The DWmegawad Club plays: Alien Vendetta

[Capellan]

Map13
Brad’s first solo effort for AV is a romping, stomping level of unabashed, straightforward bloodlust. He’s certainly not afraid to throw big waves of monsters at you! Happily he’s also smart enough to vary up the combinations so the encounters feel different. A mob of troopers become a gleeful slaughterground, for instance, while other times you’ll be hit with a one-two punch of bosses and meat shields, or be faced with the choice of what is better: fighting a lone cyber or unleashing a swarm of pinkies to function as rocket shields for you? About the only complaint I might have is that there is occasionally a little too much goatboy action. They’re fine in the big swarms but they’re sometimes used in smaller scale encounters and in those they’re really just time and ammo sinks.

I also liked that you only needed the red OR the blue key to get the yellow and thus exit the map. It’s nice to see optional content in a level like that. Especially in one that was fun enough to go ahead and get both anyway!

Structurally, I wish there had been a little less backtracking - or more to do while backtracking - but it wasn’t too much of a hardship really.

All was fine from a looks perspective. A lot of orthogonal walls perhaps, but there was plenty of detail to break things up and keep it visually interesting.

Definitely in the “winners column”, this one.

[Santos]

MAP11 NEMESIS
The final part of the first part of Alien Vendetta.
A great master piece. In my opinión this is 1 of the best maps of AV. The maps details are great, have a good architecture and the midi fits perfectly. But the gameplay is fun until red key. The blue key part is almost borring and confuse, i have to confess that i got lost many times in that part and the ending is like a faster ending to finish the map fast. I give it...
4/5 Stars
And here a video of one of my favorite part, the yellow key área.
CYBERDEMON VS SPIDERMASTERMIND epic show sine missione.

[Steve D]

Map11 – Nemesis by Martin Aalen Hunsager

If you know me, you know what's coming. ;)

If Martin had hired a team of psychologists, he couldn't have crafted a map I would hate with burning passion more perfectly than what he did here. I'm not going to claim that this is an objectively terrible map, though it contains many elements most Doomers seem to cite as things they dislike, such as sky-high sniping Chaingunners you can't even see, or progression so obtuse you have no idea where you're going, or monotextured rooms so thoroughly monotextured that the walls and floors match! Well, at least it's non-linear, which I reckon pleases those who preach the mantra that non-linearness is next to godliness. But me, from my own perspective and viewpoint, I view this as without question the single worst map I've played in years. How many years? Well, probably since the first time I played it, perhaps in 2002.

I recognized this map when I finished Toxic Touch and took a look at the opening. I felt a squirming in my gut, the result of some vague, undefined memory of unpleasantness. I'm pretty sure I hated this map so much the first time that I likely quit playing Alien Vendetta. After all, I didn't like Toxic Touch, either.

I won't discuss the gameplay that much. It was the kind of thing we saw a lot of in Estranged, with big heavy snipers all over the place – of more than 200 monsters, it seemed about 130 were snipers -- and with squinchy areas even squinchier than those of Estranged. The irregular cavern walls were so close that they kept snagging me. It was a game of being restrained, whether grabbed by walls or pinned down by heavy snipers, the map sought to prevent rapid forward progress. Wanna charge through that tunnel to engage Imps in the chamber ahead of you? Think twice, because you're liable to get blindsided by a Chaingunner shooting through a slit in a wall that's expertly curved to guarantee that the unseen Chaingun Charlie will liberate 30 points or more from your health, and since you play much of the map without armor, Ramboing is perhaps best left to those who play maps multiple times.

The progression was weird, maybe because the first key I grabbed was the optional blue one. I figured out that waterfall dealie, and soon thereafter found myself in an area where I made a difficult sideways keyboarder jump – after 4 tries – from a ledge slightly wider than a human hair to grab a Megasphere, when not more than 100 feet ahead, there's a Soulsphere on one side of a drop, and a Blue Armor on the other. Before long, the map was raining Soulspheres! You could collect them like stamps.

Oh, and the unmarked key bars! I actually gave up in despair when I had the blue and yellow keys and no clue how to get the red one. I opened the map in DB2 to figure out the path. I also needed DB2 to locate the exit since I couldn't puzzle that out, either. Whenever I play a map where finding the way out is the hardest thing, I figure something is wrong.

I guess this map is sort of like Tomb Raider, but without Angelina Jolie to look at. It also has elements of an Indiana Jones adventure. I would imagine that this map appeals to fans of Eternal and other mappers of obtuse and confusing adventures. And there were some good things about it – some tasty cavern architecture, the staging of that Soulsphere in a round window in the red key area – but for everything like that, there were acres of unadorned marble walls, and terrible excuses for encounter design.

Well, I guarantee that when I insisted on Alien Vendetta to prevent a 5th straight month of modern mapsets, I did so with the expectation that I would love it from beginning to end. Alas, now that E1 is officially over, I can only say that I think it's the weakest and most annoying E1 I've yet encountered in the DWMC. I'd rate E1 as below mediocre. Actually, Map01 thru Map06 wasn't that bad, with Map06 standing out as The Map From The Future while pretty much everything else felt like A Bunch of Maps From 1996, and not the best 1996 maps, either. I liked Cargo Depot more than most of the players, and Seclusion was really fun. Best by far was Hillside Siege. I didn't mind Showdown that much, but I basically hated everything after that, with the greatest of all hates directed at Nemesis, which now has a featured spot on my list of The Top 5 Worst Doom Maps of All Time. Others obviously see it differently.

