The DWmegawad Club plays: STRAIN

MAP05: Depot

Well, this does pretty much nothing for me. Corridors full of meat, but there's just nothing to get your teeth into. At least it's over quickly.

TheOrganGrinder said:

Corridors full of meat, but there's just nothing to get your teeth into.

I love that even a slight shift in context makes this sentence absolute nonsense.

Capellan said:

FDA = "first demo attempt". Demo of the player's first ever playthrough of a map.
...

Thanks for telling me that. I also second your feelings on map06. I might not demo that one at all. It's easily the worst, most confusing map in the set to this point.

I've played up to map07 without taking demos, but I died there early on. I might take a partial FDA for that, if there is such a thing, then take FDAs of later levels. Some of them will end in my death, so I'll take a version afterwards where I actually survive.

For today's level, the name of the game is ammo starvation. 04 played fair by giving me a chainsaw to compensate, but this level expects me to use my fists against the zombiemen to conserve ammo. Figuring this out made demoing the level easier than I expected, because I didn't run out of ammo fighting the sergeants outside. Punching them hurts me more than it hurts them. I still did it anyway at one point thanks to being surprised. I also got away with it.



EDIT: forgot to upload the demo.
This is my first demo taken with the June 2015 glboom+ beta (I got my crosshair back from zdoom!): https://www.mediafire.com/?u864kr66l6dm1qn

MAP03: Downtown
100% kills, 3/3 secrets

Blech, if you're gonna name your map "downtown", probably should make sure it at least tries to come close to delivering the scale and variation of the original. That said, as others have noted this is much more of a "Factory" than "Downtown" vibe as far as Doom 2 maps go. Brown, brown and more brown is pretty boring, but there's enough whimsy in the corridor progression to keep things interesting, actually. Usually I would mind the soulsphere being useless for pistol-starters but it's not secret tagged, more of a super-secret, so meh. The fast imps don't do much for me, they feel less like a well-designed gameplay addition and more like something that someone discovered messing around with Dehacked and decided to put in for fun. It is amusing to watch them scurry, but any advantage from moving fast is negated by them needing to stand still and "warm up" their shots. Makes sense that they replace the arachnatrons since that's sorta the role they fill (mobile turret).

MAP04: Industrial Zone
100% kills, 4/4 secrets

Another short map, though the cramped spaces makes it feel a bit shorter than it is. It's also got a bit of a texture clusterfuck going on, but the more interesting layout/architecture helps it in a way that some of the other maps have failed at. Things also ramp up a bit in difficulty here with the introduction of chaingunners and lost souls (which now operate like cacodemons) and a nasty last room ambush. There are a few weird/unintuitive bits here (the weird shotgunner one-way cubby thing, and that the bars/red key cage don't look like they'd open on their own at first glance) but this is definitely the best map so far (though that might be damning with faint praise...)

MAP05: Depot
100% kills, 2/2 secrets

Pretty one-note map here, almost arena-like with its collection of riff-raff in squares. The most interesting aspect is probably the one-time secret choice at the start (though a quick/knowledgeable player can grab both). There's also a bit of ammo shortage, I used the fists (and my vast amounts of health/armor) to just attrition my way through a lot of the enemies. The super imp ambush is a good scare though.

Map06
This level is by the same guy who brought us the tedious map05. And it's worse in pretty much every way.

I'll start with the positives, since they won't take long. The author has learned to use two or more different textures in the same room, so there is a little more visual diversity. They've also made some effort to vary the lighting more, though as they didn't understand how lighting actually works (to be fair, neither did I, back then) it's not as varied as he probably intended.

Now that faint praise is done, let's look at the bad: lots of long, narrow corridors of blandness, where often the only detail is a "windowframe" style thing on which you can get stuck. Yay!

There's a lot of repetition in the fights as well. "The floor drops out" feels like it happens in almost every room, while the multi-part teleport trap, which for my money outstays its welcome the first time he uses it, makes a "bigger longer and even more tedious!" return later.

