EngineerKappa

I've always imagined some ingame level select menu that keeps track of Time, Kills, Secrets, Items, etc. It'd have cute little thumbnails and descriptions for each level of each official IWAD. Maybe some hardcoded exceptions for levels where percentages break (via Archviles or Icon of Sin, inaccessible items or secrets, etc.) I always liked the idea of doing a 100% run of whichever Doom game, but the transient nature of Doom saves don't have the same impact to me as something like 2016/Eternal, or even something like SRB2's emblems. I wonder how possible this would be to do in Zscript, at the very least. Maybe include something like Cutmanmike's Map Order Shuffle, or something like WadSmoosh being built into the port itself. (I've seen some ports support dual-loading 1 and 2's assets, plus NRFTL or SIGIL, but it'd be neat supporting Every official WAD at once)

Every now and then I think about doing Youtube videos, but the thing stopping me always felt like trying to carve a niche. I'm not a speedrunner, I'm not good enough at the game to do challenge runs of the hardest WADs, I haven't mapped enough to do mapping videos or guides, and I don't have a wide enough experience with the overall community to do reviews/recommendations. Basically nothing terribly interesting to contribute that hasn't been done better by anyone else.

I never realized how hard of a question this was. There are a lot of WADs like BTSX, Eviternity, No End in Sight, etc. that I can enjoy and recognize as being incredibly good or impressive, but they don't resonate with me enough to say they're my favorite. I think lately I go back to Rowdy Rudy II every now and then. Good mix of classic vanilla vibes while adding a lot of neat DeHackEd stuff. Golden Souls still makes me smile. Also SRB2, but that's cheating.

I never go out of my way to look for them because some secrets can be pretty obtuse, but if I enjoy the WAD I'll definitely IDCLEV to EXM9 or MAP31/32.

Those are definitely some great points. I feel like I'm just willing to give them more leeway because Doom 1 and 2 were so new at the time, yet they still have a somewhat high level of quality overall? I'd still rather play some of the more mediocre 1/2 maps over most of the games out around the time, so they never bothered me as much. I still do think hindsight is part of it too. It's only natural that people have a better idea of what kinds of Doom they enjoy now, compared to the original games throwing whatever at the wall to see what stuck.

Here are my few: Anybody with any strong opinion towards the Doom 3 flashlight (pro or against) is a whiny nerd. I think a lot of people are unfair to Doom 1 and 2 maps because they have options designed with nearly 30 years of hindsight. Doomworld users that can name several ports they'd rather use aren't the target demographic for the Unity port. If Id were as precious about vanilla anything as some people tend to be, they wouldn't have greenlit any of the 90's ports, they wouldn't have added PWAD support, they wouldn't have added difficulty settings or cheats, and they would write it so your game self destructs if you don't have an authentic Sound Canvas to play the music exactly as Bobby Prince composed. I wish I preferred PrBoom+ as much as other people do, but it's in this awkward zone where it's more bloated than Crispy/Chocolate for vanilla, but the extra settings aren't as granular as GZDoom's.