The DWmegawad Club plays: The Darkening, The Darkening 2, & Crusades

[Memfis]

1 minute ago, Magnusblitz said:

I don't know what these are but they sound cool

99 Ways to Die is three extremely brown maps with more effort put into lighting than in most 1996 wads. The Trooper's Playground is a collection of Matthias Worch's older and weaker levels (the best one later went to Requiem). Playing through The Talosian Incident in its entirety will probably cause heavy depression due to disturbing monotonous midis and very bland design, it doesn't have a single great map.

[Pirx]

re: E4M2 - “Night-Watch”

 

ah, here's the secret exit.  right below the normal one. but, what the hell. was it really necessary to place a baron in the narrow hallway down there, so one can grind him down with the shotty? 

 

nice satanic imagery anyway 

 

 

E4M9 - “Running Scared”

 

there's little to run from scared here, more like scrambling for ammo. a bunch of helpful shotgun guys donate it, fortunately, because, again, you have some barons here to spend your hard earned shells on. i found it safer to just gun down the sergeants and then shoot the first baron until it died, because sergeants are easily the most dangerous and annoying enemy on the udoom roster when you're not armored. later in the waste tunnels you have the choice of spending the few rockets on the barons roaming here, or on groups of 10 or more imps you run into. i chose the imps, mostly, because at the same total hp, they're more likely to hit something, for the volume of fire they put out. that left me with shells for the barons. wiles could have handed out a berserk pack for this task. i mean, the baron in front of the switch with the two blue torches is literally a door with health.

 

 

E4M3 - “Berzerker”

 

this was funny, from a certain point of view. it starts as a nice hellish map made of wood and marble with a surprisingly vicious gameplay thanks to imps and souls assaulting you from all sides, especially if you just run into the trigger that makes them appear on the first tower, on the stairs below and then also in the little starting courtyard. the map is smaller than those before and it gets cramped quickly. and damn those souls are annoying. right in your face when you have shotgun dudes around. i barely got away alive (probably because i ran back down the stairs, triggering some imp teleports, so they didn't jump on me all at once), spent all my ammo and had to snatch the shell box at the feet of the baron used, again, as a door with health in front of the switch on the castle roof. managed to get some nice infighting at the red switch. then the floor gave way and i landed on what i had wished so much, a berserk pack. which is used to beat up not only the pinkie herd, but pretty much everything else, including the barons. one of them right in the exit, who would have guessed that. went down to my last few hp in the process, but it was worth it.
 

[Capellan]

E4M5

So shotgunning and/or dodging barons is going to be a thing in this set, isn't it?  Pfeh.

 

Map looks nice.  Progression doesn't make a lick of sense from the "why would anyone build a structure this way?" perspective but is at least relatively lead-you-by-the-nose in terms of what you have to do next.  Gameplay is tiresome.

[Pirx]

E4M4 - “Haunted House”

 

visually impressive. outside you see a fiery orange sky, withered trees and a cross contrasting against it. inside it's dark and... really cramped. that's still ok with the repeated imp ambushes, one just has to play calmly and hold his ground against them. amusingly, i remembered how richard wiles' maps seemed very difficult a long time to me because i played vs the monsters like vs a human opponent, maneuvering so much it was completely counter-productive. now i could only smile at this thought. imp ambushes, heh. the barons, however, were not amusing. they're not threatening, as long as you don't get caught up by the map detailing, like nooks and beams and torches. but they're in the way all the time and you get only a measly few rockets. like this gentleman (and the other i was standing on). or this noble hell warrior who took it upon himself to free me of the three hissing creatures, sacrificing himself. while i, ungrateful as i am, continued trampling the rocky, narrow paths of hell and brutalizing its inhabitants with my boomstick, because i couldn't find anything more brutal. and i thought: even though i walk through the darkest valley, i will fear no evil, for you are with me, your shotgun and your launcher, they comfort me. and i reached the exit... where i was graciously awarded a berserk pack. so brutal, and so late.