Progression is even more obtuse than map02 – I suspect this may well be the first level where people really get stuck, as Alfonzo did in his original twitch playthrough – and involves a lot of backtracking.

I got the superdupermegaarmour on this map. It's a buggy little critter though: don't pick up armour bonuses while you're wearing it.

The holo-bot (why is it called that? I don't know – possibly because of the other version later?) makes a rather low key debut near the end of this tediousness. It doesn't really get a chance to shine, which is a shame – its ultraslow homing missiles are actually quite difficult to deal with when it is used well.

Map 05: Kills: 100%, Items: 100%, Secrets: 50%, final time: 4:14 (1 death)

Very short map, not too special, as it's pretty symmetric, but it's short enough that it's kinda fun anyway. My first attempt died quickly as I lost a lot of health to the hitscanners and the shotgun guys in the outside killed me, but restarting ended up helping me as I was able to get the soul sphere secret. The fight against the modified imps in the red key hallway was neat, all those closets opening definitely surprised me, as I was somewhat far into the room at the point I alerted them. The chaotic ending was neat, too; on my second attempt, I semi-speedran the start and left a lot of the monsters alive, and ended up coming back to that area filled with monsters, so I nearly died in the chaos. :D

FDA here.

MAP05 - "Depot” by Jon Landis

Very simple layout, but the space is used and re-used quite well, fighting your way out of the central building before fighting your way back into it. I have a feeling the pistol start added a fair bit to the fun as the ammo is super tight, and sometimes requires leaving enemies til later (or lots of punching). By the end I was living from hand to mouth, shooting each bad guy with the gun dropped by the one before, certainly made things interesting. I like how abruptly it ends too.

time for some rage at this map...

MAP06: Launch Control

oh my fucking god...

this map is so goddamn nauseating to play through. Nothing but corridors and imps, that's practically the whole map. the beginning and the end parts are the same too, going through four teleporters, flicking four switches, fighting off some imp hordes. and that's just the most interesting gameplay aspect. the corridors, the amount of backtracking, the rather dumb blue key area, or the not-so-obvious-yet-totally-necessary jump to the area behind blue bars to get the goddamn key. this map makes me question why I play STRAIN. The chainsaw and super shotgun make appearances for me, as does those flying discs that fire revenant missiles. they however cannot save the corridor horror that this map makes up. at least later levels play better.

MAP06 - "Launch Control” by Jon Landis
I have mixed feelings about this map. Whilst the gameplay gimmicks in it are cleverly designed, I feel that it is too regimented and there are far too many corridors. I don't mind an odd, slightly puzzling progression sometimes but I prefer levels to be far more organic and open. Too much of this one is simply traversing rooms and corridors, going from encounter, to room, to encounter. Each one being hermetically sealed and divorced from the other parts of the map. Moreover several parts were repetitive (the 4 teleporter pads to switches trope comes to mind). At other times I found the progression quite obtuse, to the point that I was close to breaking out Doom Builder to find out where to go next, only to discover that some dumb pad with a box of shells I'd been avoiding due to ammo capacity issues needed to be stepped on to lower the next wall.

I didn't immensely enjoy this map. I do appreciate that there has been some clever thought put into designing the progression of the level and it's logical workings, but I feel overall it's far too repetitive and tedious. I got 5/7 secrets here, partly because once I figured out the soulsphere secret the way to get to it had closed. I also apparently missed a few monsters somehow too. Suffice to say I wasn't inclined to go back and search for them.

I forgot to comment on the drone enemy introduced here. It's different I guess, but it's projectile attack is awfully slow-moving. Presumably it's more powerful to compensate? I'm not too keen on the death frames for it though.

EDIT: After I initially played this, I saw on the wiki that the new enemy is called the holobot. At least the wibbly-wobbly death frames made sense after this

5

Without reading too much into them I got the idea that there wasn't much love for this level but I really liked it. Yes it is symmetrical and yes it's a comprised of hallways and rectangle areas in a very uninspiring manner, but I'm a sucker for maps that wear their concept on their sleeve and this qualifies.

