Catpho

MAP03 Besides its role as the main obstacle of the level, I appreciate that BPRD opted to still give the central chasm itself some character, making the player memorize it as a physical being. The bright lava draws you down instantly, but thorough players can find some supplies stashed in the cavernous dark, with the terraced, vertical design, in particular one long drop to a backpack that somehow also doubles as a minor worldbuilding detail, making it pretty fun to carry out the task. The chasm also rewards inferences about its shape and placement, particularly the symmetry and its roadblock nature, netting a megasphere for those who've stopped and listened to its simple riddle.

@lavaimp A question that deserves a thread of its own, as this one is more for finding specific files. To answer your question, however, try E3M1: Chaotic Keep from Joy of Mapping 6 (GZDoom) and Creep Doctor from the BTSX E3 demo (Vanilla).

Well, imo there’s three uses to this approach: As mentioned by other posters, a breather, or adding a layer of respite and introspection. Mood-building. This is my favorite reason. Think of what this implies of the Equinox corporation. They have facilities and assets so vast that it isn’t reasonable for Doomguy to just stumble on them. Instead, there’s this convenient infrastructure, complete with a map. It drives home thematically the highly corporate nature of the wad’s setting. The presence of the organization itself can never be ignored throughout the setting. Not even the UAC ever felt this pervasive and inescapable, as the highly abstract id levels and the fact that UAC has long fallen for long stretches of Doom 1 (only E1 is a freshly defeated UAC) can make one forget about its power. Not in Equinox, however. Even you are, in a way, a product, judging from the HUD. Kinda cyberpunk-ish despite the glossy silvery spacebase aesthetic. The short length very much underscores the procedural nature of this visit. This isn’t a level — it’s a thing that needs to be done in order to get anywhere in Equinox. A ritual it is, although the music track gives it an enigmatic, detached mood. Last but not least, the “what happens next”, as you said. The contrast of the safe zone becoming… something else is quite affecting. Of course, I wouldn’t mind if it could be made even more elaborate. Even in its simple form, however, it is effective.

If you've played ahead, you will have seen those bio tank textures that have been staple community texture ever since it's been used for DVII (other memorable uses are in Valiant and Epic 2), and there's probably others that I'm not recognizing right now. A lot of BPRD stuff is part of the DNA now, so to speak.

Huh, so tomorrow 02 and 03 will be played together? Weird to have a day dedicated to a less than 20s map.

Mostly using carryovers for Equinox. MAP01 For a mapper who's best known for his larger than life spectacles, and his levels here tend to be the ones where scale of both the journey and the physical setpieces is most overtly felt, I always thought of Equinox as being impressive for how alive it is on a minute level. The narrative ellipse of the hideout near the beginning, the little storytelling textures and sprites, the fact that there is a weird sidequest to the building's electrical maintenance: positively jam packed opening on an environmental-informational level. This sort of eye for the accumulation of little tidbits of life in the midst of such a grand canvas is what sets Equinox (and, indeed, a lot of BPRD's works) from its era. Only realized this on this playthrough, but for all the fancy SHAWN & lightstrips geometry, it's the blue carpet that is doing so much work in making the base seem snazzy.

Ignore the memers, play DyingCamel's Demons #3 MAP31.

Really liked your map @akolai Love the non-standard progression, love the strange, kooky enemy placements, love the elaborate 3D enviroment (enviromental negotiation is my fav type of puzzle maps over purer "Sokoban in Doom" type of puzzles for me, but I''m open to being convinced otherwise) love the whole "fact-finding mission" vibe of the level. Fans of Flynn, Evans, yakfak, and BeeWen or the like should hop on this one.

Potential bug report for E2M8:

Ah, so it's right there all along. Shoulda made the connection :P

Awesome! If you dont mind my pestering, only k11.wad is probably the last loose end regarding mork (at least, the last one I know that has a filename). I think I posted this last time but couldn't find it in your very helpful archive that you posted, so I assumed it was lost. However, I also assumed that with those infggg levels, so here's hoping for one last shot. Mega thanks for your work again.

A long shot, but anyone got infggg1.wad and infggg2.wad?

MAP27 - “Lakeside Rentals” What might have seemed a "second verse, same as the first" pairing with M26 spirals into a caustic pincer attack formed by crumbling walls and a crumbling lake. It's framed as a linear tour of some, charitably speaking, "rentals" drying their carcass in the intense subterranean heat. The tour is massively booby-trapped, and the special thing about the encounters in this level is the domino-like rhythm in which the safety zones collapse. The substance of the fights themselves should be familiar to anyone who is a fan of challenge and challenge-adjacent levels in general, and it's definitely a meatier, some even said "more normal" level than the beach preceding it, but it's the feeling of the whole world crumbling with every new step that really seals this map's place in the larger level set. The AV placements are the cherry on top. MAP28 - “Closing Crush” In a certain way, this is "just" a regular Benjo level, maybe the most on-brand map of the set alongside 11 & 20. That, I think, is the dirty trick: long are the days when this was supposed to be a silly amateur 90s levels pastiche / affectionate parody (indeed, it's stop existing fairly early on); instead, it reveals just how much synergy between who Benjo normally is as a level designer, and the perverted hybrids that only superficially resemble the novice excess of Doom wild west days. Here is a map that wouldn't feel out of place in a Flotsam style collection, being a chaotic slaughterish map with an emphasis on confusion of where all the good weapons and ammo are, and a great deal of trial by archvile fire in trying to figure it all out. Nothing really 90s about this one, as it's got elegant monster pathing that shuffles the hordes all across the map in surprising gotcha patrols reminiscent of the great ArmouredBlood levels and the like, but with a good dose of blackhearted trolling in the timing of the reveals and the use of "secret" sectors that is Benjo very own. The sickest joke here is that all this lurid organized chaos that would be a disrupter in any other mapset is in fact merely the eye of the storm here.

MAP26 - “Everyone Loves the Beach” It's the framing that makes this one. The fight that constitutes the core gameplay of the map is a fine morsel, if not a patch on Benjo's more gameplay-oriented works. However, the title and the lo-fi visual direction gives it a level of thematic levity and suggestion that makes the experience feel more "substantial" than it really is, working like a dose of forthy, cheery surrealism in a mapset conatining many. Feels like something you'd see in an Abyssal Speedmapping Session set or the like, where this sort of conceptual jokeyness intertwined with simple scale is found often, but its macabrely cheerful spirit is very much compatible with the mutated wonderland of Down the Drain.

MAP25 - “The Three Buffets” One of my favorite experiences when playing doom is to get utterly entangled by sector machinery. I remember playing NaturalTvventy's 2010 single ZDoom level Awakening, and I felt overwhelmed by how every step seemed to awaken phantom machinations, the very edge of what is possible ever expanding. The concept in this little map here in dtd isn't quite as expansive; the interesting thing about Down the Drain is how immediately graspable its levels are conceptually, and the execution isn't typically too hassled. Still, it gets to the heart of it, as the subtly telegraphed nature of the lifts that form labyrinthine criss-crosses across the level makes it hard to read in the heat of combat. This elevates what are some relatively simple setups into the bewildering nature that dominates the flavor of dtd, although like many observed it's fairly casual about the lethality, so the stress is probably more present on paper than in practice. Still, it's broadly a success if your breathers are this flavorful. Love the damaging floor interlude. The dtd cutaway special: intrusions of even more unhinged scenes into already grizzly situations.