John Wheel

Is he not going to let her play the maps that aren't his? Seems a bit harsh if that's the case. "Hey, what are you doing? The Living End? You're not going to play The Living End. You're going to play The Chasm." "But grandpa, I already played The Chasm." "Damn right you did, young lady. And you're going to play it again, and again. It only gets better each time. See that Lost Souls ambush at the final stretch? Best decision of my life."

The more detailed he gets, the more he looks like Pedro Sánchez's lost brother.

Hm? Ah. It may be for the better, on the whole.

Funny thing is that Amazon not only does owns Twitch, but also Netflix's servers . So they can choose between pressuring Netflix into not doing that or just being paid by their own "competition".

I know, right?

It means Graf's ZDoom.

You don't know what videogame music is capable of until you have experienced the Pictionary electronic adaptation for the NES. This astonishing soundtrack was created by Tim Follin, the same brilliant mind behind Solstice's opening song, a phenomenal chiptune melody that eclipses the game itself. Seemed to be an ongoing thing for him. Now, on more conventional songs, DoDonPachi's electric riffs always get me going and Espgaluda's soundtrack is beautiful and evocative and manages to blend electronic music with steampunk high fantasy perfectly. I will put them under the spoiler.

Solomon's Key 2 for the NES is my favorite puzzle video game. The game is about creating, melting and pushing blocks of ice to extinguish all flames in the level and navigate the platforms. Think Sokoban with gravity and the cutest designs ever. The first three worlds or so are pretty easy, but the difficulty goes up steadily and I remember getting stuck several days on some levels. And once you complete the main 100 levels you get a secret code to play another 50 secret extra hard levels. Adventures of Lolo 2 and 3 for the NES are Sokoban-like games with enemies and get pretty tricky pretty fast. The developers added a note on the user manual swearing that every single level had a solution, heh. Adventures of Lolo 1 is pretty easy and you can complete it in a single evening, though. Comparing the first game and the second one in the series is a bit like comparing Knee Deep in the Dead with Plutonia. Kula World for the PSX is pretty good too, if you don't get dizzy easily. In this one you are a beach ball navigating tridimensional mazes floating in space. The thing is you can change gravity by walking towards a wall to rotate the whole maze. It's pretty long, but every level throws something new at you to keep it fresh and interesting and you need to think outside of the box a lot to solve the puzzles. The main campaign is 150 levels long, but then there's the hidden exits, and the bonus levels, and the extra campaign... Finding and completing everything is an arduous task. On the other hand I don't like adventure games that much, but I'm pretty fond of Violet. It's an Interactive Fiction game where you have to force yourself to finish your dissertation despite all the distractions. It's pretty funny and the game is narrated in second person by your mental image of Violet, your girlfriend, who is the cutest girlfriend ever and adds a lot of charm and personality to the game itself. Interestingly your gender is never stated by default and there's one puzzle that can be solved in two different ways. However, if you find how to "decide" your actual gender, only one of the solutions works depending on your choice.

I discovered Linux when learning about coding and systems administration and was intrigued because it was exotic and supposedly better. I tried it, became my main OS and several years ago I just wiped out the Windows installation and now I don't bother keeping a dual boot anymore. Linux may break and do weird things sometimes, but so does Windows, so I would rather run a OS that I actually like using. Plus, the more of a commie I become, the more important I think software freedom is. I settled on Debian Stable because it uses sane defaults for everything taking care of the boring stuff without trying to automagically do more than what I asked it to do. A pretty smooth experience for me. Here is my desktop under the spoiler, fake busy and clean versions. The window manager is AwesomeWM. Gosh, I know, right? I use the command line and write custom scripts a lot because I already learned it and therefore it's comfortable and easy for me. There's no sense on trying to be extra-hardcore or whatever. Using text browsers is pretty much going against the grain, but you know those newspaper sites that hide most of the article asking you to register to see the full version and whatnot and are covered by banners asking permision to store cookies? Lynx, elinks and the like don't give a damn about that noise and let you read the full article comfortably. There's still some use for them in a heavily javascripted world.

Skelegant has you covered https://forum.zdoom.org/viewtopic.php?t=61919 I'm pretty sure people care more about the "your tastes are bad because I don't like them" thing than about whether or not you like those wads or how good or bad you're at the game.

That sums up my feelings about the question. It's better to analyze maps on how much strategy and tactics are involved and how, strategy been formulating a plan about what to do on a map and tactics how to carry that plan out. Both things aren't mutually exclusive and are more of a spectrum, so that would represent better the variety on Doom maps than a rather strict binary. For example: In E1 strategy is mostly using the shotgun because there's always ammo for it and tactics don't divert much from keeping your distance from enemies to avoid being surrounded. It's pretty light on both. In Lunatic doesn't seem to matter much where you go first, and that's when you can actually decide between different paths. It's more about thinking on your feet and survive the battles as they come. I think that high focus on tactics is what makes the WAD so agile and frenetic. Hell Revealed and Kama Sutra are meant to be played slowly, clearing things in an specific order and dismantling things from a safe space. They are high on strategy, but not so much on tactics save for the occasional nasty trap. In Going Down's Dead End you need to plan out how to attack each squad of monsters, where to be, and when to secure safe spots, restock your supplies and not get caught in the middle when the zones controlled by enemies change. However the order in which the monsters appear is random, so you need to be able to change plans on the spot and still be able to carry out your next objective. That map is high on both strategy and tactics.