E2 simply has to be better than this.

[Cynical]

As much as I like most of AV E1, I have to share the hate for map11 (and I always cringe when I see it praised to the heavens).

God, that map is horrid. The worst part is the potential to fall back down to the water at the start, forcing you to spend the next 10 minutes of your life climbing through empty caves to get back to where you were. Fun!

SteveD, don't worry, I suspect you'll like the next three. Especially 13.

[Steve D]

Cynical said:

SteveD, don't worry, I suspect you'll like the next three. Especially 13.

Glad we agree on Nemesis. Happily, I can say I already liked Map12, albeit with some reservations. After reading about Map13, I made a save just before 12's exit in case I want to play continuous. After all, I'm at full health and with every weapon, plus a Backpack -- thanks, Adam and Brad! ;) All that stuff might come in handy against the hordes ahead.

[Cynical]

I don't think you'll have problems with 13. Given your propensity towards saving, I don't think you'll have any issues with anything prior to 26, as long as you don't accidentally stumble into map 32 (and, notably, carryovers won't even help you in 26 or 32).

[baja blast rd.]

map13

I was filled with glee when I saw the cyberdemon -- it was like "This level can't be serious", but in a good way. The gameplay is mostly an itinerary puzzle with a mild secret hunting element. Actual combat isn't demanding with the right armament, but if you go the wrong way at the wrong time, you might find yourself in a hole, blocked by meat with no way to make progress.

There was a bit too much grinding for my tastes early on and not quite enough later on with the RL and BFG. Would have appreciated some larger areas dedicated just to spam them. But overall, certainly an audacious level, with many opportunities for humor.

Here is a video. :D

[NuMetalManiak]

MAP13 S.T.

There's nothing like mowing down a huge horde of zombies or imps in a hallway. MAP10: Toxic Touch was one to provide that, but this amps up the horde killing a whole lot more. The huge zombie ambush at the beginning is surely a painful one, but it's a breeze compared to the rest, plus you get an SSG and soulsphere easily from there. The big cargo area has a pretty hard cyberdemon to tackle along with a few other enemies, plus a secret blue key for later. The garage behind it has mancubi and demons, leading to the exit.

Despite that main area, it seems a lot of the focus is tended to all the areas on the right hand side of the map. There's even more enemies over there than in the main areas. Even the optional areas are nicely done, including the tight corridors where the plasma gun and BFG switch. Speaking of the latter, the next corridor is the one moment where I really REALLY liked Alien Vendetta, that one large corridor with all those zombiemen. As I was saying about Toxic Touch, this one amped up the zombie corridor killing and I always find it awesome to blast through every goddamn zombieman possible. If that weren't a thing, well, they'll just shoot each other anyways. But jeez that sure is one of the best parts of AV as a whole for. The BFG is in a room requiring the blue key in that same corridor, but its ambush can easily be escaped and held for later. To top it off, the big varied horde that comes at the end of the corridor is very rough, and the next one leads to the rocket launcher and the teleporter to the red key. Again, the imp ambush at the rocket launcher can be saved for later.

So all that talk about the northern half of the level, let's go on to the south side. The blue door leads to some supplies which can help (and yes you can get the megasphere). The first area past the red door can be very difficult to rush through, so a BFG helps against the spiderdemons and any of the other damage cheaters. The area with the vats is a letdown though, with some backtracking slowing things down, and the invulnerability-fueled archie fight isn't all that good anyways. Have I mentioned I don't like large-scale backtracking? Ah, well MAP14 has one of these too, but overall I enjoy both levels to this day and still acknowledge this map for making me like AV.

[Salt-Man Z]

MAP13: Suicidal Tendencies
39:24 | 100% Kills | 72% Items | 100% Secrets

Ha ha, this level is awesome. Right from the bat I was thinking "Holy crap I'm glad I'm doing this on continuous" when I shot a zombie and suddenly ALL THE SHOTGUNNERS started spilling out the doors. Goodness gracious. The zombie tunnel was amazing, too. This is (yet) another level I'd forgotten which WAD it was in; I'd long conflated it with TNT MAP20 somehow. (Or at least, when I replayed that one, I kept expecting to find bits of this map: namely, the northern room with the imp teleport cubbies, and the crate room, which was somehow less impressive here than I remembered it being.) Somehow I missed 12 items but found all the secrets. But what a fun map.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP12: Entropy
100% kills, 10/11 secrets

A quick and bloody techbase level split into two halves. A lot of people said it reminded them of TNT, but I got a Tom Hall vibe from the first half, which has a lot of that box-hallway-box-hallway design (although it doesn't have the same "fill in all the minimap space" design his maps usually feature). The second half thankfully changes things up with a couple of nice ambushes, and I love that yellow switch assembly. Lots of secrets here too, though they're basically all of the "push the different colored wall" variety, which is fine with me. I like color recognition, makes me feel like a big boy.

