The DWmegawad Club plays: Resurgence

[Memfis]

I suggest Garrulismo. A fun and wacky Spanish megawad.

[Jaws In Space]

Base Ganymede

[Magnusblitz]

Anything that's smallish and not full of 400+ monster maps

[scifista42]

Map27 - “Where the Poison Ivies Grow Wild”

Tough map, so many Cybers, revenants and other dangerous enemies and swarms - all of this on HNTR! At the same time, it was a damn great map. Awesome looking, good layout, well and efficiently challenging, like the maps before, just very intensely slaughterish. I've died many times, but the Afrit encounter forced me to cheat, because I've rushed forward, managed to get up the lift, saved, and then got annihilated immediately. It seemed like a good challenge, anyway, the entire blue key building with the new monsters, and the rest of the map too, of course. Extreme, but good level.

[Marcaek]

did somebody say requiem?

...no? oh ok then

32in24-14?

[Memfis]

A Requiem club would be great. It was the first user-made megawad I've played, so naturally I love it.

[Steve D]

Requiem. Been a million years since I played it, would love to see if it still holds up. And we gotta do it for Marcaek.

[AD_79]

Requiem.

[Demon of the Well]

Cynical: I found that since the mastermind's unwieldy hitbox tends to see it hang around towards the back of its platform most of the time, projectiles fired at it from most distances and positions tend to strike the lip of the platform and not the demon, whereas its superior position (and hitscan attack) mean that it is able to attack the rest of the field more freely. Rushing up to point-blank range or in front of the stairs with the plasma gun involves testing the RNG a little too much for my taste (recall that I'm playing most of these maps without savegames, though I did drop one in map 18 and 32, and a couple in map 20), so what I did instead was put the mass of bodies in the open field between me and the spider's minigun, which aggro'd many of them at him and gave me a little more freedom to fight the most pressing targets (mainly the afrits and the revenants on the sides). The spider still chipped me a few times while I was ignoring him, but ultimately I think this was a more satisfying (if not efficient) technique to use than simply blitzing spidey and then letting everything else infight.

Map 23 -- Claret Tides - 102% Kills / 100% Secrets
Ah yes, a paean to Crimson Tide (I can't remember PRCP 16 offhand, but I'm sure it would come back to me if I saw a screenshot or something), evident from the outset. The chaingunner stairs at the very start also really remind me of.......something that I can't quite put my finger on (maybe it's PRCP 16, heh), but other than that this the map is fortunately very much its own entity, rather than something recycling specific areas or constructs from classic maps. Indeed, I reckon there's some interesting commentary to be found in that while AV map 06 is itself a rather compact, modestly-scaled structure, and thus more similar stylistically (broadly speaking, of course) to Joshy's previously established style, he has really made the setting and general concept his own in his continued exploration of the more expansive, generously-scaled style we've been seeing more and more as we get deeper and deeper into Resurgence. Aesthetically, all the boxes are checked such that the kinship is obvious--lots of mortar with wood/iron bracing, many cupolas, vaguely pueblo-baroque architectural flourishes (stepped arches, colonnaded promenades made of torch inlets, etc.), and of course a sanguine sea. The desolate beige sky and grander scale give it a much 'colder' feel than either the previous Resurge map or its namesake, I think--one gets the impression that the blood sea here is just on the verge of congealing. While some of the exterior lighting/detailing is a bit austere (difficult to avoid entirely when you use this scale), for the most part it's again a very solid presentation. I do think that the way the horizon sharply terminates in the outer grey bounding wall does rob some of the exterior scenes of a bit of impact; I think that perhaps using an iron fence and then a much vaster sea of blood beyond, ala the setup in the first area of "Twi-Lite Massacre" might've been better, but alas, not a huge deal.