 

 

E4M5 - “The Witching Hour”

 

sweet beelzebub. map looks good, plays like a chore. take the baron shotgunning from the previous map and crank it up to 11. they block every path and you have most of the time only the shotgun to get them out of the way. this got infuriating on the little island with the plasma gun and 3 ! of them to stand in the way, plus more of these fucking souls. expected a showdown with some more barons in the exit room, to put those few cells and rockets i collected to good use, but they just let me leave, the cowards.

[galileo31dos01]

Re-voting for +++ Reverie

[PasokonDeacon]

E4M5: The Witching Hour

Somehow the map grew on me despite having to plunk away at the hobbling red hunks way too much. The baron quota's somewhat higher here than in E4M4; having to tango with two before the final elevator gets on my nerves because, at that point, you've done this before and it's not impressive or fun. Getting a chaingun early on though (after clearing some initial foes and getting max shotgun ammo), then diving below into the ditch, makes for a challenging but varied opening. The progression makes sense: start out with a Perfect Hatred-like set of fights, culminating with a baron backing you into a rocky hard place, before you warp out of there and enter the courtyard areas with looser combat. While it's not as distinctly cool-looking as the previous map, E4M5 has a much better sense of scale and makes good use of the long but somewhat narrow spaces you end up battling in. I also like how the metal bridge room changes context between when you first enter and when you return, all because of the Bruiser Brothers and cacos waiting to pounce.

The biggest downfall for this map is how it leaves relative breathing room for later on. It's quick to replay upon death, but tedious, and not getting to the awesome steep courtyard fight often makes this all so frustrating. E4M5's got this weird mix of id E4M2-like puzzling ambition combined with overuse of a bad theme from the previous map. Granted, it's a solid map, but one which features the best and worst of this WAD. I also think Wiles worked better with Doom II's bestiary and SSG, though E4M6 brings needed improvement in that area.

+++ Perdition's Gate

Edited December 28, 2017 by PasokonDeacon

[Magnusblitz]

E4M3: Berzerker

100% kills, 0/1 secret

 

Ah, hello E4 aesthetic, can't say I've really missed you. This one manages to pack quite the amount of monster meat into more tiny-ass rooms, leading to some spots of combat that take some care but also spots that feel like drudgery.

 

 

Also, it struck me that this room near the end of the map bore an interesting similarity to this room from Darkening MAP01...

 

Edited December 28, 2017 by Magnusblitz

[TheOrganGrinder]

E4M5: The Witching Hour

 

This is a gorgeous map, with a lovely, intricate, interconnected layout full of teleporters that disorient the player until they're able to figure out where in the overall structure they've just been relocated to and how to leads back to familiar territory; again the map author deploys the trick of starting the player with their back toward a door (or in this case, a set of bars) that won't/can't be opened until rather later in the progression.  Gameplay-wise, it's... more of the same, sadly, with a real scarcity of ammo for the player's big guns and a lot of goats strutting their stuff throughout the map's numerous hallways.  I'm rather wondering how a Doom II version of this map would handle that; would Hell Knights be less tedious and better fitting thanks to their squishier health-to-threat ratio, would revenants, screaming and fast-moving, ramp up the pressure to an entertaining degree?  Overall I think this is a solid map that's let down, as far as my tastes go, by a rather plodding pace of combat and a miserly approach to rockets and plasma cells that feels like it's treating those heavier weapons as "Get Out Of Jail Free" cards for a limited number of encounters of the player's choice, to be carefully hoarded and selectively deployed.

[NuMetalManiak]

E4M5 The Witching Hour

 

Fancy seeing one baron at the start? How about four more nearby. This will create some wrath on pistol starting for sure. Not much is fun about fighting this map's barons, add to that the cacos and sniping imps near the chaingun as well. Superb architecture done just right though. I guess the one place barons really were decent was the blue key area, two on the far side, having to shoot at them while watching out for sniper imps and the lost souls. The red key part was nasty too, but not for the barons. Getting out of there was the hard part. Also the interesting three-key area being at the end rather than close to the start. It's annoying when it comes to getting a really good max time on this map though. Probably that stupid lift that keeps going up and down and the barons too.