Extremely easy maps are cool, and I think an underexplored area in Doom pwads, especially in modern times, where most wads skew towards the harder parts of the spectrum. And I say this despite probably being known as someone who prefers harder, intense maps (which is overstated, but has some truth to it). I have a lot of random thoughts on this, but here are two quick ones: 1) One thing I'd like to play is a set of extremely easy maps that approach gameplay design with the same sort of intentionality and precise/fussy design that is commonly seen in well-made difficult wads -- y'know, highly specific encounters, precise and calculated monster use, pushing or encouraging highly specific responses out of the player ... except everything is really easy instead of trying to kill you or even threaten you much. Difficulty often makes this easier to do. If "staying alive" is such a pressing issue, then you can use that as a carrot on a stick to get the player to do what you want. In the absence of lethality, at difficulty that is closer to Fava Beans or "easy Doom 1" or "Scythe e1" intensity, what do you do to so consistently and reliably bring out that effect? Could be a fun mapping challenge to unpack -- good practice for conveyance and "framing" a situation. 2) Combat -- although it's one of the most studied things in gameplay, one of the most evolved since 1993 -- is of course very far from the only way to engage with gameplay in Doom. Puzzles and complex progression and secrets also exist, but let's go a bit more obscure. How about skillfully made walking simulators, or "fiddle with Doom engine machinery" simulators, that still manage to be fun (or enjoyable in some way)? Would like to play more of those.  I feel that easy maps are in a weird place. And now I will ramble a lot to explain it. When I first picked Doom I had to go through it on the lower difficulty levels. E3 on HMP was to hard for me and I deemed E4M1 nothing but impossible. I kept making my way through the games, finished Final Doom and today I play on UV by default without giving it a second though. Not trying to brag at all, I'm a very casual player and I wouldn't say I'm "actually good" whatever that means. I save whenever I want and play continuously because, to put it bluntly, I have better things to do. Since playing the base games I have been playing PWADs with my pal @Fadri (who is much better at Doom than me). He loved the game too and knew there were custom levels, but never got around playing them. So we take turns to pick up WADs, play them and comment them. We try to go through gradually harder WADs (our final goal is conquering Sunlust far in the future, and after that, who knows?), so the fact that we always play on UV is rather meaningless. We do select difficulty levels, just in a different way. So, some time ago we picked Eviternity, thinking it was on par with the IWADs. It was the hardest shit we had ever played. We persevered, though. After that we tried some classics like Hell Revealed, Alien Vendetta or Scythe and they felt... sorta easy? They do have a few hard levels, of course. But when we played Hell Revealed's MAP32 or Scythe's MAP30 and though "Hmm, I can do this" rather than "Holy shit, I'm out" we knew we had changed and we couldn't see Doom maps the same way again and our idea of easy was permanently skewed. We played Plutonia 2 recently and felt "regular hard" rather than "hard-hard", like on par with Plutonia, maybe a bit easier on some parts. But I know it's much, much harder than Plutonia, because when I was collecting WADs at the beginning of my journey I tried it and couldn't survive longer than ten seconds on the first map. This time however I beat it on the first try without dying. Going Down felt accessible for the most part. So, sure, there are kinda easy WADs like Revolution!, Demonfear or Suspended in Dusk. But I don't think any of us can think about what is actually easy any more. Maybe a newcomer can, but it won't be long before they tackle Eviternity or Ancient Alients or Alien Vendetta, by virtue of being the most revered WADs, and break in their shoes so to speak. So easy maps are in a weird place for me because the first question is, "Easy for whom?".

Tengo que jugar esto con el mod de Chiquito.

Waist-High in the Damned GZDoom / UV This map has a very simple and clear quirk: it's a classic Doom campaign, from tech-base to Hell condensed, on a single corridor. Despite been as linear as it gets, the author keeps thing lively by designing each room and encounter as a different locale and having fun playing with the hell-is-invading-our-reality concept, like in that hallway running along a frontier of sorts. They also use teleportation shenanigans to reuse rooms and spice up the progression so things don't get too dull. Another thing worth mentioning is that, to increase replayability, the author makes you choose at least once between two goodies. But I can't say that's enough to replay the map, honestly. The final fight is a bit weak too, the poor Cyberdemon in their pedestal is no match against a plasma rifle from afar, and the spawners don't activate until you press the switch to open the exit. Still, the map is good enough to spend 15-20 minutes and have some fun with an easy map. I liked the encounter with the Arachnotrons that can snipe at you from the dark corridors and the one with the Revenants in the basement? Garage? It sorta looks like an underground mall garage with all those columns? Anyway, that one, it's fun to punch the Revenants with the berserk pack in that room.

I would have said the Cyberdemon, but after checking it... it's a hard choice between the Baron and the Cybie. Hmmmmm.