I find the level of action here very comfortable, requiring a bit more in the way of the standard Doom techniques (albeit tuned up pretty high) and less of the no-cover constant situational awareness testing from "Mt. Katoomba." The chaingunner stairs at the start pretty much DEMAND that you move quickly from the starting area in order to find a better position, and the ensuing ruckus as more and more monsters wake up is part and parcel for the mapset at this point. It's not actually terribly dissimilar in setup to the play early in "Waves of Darkness", but finds some additional pressure in that here the gutters and spillways of the fort contain harmful fluid, meaning that they can't be so easily used as a safe zone. That being said, the pressure's not really too intense, since many of the monsters can't actually pursue you freely, and there is a decent (though far from functionally infinite, ala map 10) supply of radsuits to allow for moderate use of the blood as a movement space; the only time I really felt radsuit pressure was in the bloodswimming fight to the northeast, and that largely because I was dicking around too much. Most of the vibrancy in the combat comes from the repopulation waves that hit the fort at or just after most key objectives; arch-viles make a strong contribution here between rezzing stuff and complicating movement around the upper areas via their line-of-sight attack. The ending sequence is very similar to map 19's and perhaps a feels a mite anticlimactic, but I don't suppose too many folks will be mad they only had to face two plasma marines at the end. Fun stuff, again my main criticism, as in many other Resurge maps, is that the big monsters feel a little 'off' in their implementation--the cyberdemon's vantage makes sense (amusing the way he's placed to throw rockets down that upper tunnel at one point, especially if stuff is still alive up there/on the balcony) but once again he's unsatisfying to actually polish off because he's essentially just a turret, and while the spiderdemon's appearance was genuinely unexpected, she still doesn't really seem to make much of an actual impact being back where she is.

Map 24 -- Nuclear Winter - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
From AV reference to self-reference (and superficial Scythe reference, I guess), it seems. I was able to recognize many of the areas from early parts of Speed of Doom (the stuff from map 01 being the most closely recreated, even a certain secret if I recall correctly), although the yellow key scenario to the west, with the base wrapping around both sides of a gulley, didn't really ring any bells for me (again, show me a screenshot and I'll probably be smacking my forehead and going "Oh that."). This kind of close, specific reference to other/past maps has never really been much to my taste, but I can appreciate the potential for narrative whimsy if nothing else; there is a certain sense of nostalgia in seeing the sites of long-past battles forlorn and rimed with ice.

The map also feels starkly different from those that immediately preceded it (and those which come after as well, incidentally), not only because of the pronounced frosty theme-shift, but also because it is a revisitation of an earlier point in the author's mapping career; apart from the yard near the exit and the long dark tunnel, things are MUCH more compact, even cramped at times, and the action reflects this. In a sense, gameplay here is again of a much more 'conventional' pitch than has been the case in many of these later Resurge maps, and indeed, even the move-move-move-anywhere-but-where-you-start concept that defines most of the Surge expats is not really in evidence; I didn't get a strong sense of how much non-linearity the map contains, but I definitely felt that this was much more of a guided tour, with a more closely controlled weapon progression and more of a prescribed route through the level (e.g. you eventually wrap around to the first yard again when it's time to exit), which in a sense is something you often necessarily see more of in smaller, tighter levels--that this map is made out of 3 or so such levels sewn together doesn't really change this. Lots of incidental combat and very smallscale straightforward setpieces rule the day, the most memorable for me being the big imp-rush with squidgy little monster-booth near the blue keycard.

Unfortunately, I also seem to remember a fair bit of stuff that didn't seem to work very well....at one point there was a point-blank closet trap containing hell knights which couldn't actually leave the closet (<--this one might have something to do with the way my port was handling actor heights, come to think of it), and the long dark tunnel is the definition of a boring/repetitive slog; here, not even the troll-specters which once again gleefully try to get you to blow yourself up really add much spice. Once again, the cyberdemon seems like a dubious inclusion, since it's trivial to fight him by himself in the open yard where he appears...it occurs to me that maybe he's supposed to be threatening more because of his potential problem as an ammo-sink--e.g. you might have to juke him repeatedly while trying to get through the knot of viles blocking the exit or something--since ammo levels do seem to fluctuate pretty wildly at times in this outing, but I myself gained back a lot of ground in the yellow key area (which is probably the one area of the map which allows for any real tactical flexibility, incidentally) via efficient rocket usage, and so didn't have much trouble with him, or the aforementioned viles, making this feel like an odd trip which peaks early and then just keeps going.

