What's the most fast paced "easy" wad you've played?

By easy I mean "newbie 1994 map" or coffee break, or restoring deimos.

Demonfear

The first two episodes of Scythe 1. Quick and easy to blast through.

Kuchitsu.

Zone 300.

Fava Beans and Simply Phobos.

In general, this particular combination is what makes many E1 clones so much fun. Just have fun blasting away at hordes of cannon fodder monster without having to think too much about survival.

Dew beat me to it. Demonfear practically defines "fast but easy".

TVR!

Doom Core felt pretty damn fast to me! It offers whole galleries of hitscanners to slice through.

Tim Willits' Master Levels.

Cynical said:

Dew beat me to it. Demonfear practically defines "fast but easy".

You should've doubled down with Killing Adventure, the connoisseur's secret choice, the shitwad that's accidentally awesome.

I'll second the motion for Fava Beans. Gameplay is easy but engaging, though E1M6 and E1M7 do have some bite. The maps also look fantastic, with perfect architecture in the Knee Deep style. Best of all, it's from 1995. I've played it more than any mapset, ever.

My Number Two choice would be Osiris, also from 1995. Not as easy as Fava Beans but not that hard, either. The Egyptian/Stargate aspects are beautifully realized, too, and the mapset is oozing with atmosphere.

I'm playing Vanguard at the moment and although there are a few difficult moments it definitely feels like the difficulty is towards the easy end. Such a fun, fast-paced mapset though, that I have never been bored playing it. Normally mappers tend to try to jam-pack maps with monsters to give the feeling of 'constant action,' but Vanguard pulls it off without throwing hordes at you.

My sense of difficulty may be a bit warped though, since I have just come from playing Swim with the Whales, Sunder and Sunlust back to back :D

Those stick out in my head:
Hellhold E2M2
ShunAll
Das Labor
But each of those maps becomes noticeably slower and/or harder by the end.

Nirvana said:

Normally mappers tend to try to jam-pack maps with monsters to give the feeling of 'constant action,' but Vanguard pulls it off without throwing hordes at you.

... Until you reach its last several maps.

Soundblock said:

Tim Willits' Master Levels.

also Chris K's, though that might depend on your ability to navigate his sometimes obscure progression

ZaBigBoss said:

Doom Core felt pretty damn fast to me! It offers whole galleries of hitscanners to slice through.

I'm about 10 maps in and would have to agree with two caveats: some of the openings can be fairly brutal with the hitscanners, and there are a handful of moments where you have to think about progression.

Lunatic was great.

Nirvana said:

Normally mappers tend to try to jam-pack maps with monsters to give the feeling of 'constant action,' but Vanguard pulls it off without throwing hordes at you.

You are saying this because you haven't reached the slaughtermaps yet. ;)

It's probably more the case that mappers who pack their maps with monsters do so because it's one of the most robust ways for a map that isn't really about claustrophobic combat to be challenging, particularly on replays, without serious resource deprivation or catwalks or things like that. Skillsaw's trademark early-to-mid mapset "projectile hell" isn't so pressuring at all once you've spent a lot of time playing and dying in slaughtermaps (which is why it's probably no coincidence he started to go more in that direction, even relatively early in Ancient Aliens).

scifista42 said:

... Until you reach its last several maps.

:D

You know, I wrote that post and in the back of my mind I was thinking "I feel like the last few maps might be packed with monsters," as I had seen some of them on a stream before. I guess I should have kept my big mouth shut :D

The first 8 or 9 maps have been quick and easy at least!

This is more like medium difficulty, but it's a speedy little episode to play through and a recent release.

https://www.doomworld.com/vb/wads-mods/90498-back-to-thunder-road-a-set-of-short-explosive-maps/

Maybe Mapgame.

E1 replacement by rf, which still holds up as an inspiration for me today for its sprawling layouts and relatively consistent low-to-mid tier difficulty. A Fava Beans for the modern (2009) age. :)

Killing Adventure and Scythe, fast paced and easy.

The SHiTWAD,named rmsromainia.wad.It does not have monsters at all,imho

Since I haven't actually played a whole lot of the earlier mapsets out there, I found my own Moonsong to fit this description pretty well. I'll probably have to give a few of the things in here a run, I'd love to eventually graduate to playing slaughtermaps, and while I did play through all of plutonia (though on HMP, but with pistol starts), I'm not quite sure just jumping into them would be a good idea.

SteveD said:

I'll second the motion for Fava Beans. Gameplay is easy but engaging, though E1M6 and E1M7 do have some bite. The maps also look fantastic, with perfect architecture in the Knee Deep style. Best of all, it's from 1995. I've played it more than any mapset, ever.

My Number Two choice would be Osiris, also from 1995. Not as easy as Fava Beans but not that hard, either. The Egyptian/Stargate aspects are beautifully realized, too, and the mapset is oozing with atmosphere.

I definitely don't agree about Fava being "fast". When I played it a year or two ago, I spent so much time searching for switches or figuring out where I was supposed to go, and very little time running around and shooting things.

Speaking of rf, there is also the overlooked (?) Notebook, which I enjoyed much more than what I played of Mapgame.

Memfis said:

Speaking of rf, there is also the overlooked (?) Notebook, which I enjoyed much more than what I played of Mapgame.

I can't find it.

invictius said:

I can't find it.

There is a link to it in the page Memfis linked, click the title of the wad in the panel right above the listed demos

I've also been in need of something quick, and Notebook is great. There's no text file with the download above, but it's an e3 replacement for Ultimate Doom.