[Spectre01]

Map 13: Suicidal Tendencies

A rather fun map that's a bit like a larger map04 in that it's full of X-by-Y groups of enemies filling large sections of the map for the player to chew through. I did have some ammo issues at the start and feel that a backpack would've been nice since I had to skip a bunch of cells and rocket boxes. I found the BK and ended up clearing the area before the exit well before heading to the YK joint, so I ended up backtracking the entire map just to exit. The Invul AV spam was alright, but I goofed the first attempt by getting knocked down repeatedly. Good map overall though.

[gaspe]

Map13: We keep going with the techbase theme. Glaring is the high monster count when you start, and the map its full of silly moments. The long corridor filled only with former humans, the crate storage for once opulated with tough monsters are what I liked the most. All the places are stuffed with many enemies. It feel quite like a level from Hell Revealed, except that the map looks actually good. In particular I liked the combination of the colors here.

[Deadwing]

13: I don't this style of gameplay lol Holy shit, 600 monsters to kill, still I've killed
each one of them behind a door/cover. What's the point of having that
much monsters if you're going to deal with them the same way? Both
Spiders Mastermind died and I've not even noticed they were there due
to like 2376 revenants behind a 64-length DR door. BTW, it would help
a lot if these doors were D1 instead of DR. 4/10

[antares031]

MAP14 - Overwhelming Odds
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

A direct sequel of the previous level with even more monsters. Thankfully, the author learned the lesson from the prequel, and now you can grab some backpacks at the beginning. But the very first part is not my taste, actually. It's almost like that "**** you and just die" trap from other cruel megawads. Which is even worse, you can enjoy some more monster infighting simulator by activating switches around the arena, spawning more and more demons & shotgun guys. After that, I recommend you to grab that "secret" BFG in the next room. It's technically not a secret, but it will allow you to grab one more secret item if you have sufficient amount of health. With a BFG, it will help you to deal with more and more slaughter scenes, such as a horde of demons or groups of cacodemons, and even that vicious trap in the room with blue keycard. Overall, it's a pretty same level to the previous level; a straightforward layout with tons of slaughtering scenes. To me, this is one of the most memorable levels in this megawad, in both positive way and negative way.

[Paul977]

Map 13 Suicidal Tendencies:

Some good carnage here. The first slaughterish level of AV I guess, set in a well designed doom 2 style techbase. It can be tricky if you go in the cyber area without the proper stuff to deal with it. RL/PR/BFG are placed in different rooms and protected by a trap.
I remember the first time I played this one and grabbed the yellow key instead of the invuln ending roasted.
Fun stuff overall. Fan of slaughter maps shouldn't miss the next one by the same author.

[Capellan]

Map14
For some reason, the game started me in the deathmatch section of the level. I have no idea why. So ... yeah I flicked a switch and exited. Sorry Brad!

[baja blast rd.]

map14

Pretty cool map. Whereas map13 was mostly just very amusing, not particularly fun to play in most parts, this one is full of enjoyable action.

The most amusing thing about this map is that two of the three secrets in the map, both found in the exit hub, are completely worthless -- the single shotgun stimpack secret and the redunant backpack. That seems intentional. The main attractions are the two hidden-in-plain-sight unmarked secrets. The BFG requires humping a certain crate, and the megasphere secret can be acquired in three ways. The vile jump is the most intuitive, but there is also the SR50 and even a rocket jump.

The SR50 is easier when you just angle yourself towards the megasphere. I wanted to save it for the rocket jump grab. (In all ironies, the straightforward jump seems to be a lot harder in ZDoom-based ports, because of the way momentum isn't preserved over changes in floor height.)

There is also a ginormous VAT of pinkies. The BFG makes quirk work of these, although it's fun to fight them back with rockets. Also, there is setup Steve D will probably enjoy. :)

[Spectre01]

Map 14: Overwhelming Odds

Not as overwhelming by modern standards but still packs enough challenge to be interesting. Again, this map involves blowing through rooms full of 20*X-enemy with the occasional teleport trap and whatnot. There are a few peculiar design choices, such as monsters being stuck in the starting courtyard which can't threaten you if you escape right away. Flipping switches teleports more enemies in there which can be completely until the end when the 2 arriving Cybers clean house. I found all 3 secrets but never grabbed that Megasphere which apparently needs a few speedrunning tricks to get. Interestingly enough, health is rather low in this map otherwise. Wasn't a fan of the blue armour I was forced to grab before the key, which ended up being a complete waste since I was close to 200 anyway. The Demon use was also not very compelling and mostly served as either ammo or time sinks. Plus they had some trouble getting stuck on stairs and whatnot.

[Peckles]

09 - Castle Gardens

This one looks fantastic, and it's fun, but it feels like it tends to stutter forward rather than flow forward cohesively. By that, I guess I mean that combat-wise it just feels like a series of engagements that don't really add up to more beyond the sum of their parts. Then again, maybe I just feel that way because many of the packs consist of a single enemy, giving each battle a "discrete" feel. But the fights were still fun, and so was exploring the map.

