Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (rd reviews The Iron Forge)

Firedust · January 27, 2020

Your write-ups are always such a joy to read :)

Not Jabba · February 8, 2020

I actually reviewed this one for The /newstuff Chronicles, but I barely wrote more than a single paragraph, and I've decided to redo my review entirely. At the time, I saw Mercury Rain as a very simple map that manages to stay fresher than average by hybridizing its easy-going, classic gameplay with a number of basic ZDoom features. This is an accurate description, but I don't think I gave the map enough credit. For one thing, Mercury Rain one of the highest-rated WADs on Doomworld's (admittedly somewhat skewed and out-of-date) /idgames download frontend, with 5-star ratings across the board. One of those reviews is from @Pinchy, who later released a 50-map megawad full of maps in a similar style.

I think the main reason for Mercury Rain's popularity is its pleasant, disciplined moderation. The map's core combat is every bit as light and player-friendly as its use of port features, but both elements are handled tastefully and with good presentation. Never sloggy and never over the top, it's a likeable map that almost anyone can have 10 minutes of fun with.

The most immediately noticeable ZDoom effect is the weather system, which gives the map its name. The drizzly gray rain permeates the map, drenching the extensive outer grounds and making the small, scattered interior areas feel more cozy and safe by comparison; the way the space is dichotomized gives you a surprisingly realistic sense of being rained on, and it does wonders for the map's atmosphere. The overall mood is one of dreariness and desolation, but the slatey rain and ubiquitous pale green and brown tones of the techbase and surrounding environs contrast strikingly with gleaming tech elements and glowing forcefields. The sky is the same pale green color, which contributes to the washed-out, semi-monochrome feel, and is punctuated by hostile flashes of lightning. There's even a subtle atmospheric effect (or maybe a colormap change?) that causes certain colors to fade into that same greenish tint at a distance, which makes the map look even more gloomy.

3D floors are used sporadically to create the sorts of progression aids you might see in a typical Boom map, but with greater ease and convenience. Using a raised 3D walkway around the edge of a room allows the mapper to reuse the same space without having to build in a lift that potentially gets in the way and needs to be repeatedly lowered to pass; using a bridge to cross a gap between two rock outcrops means that you don't need to put the rocks close enough together for the player to run across the gap, which makes spatial design a bit more flexible and reduces the need for geographic bottlenecks. From a player's perspective, however, the 3D architecture is barely noticeable. It's used in ways that complement the map's conventional, classic gameplay—simply to create floors where you would expect there to be floors. Similarly, the cool-looking forcefield effects that appear in the interior areas function just like your typical keycard doors, but create a more high-tech look and make it intuitively clear that each locked switch opens up multiple doorways throughout the map.

Mercury Rain also gets a lot of mileage out of custom Decorate actors, which has always been my favorite use of ZDoom. The map is absolutely loaded with all sorts of corpses and gore, giving a greater sense of variety to the underlying death and destruction that's part and parcel of most Doom maps than you would be able to add in within the limitations of Dehacked. There are plenty of swampy plants to help flesh out the setting as well, most notably a skull-covered hellish growth that is destructable and releases a cloud of poison gas. Although these new hazards aren't placed with the same joyful sadism and attention to detail that certain mappers (e.g., SuperCupcakeTactics) show toward nukage barrels, the gas clouds linger around for a while, and it's fun to lure enemies into them.

I've already said that the gameplay is relaxed and uncomplicated, but its casual nature doesn't mean that the combat was thrown together without thought. The very first gunplay of the map is a juggling act between dealing with two hitscanners and using a line of barrels to take out a Revenant, all of which likely needs to be done before you're able to pick up the shotgun. Of course, you can also just escape this area and run around to find a more opportune zombie to get a weapon from, but the placement is just so tempting. In the penultimate room, the combination of narrow platforms and turreted Revenants demands that you grab a radsuit and dive into the toxic slime, forcing you to give up a position of advantage and aggressively wade through a small swarm of Lost Souls and the Revenants themselves. My one complaint is that the end of the map feels a little underclimactic—you finally get the rocket launcher and plasma rifle and start collecting ammo, but the Revenant fight isn't rocket-friendly and there's nothing else to use your heavy firepower on but a few Cacodemons and Mancubi and the inevitable exit room Arch-Vile.