Again, I can understand the appeal here, but neither the concept nor the actual action interests me nearly as much as a lot of the other stuff Resurgence has been serving up lately.

[Memfis]

Demon of the Well said:

at one point there was a point-blank closet trap containing hell knights which couldn't actually leave the closet

A common mistake. Mappers tend to forget that hell knights are taller than most monsters (64 vs the usual 56), so if a door opens in a 64-high area, the HKs can't walk under it since the door sector is only 60-high. I actually started putting DEHs that change this in my wads because it's really inconvenient sometimes.

[Suitepee]

I'm going to request Winter's Fury for next month's DWMegawad Club, since it'll still be winter in February.

[Demon of the Well]

About next month: As far as Dobu's episode-based suggestion goes, I guess February is as good a month as any for that, given the month's odd length. To that end, some shorter episodes I would like to revisit/suggest include (would play any/all of these in any combination, as well as Vanguard too):

Back to Basics - Espi's 'Shores of Hell' replacement for Doom. This is actually my favorite thing that Espi made (yes, much more than Suspended in Dusk, and it also plays much better than his otherwise beautiful/engrossing Eternal Doom swansong), and should nicely suit those in need of some much lighter/more casual fare after tackling Resurgence this month.
Dark Resolution -- a.k.a. DR 2008. 11 map community episode with no particular theme or gimmick, heavily dominated/defined by maps by Death-Destiny, including what is possibly my favorite map to come out under that handle. Some really brutal stuff in here as a result, although the maps are again generally on the shorter/more compact side in comparison to Resurgence's endgame. I've not played this in years, but I've been wanting to revisit it since DWMC started doing episodes on occasion, so there you go.
Hellcore 2.0 -- Somewhat controversial 12-level mapset containing the most developed maps (plus several exclusives) from the otherwise highly abortive Mordeth-winning Hellcore megaWAD. 'Controversial' mainly because it heavily emphasizes atmosphere and Doom-narrative over action/gameplay at times (I honestly think the weird-ass weapon progression and route in map 01 puts a lot of people off), although it has some nice violent battles in it, too. Seems in tone like the sort of thing the Russian community would later go on to do, I think.
Titan and Titan 2 - 9 maps and 10-ish maps, respectively. ZDoom mapsets, but the ZDoomy stuff is used tastefully/moderately. The first tells the staple Doom story in microcosm (base-corrupted base-Hell); the second takes place entirely in Hell, but it's the best sort of Hell, that being the one that's very different from map to map. No real gimmick, just more episodes I remember enjoying.
Demons of Problematique 1 and 2 - Very short (G)ZDoom episodes (maybe 4-6 maps apiece) staged almost entirely in Hell. Very worthwhile in both atmosphere and action--quite bloody, but not terribly brutal at any point. Short enough to maybe need to find a third odd-length episode or something to fill out the month, though ('Lunatic', maybe?).

.....Alllll of that being said, if we're not going to actually go through with the episode thing, I guess I could be a sport and vote for Requiem too. It's as good a 32-level mapset for February as any since later on it has a number of tiny and I daresay borderline filler-y maps which blaze by in an eyeblink, meaning it would be easy to do 2 maps instead of 1 on a couple of days.

Edit: Yeah, Winter's Fury would be fine, too. It would give me a platform to feel like a unique and special and bold and edgy snowflake for telling everybody they're wrong about the bossfights being too long, heh.

And after next month, I'm probably just going to make Hellbound my new Vile Flesh anyway, unless the fine community mapping industry puts out something new and shiny to fixate on instead.

[dobu gabu maru]

^ Ideally Panophobia should be ready in March if people are up for more playtesting, otherwise Hellbound is a great wad to root for as well. But for next month, Requiem takes our February slot!

[AD_79]

dobu gabu maru said:

But for next month, Requiem takes our February slot!

Excellent. Considering how small some of the maps are you could do two in one day for a few days, like 25 and 26 in one day, for example.