10 - Toxic Touch

This one, on the other hand, was immensely satisfying as a cohesive, immersive experience. I generally don't look forward to sewer levels, but the general absence of lengthy jaunts into damaging floors meant I could just enjoy the atmosphere and the gunplay. This map has a few of the most gorgeous rooms/locales I've ever seen in a wad.

11 - Nemesis

Mixed feelings about this one. I like everything up until the last cavern bit. The castle section was fun, particularly the exterior bits on the ledges around it; I enjoyed cleaning house and then watching the cybie and MM duke it out--it's probably a stale trope for most Doomers, but given my lack of PWAD exposure, it's a lot of fun for me.

The labyrinthine cavern section that closes the map, though...it's really an assault on the eyes. I had lots of trouble with depth perception and finding my way around, and I just got sick as hell of looking at a screenful of brown. But while you never want a map to end on a down note, I had plenty of fun before that.

12 - Entropy

It was kind of jarring, jumping back to techbase all of a sudden; one of the things I admire about AV so far is the sense of progression engendered by the arrangement of maps. But I liked this one. It's a two-phase map, and while the first area is solid in its own right, the yellow key/door area really kicks things up, and it's a lot of fun (here's a map that ends on a high note). Crazy traps are sorta the dominant motif of that second area--some of them would make Plutonia blush (though I guess the traps here and in Plutonia are probably considered tame as hell these days).

A couple of minor complaints. There really don't need to be nearly as many secrets as there are; many of them aren't especially rewarding and they're just unapologetically there to kick up the secret count. I wonder if the intent is to make players say "to hell with it" and stop hunting for them, which I did, so that they'd miss the BFG secret, which I did. A kind of way of rewarding players who stick to it, maybe.

I wish I'd found the BFG secret, though, because I love it (the secret, I mean, but certainly the BFG too)--another example of using a secret as not *only* a pile of goodies, but also as a means for the player to leverage a tactical advantage over the enemies--clearing out the chaingunners makes the YK trap a LOT less vicious, obviously (I think the BFG secret is actually separate, but yeah).

The second minor issue I had was that the texturing can get kind of unrestrained at times. It was Hillside Siege that made me marvel at how well its rooms made use of many textures; here, not so much. Though to be fair I'm only thinking about one room in particular, the trap room immediately beyond the yellow door. The texture use in the alcoves after the trap triggers is...not judicious, to say the least. Solid map though.

[Salt-Man Z]

MAP14: Overwhelming Odds
37:56 | 100% Everything

Whew! I had forgotten all about the slaughter-y aspects of this one, oddly enough. The parts that always stuck in my memory were the megasphere crate room, and the outdoor nuke-pool pinkie-fest, as well as the radsuit room. Mostly I remember trying to ride the lift back up into the starting area, but having it clogged with cacos. (Happened this time, too, but not as badly as I recall.) The starting room was just a matter of #1 getting out of the middle of everything, then running around hitting switches and grabbing ammo until I could ride the lift down. That area mostly cleaned itself out through infighting while I was away. The rest of the level was basically just wall-to-wall combat from there, though there was the occasional lull that felt odd. Probably the place that gave me the most difficulty was the red key room full of viles. I had basically one hit left, and had used up most of my ammo on the cyber, so I had to dash in and out of the room to grab health and cells, and avoid getting fried. Once I grabbed a cell pack, I could dart in and nuke the viles. I did the southwest corner next, and had to clear out the hallway and first wave of monsters in the room using pretty much just the chaingun! It was weird how the starting central "pit" area filled up with monsters again, which I never had to fight; I just darted around. When I came back on Max Quest, all that were left were the cybers, who couldn't even get me over the railing. The last thing I did was get the megasphere, and it took me way too long to figure out how to easily straferun to it. I then may have, uh, accidentally played straight through the next map, too, but that's (literally) a story for another day!

[dobu gabu maru]

Sleepy dobu catching up a few maps at a time.

MAP08: Yup, didn’t like this one either. Lack of health + perched chaingunners + dickish traps all created some salty backwash in my mouth that I wanted to spit out as soon as I could. On one hand the map is pretty good at killing the player over and over (especially for a spacious cliffside), but on the other it was so vacant and drab that nothing was really catching my eye, not even the castle of angry assholes at the end. Not really a terrible map but it’s just torn between being “blah” and being rude, so it doesn’t leave you with a good aftertaste either way.

MAP09: Some good stuff from Malde. While it certainly does reek of an early effort, there’s some clever moments here that I really like—keeping the rev behind block monster lines while zombies protect it from the sides, the manc warp-in at the RL, the chaingunner flood at the blue key… Plus, as I noticed earlier with MAP03, Malde’s mapping quirks really gel with me. I like his use of hard dark lighting, the mapping “optical illusion” in the AV room, the ominous look of the angled blue key library, and the crumbling tunnels near the exit. I think his use of bulky monsters can be a bit tiresome (there’s only so many times you can fight HKs in a monster-blocking corridor before you roll your eyes) but I feel like his sense of atmosphere, detailing, and surprises now and then more than make up for it. Plenty of secrets were fun to find too, which I don’t usually notice/care for.

