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MajorRawne

Most dreaded maps/wads

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Greetings fellow Doomers! I was wondering which maps or wads people actually fear - the levels that have built up in your mind over time to be so powerful and dreaded that the idea of playing them seems horrible, and the idea of actually beating them from a pistol start is something you can barely imagine.

I am just about to finish Alien Vendetta years of cold sweats about the Cyberdemon near the beginning of Whispering Shadows, but I have always felt cold, immortal horror about the Revenant attacks in Demonic Hordes (which I beat easily on Christmas Eve of all days) and Firewalk With Me.

I also feel this way about Hell Revealed 1 and 2. I can rampage through these on HMP, but to be honest they piss me off a bit too much on UV and I don't find them rewarding. They're visually horrible which kills a whole dimension of fun for me.

Currently I'm butchering my way through map 28 of Speed of Doom and loving it, but a year ago the idea of playing this map would have given me the shits.

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I want to beat Eternal Doom III so bad but it's so hard for me. The maps are breathtaking. I don't know what it is, I just get obliterated on almost every map. Even the early ones.

I also really want to beat Deus Vult MAP02 without cheating, some Hell Revealed 2 maps, and Degrassi by TimeOfDeath

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Thanks, I'll check those out myself!

I just finished map 28 of Speed of Doom. Now I can see why people fight hard to beat these maps. Crossing the exit with just the tatters of your armour and health, knowing you killed over 4,000 monsters, is something to be proud of :)

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If a map had over 4000 monsters I would lose interests in playing it right away. :P 300 monsters seems like the maximum I could handle without getting instantly bored.

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Only Plutonia Map 11: Hunted makes me pause. PSX Doom does consistently too, for obvious reasons...even years later after playing the faster harder PC version.

Hell, Go 2 It in that same mapset just gets my blood pumping.

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Roughly a year ago I began a simple UV playthrough of Scythe intending to finish the entire game without dying, and to this day there remains within my directory a save file for that game... with the marine poised at the beginning of map30.

There's no way I'm loading up that save game. I just don't have the mettle.

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I am reluctant to play (or flat-out refuse to play) the following:

-Plutonia MAP11 and other Arch-Vile mazes
-Any/all Icon of Sin maps - even the one I made in Scourge
-Big slaughter maps - I've never played Sunder, Slaughterfest, New Gothic or most of Time of Death's maps, for examples, whilst I have happily played through AV, Plutonia 2, SoD, HR, HR2 and Kama Sutra (just to give an idea of where I draw the line). The second I see a big grid of monsters in a large, open area, I've lost interest
-Joke WADs - I've given some a go, thought they were alright (Wills made some good ones) and then seen a huge number of things (Terry's and Doomguy2000's stuff, for example) that I flat-out refuse to even give a go
-Maps that rely on speed running tricks. I can live with strafe running, but when I have to try and get glides and stuff, I generally lose interest
-HeXen and Heretic - The games themselves didn't appeal to me too much, even though I've beaten them both once in their entirety, but I am yet to ever want to play a .WAD for them all the way through, IIRC


I'm pretty easy with most Doom maps and tend to push through everything I'm playing at least once, so switch hunts, puzzles, difficult maps and many more things don't turn me off enough to stop playing, but my lengthy experience with Doom has told me there are some things that simply are not for me.

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Both Plutonia Map11, the archvile maze is terrible, so hard to memorize the maze and its route.

Others are some very tough maps with lots of cyberdemons and tricky situations.