[Suitepee]

dobu gabu maru said:

^ Ideally Panophobia should be ready in March if people are up for more playtesting, otherwise Hellbound is a great wad to root for as well. But for next month, Requiem takes our February slot!

I'd kind of hope NOVA 2 would be finished by March, which would make for an excellent DWMegawad Club in my opinion.

I'll join in for Requiem next month for sure.

[dobu gabu maru]

Suitepee said:

I'd kind of hope NOVA 2 would be finished by March, which would make for an excellent DWMegawad Club in my opinion.

I wouldn't hold your breath for NOVA 2—it'll be a couple of months still, even with the support we've been getting.

[Steve D]

I'm intrigued by DotW's episode picks. We'll have to set aside an episode month soon. I'm also intrigued by Hellbound because the screenshots I've seen are scrumptious, almost to the point of, "Who cares how it plays, I just want to walk around in it." ;)

[Demon of the Well]

Map 25 -- Technoprison II - 135% Kills / 0% Secrets
Ah, it makes perfect sense, doesn't it? I had completely forgotten that the original Technoprison had a vaguely snowy/icy bent to its theme, so it's not at all surprising to see the idea revisited here. The setup is different but the name of the game is the same--after some fairly light calisthenics to get the ball rolling (those chaingunners along the northern hall can be pretty nasty/annoying, though), we are put in a position where we must unleash chaos in order to proceed. The whole point of the 'prison' angle, I think, is that you spend the first few minutes looking at the legions and legions of demonic inmates you're inevitably going to turn loose, sweating over the impending riot as they relax in peaceful, stasis-induced repose (with small stimulative electrical currents to the brain's motor centers to induce a light jogging motion in order to keep the circulatory system from atrophying...? :D ), waiting until it's time to awaken and quite literally have you for breakfast. If you're paying attention to both the cellblocks (and their contents) and the layout, you can actually get a fairly detailed impression of how things will play out once you flip the innocuous-looking breaker switch with the not-so-innocuous-looking megasphere sitting directly in front of it (I wish it were positioned farther from the switch, incidentally, I didn't need it when I first came to it), and so let it not be said that this map presents a mindless slaughter--on the contrary, it's one of the only times in the latter part of Resurgence where you enjoy the benefit of being able to come up with a detailed plan ahead of time, rather than having to come up with it all on the fly while under heavy fire.

I had a lot of success using an active/pacifistic approach, running 'laps' through the prison over and over while allowing much of the riot to slowly but surely quell itself, mainly using the BFG to clear the occasional roadblock which would pop up in my path, while also occasionally firing a shot to gradually reduce the boney congestion on the lower level, particularly in the hallways jutting off from the small warehouse area. This approach meant that several of the arch-viles lived for quite a while (hence the notable killscore inflation in a map with an already beefy monstercount), but I was pleased to find that my surmise that they would generally be too engrossed in the riot to actually target me was a good one; always nice when a plan comes together. On that note, I said 'laps' earlier because, despite my planning, I found that monsters were able to path through the layout fairly well (I was surprised when one of the cyberdemons accessed the lower level by casually walking right down the staircase nearest the red bars), meaning that I was compelled to regularly make adjustments to my route in order to avoid getting caught between two roving groups of inmates. Fortunately, the highly interconnected layout subsidizes this approach nicely, leading to a fun and fast-paced free-for-all that reminded me more than anything of 'Obsidian Hotbed' from earlier in the WAD, which I also enjoyed.