[T-Rex]

Alright, time for me to continue the Alien Vendetta experience.

Map09: Castle Gardens (Kim Andre Malde)
100% kills, 100% items, 100% secrets
Time: 06:20

While many here regard it to be Kim's weakest map, which I kinda agree, it still holds up quite well as it's a realistic castle map with grand architecture and attention to detail that I never seen from other authors except for Iikka Keranen. The Heretic-ish sounding music track helps to capture the mood of the map. Getting to the soul sphere secret via the green torch by the stairs that lead to the central courtyard takes a bit of practice as you have to be fast and fall right into the lowered lift in the north corridor. A couple of ambush spots here, the first being the mancubus that teleport in the south courtyard when you obtain the rocket launcher, and then the chaingunner squad in the library beyond the red key door after picking up the blue key. The catacombs below are really well done, and I like how Kim has made some of the walls cracked revealing toxic slime, and then there's the exit which serves as the starting area of the next map, much like Map07's ending being Map08's start. This map isn't terrible, but it wasn't the best Kim has to offer, and considering this was an early map of his, it's forgivable.

Map10: Toxic Touch (Kim Andre Malde)
100% kills, 100% items, 100% secrets
Time: 10:26

HAHAHAA!! Duke Nukem 3D music?! This is just so freaking awesome! First Rise of the Triad music and now we get Duke Nukem 3D music here (Plasma, which was used in level 8 of episode 2 in DN3D)! Of course, Kama Sutra also has done that, even though that came after Alien Vendetta. Still, it makes me wonder if there seems to be some sort of conspiracy going with using Apogee/3D Realms games' soundtrack for HR-style wads. Ah, it's probably me. Enough spazzing, this picks up from where Castle Gardens left off, where we enter into a sewer, which as the name implies, is full of toxic sludge. I'm picking up a bit of a vibe from Plutonia's Map28: The Sewers, though this map is much greater in detail and realism. Lots of zombies and imps to gun down, with some heavyweights mixed in and a spider mastermind guarding the end of the map. One thing I've noticed with this map is that locked doors are given no indication through the key coloured wall textures, so you'll be guessing which doors you can enter and which ones you can't until you found the one that can be opened and the ones that activate through switches. Level progression is extremely linear for the most part. This map is one of the few in Alien Vendetta which has a separate section designed for deathmatch, with Map04 being the first in the set (kinda like how Memento Mori 2 and Requiem has separate deathmatch areas). If you're lucky or manage to time it just right, you should be able to get an exact capture of the intermission screen, as it came from that part of the map. Really loved this map, felt heavy on exploration, lots of detail was put in, as with any of Kim Malde's maps, and of the course the fact that it uses music from one of my favourite games of all time. One of my top 10 Alien Vendetta maps, hands down.

Map11: Nemesis (Martin Aalen Hunsager)
100% kills, 100% items, 100% secrets
Time: 28:19

Hoo-boy, Martin Aalen Hunsager's second and last map to cap off the first episode of Alien Vendetta is a mastodonic masterpiece in the same league as Eternal Doom. You start off out at sea next to a boat, and you need to climb up a rocket cavern, then back down to find an opened passage to another cavern, where you need to scale up again to reach a huge marble fortress that screams Ultimate Doom Episode 4. Scaling up the caverns is a bit of a hassle due to how there's so many narrow passages and ledges, making it very tricky to get a footing. The detail of the caverns add more to the confusing navigation. The marble fortress is one of the best parts of the map, though. Once the spider mastermind teleports in, you can instigate an infight between her and the cyberdemon (somehow, I am reminded of The Ultimate Doom E4M6: Against Thee Wickedly and Doom 2 Map20: Gotcha! in that sense). There's some enemies positioned in hard to reach high levels, which is another annoying factor to the map aside from the caverns, especially when trying to get 100% kills. Once you obtain the yellow and blue keys, you'll have access to the dungeons at the northwest part of the fortress. Thankfully, this isn't as confusing, but you'll have to navigate through more caverns yet again for the red key, and passages holding monsters open up as you make your way around. Once all that is done, you'll find yourself back at the northeast cavern with an opened passage to the exit. It's a good map, but damn it's long and pretty confusing. Unfortunately, there are later maps much more massive than this beast. We'll be crossing that bridge once we get to it, though.

Phew! That map sure takes a lot, so I'll be leaving it here for now. Until then, take care and have fun, everyone.

[Steve D]

Map12 – Entropy by Adam Windsor and Brad Spencer

First pelt was surrendered within 30 seconds thanks to that brutal opening. There I was, warping to the map while having a sip of tea, and boom! I've got a Sergeant and 2 zombies up in my grill. Didn't even have my fingers on the keypad yet. :D Lost 60 health points by the time I gained control of myself and cleared out that riffraff, only to open the door and find another Chaingunner plus assorted baddies, but it was Chaingunner bullets that that set me up for the imp fireball that faded my ass. It was the very last monster left alive, too. ;)

Oh well, lesson learned. On my second go-through, I had the singular bad luck of killing the Chaingunner at the door, so that it closed and obliterated his weapon, meaning I had to kill a sniper next door to get the cherished gun.

