Rujasu

MAP16: Pier Pressure Success: No A three-part arena fight. I was a little starved on ammo in the first one with my amazing aim, but the payoff with the ship was really nice. Very clever use of the invisibility sphere in Arena 2, was a cool little fight. Didn't have time to figure out the last section, but I was a little out of my depth with the sheer volume of enemies. Unlike the first two, that one has no room to just run around and get a feel of the space, and even if there was it's partially covered in lava pits anyway. I'm fine with the style of gameplay offered, though, it's just my own lack of time hindering me.

MAP15: Crowded House Success: Yes Other commitments made me skip a map, but this was a pleasant romp to return to. Lots of holding the fire button down, mostly in tight quarters but a couple of more open spots with a revenant and pain elemental swarm and stuff. Plenty of health and ammo around to not need to worry about either along the fairly long playtime of the map. Like has already been said in an above post, it's not the greatest Doom map of all time, but it is a good Ray Mohawk map.

MAP12: Beautiful Clean Coal Success: Maybe some other time I gotta say, I barely even noticed the change in skybox from the notable jump in difficulty, the first combat room containing five archviles and two cyberdemons, even if you can avoid triggering all of them at once. The cave contains large amoutn of enemies too, and somewhat annoyingly they tend to teleport back to the courtyard. It was neat at first, but got a little frustrating as the map went on. The other half of the map will have to wait for some other time; I don't really have the attention span for a map of this caliber right now. It also kills me that I clearly recognize the midi but can't put a name to it.

MAP11: Vacation Gone Wrong Success: Screw the one attempt thing A series of short, intense firefights, this one, in fairly cramped locations. While the rooms are quite plain, with the exception of the mini mouth of madness at the end, having these bite-size isolated combat scenarios dotted here and there among the more sprawling levels creates good variety in the experience. Good use of dehacked, really, since these encounters would have been miserable with the default weapons.

MAP10: Kalua Atoll Success: Yes (but no) Cyberdemons: 1! As the first fight already kicked my ass a couple of times, I decided to depart from my usual format and just beat the map with saves. As basically a ten-minute introduction to the flamethrower, it was good fun. The well marked but still invisible map limits caused some headache with the cyberdemon (who seems to hit even harder than the regular one, now that I finally get to meet one), but otherwise it was a fun collection of battle arenas with a lot of LMB-holding. The spiral staircase and the extra ammo that lowered for phase two of that one room were neat, and the visuals were good as usual.

Stix by Steve Parkinson 07/31/95 IWAD: Doom 2 Port: Woof An uninteresting '95 wad with too much ammo to make the 39 monsters contained within memorable. All credit where it's due, though: The rooms might be boring squares with some boxes and shit in them, but the author demonstrates a decent grasp of lighting. The first room is all dark but has a light switch, and the second one has some basic shadows around corners. The gore promised by the description mostly comes as that one corpse wall texture repeated in a room without much more thought put into it. Having the end be just a Romero head in plain sight might still have been novel in mid-95, but nowadays it just gets a shrug from me.

MAP09: Temple del Sol Success: No (Temple entrance trap on the second try) Cyberdemon count: 0 The second longer form odyssey of the set, and quite a fun one, even if I once again failed to reach the main attraction. Heavy on the monster closets, but the fights (or, well, the parts of them that aren't a swarm of demons following you from the previous area that failed to infight each other to death) feel well designed and interesting. That's really the thing that pushed me to do a second attempt and get a little farther than the invuln room. The choice of music is maybe a little docile for how hectic the combat feels at times, though.

MAP08: Chocolate Island Success: Insta-annihilated by plasma cannon trap Another good implementation of the "space to wander, but need to go into tighter spaces to progress"-formula. Tiny little map with a high archvile concentration. Also another map with a supposed cyberdemon, but my first proper encounter with them will again have to wait for another day. The general wood & water aesthetic was easy on the eye, so it has that going for it, too.

MAP07: Warehouse Success: Second try A rather strange rooftop level, and a fairly easy one too after the super shotgun fight, which was the thing that caught me on the first attempt. The rooftop areas were all alright, but I kinda expected more from the area down low than just a random sprinkling of pinkies. It was a mandatory part of the progression after all (I think), and having the player run around in what's basically a flat square - with all that health and ammo I couldn't even dream of burning through with this enemy count - is a bit strange. It felt like a setup for a more climactic battle that was just never implemented. Reading the posts above, I was a little concerned I messed something up with complevels or simply missed something obvious, but turns out one of them was of Map 8 instead, so alarm over.

MAP06: Hidden Ship in Pirate's Cove Success: Nowhere near Well, this one's definitely a ramp up in scale compared to the other maps so far. We also get introduced to the new chaingun, which reminds me of the Dark Forces blaster for some reason, and - as I learned from idclipping around after dying - new cyberdemons! My journey ended in the archvile room; I was distracted by there being three whole archviles and kinda ignored the cacodemons in the room that blocked me from breaking line of sight. The going until then was fairly standard Dooming, but it worked. I considered just giving it another try since I missed out on so much, but I'll just leave it for another playthrough in the future.

MAP05: 11 Holidays Success: No A tighter cavey level this time. Plays very differently though, because of the autoshotgun, a brand new way to burn all your ammo from mid- to long range without actually achieving anything. Definitely doesn't step on the "pistol's" turf, that one. There was a beachy area of some sort, too, but as always I ate a revenant rocket. I'm not doing it on purpose, I swear!

MAP04: Surf's Up in Nuketown Success: No (184/something) This is the one where I finally do damage to myself and realize that it's a rocket launcher replacement, not a plasma replacement. Anyway, I think I've already mentioned my affinity towards the "run around in an open area, and then there's some side zones"-style of mapping, and this is one of them. Gave this one two tries, as I got fried pretty quickly by the first surprise archvile. The second one went better as I managed to find the pla- ehm, rocket launcher, first. And naturally, it was one revenant on a box with nobody else around that finally killed me as I was trying to shotgun it away. Why am I so terrible with those guys?

MAP03: Beachside Bookworms Success: No It is a very nice map from an aesthetics standpoint, and the shooting continues to be satisfying too. Sadly I didn't really get to play with the new gun all that much, as I found a welcoming party of two of those flamethrower guys waiting for me when I went back up on the library elevator. The pistol did not do the trick at that point. I notice I've not been too bothered by the liberal use of archviles since the arsenal makes them less of a big deal, so that's also nice.

MAP02: Ossuary of the Hula Imps Success: Yes A bit of an Egyptian theme here, and a guest author which is noticeable by the cacodemons apparently not being able to enter the map proper. I just ignored them after getting the shotgun sitting by the fence. Heavy use of surprise archvile entering the place you just painted red, but the "pistol" helps with them. The archvile in front of the red key door felt a little impotent because it refused to move much in contrast to the revenants, which also made the last one behind the door very superfluous. Nice map overall though.

MAP01: Back Ashore! Success: No Ray Mohawk 2 starts with the familiar theme of mowing down hordes of enemies with an even more OP pistol this time. The intensity has been cranked way up from RM1, which bodes ill or well depending on your own tastes, and there's also noticeably more dehacked stuff running around. This one also really made me wonder what even triggered that enemy wave repopulating the first area, but more things to shoot at isn't exactly a bad thing in Doom. I turned my brain off and ran into a dead end after the tunnel, so no map completion for me this time.