It definitely tails off after the riot dies down, though, and some of the later action seems a bit phoned-in in comparison. I made getting onto the outer mancubus wall more troublesome for myself than it needed to be by refusing to kill the cyberdemon, a bad call on my part (I suspected more arch-viles would appear there to block me at the end since that's been such a running gag with this megaWAD, but it turns out to just be another cyberdemon instead), but once I was up there I found that moving along the wall was very much an exercise in 'hold down fire 1; sidestep occasionally.' The gasbag trap has potential but isn't bad if you can spare a couple of BFG shots (many of the commandos were dead before they even popped up, probably casualties of infinitely-tall splash damage from when I was throwing rockets at the revs from below earlier), and the field of plasma guys on posts, well.....I really don't see any point in that, since those guys are easy to hit and easy to hide from or ignore (I can only surmise they were supposed to complicate the gasbag fight, but if so the timing of the trap/placement of the trigger is definitely botched). Afrits at the end are fine, I guess some folks will have their first opportunity here to learn the hard way that BFGing them is riskier than for most other enemies (I myself already learned that hard lesson well from seeing them in other PWADs...).

The main event is fun, and my overall impression of the map is favorable as a result, but while I've spent a lot of this month saying how much I generally prefer longer/meatier maps to short/fast ones, this is a good example of a map that goes on for a lot longer than it needs to (and the fact that you can skip most of the later stuff by climbing on architectural trim and then doing a little precision falling doesn't really get it off the hook ;) ). Short/concise would've been better here.

Map 26 -- The Library - 120% Kills / 66% Secrets
I enjoyed the hell outta this, but in a way it's a heartbreaker because I know it's the sort of spiteful bastard of a map that's going to alienate/aggravate a lot of its audience. It sports 'only' 300 monsters used to cover a single vast location, but the way those monsters are placed in concert with architectural features like crushers, stack-mazes, level-spanning crossfire vistas, and any number of other things gives you very little peace for a majority of the runtime, proving that just because a map's architecture is macroscaled doesn't mean it can't feel oppressive and intimidating. While there are a couple of side areas, for the most part the action is highly centralized, taking place on several different levels of the huge central archive. This vertical nesting makes for a very interesting playspace and allows Joshy to wring quite a lot of variety in combat setups out of what is again a fairly simple layout: if you're not being hunted through the stacks by a cabal of arch-viles and their cyberdemon guardian while a hellish bombardment rains down from high above, you're hopping across bookcases and punting imps out of your way while dueling with floating terrors, or trading salvos with a squad of zombified ex-comrades across a chasm of dead air high in the rafters. And all that's before the place sinks deeper into the molten sinkhole that is slowly cremating it!

The Surge kickstart concept returns here, but it's more subtle and thus more sinister in its execution. Not long after disturbing the library's moribund silence, you catch a glimpse of the arch-viles as they teleport away, and so you know they're going to be prowling around somewhere deeper within the decaying edifice, waiting for you, which may make you hesitant to press forward. But press forward you must...moving on, you encounter a cyberdemon and a withering crossfire from the periphery, which in turn drives you through one of the two crusher sections, not because you have to run or die, but simply because you can't accomplish much from here. These crushers essentially soft-gate movement into/out of the lower area, making retreat impractical once you've entered, but one may well not realize this until the arch-viles awoken earlier start converging from far-flung corners of the archive, which can be panic-inducing....so you run deeper in, waking up even more of the spindly fiends lurking in the stacks, and soon you are a desperate animal, hunted through unfamiliar surroundings where a moment's hesitation likely means death....I love it! It's a real adrenaline rush struggling to work out a plan on the run, and then even more of one when you start stumbling on destructive implements that allow you to gradually turn the tide, eventually becoming the hunter instead of the hunted--there's a real sense of drama to it, hard to pull off in a game as simple as Doom, but brilliant when it occurs. In contrast to map 25, which added a lot of underwhelming stuff after the main event, The Library comes to a classy, cinematic conclusion when the central space is partially subsumed in lava to create a dancefloor for a cyberdemon tagteam 'miniboss' duel as a preamble to finally breaching the ritual sanctum, which in turn brings on one last desperate assault by the remnants of the now devastated coven of booklords. Brilliant I say!