[gaspe]

M5: The architecture was really nice though the previous levels were visually more striking to me, maybe it's the style of bricks and metal which is pleasant (it's quite a safe bet to use) but it lacks something to be more memorable. Oh and suddenly: Plutonia bricks. Even for the gameplay I think that the previous levels were better, some nice ideas (like the usage of snipers and a the rather devilish BK setup) weren't missing here but as I progressed in the wad the levels started to rely more on barons and making the things more tiresome. At least here you are provided of a plasmagun not very late, and the ammo past the start was reasonable.

[RjY]

E4M4 69/69 0 28/28 0/0 9:19+32

 

This was the map that made me switch to keyboard+mouse all those years ago. Not for the fast turning / aim ability, but because the mouse allows you to "creep" forwards very slowly and not wake up more monsters round a corner than you want to. Unlike keyboard control where pressing key_forward inserts GF25/GF50. Now I am able to max the map in one segment, but in 1999 it was: save the game every time you move, take even 1% damage and reload. I am not a fan of resource starvation, and here there is only just enough ammunition and next to no health. It's an exercise in monster avoidance and watching lost souls bite each other from behind some torches. And again with the top-heaviness - I needed many attempts to get past the start of the map up to the yellow key, but this recording was the first time I got through the yellow door. And the final insult, a berserk box in the very last room.

[Pirx]

4 hours ago, TheOrganGrinder said:

E4M5: The Witching Hour

 

This is a gorgeous map, with a lovely, intricate, interconnected layout full of teleporters that disorient the player until they're able to figure out where in the overall structure they've just been relocated to and how to leads back to familiar territory;

[...]

 I'm rather wondering how a Doom II version of this map would handle that; would Hell Knights be less tedious and better fitting thanks to their squishier health-to-threat ratio, would revenants, screaming and fast-moving, ramp up the pressure to an entertaining degree?  Overall I think this is a solid map that's let down, as far as my tastes go, by a rather plodding pace of combat and a miserly approach to rockets and plasma cells [...].

 

Indeed! It's a shame that this gorgeous looking map is turned into a game that I don't intend repeating so soon (I played with a few saves, btw, so i didn't have to repeat it, after the "infuriating experience" at the plasma gun, because the goats were simply standing on it, while the souls hacked away). Not only would a conversion of this map benefit from the more varied doom 2 bestiary,  it uses the most tedious way of dealing with the udoom roster.  2 ssg shots to kill an agitated skeleton is rather different from this circling and hoping that I have enough shells left. Nu metal maniac pointed out the weaknesses well, the barons on the lift were hilarious... somehow the author must have considered this baron hunting a test of endurance? Hence E4M7 surprised me even more, in a pleasant way...

[rehelekretep]

finishing off baroning 2: baron harder

map09

map10

map11

map12

 

i thought map12's exit through nukage was going to fuck me; not a big fan of mandatory damage-floor, especially like 20 enemies from the exit - not cool!

[rehelekretep]

i actually played Crusades when it was picked for the DWMC Ironman competition and i DNF'd on e4m4, so ill skip that and go straight to m5. heres my Ironman FDA demo: crusades-rehelekretep

[rehelekretep]

jesus christ m5 is tedious as hell - not sure if i can be bothered to actually keep playing it...

[Magnusblitz]

E4M4: Haunted House

92% kills, no map secrets

 

Not much to say about this that I haven't already said about this WAD... the use of lighting and atmosphere is top notch, and then ruined by the frustration of ammo and health starvation with so many barons. Halfway through the map most of my thought process became "I wonder if I can skip this baron and save the 15 shells?" which isn't a fun way to play Doom... if I wanted to worry about resource management I'd go play Football Manager or something. I think there's a total of 8 rockets in this map and no plasma gun I found. And no, the berserk at the end was not enough for me to go back and kill the barons I skipped. One interesting note that the lava isn't harmful.