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Phobus said:

I am reluctant to play (or flat-out refuse to play) the following:

-Plutonia MAP11 and other Arch-Vile mazes
-Any/all Icon of Sin maps - even the one I made in Scourge
-Big slaughter maps - I've never played Sunder, Slaughterfest, New Gothic or most of Time of Death's maps, for examples, whilst I have happily played through AV, Plutonia 2, SoD, HR, HR2 and Kama Sutra (just to give an idea of where I draw the line). The second I see a big grid of monsters in a large, open area, I've lost interest
-Joke WADs - I've given some a go, thought they were alright (Wills made some good ones) and then seen a huge number of things (Terry's and Doomguy2000's stuff, for example) that I flat-out refuse to even give a go
-Maps that rely on speed running tricks. I can live with strafe running, but when I have to try and get glides and stuff, I generally lose interest
-HeXen and Heretic - The games themselves didn't appeal to me too much, even though I've beaten them both once in their entirety, but I am yet to ever want to play a .WAD for them all the way through, IIRC

Wow, we're like, the same guy. The biggest difference is that I only play coop so I'll play (for a while, at least) almost anything fun. I never have played a joke wad. I'll play Plutonia MAP11 because I just have to suffer through it and maybe half a dozen deaths. Same with any map that's too hard. I'll usually make sure cheats are enabled for Icon of Sin maps.

Which reminds me.. does MAP30 have to end with an Icon of Sin? Could it not just end with a regular switch? I've played through probably a couple dozen megawads now and every single one of them has Romero's head on a stick at the end.

The only thing I truly can't stand is consistently not having any ammo. I better have plenty of ammo for at least 1 gun, preferably shotgun. The SSG is tough as hell but fighting a cyberdemon or a room full of big monsters with one is as ammo-restricted as I ever want to be. That's why we always play with "keep ammo after dying" enabled. It kind of cheapens death but not to the point where we sacrifice lives.

Also, after playing the first few maps of Speed of Doom the other night, I hope I never see an instant teleporting monster again. The concept makes absolutely no sense, and SoD does it at what seems to be completely random times. Stupid and annoying.

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qoncept said:

Which reminds me.. does MAP30 have to end with an Icon of Sin? Could it not just end with a regular switch? I've played through probably a couple dozen megawads now and every single one of them has Romero's head on a stick at the end.

Play Vilecore. :)

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Memfis said:

Play Vilecore. :)

I loved it! But there are some probs when it comes to CooP play. Like traps that trigger allowinhg only one playing to access an area. But if you die afterwords theres no way to go back thru the path. Hope that all gets fixed in Vilecore II :)

Can't do it.

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surprised how many Plutonia MAP11 mentions in this thread. That map was horrifying when I was younger, but that map kinda alleviates my fear of archviles. If you give it a chance, it's really not all that hard.

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Doom 2 MAP19: The Citadel.

And it's D2INO counterpart moreso. I think when it's released, others will agree.

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qoncept said:
(In relation to fixes in Vilecore 2)

Can't do it.

What do you mean? God I forgot all about Vilecore 2, is he still working on that?
[quote]qoncept said:

Which reminds me.. does MAP30 have to end with an Icon of Sin? Could it not just end with a regular switch? I've played through probably a couple dozen megawads now and every single one of them has Romero's head on a stick at the end.

Which goes to show how good some mappers are at thinking outside the box ;) I also hate IoS maps and have never seriously tried to beat one. They stress me out and it's also annoying when your timing is as bad as mine.

qoncept said:

Also, after playing the first few maps of Speed of Doom the other night, I hope I never see an instant teleporting monster again. The concept makes absolutely no sense, and SoD does it at what seems to be completely random times. Stupid and annoying.

Trust me, I've played through 8-10 maps from various points throughout the megawad and the instant teleport traps only get more predictable and annoying. Glad I accidentally gave it 4 stars on the archive instead of 5. On the other hand, some of the maps are fantastic and map 28 is a masterpiece.

Back on topic, Darkness Without End and Pyramid of Death on Speed of Doom cause me to catch my breath for sheer lunacy, and map 29 (Ruins of Kalnik?) gives me a horrid, doomed sense of claustrophobia.

I'm dreading playing The Hag's Finger and a few other maps from Sunder.

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40oz said:

surprised how many Plutonia MAP11 mentions in this thread. That map was horrifying when I was younger, but that map kinda alleviates my fear of archviles. If you give it a chance, it's really not all that hard.