With its Square-esque fusion of gameplay elements, Mercury Rain was one of the first Doom maps that clearly stated, "Yes, it is totally okay to put advanced features in a map and still have it feel like classic Doom." The quiet, understated power of this statement has impacted not just Pinchy's mapping style, but my own as well—and perhaps others of you are nodding along too. Though it doesn't stand out as much as Jimmy's bigger projects, it's a fast, fun map that will especially appeal to newer or more casual players.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Not Jabba · February 29, 2020

@rd. (no, I still don't know if that stands for anything) first appeared on the mapping scene with a rather explosive bang that was hard not to notice, releasing at least a half dozen hot-looking individual maps in separate threads over a very short span of time. This is the first time I've played any of those solo maps, however, due to a development style characterized by mostly finished RCs that languished in their respective threads and never saw an /idgames release. In fact, I don't think any of rd's maps have ever been declared "finished" except for their collaborative contributions to an assortment of Mayhem projects—not that rd's friends haven't petitioned to get them all assembled into a compilation on multiple occasions (AHEM). Of course, all of these maps are firmly polished and stand on their own two feet perfectly well, assuming you remember to stop waiting for the "release" and get down to actually playing them. The five maps I'm reviewing here are ones that I specifically tucked away for later attention; I know there were more, but I'd have to recall their names and dig them up via a forum search, which means that for practical purposes, they're lost in the mists of time for now.

Rd's work is quite hardcore, probably in the top echelon of stuff that's not uber-niche, and I've never been the best person to talk about this sort of thing. I did, however, give it a serious try, and so far my victory count stands as follows: Blank Space on HNTR with some good luck and one death; a surprisingly comfortable max of From Tears on HMP, albeit with several deaths; Mucus Membrane on HNTR after a glut of suffering; and finally, a "good faith play" of all five maps on UV with god mode for reviewing purposes, which for the record is how I play most truly hardcore stuff. I suspect I can do better with further study, as rd is a very skilled mapper and they're all plenty fair.

The reason the maps are so tough is that rd's mapping style encompasses and integrates every means of imposing difficulty in the book—specifically, the lock-in arenas and smallish freeform pseudo-arena spaces that are common in modern slaughter combined with resource starvation and spatial pressures similar to the Chord series, with every battle of course being dominated by high-powered monsters that are tricky to deal with in conjunction with each other. From Tears on UV is particularly intense in the way that it uses limited ammo to keep pushing you forward into deeper trouble, refusing to give you respite from the powerful foes you haven't been able to kill yet. It is largely linear except for one optional side arena, meaning that if you can manage to silence everything trying to kill you in the first half, you'll have some breathing room to contemplate what to do next or (gasp) save your game—though victory is perhaps most easily achieved by hoarding as much ammo as possible through evasion until you get to the later encounters. Blank Space and Mucus Membrane are both much more open-ended despite their similarly small size, each one throwing you straight into the middle of combat and playing out primarily as a resource management puzzle, since you have multiple options for where to go and what to pick up but will release more monsters at every turn as you do so. With Blank Space (the easier of the two on any skill setting), it's basically a matter of choosing from various accessible weapons vs. the handful of health and armor pickups vs. collecting ammo to clear some space for yourself. In the more exacting Mucus Membrane, you get most weapons early but have to be extremely careful about both health and ammo usage in order to survive, as there is very little of either immediately available. In MM, small decisions can have a huge impact on gameplay: do you try to maneuver your way through the space-hogging hard-hitters to collect more rockets and the Berserk pack around the far side of the building, or duck inside and push through the gantlet of hitscanners and Arch-Vile in an effort to carve out some relatively save ground, or, god help you, attempt to survive the hornets' nest and grab the yellow key right away? The similarly styled Chord maps are much more linear, since their linearity/semi-linearity was used as the means of controlling the challenge. Adding nonlinearity to that same style of combat creates a lot of depth—especially in Mucus Membrane, which has multiple completely optional areas.

I should also mention that rd has a strong grasp of how to create interesting settings, though you can probably tell that from the screenshots. One thing I particularly like about their mapping is that they have never been very interested in the void setting that's formed the basis for much of the slaughter genre (with all due respect to the mappers who have created super cool maps using that setting). Blank space is something of an aesthetic inversion, with a pale sky stretching to infinity and onyx architecture, though some of the genre's more common tropes are present—bright red highlights, midtex platforms enabled by fake floors, and a layout constructed as islands over a sea of death. By contrast, From Tears is all-interior and brutalist, with a lot of essentially orthogonal architecture that emphasizes the routing aspect of gameplay and the tight confines in which monsters will try to corner you. Mucus Membrane might be a fairly typical indoor/outdoor map if not for the monster placement, but the combination of very dim lighting and bright yellow sky make it feel much more distinct, as well as creating an interesting dynamic where it's very easy to see monster projectiles but harder to see the monsters themselves against their muted background.

The three maps I've discussed so far all feel something like musical etudes; they're all pretty small and quick (if you can stay alive), and they serve to test specific skills in contained settings. For players of rd's skill level, I imagine they must feel like short, energizing workouts. Ovum and Eden, which I believe were rd's last two major solo releases, are larger and more fully fleshed.

