and the keens added) for humor's sake, since one of the early testers forgot to load the .DEH and were greeted to an epic throne room buildup followed by a single SS Nazi rising from the throne. It's a "bonus feature" now. :P

But yeah, this is a pretty serious break that warrants an /idgames-y update. The DEH in the final wad appears to be out of date -- the latest one can be found in this version of the map I found lying around: http://static.angryscience.net/doom/xa-wolfy-v4.zip

Glad to see folks are enjoying the map despite the oopsy, though. :)

[Tristan]

Xaser said:

The DEH in the final wad appears to be out of date

Looks like it MAP12'd and reverted itself.
Well, since this needs a new upload, I think there's some other less essential things that need sorting out too?

[mouldy]

TimeOfDeath said:

No problem, map28 sure was neat.

Here's a max for map20 in 7:09

Bloody marvelous. How come you run around the back of the fort at the beginning? If you just run straight in there through the front gate it will automatically close behind you.