The DWmegawad Club plays: Reverie

MAP29: A square arena level, I think it's quite stylish with its tan-brown look and it fitted with the sky. The pink parts looked weird when I started the episode but I like them now, they add a little surreal touch to the levels.

11 hours ago, TheOrganGrinder said:

@Pirx yeah, the implementation of deep water here really doesn't play nice with the ability of monsters to detect and attack the player, so some of them you can just ignore, and others you can gun your way through with impunity should you be so inclined.  (I felt cheap doing it, but then again there were moments when the map felt cheap in its insistence that I go for a long walk again so ultimately I swallowed my pride and got on with it.)

and for this, see the reason above... but, you know, being able to remain undetected in deep water is a cool thing! so i must have approached those goats like rambo in the water...

some revenants or mancubi instead would have been better. the thing i really like reverie for, however, is offering zombies as cannon fodder (behind the goats)

map29 fda

uv pistol starts saveless

now this is a cool map, but what actually stood out for me here is how much the advanced hud can help in certain maps situations - im talking specifically about the monsters killed/alive count.

when i saw that there were only 9(?) left i felt safe to grab the invuln and it pretty much saved my bacon. of course you can see from the keys progression that it might be a smart bet with only 1 key door left, but i had that extra 'insurance' of the monster count.

if i didnt have that i feel i wouldve been at a big disadvantage.

MAP29 - “Salvation”

simple, straightforward and fun. consists in running circles, basically. until the archviles arrive with the third wave. i suspected immediately that 2 megaspheres and one invuln weren't there only for 2 siege cows... or 4 of them, after a bit of circling and touching the locked doors. the difficulty with this was that the keys were recessed in a kind of cubicle, so i had to take care not to catch a rocket while picking them up. the invuln comes handy for the viles, although it's possible to bfg them out of the way without, just less safe. while the invis is better left where it is, as it only complicates matters. so, yes, an unexpectedly short map in slot 29. music is also kind of epic.

MAP29: Salvation

100% kills, no map secrets

Eh, it's okay as arena maps go. It left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth since I feel like it requires foreknowledge, in that you pretty much need to get the invulnerability sphere for one of the AV waves. And even then, it didn't last long enough between the two, so I had to get really lucky with monster infighting (thankfully left the cybers alive) to distract the last wave of AVs. At least it's short so doing it over again isn't too much of a problem I guess.

I've been playing sporadically, but neglecting the write-ups (and being sick in between), so most of this is from memory, some over a week old. (Aided by Doomwiki and YouTube.)

MAP19: Dusk Town

11:24 | 100% Everything

A highly linear affair. The coffin was cute, and the way you had to go through the same room a number of times en route to the yellow key (with a new ambush appearing every time) was pretty neat.

MAP20: One Such Reverie

36:14 | 100% Everything

One of the first maps I think of when I think of this WAD. That imposing metal structure at the beginning is instantly memorable, as is scrambling around it trying to figure out what to do next. Eventually you're taken through a series of numbered teleporters (why? I dunno) visiting a number of varying locales. The first canyon area with the blood river or whatever is pretty fun (if a bit underpopulated) and then you climb out of a second canyon to a techbase rigged up with trapped doors, which is neat. Finding the yellow key took me way too long, and the placement of the (two!) switches to reveal it was pretty questionable.

MAP21: Sunrise

9:14 | 100% Everything

Pretty much totally hated this. That is all.

MAP22: Egyptian Plains

28:04 | 100% Everything

Weird little temple crawl. I love the mandatory-secret method of raising the bridge over the lava. I'm always surprised to exit the pyramid thinking it's over, but nope! another half of the level to go! And that half has some real dickish AV fights. Blech. (Aside from those, it's pretty fun, though!)

MAP23: Cyclone Rider

29:02 | 100% Everything

This is weird, 'cause it's basically two totally-unrelated maps connected by a teleporter. The first is a big box of slaughter, with what? four masterminds and two cybers? C'mon. It's kinda memorable (I remembered it) but just about as bland as can be. The second half is far more interesting and fun. The yellow key quest is a total bastard, though, especially if you're not at full health. And the blind elevator that drops you right into the faces of two more cybers? Eff that noise. Even taking the secret megasphere teleporter gives like a 50/50 chance that you'll be killed immediately upon 'porting in. And the red key quest is just silly; I had to double-back on the entire map just to see what that last switch did, and the red key was in about the last place you'd think to look.

MAP30: Final Doom

This is a bigger and more involved level than is typical of the MAP30 slot, with an extensive series of encounters before the player is finally plunged into the inevitable Icon of Sin confrontation.  The length of it makes the "punctuation mark" of the preceding arena map somewhat less effective; a lot of what's encountered herein feels very normal and might leave the player wondering just what that survival challenge was meant to signify, what precisely its purpose was.  Is this map intended to represent Reverie in microcosm, then, from its curious start at the player's computer desk, tucked into the corner of a creaking mansion, through a succession of caverns and castles, to its ultimate and bloody throwdown against a legion of high-tier monsters and their demon-spitting master?