Being called the depot, the central base holds a large quantity of health. The level starts with an annoying switch sequence that has to be repeated until all the imps in the next room are dead lest you rush in before the door closes only to be trapped in close proximity to their waiting claws. Encounters after this were rather pedestrian but quick to get through and after some more switches we reach the outside area and travel two more corridors to collect, then use, the red key in what feels like busy work.

This however, has all been a ploy to run down my ammo so when the central area repopulated I was put at a major disadvantage and the same corridors I was earlier clearing at leisure now have me running circuits and gobbling up medikits like pacman whilst taking our fast imps and chaingunners with a chainsaw.

So the first two thirds of the level are uneventful but in my opinion are saved by the bloodthirsty final act. This level could have been much better if the switch speedbumps were removed from the early part and the outdoor red key traipse didn't feel so much like filler, plus I don't know if pistol starters are unfairly hampered without a melee weapon or if secrets unbalance the map, but in my own experience it was a fun romp.

6.

This is a wierd one. It also falls foul of textbook design errors most notable the noodley corridors that use wall brackets to make going through them even less fun and then force the player to go through them multiple times. The progression is also unclear to the point of wondering whether or not I broke the map by jumping over blue skull bars only to find the blue key on the other side. Further to this point the blue door houses a switch that opens up an area that I had visited earlier that looked like it was a shrine to a missing blue key leading to me thinking for a few minutes that it has not been flagged for HMP difficulty.

There is more, multiple teleport switch puzzles, a largely superfluous underground corridor system, rooms that initially look like they serve no purpose before you hit a seemingly unconnected switch and nerve shredding surprise warp attacks.

Funnily enough, I still don't hate this map. Maybe the aforementioned caused me some sort of delerium but it seemed to have character. The spooky music might have helped. It felt like I was in some malevolent sentient complex that was built to erode the sanity of anyone trapped within and going out an a limb, if this was an IWAD map I could see it having a cult appreciation like the Chasm or the Pit.

MAP06 - Launch Control

Kills: 98% | Items: 75% | Secrets: 71%

Meh here as well. But this one is a little more interesting than the previous map. I liked the corridors below th others like there are actually different floors, similar thing is used near the end but with revealing stairs. The navigation of the corridors is annoying because you keep bumping on the support details. For the most the map is pretty bland and almost all grey. Here we see the for the first time the Holo-bot, which replaces the revenant and it's missiles are slower, maybe too much slow. Most notable thing is the symmetry on the first and the final fight. The secret soulsphere is broken:

MAP06: Launch Control
29:43 | Kills: 98% | Items: 100% | Secrets: 85%

I actually liked this one, or at least didn't mind it. It helps that the end with the launch tunnels is burned into my memory as a key "STRAIN moment". The interminable corridors did get tiring, but the morphing scenery was cool, and there were some good secrets tucked away (of which I still missed a couple.) During the first teleporter puzzle, I thought "Well at least they're not super imps" and then had to laugh when I got to the final room. I like how that last room is like a scaled-up version of the first. Also in the last room, I saw all those shellboxes and was like "I sure could use a backpack about now!" and then when secret-hunting stumbled across said backpack, which I had run right by and missed the first time around.

Two odd things that stuck out: In the final room, why was the upper-inside texture of the southeastern teleporter in flames? Seemed like it was a signal for something, but I couldn't discover what. Also, in the red key room, there's a lift (with strange scrolling lift tracks) that lowers when you nab the key, but I couldn't figure out what the point of that little alcove was (it contained a medikit and a switch to lower the lift again.) Was there an enemy stationed on the lift platform, waiting for you to grab the key?

It occurs to me to wonder how much effort it would take someone to tweak the lost soul death frames into proper doppelganger graphics. I actually like the guy (its hissing/clicking noise is creepy) but the death frames reverting to lost soul graphics is awfully jarring.

gaspe said:

The secret soulsphere is broken

I was able to get both. The ceiling height was a slight encumbrance (I didn't realize that was the issue) but I backed up slightly and charged forward, and there was a discernible moment where I was stuck up against the lip, and then I "popped" forward into the alcove. This was in GZDoom, so it might have been a port-specific thing?

