I Drink Lava

uh oh let's hope they've improved on their arena shooter craft since Will Rock

What exactly do you mean by "modern standard"? If you're referring to "obscene amounts of detail", then the answer is obviously Gothic99. If you're referring to "ludicrous amounts of enemies in one map", the H2H Mud competition maps are right up your alley. But if you're referring to "competent design without any notable mapping mistakes", then there are actually a lot of maps I'd say fit the bill. The oldest stand-out map I can think of might be OPOST21.WAD from May 10th, 1994, although IIRC it has mandatory secrets and confusing progression that is most certainly not up to modern standards. I feel like good Doom WADs are timeless, and it's part of why we're all still here 27 years later.

Please don't do this.

You'd have to wait a long time, then. The initial LavaMod release is only the main campaign levels. The DLCs and Master Levels might not even come until 2022 or even possibly 2023. I have obligations outside this mod's development, and I've been letting my main channel's content (video game HRTF demonstrations) fall behind just so I could finish this massive project faster.

I've been eating a lot of knock-off Skyline Chili ever since I got a bunch of packets of it for my birthday. When I was a little kid, I had a frozen meal of it once and I thought it was the worst thing ever due to the overpowering cinnamon. Now I can't get enough of it. There's just something bizarrely good about it, even though it's completely backwards from a typical chili recipe. I eat it with the spaghetti, pinto beans, chili, chopped raw onions, and like nearly an entire bag's worth of finely shredded cheese to match the pictures. As for hot sauce, I used to eat at a latin market that had $6 lunch specials in the back. They had a few tables with this unique hot sauce. It had a mild amount of heat, but it was more fruity-tasting and sour than anything. Before the pandemic hit, I went in near closing time to ask them what flavor it was or where I could buy it, but all they said was "we get it from a restaurant supplier". To this day, I haven't been able to find anything even remotely similar. I tried "chamoy sauce" because it was a similar color, but it just tasted like salty water. I got some "Mango Habanero" recently after getting my shots, but it just tastes like regular hot sauce with no fruity flavor.

I watched about 8 minutes of it. The way this youtuber plays is not unlike my own playstyle, just without the cautious quicksaving before every key door. He or she even throws dynamite around corners occasionally. All this proves is that Blood's quirks are just a natural part of the game, just like Doom's circlestrafing. The only reason this player is so good is because he or she has the level layouts memorized, which 99% of Blood players will not have the privilege. And comments like these are why Doomworld desperately needs reaction emotes that convey some sort of negativity. I guess Temporary Invisibility will have to suffice, since it's more of a hindrance than a powerup. First of all, the playstyle I mentioned dates way back to when I bought the game on CD around 2012-2013, and even earlier counting the shareware version. Civvie 11 has nothing to do with my post, besides an excerpt mentioning that he brought in a wave of Gen Z fans who never had to suffer in the dark days of DOSBox. Secondly, what's wrong with trying to entice a young modern audience into playing classic games through snarky humor and namedropping useful source ports? Toxic gatekeeping benefits no one, especially not the companies who get royalties from these games on GOG and Steam.

Just finished a classic Mega Man marathon that was partially inspired by this thread. I played basically everything except Powered Up and the shitty Rockman & Forte sequel on the Wonderswan. Some of them I was playing for the very first time, most notably Mega Man 11. After finishing Mega Man 11, I can see why the Classic legacy has lived on while the X series has been in hiatus. There's a level of precision platforming skill in Classic you just don't get in X due to the dashing, air-dashing, and wall-jumping. Acid Man's stage in particular is really fun and stressful at the same time. In an older title, the spike traps + running water gimmick would've probably been saved for the Wily Stages. The fact that they put something this challenging into a regular stage shows me that Capcom has a level of confidence in Classic that they just don't have in X. The whole gear system just shows how strong the foundations of the Classic series really are. They perfectly compliment the game mechanics without impeding on the regular moveset, like the "boost" mechanics in modern Sonic games do. The power gear basically gives you the Arm parts from X from the very start, and it feels so much more fluid. The speed gear has dual benefits since it can either make regular platforming easier for casuals or open up new possibilities for speedrunners. I would've loved to see more speed gear-related challenges like Quick Man lasers, but apparently Mega Man 11 was rushed towards the end. Mapping Rush Coil and Rush Jet to face buttons was also one of the best ideas Capcom has ever had, and it makes me wish X titles had more movement options through the use of items. I think I said it before, but I much prefer E-Tanks to Sub-Tanks and MM11 really reminds me why I think this way. With Sub-Tanks, you have to tediously grind for health by shooting respawning enemies over and over. With E-Tanks, you can just buy them from the store with the bolts you collect throughout levels. MM11 is generous enough that you'll usually have enough bolts from one stage to buy a few E-Tanks along with some lives to make up for any you lost. There's even an easy 100 bolt item at the end of the first screen in Block Man's stage, so grinding for items for the Wily Castle stages can be done in only a few minutes.

Has anyone in this long-ass thread I didn't read pointed out to @Doomkid that even the word "stupidest" is in contention over whether it's a real word in the English language or not?

thank you archvile for making cool-ass secret exits in vanilla megawads possible

Running past monsters is always an option, even in maps like No Rest For the Living MAP05 where you start out boxed in. Learn to juke Hell Knights and Barons in close-quarters. Take advantage of infighting, especially with shotgunners or chaingunners so you can get their weapons early. I've shilled this episode in the past but Infected Area is a decent PWAD to start with since it's one of the earliest examples I can think of (1996) that was designed with pistol starts in mind.