....but I can't overlook the fact that some of the stuff here is less than sterling. I imagine the constant problem of homing rocket sniper-fire from the revenants on high that persists for a loooong stretch of the map is going to drive lots of players batshit, but I don't mind at all; what I take issue with are the two laborious mancubus-climbs that must be navigated en route to two important switches. The stair-climbing one's not TOO bad since there are fewer total fatsos and it's quicker to plasma-blitz through, but the lift-riding one is a bafflingly awkward (and bland-looking!) exercise in lard-grinding which temporarily brings the level's otherwise fine pacing to a dead stop. I imagine these setups were supposed to be soft gates like the initial crushers to keep the player from just fleeing the hunting grounds below, but whereas the crushers present a risk/reward means of potentially deadly retreat, all these really do is act like roadblocks that have to be dutifully cleared aside, even for those players who fought like men (and women) and played the hunting ground to its fullest. Not cool. It's also a little odd that the last enemy you're likely to fight is a lone afrit in the vast open lava-hall....he works okay in that setting, don't get me wrong, but it could easily have accommodated giving him 2-3 buddies to deal with as well, a bit of an odd conclusion for a map that's otherwise so good about not ending in anticlimax.

Still, these clunky bits don't seem to have soured how much I greatly enjoyed playing most of the level, and I might go so far as to say that this is my favorite map in the WAD up to this point. Fine work, Joshy.

[Capellan]

AD_79 said:

Considering how small some of the maps are you could do two in one day for a few days, like 25 and 26 in one day, for example.

Oh, are 25 and 26 small? :)

Can probably do 29 & 30 on the same day too, which would let us squeeze the 30 non-secret maps into 28 days.

[tourniquet]

25: "Technoprison II"

Well that was fun, seeing all the imprisoned hordes was kinda intimidating but at least you get a forecast of the chaos you'll encounter eventually. Being unaware of when you'll unleash all the inmates kept me on my toes and i hesitated whenever i ought to press a switch. Once this hell broke loose i actually had a decent play, the map was very spacious and provided lot's of room to herd and tackle without getting cornered, this fight sure was the hightlight of the map. Didn't struggle much with anything afterwards. The plasma marines felt kinda pointless easy targets since they're stuck on the posts and thanks to the BFG i had not much trouble with the afrits.

26 "The Library"

Phew sniper hell, i allready knew about the 30 sec door so i had a bit of an advantage. The map isn't that hard to pistol start but taking out those viles in the lower part with SSG/CG only sure is tricky and time consuming. A lot of trial and error until i've managed to clear the libary/graveyard part, didn't like the Manc/Cybie climb up. Lot's of frustration in general while trying to beat this one. Nonetheless an interesting map, i just wasn't able to handle it properly.

[NuMetalManiak]

I don't think NOVA 2 should be ready because I am still too lazy to fix the blue key on MAP04 :p.

MAP27 Where The Poison Ivies Grow Wild

I love how like one baron sees me out of ALL THOSE MONSTERS. yep, this is another slaughterfest, and one I'm glad to have found fun rather than frustrating. the biggest dangers of course are arch-viles and stray projectiles from everywhere, especially flying rockets. then there's damaging floors that are thankfully hampered by careful radsuit placement. not much else to talk about, except maybe that the rush of arch-viles guarding the westernmost switch can be difficult without a BFG. the dead marine corpses showed quite a lot of suspense too, whether it's the spiderdemon before the platforming section or that one hall before the blue key. THAT hall had me surprised with how many afrits there were once I opened it up. that's a fucking bastard of an ambush, accompanied by spectres which block your way back. the ending area was more hordes of monsters over the lava, where the partial invisibility could prove to be a bad powerups in terms of arachnotron evasion. really rough and nasty map that was thankfully fun.

[scifista42]

I've started playing MAP28 and I'll probably give up, because I would need yet another savescum to beat the map, even on HNTR or ITYTD, and MAP29 and MAP30 gave me the same impression when I've loaded them up.

This was a great megawad, that's for sure. Visuals, level design and gameplay were top notch. The least satisfactory (=HORRENDOUS) maps for me were the extreme slaughterish ones, while I can see that they're definitely quality ones, I can't handle them, and I don't like seeing too big enemy hordes anyway (unless I'm playing ZDoomWars, where they don't necessarily attack only me). Resurgence gets 5 stars from me anyway.