I liked Adam's 45-degree rooms. I've put areas on 45-degree angles, too, but usually I employ a curving hall to reach the angled section, which has the effect of taking away that off-kilter sensation. I prefer Adam's way, and will undoubtedly copy it at some point.

I should mention that I still like criss-crossing Dr. Sleep lighting. I was also fooled into thinking the light in the SSG room was more complex than it was, because it looked as if Adam was trying to calculate bounce reflections, when in reality it was the inherent qualities of the Floor3_3 texture which created this effect. Adam's light was just a simple triangle.

The early section calms quickly after the initial storm, and I found 3 secrets – including the almighty rocket launcher -- before progressing into Brad's section of the map. I'm not sure who's responsible for that room with 2 teleporting Revvies, but it was a lot of fun and I can scarcely believe I survived without a scratch on the first try, using nothing but the SSG and some radical keyboarder maneuvering.

Shortly after this, I suffered ammo starvation. I made a huge mistake taking out the Imps in the trap that opened high in the corridor walls. It was really weird positioning because their fire was ineffective, but I used 1 rocket and 4 shells to kill them all and soon came to regret that decision. Before long, I was punching Spectres, Imps and even a zombie with my non-Zerk fist.

This leads to probably the biggest downside of the map – the problem of too many Barons and Demons. I have many complaints about what I call The Meat Game, and one of the most prominent is ammo balance. Meat is generally weak on the attack, but very resilient in HP, the exact opposite of Hitscanners. Meat does not drop ammo when it dies, either, so if a mapper goes for a stringent ammo balance in a Meat Game map, the possibility of ammo starvation or even an ammo fast becomes an issue for the player. Luckily, once the initial starvation was overcome, the map soon became flooded with ammo plus cool weapons like the BFG.

Gameplay in this section was not very nuanced, it was more a Blunt Force Trauma approach where you faced big numbers of Spectres, or a Baron or a couple Hell Knights, and the question became whether you have enough ammo and dodging ability to get them all without letting any of them sneak around to your side. The answer in this map was mostly yes, except for the ammo. I knew those mobs of Demons and Nobles were sapping my ammo supply, and the tension came from wondering whether I'd have anything left after the next mob.

Highlight battle towards the end was the yellow key trap. I knew a trap was coming, so I backed up to the key, expecting monsters to teleport between me and the door. Oops! The 3-sided Chaingunner crossfire that opened behind me and to the sides was a big surprise. You roll the dice; sometimes you win, and sometimes you lose. ;) But amazingly I survived because sheer panic propelled me forward. Seriously, the sound of multiple chainguns opening fire is probably the second scariest in Doom, right after the roar of the Cyberdemon. After racing out of that room shrieking in blind horse terror, I managed to find the path to the Chaingunner alcoves and the heaven-sent BFG. Thanks, Brad!

I finished this map with 100% Kills and 10 of the 11 secrets, plus a serious decision to make given this megawad's reputation – continuous, or pistol start?

All in all a big improvement in fun factor over the previous map.

[Deadwing]

14: Okay, this is getting ridiculous lol definetly not my style of
gameplay. Releasing 23478 Cacodemons and shooting them in a corridor
(if you run away, they are going to wait for you in the lift area lol)
is not a fun thing. I didn't bother
killing all the enemies (remaining cyberdemons along with 3284 HK). If
the next batch of levels keeps like this, I'm going to drop out.
3.5/10

[NuMetalManiak]

MAP14 Overwhelming Odds

While I was overwhelmed by the last level, this one continues very traditionally, giving the player the surrounding enemies plus the supplies needed, except they release more enemies upon unlocking them. I still save them for later, that's something I like to do from now on in AV, because bottlenecking and potential infighting are better than picking and teething. Like S.T., this one is split with the start in the middle, but we head south first, as the three-key way to the exit lies in the northern path.

The radiation suit room has a very nasty revenant ambush, and there are two bridges to cross. Plus there's a room with a spiderdemon with a switch. I always press it anyways, but I can't remember what it did, heh. And I was the one who revised the wiki walkthroughs for every AV level. The blue key's past the left bridge, and a freebie BFG is totally necessary for a 30-second ambush that lied ahead. The blur artifact may not seem too necessary, but killing its guardian archvile is.

I think the nastiest part is clearly the moment where the second bridge is raised, with a cyberdemon et al, but mostly a caco horde, and surprise chaingunner and arachnotron ambush all in one. I went back to the radsuit room for this purpose, and the BFG helps in winning, although the caco horde gets really scattered at times. The path that follows just has the regular horde placement. Then past the teleporter is one rather surprising virtue, which is honestly easier if you run past and open up the surprise trap walls. Not that infighting helps though, since most are imps, but I love circlestrafing in this particular area. Oh, and the red key is behind, in a HR MAP23 homage. Complete with a cyber, archies to the side, and the revenant teleporter bridge, some fat surprises are on the way back too.