 

E4M5: The Witching Hour

68% kills, no map secrets

 

In order to save myself the tedium of shooting them, I decided to try the No Baron Challenge, in which I didn't purposely kill any barons. And I'm happy to report, that it worked! (After probably a hundred savescum/reloads at least) The most problematic areas were the blind teleport back to the start area by the yellow key switch (had to do that one over and over until the barons/cacos infought enough for me to squeeze through) and the part near the red key that required hitting timed switches to escape the caverns, since the two barons there liked to walk back into the one-baron-wide caverns and block me. Even managed to squeeze through the wall baron guarding the teleporter leaving the blue key area! So many goddamn barons...

Edited December 28, 2017 by Magnusblitz

[Snikle]

+++ Tangerine Nightmare, Master Levels

[Capellan]

E4M6

Well, it is relatively free of shotgunning barons, at least.

 

This is another nice looking map with illogical but easy to follow progression.  Health seems pretty light, except for the gimme Supercharge right before the cyber makes an appearance.  Speaking of which, what a boring cyber fight.  He's just a helpless speed bump once he teleports.  The only wrinkle to the encounter is the lost souls that spill out at the start, and they're the bad kind of difficulty in classic Doom, since they can infinitely-tall you to death.

 

[Pirx]

5 hours ago, Magnusblitz said:

E4M5: The Witching Hour

68% kills, no map secrets

 

In order to save myself the tedium of shooting them, I decided to try the No Baron Challenge, in which I didn't purposely kill any barons. And I'm happy to report, that it worked! (After probably a hundred savescum/reloads at least) The most problematic areas were the blind teleport back to the start area by the yellow key switch (had to do that one over and over until the barons/cacos infought enough for me to squeeze through) and the part near the red key that required hitting timed switches to escape the caverns, since the two barons there liked to walk back into the one-baron-wide caverns and block me. Even managed to squeeze through the wall baron guarding the teleporter leaving the blue key area! So many goddamn barons...

 

wow so that works  ;)

 

i tried but didn't have the patience though.

 

 

3 hours ago, Capellan said:

E4M6

Well, it is relatively free of shotgunning barons, at least.

 

This is another nice looking map with illogical but easy to follow progression.  Health seems pretty light, except for the gimme Supercharge right before the cyber makes an appearance.  Speaking of which, what a boring cyber fight.  He's just a helpless speed bump once he teleports.  The only wrinkle to the encounter is the lost souls that spill out at the start, and they're the bad kind of difficulty in classic Doom, since they can infinitely-tall you to death.

 

 

i avoided the souls by rushing into the building through the door on the left, so i had plenty of shells when i came back. 

 

 

E4M6 - “Trooper’s Graveyard

 

it gets better. there are alternatives to shotgunning barons now. i enjoyed seeing more cells and rockets around. the map steers away from the wooden, orange e4 theme, it's a corrupted  base now, with some situations that require barrel science. fights are also more elaborate than before, with souls and demons to deny space to the player and barons and cacos as the main enemies. i saved the cells though and rightfully so, because at some point i had to fight a siege cow. now, said cow is less dreadful than it was years before, but the radsuit running out still gives a reason to end it quickly. i don't see where the cyb should have teleported? he stayed on that wall all the time until he fell off, or what was left of him. 
 

 

 

[gaspe]

M6: Not a fan of the pistol fight against the lost souls at the start and I was expecting something worse but this level redeems many of the issues of the previous levels. The barrels were welcome to alleviate some situations. The cyberdemon scared me at first but it's used in a rather boring fight. The fight at the RL was very hard (a bit less the PR encounter) and I wasn't able to pass it so I decided before going there to explore and see if I missed something, and ideed I initially skipped the "secret" chaingun. Theme is rather weird, it looks mostly like a medieval citadel but there are mixed some techbase parts, it isn't the usual corrupted base. I liked the new textures and the detail and lighting was again very good.