It's not that it is hard. It's that you're stuck using the SSG (mostly) on a load of Arch-Viles in a boring, blandly-textured maze with remote triggered doors and little in the way of cover (making for a lot of corner camping and sniping). As a one-off experience it's liveable, but I'd not choose to repeat it. Ever.

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MajorRawne said:

What do you mean? God I forgot all about Vilecore 2, is he still working on that?

Broke-ass coop. I won't play it.

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My most dreaded WAD would have to be KDiZD. I've played it three times, and every time I get more frustrated at how poor either the game is or how awful I am. I can never figure out which it is, but I often look back after I finish and think its a mixture of both. I have yet to beat it on Nightmare, which should be a chore and a half, but I don't hate KDiZD like a lot of people seem to, though I do think some of the map designs are absolute overkill.


Either way, I'd rather spend my time playing through KDiZD than some totally obscure and shitty WAD from the mid 90s that no one remembers because its ball cheese.

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Any map with excessive monster counts or which require copious amounts of BFG Spam to get by.

The former just eats up too much time and usually consists of a Groundhog Day-ish sequence of repeatedly blowing up several hundred monsters that suddenly get unleashed, even for something as simple as going up some stairs.

With regards to the latter, I dread falling asleep on my keyboard. There's little to no entertainment in a big area filled with Cell Packs and 20 teleport pads under constant heavy use.

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Some excellent posts here and we even get a mention of ball-cheese! I'm gonna have to use that next time I review a crap old-schooler! :P

As people may have seen from my efforts on YouTube, Help Revealed map 26 (Afterlife) is impossible for me on UV, mainly because I dodge like I've just had a poorly-anaesthatised hip replacement.

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Sewers. Anything with sewers/nukage tunnels or a nukage/refinery theme.

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40oz said:

surprised how many Plutonia MAP11 mentions in this thread. That map was horrifying when I was younger, but that map kinda alleviates my fear of archviles. If you give it a chance, it's really not all that hard.



it's not that hard because of the arch-viles, if you know how to handle them. the idea of playing hide and seek with viles is pretty cool. it's hard because of the layout imo, it looks all the same to me so it's easy to get lost.

i don't like jokewads or wads with mspaint "artwork" or stupid sounds, it ruins immersion instantly.

also chasm-like catwalks and jumping puzzles.

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Pirx said:

it's not that hard because of the arch-viles, if you know how to handle them. the idea of playing hide and seek with viles is pretty cool. it's hard because of the layout imo, it looks all the same to me so it's easy to get lost.


Yup. Plus, if you're like me in any way, the first time you played it, that map took you an eternity to beat. I basically have no sense of direction in Doom to start with anyways, so the first time playing Map 11 of plutonia for me was probably comparable to giving a first grader a calculus problem for homework... and probably yielded similar results:

I got stuck on it for hours, and I eventually got so frustrated that I gave up and went to bed.

Took me three days to beat it the first time.

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Map 11: Hunted is actually one of the only good things about Plutonia. The map itself is ugly as hell, but it's probably only one of the commercially released ones that can make my heart pump. Really makes you feel like you're hunted and need to run for your life.

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I've never liked Doom 2's The Tenements. Mainly because of that one red colored room, with the narrow stairs going down towards one of the keys. As soon as you reach the bottom, doors with monsters open up all around you, and you're forced to run up to the door as quickly as possible without falling off of the pathway, or else you'll be swimming in lava. I've always hated that room.

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obake said:

I've never liked Doom 2's The Tenements. Mainly because of that one red colored room, with the narrow stairs going down towards one of the keys. As soon as you reach the bottom, doors with monsters open up all around you, and you're forced to run up to the door as quickly as possible without falling off of the pathway, or else you'll be swimming in lava. I've always hated that room.


The easiest thing to do here is stand in the middle of the doorway and line yourself up with the Red Keycard; you can simply sprint straight down, then run backwards. Don't turn at all. Just forward, grab the key, then back yourself out of there. You can then shoot anything that follows with more than enough space.

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