[MajorRawne]

Scifista42, the last three or so maps don't support anything below ultra violence. That was an annoyance, to say the least.

EDIT: Demon Of The Well, I love reading your epic posts, it makes me feel like I'm playing them again and enjoying them in a different way.

[Lingyan203]

@MajorRawne The last 3 maps I actually did beat on UV but required a lot of quicksaves halfway through the maps.

[Tristan]

I liked most of what I played except for MAP08. Still pissed that my computer died twice in the space of ten days (and I MISSED 31), but chances are I would've preferred most of the later levels to what I played, depending on how I managed the difficulty. I suppose I'll still have to play 14-onward at some point because the wiki articles still need finishing (presumably).

Anyway, maybe 4th (5th?) time lucky I'll finish a month here with Requiem.
Requiem's easy, right?

[Capellan]

It's certainly no Resurgence, difficulty-wise. I finished it twice on HMP playing keyboard only.

[MajorRawne]

Requiem is a more traditional megawad dating from a time when there WAS no tradition. It's a defining epic of Doom. It completely blew me away back then. Wonder how it will hold up? Hopefully a lot better than Vilecore! :P

[Steve D]

Just thinking out loud here, but another episode to consider for any episode month would be Dinner by Damian Pawlukanis. It's a 1995 E2 replacement which is nothing much to look at, but which has some fairly mean-spirited gameplay. You're gonna get perforated in this one. Looking at the idgames reviews, Marcaek disliked it, but DeathevokatioN and pcorf really enjoyed it. I have dim memories, but do remember feeling stressed when I took a quick look at E2M1 about a year ago.

[mouldy]

I fell well behind so I'll try a quick catch-up

Map23 - “Claret Tides"

Nice map, I like the theme of the island fortress. Funny start, I took one look at that army of chaingunners and decided to sneak past them and leave them to it. Luckily there was enough shit flying around that I could hide in a corner and wait til the dust settled. My first death came from the sinking platform trap, thanks mostly to more chaingunners. On my second attempt I nuked those guys straight away and then just legged it, so for the rest of the map I could hear an angry horde of revenants outside. I think they are still there even now. The second tricky part was the dash through the poison blood gauntlet with 2 archviles suddenly appearing, and my radsuit running out. Apart from that it was plain sailing, and very enjoyable overall.

Map24 - “Nuclear Winter”

Fun seeing these old maps given a sprinkling of snow. Didn't have too many problems with this one, a lot of the fighting is whatever happens to be standing in your way, but the final area provided a bit more of a tactical landscape. By the time I finished off the cyber I had so little ammo I had to punch the last exit archvile to death, that was probably my fault though. I noticed some hellknights stuck in closets which I'm sure has been mentioned, and some hexagon floor tiles that look like they were shifted at some point and don't line up. Cool montage map.


Map25 - “Technoprison II”

Great slaughtery fun. I'm my own worst enemy in these kind of maps, running around trying to get everything infighting. I'd already picked up the blue key without firing a shot, but the idea that the more stuff I leave alive the more they will all kill each other later doesn't always work, and in this case there is just such a massive army to unleash its hard enough trying not to get cornered by a wall of revs. Somehow I managed it, not without a fair few deaths. Nothing beyond that battle is quite as tough, although the plasma zombies can wipe you out pretty fast if you are unlucky. As for the final afrits I left them to argue with the cyber and ran through the exit. An excellent map.

[Demon of the Well]

Thanks, Rawne. Also, I would try this 'Dinner' WAD, that's one I've never played before.

