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Crunchynut44

What PWADs invoke the most nostalgia for you?

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I always tend to replay Marswar for this reason, never cared for the mapset much but it feels so homely to me. Map 09 in particular gives me certain chills. Revolution and Scythe also play on my nostalgia, but I still enjoy these wads for their game play value to this day.

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Doomsday of UAC.

And many of the "Maximum DOOM" PWADs included with Master Levels for DOOM II.  That CD provided me with a lot of (low quality) levels to explore before I had better Internet access.

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TREE3.WAD was like the first pwad I got after discovering that I can choose what to play using the "random file" button on /idgames. And it had freaking PASSPORT.MID on the first level! It doesn't get more nostalgic than that.

 

Some of my earliest FDAs were recorded on wads by Shamus Young, also incredible memories. That was probably the best Doom era for me. Just downloading whatever the roulette gave me and playing it no matter how awful it was. Like a totally unpredictable constantly changing romantic adventure. And back then it was still very exciting to beat just about any level without saves, and I wasn't good at spotting common tropes so almost everything seemed new.

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Wads with Skulltag monsters, as Skulltag was the first Doom port I've used to play PWADs.

 

Also, any such maps whose author apparently put a great effort into them but their design or gameplay is absolutely horrible anyway, as that reminds me of my own early mapping attempts (at least as I think of them now).

Edited by scifista42

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Extremal Doom.

 

Was my first PWAD (still a modified IWAD at the time). Gameplay may not hold very well today in some maps, but still a very neat work nevertheless. I associate it with simpler times: a lot of inspiration, not a lot of means to express it.

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I also think of shovelware levels where I get lost in randomly textured corridors that stretch on for miles when it comes to nostalgia :))

there's one in particular with an unmappable zone that if you fire inside it alerts a spiderdemon and that's always in my head for whatever reason

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Hoover.wad - first add-on i played. Luckily, it was a really good one.

I also played MAP13 of requiem last night, that one invokes a really nostalgic/melancholic feeling for me.

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Doom 2 mods rarely make me feel nostalgic, as I only played it after getting the first user made levels.

 

For me the real nostalgia is episodes like Cleimos or SudTic, and not to forget the first PWAD I ever played: AA22Doom.

 

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ARMAGEDN is always pretty nostalgic for me. It was one of the first PWADs I ever played. My dad had gotten it and a bunch of other wads from some websites back in 2000 and put them to a disc for me to try out, around the time I got a copy of Doom 2 again during summer of that year. Although the levels are pretty trash and sometimes outright nonsensical, I still hold it dear in terms of nostalgia. Playing it with Doom2 X-Treme as well also brings back some good memories.

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Requiem was the first PWAD for me. Lotsa people say it hasn't aged well, and eh, maybe it hasn't, but I'll always love that old gnarled bastard of a WAD.

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Operation: Biowar which I remember thinking was super cool with the various custom stuff it included, especially those creepy ambient monster-active sound replacements.  Nowadays I realize a lot of the custom graphics came from other WADs initially but it had a pretty "wow" effect first time I played.

Hellrazor is one of my early favorites, along with the spinoff it generated, Blackgate which was... okay too I guess.

N4-EVIL.WAD was also one of the earliest ones I played or at least one of the earliest ones that I remember being kind of decent.

 

In the rather barren landscape of Heretic PWADs, Dark Mountain and Desert Crypt stand out as classics.

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diopatra

Eternal Doom

Hellrun

Castevil

 

all of these are exploration heavy with a great atmosphere and plenty of combat, which is how I prefer my Doom.   They aren't refined and have some ugly bits, which is also how I remember Doom back before I had internet and used shovelware disks for all my Doom playing.

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All the big names from the 90's, but especially Icarus and Memento Mori, as they were the very first megawads I'd ever played. Marswar and Dark Covenant also have their charms.

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Let's see..

 

Memento Mori 2 MAP01

Icarus

Crossing Acheron

11GETBFG.WAD

SIN_CITY.WAD / SINCITY5.WAD

Some of these are from D!Zone 2, others from the early days of /idgames/ AKA ftp.cdrom.com

 

 

Edited by Glaice

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Most nostalgic for me is Aliens TC. I was amazed at how tense and atmospheric it was compared to Doom.

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7 hours ago, scifista42 said:

Wads with Skulltag monsters, as Skulltag was the first Doom port I've used to play PWADs.

Unfortunately most skulltag wads are terry wads.

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The thing that made me even play Doom was Hell Revealed for some reason. So it makes sense that I feel most nostalgic when I play Hell Revealed and Memento Mori because those were the first PWADS I've ever played. Memento Mori especially. 

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boris's FBase 6, which at one point came packaged with versions of DB1. I can't remember if it was the first PWAD I had ever played (I used to trawl through the old Doomworld-hosted 'Underground' review site to get my custom level fix), but I have memories of studying it closely, becoming enamored with the idea of making content for the game.

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Memento Mori 2 and Requiem.  Those Klem/Shaw/Doyle midis and the maps that are commonly associated with them really stick with you.  There won't be any time when I hear a midi from the soundtrack and be like "hey I know where that's from."  It's the same way with Requiem.

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4 hours ago, Alfonzo said:

boris's FBase 6, which at one point came packaged with versions of DB1. I can't remember if it was the first PWAD I had ever played (I used to trawl through the old Doomworld-hosted 'Underground' review site to get my custom level fix), but I have memories of studying it closely, becoming enamored with the idea of making content for the game.

Wow! I remember playing that too when I downloaded DB for the first time. That one got lost in memory.

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Eternity, Fava Beans, and UAC_DEAD (thanks someone else for mentioning it! it's been years since i've seen this) were among the first few sets i played in the late 90's. also i'm pretty sure i played ALOHA_999 because it was one of the first sets in the idgames archive. but Alien Vendetta is the first big pwad i played through several years later (probably 2003). lots of nostalgia for Map 08 ("Beast Island") and Map 11 ("Nemesis") in particular.

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