But yes, both armor and soulsphere are accessible:

Salt-Man Z said:

This was in GZDoom, so it might have been a port-specific thing?

I was able to get both in PrBoom-plus v2.5.1.3

MAP04: Bit of an oddity here. Symmetrical design that gets clogged pretty quick makes for some dull gameplay (how are you supposed to handle the post RK right other than just shooting at knees from the lift into the complex?), but I did enjoy the fist-oriented gameplay at the start... really shows the strength of double hooks.

MAP05: Cool midi. I honestly can't hate this map as it kept me mildly entertained throughout, especially with that hectic final battle. The only thing that got to me is that progression was pretty obscure (it also didn't help that I missed the lift to the BK since but the lift and its pedestal are SUPPORT textures, so I wound up backtracking quite a ways), and health was pretty unbalanced; thank god I found the megasphere. An alright map, though it certainly is gimmicky. And unfortunately I don't think that neat new flying eye enemy was showcased all that well, as my eyes were locked onto all the other targets on the ground.

All in all, I don't think I have anything against Landis' mapping style... I prefer his corridor gameplay over Keranen's.

Dobu, those are MAP05 and 06, not 04 and 05 :P

Yeah dobu get your shit together geez

MAP06: Launch Control
98% kills, 6/7 secrets

I'm not nearly as negative on this as others; though it's quite obviously flawed, it gets points from me simply because it's definitely the most interesting level so far. The ground falling out at the start is certainly different, and a good taste of things to come. There's a couple clever uses of staircases and raising/lowering floors throughout (especially the Hexen-ish dual staircases before the last part of the map), and some decent ambushes.

The main problem in my eyes is that the author doesn't know when enough is enough, he keeps repeating the same tropes throughout. The teleport fight at the beginning is a good example, one or two groups of monsters would be fine, but the player has to repeat it four times... and then repeat that same encounter (with different imps) at the end of the map! This map is a perfect example of symmetry run amok, I don't know if there's a single encounter in this map that isn't either a symmetrical room or symmetrically placed.

Texture usage is better than MAP05, but still pretty boring; I agree with purist that the wall brackets hurt as much as they help. I also take beef with the required jump past the blue skull bars, I feel that keys/doors are indicators there to guide the player as to which areas they need to tackle and in which order; the jump there feels like either a secret or breaking the map, not required progression. Still, points for finally perking up my interest.

MAP06: Launch Control

Compared to the same author's MAP05 offering, this one is much more ambitious and conceptually clearer. Instead of an utterly nondescript nest of corridors and courtyard, what we've got here is a largely clean-feeling techbase, lots of white tile walls, gleaming metal supports, a much more involved and intricate layout. The level makes fairly heavy use of over-and-under corridors that intersect and interweave, creating a map with a "walk distance" much greater than its footprint would suggest - whether this is a good or a bad thing is left as an exercise for the player to decide, but there's generally no shortage of ambulatory meat in which to find a home for your bullets. The map modifies itself as you go along in often unexpected ways; it's got that abstract, "no sane person would build a place like this" quality to it that sets me on edge delightfully. And while it's cramped and claustrophobic, the map isn't excessively gloomy; instead, it's often bright enough that the feeling is one of stifling sterility, a meticulously-maintained "clean room" filled with a silence that swallows your footsteps and through which the opposition drift like sullen ghosts.

All of this isn't without its downsides. The support brackets in the already cramped corridors are very easy to get caught up on, making dodging and even getting from place to place an exercise in periodic frustration. Individual elements and overall progression often seem unintuitive (e.g. the two rooms crowded with multiple teleporters, or the transparent lifts) and there are points where the player engages with the scenery in a way that feels repetitive and dull. Overall there seems to be an expectation that the player will anticipate and accept "walk to the other end of the map" as the intended solution to dead-ending along one particular path of progression, and it's at this point that the map's long, twisting corridors start to seriously wear out their welcome. I'm left feeling that the map values and emphasises "clever" over "fun." On a purely personal note, I find the "sealed-in" nature of the map disorienting; there's nary a peek at the sky, and the player starts in a doorless, anonymous room, with nothing but the map's name to cement its place in the world or greater narrative the player is butchering his way through.