Map 27 -- Where the Poison Ivies Grow Wild - 103% Kills / 100% Secrets
I suppose it was inevitable that there would be a Poison Ivy map in Resurgence, although the slight change of flavor in the previously straightforward naming convention is interesting in that from a gameplay standpoint this is arguably the least traditionally 'Poison Ivy-ish' Poison Ivy map to date, and that's including 'Fireking Says No Cheating' from BTSX (in that one there still is no monster that can see you when the map first loads ;) ). In a sense, I think that the Poison Ivy series, at least as previously known, derived a lot of its character from the compact nature and squat stature of Joshy's older maps; perhaps the series' greatest hallmark is how much it makes you fight to gain a foothold by dint of denying you anywhere to run or hide; you are never safe not only because so many angles are covered, but because a given monster (or projectile) almost never has to travel very far in order to reach you. A good deal of that has been lost here in this Neo-Joshian epic; indeed, in these spacious surroundings, with good footwork (and a mind towards arch-viles' fields of view) you can 'hide in the open' as it were, with even the persistent presence of lava in many areas presenting only a very soft restriction on one's movement, once again on account of a fairly generous supply of radiation suits. While many of the Poison Ivy hallmarks remain--the aesthetic, the opening shot, some of the cyberdemon placement, etc.--in many ways this a very different beast, some new creature wearing the older one's skin.

There is something of an unusual vacillation in the map's action, perhaps reflecting a collision of old and new sensibilities. At the outset, this plays very much like what I've taken to referring to as an 'oldschool' or 'zone of influence' slaughtermap--powerful groups of monsters decisively control essentially 99% of the board at the start, with different arrangements of foes encamped in different zones from which they generally cannot be easily coaxed. In this kind of map, it's the player's task to take that 1% of the board not controlled by monsters (in this case, this 1% is chiefly comprised of the lava moat and a couple of alcoves near some small supply caches) and gradually expand it, through guile or simple strength of arms (ideally, a bit of both), until the entire board has been conquered. It's very much a game of momentum, and while I wouldn't say it's usually particularly 'cerebral' in nature (this is still Doom, after all), there's a definite element of strategy and perhaps planning and foresight involved. The main twist to the general scenario in this map's case is that you have to do some heavy lifting (or lava-hopscotching, as the case may be) before you can lay your hands on any of the high-end weapons, meaning that pressure is highest early on not only because the monsters still control so much ground but because your own offensive capacities are fairly limited. Survive the first rush, though, and it's a very workable scenario that largely lets you proceed at your own pace (as is so often the case for this style of map), with the main concern likely being some of the signature PI cyberdemon watchtowers, who are likely to remain in play until very late in the map.

For how much it initially seems to commit to this initial style, however, it's a big map, and it finds the time/space to shift gears entirely once you drop into the lava-chute to claim the BFG 9000. Beginning with an Acme brand Revenant Corridor (a staple encounter type for modern crowd/motion control slaughtermaps), from this point the map takes us on a long linear journey of setpiece battle after setpiece battle as we climb around the periphery of and ultimately penetrate into the inner reaches of the creeper-ridden fane. Some of these are more memorable than others--I kinda like the cyberdemon who King of the Hills you from the top of a lift while a bunch of malcontents spawn behind you, myself--but the obvious climax is the blue key killbox, where my brash playing saw me unleash the closets full of afrits before the cyb duo + skeletons had been properly cleaned up. Weird thing is though, that after all of this setpiecey stuff, at the end the map tries to go back to that oldschool slaughter flavor. One of the treats of that style of map is that, once you control the board, you will occasionally get to defend it from an onslaught as a force of monsters tries to take it back, and we see that here with the cacoswarm waiting topside when we return from getting the keys--a simple and not very pressing encounter, but fun to mitigate.

Unfortunately, as has been the case with a couple of the other maps, the map just keeps going and finally ends on something of a bum note--the final battle (or battles, depending on how you play) is really disappointing. Here again, monsters control an area which they won't/can't leave on account of a few huge monster-blocking lines, but the geometry, supply balance, and in this case even the monster composition grossly favor the player at this point, meaning that your final experience in this map is plugging away at a couple of groups of monsters as they pace helplessly to and fro (a convenient blursphere handily negates the ranks of chaingunners, who would otherwise be the only really credible threat). A wall of specters and cacos stuck behind a blocking line, Joshy? I'm sorry, I just don't understand what the intent was here at all.

A map with a lot of ups and downs and maybe a little bit of an identity crisis. Certainly not without its good times, but I'm finding it a lot harder to forgive the questionable stuff in this one, for whatever reason.