Back to the starting room is where I finally mop up that horde in the center. And then the northern path, there's a non-secret BFG, and it IS possible to grab the megasphere via strafejump (not sure of another way though, and then I noticed rdpaw's comment above). A series of paths leads to the yellow key and it isn't long, although I can't help but think that blue hallway is another HR MAP23 homage. By the way, it's easy to miss some kills here, those supply switches in the starting room actually open up some enemies to teleport into the center, and I almost missed another horde again. And I thought I knew how to perfectly go through this map. XP

[Steve D]

Szymanski said:

I didn't have any contact with the rest of the AV team bar some emails between Andy and Fish. Neither Siege or Complex were designed for AV initially and were submitted by Anthony to the project. I think I worked from a texture pack (could be wrong here) but I don't recall submitting feedback for the other maps, a lot of which I had to play on HNTR because of the difficulty. Most of the maps were finished so if I found some gameplay I didn't like I would put it down to personal taste.

Thanks, Lee. Ah, the glory days of megawads made by people communicating through email, or did they have a thread or IRC channel as well? Searching my dim memory of my days on The Macintosh Team, it seems we had both a website and a secret website. The secret website was for all the comments from our leaders and also where we downloaded the map candidates, though IIRC every "candidate" was accepted because of the looming release date of Halloween Night and the small number of mappers. Alas, we could not move Halloween -- several requests made to The International Halloween Committee were bluntly refused -- nor were there any other mappers to be had on the Mac. So it goes. ;)

I find it sobering that the author of Hillside Siege played most of these maps on HNTR. What was the original plan for Siege and Complex?

You also asked in an earlier email whether every map has to be smooth, perhaps in regards to my complaint about the Soulsphere jump and the problem a mapper might have if they put too many irritating things into one map. The answer of course is that maps don't always have to be smooth, and since we're all humans instead of robots, they never will be. Hillside Siege only had 2 irritating moments for me, one being the fiddly Soulsphere jump, the other being that stalagmite in Sector 74.

The Soulsphere jump was reminiscent of something I did in my very first map. In that map, you had to climb stairs to reach a platform filled with highly damaging nukage, and you had to do it under potentially heavy fire from Arachnotrons, Hell Knights and Chaingunners, and once there you had to balance on the rim so you wouldn't die. But to make it even more perfect, the final stair was missing, so if you didn't run fast enough to cross the gap, you fell in between the staircase and the platform and most likely died thanks to overwhelming enemy fire. So it was a dick move, made with malice aforethought to achieve exactly that result. Whenever someone told me they got punked by this, I smiled and laughed, because like many mappers, I have a bit of an asshole streak and I want to make life hard on the player. Hillside Siege causes me to suspect that you are similar in this regard. ;) The big gap in the Soulsphere jump, along with the odd angles, was clearly intended to make the jump difficult, frustrating, and potentially fatal if you made it under fire from a Manc or 2. Those factors combine to make it irritating for the player who falls victim to this potential, a player who may well curse your name as a result. But you pays your money and you takes your chances, right?

Now to that stalagmite. I made many runs through Sector 74, and only died once. Most of the runs were made to do better than the last one so I had good health before continuing. The run just before what I call The Stalagmite Run was a tight one hugging the Western wall. Alas for me, just as I turned the corner, I ran into a blast of Hell Knight slime which dropped me to under 100%. Lesson learned. I decided to take the next run wide, heading towards the Medikits on the Eastern wall, when I slammed full-speed into that fucking stalagmite which brought me to a dead stop long enough to get fried by 3 Mancs. Oh, the rage and the cursing! :D

I suppose it's possible that you simply put that stalagmite into a sector lit at 112 as a bit of random Thing placement. But if you're anything like me, you put it there in hopes that sooner or later, some brain-dead jagoff -- ahem -- would run in there, not see it in the deep darkness, get stuck on it, and die like the pathetic piece of shit they are. And you smile, and maybe chuckle over that thought. I know I would. ;)

Just to be clear, it's not my view that a mapper should never put irritating things, including various dick moves, into their maps. A good dick move adds a bit of character to a map. However, one should be careful about putting in too many. The more irritations a map has, the more likely a player is to remember the map as just being irritating rather than fun and challenging. After all, players can smile over a good dick move, too, and it may serve to help a map stand out as memorable when more smooth maps are forgotten. It's like spices, a little goes a long way.

[gaspe]

Map14: Another level in the vibe of the previous one: the theme and many aesthetic choices are the same, and the gameplay goes even further into HR like stuff. For the start you need at least little of pre knowledge if you don't want to get caught by the monsters. I like how you can pick some some optional backpacks and cells and they release some monsters, though the starting room easily becomes a place where the demons just infight there. The best moment is the huge swarm of cacodemons, quite memorable. Fun stuff overall.