Maybe I was just distracted while playing through this, but it didn't really click for me, like there was some expected, desired element of this-is-the-final-level that just wasn't present.  I mean, yes, for better or for worse the Icon of Sin is there, and there are Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds to contend with, but much of what comes before that feels... low-key, small-scale?  Like this could mostly be lifted from anywhere else in the last one-third to one-half of the WAD, with everything past the yellow door feeling like a modular set-piece grafted onto another level.  Individually the various areas and encounters are solid enough but they don't cohere well into a dramatically satisfying whole.

MAP30 Final Doom

Amazing music track, and surprisingly no secrets for a final level in this set. Somewhat of a straightforward map, with many things to remind us of one half of TNT, the water house, the caves, some of the indoor portions, yeah, it's all there. It's a shame the Icon of Sin is in this one though. Make sure to enter the main building to get the blue key, then through to the caves for the necessary switch to continue. The red key area honestly sucks because I hate the lifts. Getting the yellow key is pretty basic at this standpoint, go to two different areas and get switches there, then get the key and prepare to be mowed by fired squad, UNLESS you are on Hurt Me Plenty, in which case you get lucky and only have to deal with demons instead. Geez, aren't those difficulty skills for that part a little off? Whatever, afterwards is a rogue's gallery before the semi-final area, look out for sneaky revenants who may use their teleporters, plus the chaingunners are a real pain here. Well Icon of Sin is hideously basic overall, get rid of window chaingunners and arachnotrons, anything else in the way, and time it right. Only problem is that one of the spawn targets is directly in front of the lift, meaning a rocket could go for that instead.

Favorite five music tracks: MAP10, MAP30, MAP26, MAP14, MAP27

MAP30: Final Doom

UV/Pistol start/Saves

Deaths: 3

What do you get when you mix Last Call and Caribbean?... This map. Fairly straightforward and somewhat tough to do saveless. Indeed, I suffered a bit trying to record this, some specific key parts to survive were quite demanding, plus the fact that armor exists only at the beginning and at the end. These key parts are: the RK part particularly the last wing with barrels and the archvile later, sometimes reviving ghost shotgunners and screwing my life. The gallery like NuMetal called it, with numerous failed attempts, I should clarify that spiders are not supposed to leave their nests, but turned out in my world they can, which made it more intense. And last but not least, the finale, valkiriforce brought the most invasive monsters (excluding archviles) to clear first while you have to grab rockets, simply because Romero's head is either stronger or positioned to endure much much longer. Very tense situations all of them, specially the gallery and the IoS part, can't explain how I breathed after he died uffff...

I liked this map overall, honestly as far as IoS maps go, this one was bearable, no timed lifts for the win. A questionable thing is the timed metal bar near the end, I guess the author thought you would skip the gallery and while you are fighting monsters the bar is lowering, but in practice there're no reasons to ignore the giants if it already a crossfire outside. As for the YK part, there's a blur sphere you can use for the UV chaingunners, it's key to not lose armor. Oh and yes, the midi is great. 

My final thoughts remain pretty much the same as when I played this set on HMP/Continuous (my "review"), it's a very nice wad and I enjoyed to revisit it, valkiriforce's style appeals to me and I have his other works in my list already, anyone new to his style should check at least Oceanside and Eternally Yours, along others like Vispire and Pulse. This was also my first time recording demos to upload and share as videos, from a complete 32-maps set. Not gonna lie, the experience was stressful sometimes, saveless is not my typical thing, and I found out what was my biggest enemy when recording: RNG. The initial purpose was to show the secrets to everyone who was interested in them (also to give more content to my channel), I'm a bit inspired by Lingyan203 in some ways, his videos helped me a lot with progression and secrets of many mapsets, and I wanted to contribute my grain of sand in a similar way. Hopefully I'll upload more demos from other wads whenever I want, because following a "schedule" is not my thing at all. Also, hoped my videos were any helpful to people! 

Uh, nothing else to say, bye.

MAP30: Reverie

I definitely agree with @TheOrganGrinder that something about this map felt a bit off and just didn't do it for me. Most of the map plays fairly standard, and would've been at home in any other middle-of-the-WAD mapslot, to be honest (even the start in front of the PC apes MAP18's opening... is this some Inception-style dream within a dream?) The obvious IWAD riffs/homages (in this case Last Call/Caribbean) are another things done in other levels. And the end was more annoying that anything else, with those goddamn chaingunners perched while you wait for the column to lower and running around with no armor by the point while pain elementals harass you... and then the actual IoS room repeats the same thing (chaingunners, lost souls, etc.) The usual pillar raises instantly (which actually led to me falling off half the time) but it takes a lot more than the usual rockets to kill the Icon.

