Foodles

I saw him reply to one of the comments in one of his half life videos where it seemed like he was going to do a Half life 2 playthrough/commentary sort of thing, so I'd expect that to be up on his channel at some point in the near future.

What do you mean? Was the episode order meant to be different from what it ended up as?

Has anyone said Drake O' Brian yet? I'd love to see a redemption arc for him after his 3 memorable but flawed offerings in TNT Evilution.

The title is a bit confusing, so as I understand it you are asking for levels with bad music choices, where the choice of music wasn't picked either ironically or as a joke?

Interesting. Didn't realise he'd left Valve, wonder what he'll do next.

I played HR for the first (and to date, only) time maybe around 5 years ago now, pistol starting each level on UV without saves. Overall I really enjoyed it, several of the maps were quite challenging but not really what you would call slaughter, by today’s standards at least (I think the most enemies on a map is only something like 400). The best levels, from what I remember (like city in the clouds and afterlife) were like puzzles that you had to slowly piece together and when you finally beat it, it was very satisfying. I played through this very much with the aim of challenging and stretching myself as a player and to that end I think it was the perfect level of difficulty for me. The first 9 maps or so were a little boring and it does fizzle out a little after map26 (which to me is the climax of the wad). I don’t really think too much of Hagay Niv’s offerings, not that they’re bad but the gameplay’s not as compelling as a lot of Yonatan Donner’s maps. Were they both speedrunners back in the day?

It's hard to see how that would be fun to play. Not surprised that it hasn't been done. The enemy variety is one of the best features of Doom and the SS trooper is maybe the least interesting enemy after the zombieman.

If only we had some sort of pinned thread dedicated to finding stuff like this

You can do polls on here for this sort of thing.

Hellcore 2.0 has a couple of good city maps - map02 and map09. Still holds up well today considering it was released in the mid 00s

I bought Return to Castle Wolfenstein for about £1.50 which I'm looking forward to playing again. I played it a lot as a child but the last time must have been, over 10 years ago now... I don't know if it's considered a good game but I certainly loved playing it when I was younger.

What a rip off - I'm starting to think this CD isn't legitimate at all. The boys at US dreams inc have really let me down this time!

I'm kind of surprised that there even were 2000 levels made for these games back in 1996. I always thought of Heretic and Hexen levels as being quite rare - no idea about the other games but I imagine it's the same story.

I figured that's what it probably was. I can't imagine that it was legal to do that sort of thing - selling other people's work even if they didn't include the IWADS. I could be wrong but I seem to remember buying this off Amazon way back.

We've had this old CD lying around for a long time now but I can't recall ever booting it up and seeing what was on it. It boasts that it contains over 2000 new levels for Hexen, Rise of the triad, Dark forces and some other games I've not heard of as well as some sort of level editors. It's made by the well known US Dreams inc (based in Holland?). I don't have a CD drive on my PC anymore so I was wondering if anyone knew what was on this - I imagine it's probably just a bunch of fan-made levels shoved onto a CD similar to maximum doom or something right? I seem to recall we bought it mistakenly when we were trying to get hold of a copy of Hexen.

wtf were they smoking when they set the par time to 30s for that level? Just did it myself and got 47s after many attempts, pretty difficult for me to get that even.

Like Jacek Bourne mentioned above, I find that I don’t get worse over a long break. There was a few years between 2014 and 2018 when I didn’t map at all and when I returned I found that what I made was better than anything I’d done before. I suppose the only thing you might forget is some of the technical stuff like dehacked or scripting if you’re making for gzdoom etc.

Thank you for the kind words, glad to hear you're enjoying it. I suspect that the end fight of map04 might be a bit much for you, don't worry too much if you can't finish it. Map05 gets a bit harder so you may want to consider playing on hurt me plenty or hey not too rough - there's not a whole lot of difference in the difficulty levels but dropping down might take the edge of some of the fights if you're more interested in the exploration/adventure aspect of the maps.

I notice they don't seem to tell you how many hours you spent playing. Probably a good thing as I'm afraid the number would be depressingly high.

This has finally been uploaded to idgames - I've updated the link in the top post. If you've played this I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts, even if you thought it was crap. Especially seeing as the idgames reviews don't work anymore, apart from the couple of individuals who replied in this thread I've not really had any feedback. I'm quite pleased with maps 3, 4 & 5 in particular so I'd encourage you all to give those a go. https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/d-f/fromhell

I released a full 32 map megawad some years ago now. Getting it finished was difficult; by the end of it I wouldn't say that I was particularly enjoying the process and after it all I had something that I didn't really feel was that good. I would probably have had more fun just making a few maps and trying to make them well. Also I know that we all like to dream that we'll drop our masterpiece and everyone will be queuing up to heap praise upon it and shower it with cacowards but the reality is sadly that even if it is good, it's a real gamble whether or not people take notice and play it. I think that, in this regard, people are more likely to try out one map that start a 32 map wad which may or may not be good.

Seems like the writing had been on the wall for some time now, probably won't surprise a lot of you. https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=pfbid0iPixEvPJQGzNa6t2x6HUL5TYqfmKGqSgfkBg6QaTyHF5frXQi7eLGxC7uPQv5U5jl&id=100006735798590&__cft__[0]=AZXsDdV3k6gSu83P0a2jJg4FQsWHW-usRsi2ayd7dymrA9C6yBA-uWSUgw7A8Mhza8gpZFkCvbip_sJRxDvUMP273PIS0FOSQQWGmL2Cbv3HVg&__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R

So now that you're done with the wad what are your final thoughts? Would you reccommend someone who was getting into Doom to play or skip this? I do think that a lot of the fondness I, and many others, have for these levels is due in no small part to nostalgia but having said that I would argue that there are some legitimately good and enjoyable maps in the set even if they are sadly outnumbered by the not so good offerings. Did it deserve to be an iWad? I would say yes but I think there definitely needed to be a final layer of quality control applied to iron out some of the wrinkles and maybe even fully replace some maps e.g. Habitat.

Fair point about HR2 being made by different people, I'd forgotten that. I don't actually believe that 3 is cursed or anything like that - I cherry picked some examples but you could equally pick a few examples where the third of something was good e.g. community chest. Someone else made a point earlier where most things don't even get a second installment so it follows that a lot of things that do wouldn't get a third - and each of those that do get a third are unlikely to get a fourth and so on so you end up with a sort of exponential decay. Also didn't realise Huy Pham had gone to be a full-time full-stop (or period for you Americans).

As a mapper it's always interesting to see people tackle your fights in ways you never really expected or planned for - speedrunning or just doing maps quickly isn't something I've ever dabbled with so it wasn't in my mind at all when designing these levels, so I'm glad you had fun though trying to get through it "quickly". Thank you for the video. MAP03 was probably the one I had the most fun building, partly due to the use of the amazing OTEX pack, partly due to the sandbox design and also I just love the space station theme - I think it's probably my personal favourite in the set. You're right in that I was influenced by Interstellar Sickness as well as Scythe X.