[TheOrganGrinder]

E4M6: Trooper's Graveyard

 

So for once the door immediately behind the player at the start of this level doesn't open up as part of the map's meandering progression, through the two flanking it do indeed flip open at the collection of the red key.  For the most part, this is a continuation of the themes the WAD has explored and developed so far, with a corridor-centric maze to explore and various teleporters, false walls, and locked doors making the whole thing a bit more disorienting and less straightforward than its modest footprint would suggest.  This is (as far as I can tell) the player's first contact with both the Cyberdemon and the BFG 9000, the former standing guard over the yellow key before relocating to block the exit with his body when he fails at that initial endeavour, while the latter is tucked away inconspicuously in a courtyard full of crates in one of the map's two secrets (the other likewise comes quite early in the level's running time).  I think this is also perhaps the first time textures from Heretic (or is it Hexen?) have put in an appearance in this WAD, and the commingling of textures from quite a few difference sources and themes, with medieval timber-and-plaster walls, techbase pipes and bricks, and demonic decorations, contributes to a feel that's less schizophrenic than it ought to be, what with castle battlements standing only metres away from what looks like a recycling plant feeding dismembered limbs into a furnace.  It's good stuff, and its use of mid- to high-tier monsters is, for the most part, much more interesting the the preceding map's "here's another Baron of Hell in a corridor."

[NuMetalManiak]

E4M6 Trooper's Graveyard

 

Hmm, I don't remember seeing these textures anywhere else. A much nicer level to deal with enemies here, with a few barrels around. Not as many barons as the last, but one horde of cacodemons beckons attention, might want to ready the rocket launcher or the secret BFG for that fight. Better to do the rocket launcher, the BFG is for the cyber later. Not much of a graveyard can be seen for this map to be honest. More like a water system, one part of it is crossed multiple times. It's a good idea not to snipe at the cyber at the yellow key area, he'll teleport to the exit and be much easier to tackle, at least until the lost souls come marching in. Decent map.

[rehelekretep]

19 hours ago, Snikle said:

+++ Tangerine Nightmare, Master Levels

great suggestion!

please I implore others to vote for something a bit more modern (i know the MLs arent modern but i have a fetish for playing all the iwad stuff with the club >.<)

i cant stand another month of shotgunning barons!

[rehelekretep]

+++ Tangerine Nightmare, Master Levels

[PasokonDeacon]

Good thing I voted for something with a lot less Barons and a lot more of the other weapons.

E4M6: Trooper's Graveyard

Backyard aside, this map handily avoids the inflated difficulty of the past two maps and generally works a lot better. Sidling past lost souls, demons, and sergeants before taking a lift straight down to barrel land is fun and hectic. The backyard gives you multiple safe options for dealing with its guards, as well as enough clearing for a precise BFG shot if you get behind the grey crate quick enough. Caco/souls trap obscuring the shoot-switch is just one example of how the progression varies, culminating in a ez-pz cyberdemon and flyers revue. The "graveyard" part shows through with how (one could assume) the UAC operated the previous maps from this base before it got corrupted even harder than the others. Strange texturing doesn't hurt the overall theme of a gothic, hyper-E4 world retaining some of its logic. I don't quite get why there's a lot of hanging corpses and entrails lying around vs. E4M4 or E4M5 where those elements fit better, but I'm not eager to complain about that. Relative lack of imp teleports and impractical Barons makes me think Wiles had gotten tired enough of his usual UDoom predilections, giving way to less tedious set-ups with or without innovations alongside. Going by sheer quality, this map sits atop the rest in Crusades. It lacks a few of my favorite moments from previous maps yet doesn't suffer from any big issues plaguing them.