[Paul977]

Map 14 Overwhelming Odds:

A further step in difficulty than the previous map. Died a lot time by my mistakes and by traps I didn't remember: the imp trap in red key area and the following revenant ambush in the Ascending to the Stars tribute room. The blue key trap wasn't particularly difficult, some few bfg shots and run in circle untill the door open do the job. For the cacos swarm the best way I found to deal with them was to rush the first horde with the bfg, grab the cell packs behind them and kill the rest with bfg/rl/ssg.
Visually I prefered map 13 to this one, it's better designed imo. I always took the megasphere via the arch-vile, seemed the most viable option to me.
A map that I remembered more easy give me some trouble this time, still quite fun when you know how to efficiently deal with the many hordes of monsters present in this level.

[antares031]

MAP15 - Bulls on Parade
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

Nothing much to say about this level. The first few minutes offers you small action scenes with a handful of monsters. After you pass through the yellow key door and that narrow passage with vicious monster closets and pop-up, this level now gives you a large group of monsters with a wide-opened arena, not once, but twice. The last arena even throws a Cyberdemon to surprise you. The detail is acceptable, but not good for the standard of this megawad. Except the entrance of the secret level. I love these blue textures so much.


MAP31 - Killer Colours
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

Again, I love these blue textures so much. This level consists of three parts, and each part represents the primary colors of additive color system; blue, green, and red. The blue textures from the first part gave me an unforgettable inspiration when I played this level for the first time back in early 2000s. I even created some maps with tons of, tons of garish blue textures, thanks to this secret level. Other sections of this level also looks cool, although they've failed to give me an impression that I felt from the first blue section. The gameplay is linear and straightforward, but each section has own concept of monster placement. Blue part has spectres & cacodemons, green part has hell knights & demons with a few arachnotrons, and the last red part has lots of revenents with some barons of hell and Cyberdemons. The object of final arena is simple, kill all of those ten arch-viles within 30 seconds. Dealing with five Cyberdemons is easy, but with ten arch-viles? That's a totally different story if you don't have covers and invulnerability power. While the gameplay itself isn't that strong, this level is memorable because of the concept.


MAP32 - No Guts No Glory
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

For years, I played this level with rather passive strategy than aggressive way. Spamming rockets while hiding behind the cover, this level took me about 20 minutes or even more to beat with UV-Max category. But now, since I learned some telefrag tips and powerup placements, I tried something aggressive with my BFG this time. And, surprisingly, this level was more enjoyable to play with this method. Certainly you need some luck to avoid magic spells from arch-viles around the corner, or to dodge rockets from Cyberdemons. And I'll be honest that I'm not a speedrunner, or a fan of this kind of luck-based slaughtermaps with lots trial and error. But then again, I'm glad to beat this level with less than 10 minutes with a different method. Not a big fan of this one, but this level works pretty good as a secret level.

[dobu gabu maru]

MAP10: I was surprisingly disappointed by this map. Now don’t get me wrong—the ambiance here is fantastic, and is probably the right way to portray sewers in Doom (the lighting on display here is top notch, absolutely beautiful)—but the gameplay in this map is sorely lacking. It’s biggest problems are two-fold: it’s linear, and there’s packs of hitscanners everywhere. There’s nothing inherently wrong with linearity, but it forces you to approach encounters and problems from basically one direction, especially if most of the battles take place in hallways. The second problem is the more dire one; hitscanners in packs require you to fight them in only one way, which is to corner camp unless you have a surplus of health or rockets—which this map provides you with neither.

It’s a shame too because I really wanted to soak myself in this setting and enjoy my time with it, but found myself humming and hawing so much of the enemy placement. Maybe if the map was seven minutes shorter it would’ve fared better for me, but as it stands I can’t help but feel Malde needed some enemy placement help from Johnsen or Szymanski.

MAP11: This map might seem a bit redundant, seeing as we’ve already seen a coastal->castle progression before, except that Hunsager does phenomenal work with MAP08’s theme. Whereas “Beast Island” kind puttered out as it went on, “Nemesis” hits its stride once you arrive in the castle and start clearing out its marble halls. What’s great is that the level is mostly linear but unlike MAP10 you’re given opportunities to explore small side paths that contain goodies like shells or health. While most of the map is dominated by the SSG, there’s enough ammunition for other weapons to give the player a choice in how to approach encounters, and the frantic scramble the player experiences from the cyberdemon onwards is my favorite moment in the wad thus far.

It does perhaps go on a bit long, having climaxed in the search for the yellow key, but its claustrophobic close resonates well with me, as I actually remember it from the last time a played. It’s a bit mazey and toothless but since it’s a change of pace neither the catacombs nor the caves got old for me, and I think the only thing I was disappointed about was how the map came full circle, making the journey feel a bit pointless. Good stuff though—certainly one of the best maps of E1 (sorry Cynical and Steve D).

MAP12: Spencer promptly decides that it’s time to start killing the player, and kill he does! This map has some nasty ambushes up its sleeve that rip the player apart, but perhaps the worst part is that if you don’t find any secrets you’ll be starving for ammo throughout it (health too). I think it’s a pretty cool map—albeit very typical Doom fare (techbase hallways mostly dominated by a single progression)—but I think a couple of the traps at the end (YK, final AV & army) are a bit cruel for my tastes (plus I'm generally not a fan of warping enemies right on top of the player). Certainly not bad, but I’ll have to be more careful of Spencer’s maps in the future.