Salt-Man Z said:

But yes, both armor and soulsphere are accessible:

Spoiler

You have to hit the front switch in the tekgreen room again (the back switch being the one which raised the stairs) which opens the soulsphere-side passageway back up.

I totally missed that the switch was repeatable, now I see how to get the soulsphere.

Ugh....
Map06 is officially the worst map I've played in the DWMC. Map05 has a lot of open space to breath and punching the zombies is pretty fun. This level is NOT. There's too much cannon fodder, cramped spaces, teleporters EVERYWHERE, lifts with half the damn thing invisible like the author WANTS me to get stuck on it REPEATEDLY, and confusing progression. The latter doesn't show much in the demo too much because I've played the map 3 times. The first time I didn't demo and it probably took 20 minutes instead of 10 thanks to getting lost. The second time I died to superdemons in the chainsaw room because I'm not used to infinite height monsters. Here's the third. I hope I don't make anyone sick with the whole spinning my mouse around thing during the final battle. I was ready to ragequit the map at that point.

view this with glboom+ and the STRAIN deh and wad in the same folder as separate files: https://www.mediafire.com/?q7inlb3s2009dod

I really don't like all the teleporting monsters because I lose track of where enemies are. It's obviously the author's idea of difficulty, but it just frustrates me. I'm used to a more straightforward approach.

EDIT: You don't need to jump to reach the blue key area. Watch my demo. I ran from the lift into the hallway below.

SoundofDoomDoors said:

You don't need to jump to reach the blue key area. Watch my demo. I ran from the lift into the hallway below.

Yes, that's what "jumping" refers to in games that don't support actual upward movement via a dedicated button (like DOOM2).

7

Yeah, not the 7th for another 5 hours here but I'm a maverick, what can I say.

En Route has a nice spaceship theme adorned with some good texturing - particularly creative use of midtexturing and earns points for telling a meaningful part of the STRAIN story through the map but outside of this it is a bit of a nothing really.

You start inches away from the type of barred off exit that probably makes this essentially a skip map for speed runners. The bars are removed by hitting switches behind blue and yellow doors in each wing of the ship and the nose in the impressive but unmanned cockpit. Really the map should end here because the teleport itself seems an odd way to transition to the moon.

Monster fodder is hitscanner hell, which leads to some rather shitty firefights when they are at a low unsighted angle (doubly unsighted by the railings). Scoring the megasphere made life easy from this point on but not a great deal more enjoyable and the soulsphere at the end was just overkill.

Map07
The first of eight STRAIN levels in which Adelusion had a hand is an unusual map07 in that it features neither tag 666 nor tag 667. Of course, STRAIN eliminated both the arachnotron and the mancubus from the bestiary. Something presumably could have been done with the super-imp if desired though, since it replaces the arachnotron.

Instead we get a pretty standard key hunt arrangement. The level looks nice – it's Adelusion after all – with good use of the new textures. I don't much care for the gameplay, though. I pretty much invariably hate unmarked teleporters for a start, and a lot of the encounter setup tends to reward corner camping too much. It's a level where you're encouraged to inch forward slowly, grinding it down, which is not really very exciting. The one fight I do like is when you get dropped in among the holo-bots and dopplegangers. That's quite fun and much better use of the holo-bot than on map06.

Adelusion appears to have got unnecessarily fancy with the exit for some reason, as discussed previously.

MAP06 - "Launch Control” by Jon Landis

Super annoying navitagion and confusing progression make this a real test of patience. That first room with the teleporters that you can't help stepping on is terrible, but the worst thing by far is the bloody ribbed corridors, my god. I spent more time fighting the damn walls than the monsters. Somewhere in that mess there was a new enemy introduced, but I didn't really see much of it behind some other stuff. I think I saw it firing rev missiles, but it didnt really live long enough to give much of an idea of its potential. I also noticed the rainbow lost souls don't have a death animation which is a bit weird. Anyway, glad to see the back of that map.