[Capellan]

E4M7

Now this is more like it!  On continuous play, anyway.  On pistol start, I imagine the lack of any RL or PG makes some of the fights a bit more tiresome since you have at best the chaingun for clearing out the mobs of enemies around the place.  At least the map mainly uses smaller fry, with only the one baron that I recall.

 

Honestly, this feels like an odd choice for the penultimate map.  Despite the flaws of its cyber fight, e4m6 feels like it would work better in this slot.  This level, by contrast, given its weapons and principle enemies, feels more like it should be somewhere around m3 or m4.

 

Things I like about this map: that there's a fair bit of freedom to roam until you're finally unable to proceed without a key.  It feels a lot less "one true path" than the maps before it because of that, despite the fact that ultimately it is pretty linear in what you must do.  I also quite liked how all the keys are in the same room, but not all accessible at the same time.  Amusing little gimmick.

 

[RjY]

E4M5 97/97 0 0/0 0/0 18:05+13

 

This is the big one folks, I must have taken 100+ attempts over a span of two months in the middle of 2000 working out how to get a 100% kills exit on this map, carefully waking, luring, and shooting as many monsters as possible out of the way before diving in to danger areas, getting as many infights as possible, and then still dying in the blue key ambush for which I eventually evolved the tactic "save all your plasma, burn the baron in the tunnel out of the way, then come back later having lured all the lost souls halfway across the map". I don't know. This was all 16+ years ago and seems totally unnecessary now. I did die at the start of the map by getting trapped at the first descent or just beyond, but the first time I cleared the lower passageway and managed to teleport out was the successful run. I don't know why this map isn't anything like as nasty as I thought it was at first. The layout is excellent, cohesive and intertwined, and giving many future glimpses of points of importance not yet reachable until later. Although it is more or less completely linear (there is only one path through the map), it never seems that way.

 

--

 

E4M6 101/101 0 56/56 2/2 13:51+10

 

Another nice interconnected layout and another map that caused me a lot of trouble in 2000. The biggest problem is the horde of teleporting cacodemons past the red door, which I dealt with by keeping the second door open so I could retreat back out to the start instead of getting trapped between them and a bunch of lost souls, and have to avoid the mess for long enough to shoot the switch and teleport away. Another top-heavy level as if you survive that and a bit further, you are almost guaranteed to finish, barring accidents -- this recording is the first time I survived picking up the plasma gun. Dodging the cyberdemon rockets might go wrong and I exposed myself to unnecessary risk by using rockets on the baron guarding the switch, I should have used the BFG but I thought I had far fewer cells than I actually did.

[Crusader No Regret]

Drive-by commentary on the first Darkening:

 

Played maps 4-6 in one continuous run.  Also dropped down to HMP.

 

Map 4: It uses one of my favorite MM2 tracks.  This time I was prepared and took down the spider demon.  Found both secrets.  Blundered the last trap of the map and got reduced to about 40% health and no armor.  Berserk, megaarmor, soulsphere and on to the next map.

 

Map 5: Smooth going with carryover.  I expected the archvile to warp in the vicinity of corpses.  Will be generous and call it great use of tension without actually being deadly.  And it did leave me surprised when a revenant showed up.  Liked the setup of the soulsphere secret.

 

Map 6: "Oh sweet, a megasphere.  I'll just pick it up when I'm ready to exit..."  "Denied."  Felt a bit trolled finding it just out of reach.  Assumed the megasphere was there for cinematic reasons.  It never occurred to be it was obtainable until reading other comments.

[Magnusblitz]

I do want to avoid more Baron shotgunning so I'm going to change my vote to

 

+++ Reverie

 

(Sorry Dobu, hope that's not making more work for you)

[dobu gabu maru]

12 minutes ago, Magnusblitz said:

(Sorry Dobu, hope that's not making more work for you)

I'm considerably happier when there's a clear winner rather than having to recount votes :P The earlier I start stitching together next month's thread, the better!