Nice to see some Memento Mori 1 positivity around here for once instead of the usual "accentuate the negative" post that gets hung up on MAP12. I personally prefer it to both TNT: Evilution and Icarus: Alien Vanguard, though I haven't played it in years for fear of the "good" maps being worse than I remember. I still love the MAP05 music, as well as the one track that turns into a Scooby-Doo metal remix halfway through (MAP09?)

funny you should say this

Download link here

I like Blood, I think it has a solid foundation and top-tier level design, but I don't consider it on the same level as Doom or Quake. I don't quite get the whole "BEST FPS GAME EVER" mentality that a lot of people (mostly younger fans of Civvie 11 who never had to suffer through the pre-source port days) seem to have. There's too much "throw a stick of dynamite around a corner" and "stand still and wait for the ear-piercing ghost to become vulnerable to the shotgun 4 or 5 times" and "waste all your ammo against a bullet sponge spider" and "hold crouch for 5 minutes while you whittle away at 4 Stone Gargoyles at once" present for it to be considered the pinnacle of FPS design. In fact, I think Blood is one of the rare old-school FPSes that plays better on the easier difficulties in spite of what the "git gud" crowd thinks. I used to like playing BloodGDX's custom difficulty with medium scaling and hardest enemy placement for a more Doom-like experience. My favorite level in the game is the haunted house one in E2 which just so happens to have no cultists whatsoever.

What you can't do now: What you can do now: What you will be able to do in the future:

You missed the point of my post. The differences between classic Doom and Doom Eternal don't lie in the "complexity" or "skill ceiling" but rather in the nuances of the overall design. Classic Doom is very much a "building blocks" kind of game like Minecraft, Super Mario, or Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. Weapons, enemies, and linedef actions serve the most rudimentary functions, which synergize with the hand-crafted level geometry to create an infinite number of possibilities for players to experience. The simplicity of Doom's design is what allows this limitless level design potential to be possible. Contextualizing functions any more than "shotgun that deals up to 105 damage but dissipates with distance" or "large spider with 500HP that acts as plasma turret" would ruin the flow of everything. The only real objective of classic Doom set by ID Software is to reach the exit linedef. Everything up to that point is in the hands of the level authors. Doom Eternal, as you've said, is not unlike a character action game in terms of constant weapon switching against aggressive, specialized foes. The combat loop is very much set in stone, arguably to the point of being rigid and overtuned. Weapons and enemies now have so many different functions that the lines between hierarchies have been completely blurred. Due to the highly contextualized weapons and enemies in Doom Eternal, level design has devolved into a string of Unreal Tournament 99 arenas with the most basic platforming, punch or shoot switches, and "secrets" telegraphed by 8-foot tall wall cracks to connect them. Every level in Doom Eternal feels exactly the same as the last but with more enemies and different textures. The fact that most of the Master Levels (aside from unique gimmick rooms like in the SGN ML) barely play any different from the original versions aside from just taking longer and requiring more chainsaws and glory kills to survive shows how superficial Doom Eternal's gameplay loop ultimately is compared to the classics. Pretty much everything except the most extreme contextualized enemies like Marauders can be taken down with Precision Bolt-Super Shotgun/Ballista/Rocket Launcher swaps until you run low on ammo/health/armor and need to perform a context-sensitive function with cooldown on an infinitely-respawning zombie.

I used to, but I really grew to appreciate the extra vertical FOV gained in ports that have fullscreen HUDs.

They still call him Doomguy in the Doom Eternal DLC.

@Antroid Big problem with this is that it's fundamentally impossible to make a new game like the classics with modern technology. Levels are not loaded in all at once, they're dynamically streamed in. Every time you hit a checkpoint, the level changes layers and despawns everything behind you. It's also why the Fast Travel system works the way it does and freezes you for a short period of time. Enemies are 100% dependent on navigation meshes that have traversal scripting for jumping up ledges or knowing how to box a player in from multiple angles. They can never leave the encounter they're spawned in, or they'll automatically despawn. Only reason I think games like Amid Evil and DUSK can get away with classic design is because their graphics are so low fidelity, they have the the leftover resources to render everything. Aside from that, I do agree that Doom Eternal makes design sacrifices in the long-run in order to provide a more flashy spectacle for the short-term. Everybody loves Doom Eternal now in 2021, but I have a hard time believing it'll have the same lasting appeal as classic Doom due to its ultimately more repetitive gameplay loop. The pointless platforming represents the zenith of ID Software's capabilities to expand on the core gameplay.

DPS weapons in general are really useless in Doom Eternal's meta because combo weapons kill so much faster while using less ammo. I theorize the Energy Shield mod was created just so the chaingun would be usable on Nightmare difficulty. Buffing the Plasma Rifle would take a lot more than just increasing its mouse sensitivity. It would require a lot more incentives for the player, such as guaranteed falters with prolonged fire or maybe even increased splash damage with a chain reaction effect like the 2016 Stun Bomb upgrade.

There were some Pokemon ones, but I think they may have been taken down because their samples weren't 100% authentic. On a semi-related note, there is a composer named Ian Stocker who publishes his original uncompressed GBA game soundtracks on his channel. His Robots soundtrack is really atmospheric for what's probably a shovelware tie-in movie game.

There's been a trend recently where people are coming together to locate various sample CDs and ROMpler keyboards from the 90s in order to recreate game soundtracks from the Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 in uncompressed quality. Knowing that the Doom community has seen numerous projects of a similar sort like Per Kristian's HD soundpack or the SC-55 recordings, I was wondering how people here felt about these various projects. I personally think these people are doing God's work, although knowing 99% of these are Nintendo games makes me fear for the inevitable cease & desist letters. I really hope someone restores the Bomberman Hero OST someday, even if the cartridge compression adds to the lo-fi charm. I apologize if a thread like this has been posted before. I used the search bar and found nothing similar.