Am I the only one who didn't have any trouble with the ribby corridors? Maybe it's a keyboard-vs-mouse thing?

MAP07: En Route
98% kills, 2/4 secrets

This is a very oddly balanced map with the toughest fight at the start (throwing the player in with the holo-bots and rainbow lost souls without an SSG), then the rest of the map is filled with zombie riff-raff. It is possible to grab the blue key without falling down the lift, which I was happy to do. Gameplay-wise it's pretty much a bore though.

The new textures here don't look too bad, though the use of the 'star' wall texture to try and create a starry sky effect just looks odd. I suppose it was necessary back then, since the default sky for the episode is blue, but, eh. The blind teleport 'tricks' and the teleport pads being damaging is annoying.

Map 06: Kills: 98%, Items: 75%, Secrets: 71%, final time: 23:13 (3 death) (took me about 30 minutes including the deaths)

Longest and most confusing map so far, the progression is the strangest so far. Despite that, all my three deaths occurred very early in the map, first at the beginning imp fight, second at the fight with the four demons with the chainsaw, and the last being at the SSG/hitscanner encounter. Most confusing for me was probably the transparent lift to the chaingunner, took me way too long to figure out that was the lift; although I found that there were many parts where I was activating switches and linedefs and didn't really know what they did, I'd usually find some place to go pretty soon.

Despite the progression, I can't say I disliked this map as some others in this thread have. I didn't really mind the wonky progression probably because I played so many 90s maps from randoming through /idgames that I've come to enjoy the exploration value to some extent (the progression here isn't nearly as confusing as some other maps I've played anyway :P). Gameplay wasn't too bad either; even though some of it got kind of grindy with the demon and lost soul hordes, the start and end fights made up for that. At least until I got sort of used to the teleports, the start fight was kind of disorienting with all of the teleporting imps which I sort of enjoyed, while the chaos of the end fight was really fun. The new flying monster didn't really receive a great introduction, I think, though; the first fight it is used in it is not very threatening. It was used much better to add to the chaos at the end fight, though; I think that fight would have functioned much better as an introduction to this monster.

Edit: forgot FDA.

MAP07: En Route

...which is thankfully a short map. the two secrets next to the shotgun at the start are very tricky to acquire, and one of the teleporters leading to one of them actually masks another secret! Not much else to note, apart from a place that the keys are always at plus the exit being right at the start of the map. better than the last map.

Salt-Man Z said:

Am I the only one who didn't have any trouble with the ribby corridors? Maybe it's a keyboard-vs-mouse thing?

I've played it with both and they sucked both times, but I am not the most elegant player.

MAP07 - "En Route” by Anthony Czerwonka
I think I enjoyed this map more than the earlier club members. What a change to have a map 07 which serves an episode transitory function that does not include mancs or arachnotrons.

That sentence alone makes me impressed by the map. It is indeed very brief, and in this respect it does indeed echo it's iwad counterpart. However the outline of the map quite strongly conveys the sense of being on a spaceship (albeit some of the texturing is perhaps a bit less evocative and more generically tech, but it's still good.) Being a moment of transition, the brevity of the map is completely appropriate in respect of the story the wad is trying to tell. Strain demonstrates you can make a more story/realism based wad and not have to make a derivative Map 07 (take that Doom 2 Reloaded!).

Looking at the map more mundanely and discarding it's significance to the 'story' of the wad for a moment, it is quite trivial in terms of combat. The most notable moment would be the blue key drop with the drones, doppelgangers and demons which might be able to get a few knocks in. I suspect they have more of an impact from their sudden reveal than otherwise however. The majority of the damage that will be inflicted on this map will be from hitscanner attrition. The two secrets in the map were quite straightforward, though my discovery of the soulsphere teleport owed more to chance and fortuitous intuition than observation. I should finally note that the flying star field on the bridge is pretty damn neat, particular given the time. I was genuinely impressed.

Oh and Capellan, the map exit worked fine for me on complevel 2 :P