+++ Tangerine Nightmare, Master levels

bit late lol

8 minutes ago, rehelekretep said:

bit late lol

Yeah I knew it. Even with timezone differences. I hope someday DWMclub will play Master Levels.

MAP30: It's a quite unique ending map with its more warm feelings, and it makes me melancholic for some reason. The music track is beautiful, I didn't wanted the map to end. There's some work to do before reaching the finale, from the peaceful start in the Carribean mansion through the Last Call part and the YK branching sequence. I liked the "gallery fight" in the big hall after the yellow door. The IoS itself is easy to kill, you just need to clean the monsters set in the area first. This levels stands among my favourite last maps.

I was really glad to replay reverie after a long time and I think that this time I could appreciate more the old-school style and how well it was done, and also the various references to other wads or authors. The second episode is probably the part I liked more, thanks also to its darker tone, thought I think that the wad on the whole is plenty of inspiring stuff. I think that the lack of hell maps or with more prominent hellish parts is weird, but at the same time I'm glad since classic hell done nowadays isn't an interesting theme to me.

I had a lot of fun working on Reverie; it amazes me to see even after being away from the community for some years that people were still occasionally mentioning Reverie and some other wads of mine in some threads and recommended lists. Reverie was never intended to be another megawad, since I was working on Doom Core at the time; it just sort of happened over time as I became more accustomed to understanding what it meant to work under vanilla Doom's limits and having a better perspective on what I enjoy making and playing in Doom maps. Each map in the set was very intentionally made for the slot it occupies; take map 32 for example - both Icarus and Requiem had a smallish arena-type map in the 32 slot, so I wanted to do something that was sort of like that. I think more than anything else it was the map layouts of old megawads that I really liked - if you've ever looked over some of those layouts before playing them and wondered what they would look like in-game, it was those little thoughts and just looking at interesting layouts that inspired me to make some of my own.

Here's a couple example maps from Cleimos 2 that inspired me:
 

To this day I still love looking at old layouts like this and coming up with some of my own; in a way it's like an art form of its own. It's still one of my favorite ways to go about mapping besides the look of the map in-game. Anyway thanks everyone for taking the time to play it again; it was fun reading through this thread even though I know my mapping style isn't for everyone. Most importantly everyone should keep doing what they do best and keep the oldschool flame alive however you please.

lol this is bad timing but:

map30 fda

uv pistol starts saveless

its an IoS - it would be ok if it didnt take so many rockets to kill. i played 30 minutes through the map and then died. the map is not exciting enough to play through again to get back to the Icon. DNF

1 hour ago, riderr3 said:

Yeah I knew it. Even with timezone differences. I hope someday DWMclub will play Master Levels.

me too! but id rather play ESP first (▀̿Ĺ̯▀̿ ̿)

On 1/30/2018 at 3:45 AM, TheOrganGrinder said:

MAP30: Final Doom

 

This is a bigger and more involved level than is typical of the MAP30 slot, with an extensive series of encounters before the player is finally plunged into the inevitable Icon of Sin confrontation.  The length of it makes the "punctuation mark" of the preceding arena map somewhat less effective; a lot of what's encountered herein feels very normal and might leave the player wondering just what that survival challenge was meant to signify, what precisely its purpose was.  Is this map intended to represent Reverie in microcosm, then, from its curious start at the player's computer desk, tucked into the corner of a creaking mansion, through a succession of caverns and castles, to its ultimate and bloody throwdown against a legion of high-tier monsters and their demon-spitting master?

 

Maybe I was just distracted while playing through this, but it didn't really click for me, like there was some expected, desired element of this-is-the-final-level that just wasn't present.  I mean, yes, for better or for worse the Icon of Sin is there, and there are Cyberdemons and Spider Masterminds to contend with, but much of what comes before that feels... low-key, small-scale?  Like this could mostly be lifted from anywhere else in the last one-third to one-half of the WAD, with everything past the yellow door feeling like a modular set-piece grafted onto another level.  Individually the various areas and encounters are solid enough but they don't cohere well into a dramatically satisfying whole.

MAP30 - “Final Doom”

agree with everything you said here. while map30's references to final doom are obviously obvious, and welcome for me, as i like such "fan service", playing it feels like a series of quests while you're wondering where's that icon already. especially the symmetric corridor is an exercise in 2-shotting cows and 1-shotting spiders, things went just wonderful here for me, only to blow myself up while riding that elevator. the romero head was apparently farther back in its hole than usual and i couldn't just shoot it with mouselook as i normally do because i'm just not very interested in timing my shots to hit some pixels.

the music was excellent again and i can praise this wad for its good selection of music tracks. the idea of a megawad inspired by 90's classics appealed to me because those classics have a place in my heart with their relaxed, adventure-like gameplay, no matter how much doom mapping has changed since (64-wide corridors, yay) and reverie does a good job emulating this.

@valkiriforce, thank you for that insight into your mapping motivations when working on this, it's always a treat to get a little peek "behind the curtain" of a WAD's creation courtesy of the author.  :)