Ovum, which takes place in an oppressive fleshtech-and-blood setting that perfectly matches the tone of its combat, is probably the strongest map that I played in terms of gameplay. It's dark, crowded, and utterly evil—every space is tight relative to the intense fighting it throws at you, and nearly every monster is very dangerous in those spaces. There's easily enough ammo to kill everything, but your ammo reserves are a constant concern even so, as it's easy to run low at specific points depending on the route you take or, more likely, run out of a specific ammo type you need to deal with the most powerful monsters in your way if you don't budget your pool well. You could call that imperfect balance, and it may be, but given the broader hostility of the map, I'm inclined to believe it's not accidental. The 10% damage of the blood floors is not to be underestimated, and radsuits are limited; managing the amount of time you spend in the liquid is a huge factor in the upper leg of the map, and makes your life that much harder as you jockey to get in a good shot while under fire or to maneuver around enemies you're not up to beating at the moment. Indeed, every piece of the puzzle seems to make every other piece more dangerous—constant motion is essential for survival, but movement is challenging throughout the map. There are also several fun secrets, and once you've found any one of them, you should have a pretty good idea of how to look for most if not all of the rest. In particular, keep an eye out for the one near the end of the map that leads to a very cool optional battle.

Eden, which is perhaps regarded as rd's magnum opus for the time being, trades in a bit of that tight no-holds-barred design for a more unusual layout style and a more beautiful, surprising aesthetic theme—though it's still quite combat-focused, as you'd expect. The map is set in a beautiful watery garden under a starry sky (or perhaps floating in space?), with a sort of wood and metal boardwalk fortress making up the first half, and the second giving way to a huge, lush natural paradise drenched with waterfalls. It's also got a nice modified palette that does neat things to the warm colors and makes the greens more vivid, and a few other cute details such as a wood skull key. As with Ovum, the setting itself seems to reflect the combat design. I mentioned that I god moded it based on expectations from playing the rest of rd's maps, but I shouldn't have, and I'm interested to have another go at it on UV without cheats; it's a spacious map with abundant resources, and I have a feeling it's the most accessible map I've reviewed here despite having far and away the highest monster count (about 16 times as many enemies as Mucus Membrane when all is said and done). It's almost as though rd decided to design it in the opposite style of what they'd been doing in previous maps, though it's still a hefty map and no pushover, especially at the finale. The early part of the map (in the boardwalk fort) is somewhat Ribbiksy and more confined, a running battle punctuated by some arena-like fights, but mostly scattered teleporting/roaming enemies that you can deal with at a slower pace if you like. The second half (in the jungle paradise) goes full-on slaughter, though as I said, there's a lot of freedom of movement; the whole sprawl is populated twice, with the second part leading up to the fiery endgame. As with Ovum and Mucus Membrane, a lot of the coolest content is optional or secret, so make sure to watch for that—if you can see an area, there's a way to get to it.

Rd is perhaps more polyglot than pioneer, but all of these maps are excellent as a result of their study and mastery of a variety of challenge modes. The hardcore genre was almost oppressively dominated by a handful of voices throughout the 2010s, at least in terms of popular interest, and it's really nice to see a fresh mapping style that feels like it contends pretty effortlessly with the heavyweights—though I realize these maps all came out in 2015 and 2016 and I could have played them ages ago. Most of these maps show a willingness to pulp the shit out of their challengers that's roughly on par with the US women's soccer team, but if you're looking for a fight, you'll certainly get it. The lower difficulty settings also offer good opportunities for skill-building; if you're looking to work your way up, I'd start with Eden or From Tears sub-UV, and save Ovum and Mucus Membrane for when you really want a hurtin' put on you.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Not Jabba · March 1, 2020

My Top 20 Maps of the 2019 Cacoward Season

This isn't exactly "not the Cacowards," but I wanted to write it, and oh look, I have a thread! Like everything else in this thread, this is totally unofficial and only represents my personal picks, but hopefully it will make someone's day.

Runners-up (alphabetically by wad/pk3):

*Seatooth by Lorenz0 (Alienated map 03)
*Made by Crates by @Matthias and @damned (Czechbox map 23)
*Creation by Dragonfly and @Afterglow (Eviternity map 10)
*Dehydration by Stormcatcher77 (Eviternity map 19)
*Smelling Faintly of Roses by Ribbiks (Finely Crafted Fetish Film map 02)
*Parapet by Zan (Hedon map 07)
*Crystal Heart by Zan (Hedon map 10)
*The Hellforge by Amuscaria (Hell-Forged HF1M8)
*River Valley by Jaska (Lost Civilization map 04)
*This Is My Shotgun by Steve D (Shotgun Symphony E1M7)
*Abaddon's Void by John Romero (Sigil E5M5)
*Crimson Chaos by @Bridgeburner56 (The Slaughter Spectrum map 02)
*An End to Darkness by Xaser as Dr. Sleep (Ultimate Doom the Way id Did E4M8)

20. Hyper Safari by Tango (Paradise map 03)

One of the big challenges of creating a new gameplay meta is introducing it to the player—specifically, doing so in a way that teaches people how to deal with the new mechanics, weapons, and monsters without feeling like preschool. The first two maps of Paradise slowly introduce new material in the context of more conventional gameplay, but the third map is where it really hits the fan—where you're expected to show what you've learned or die because you failed to learn it—and it's a great example of how to craft proper introductions and ramp-ups, giving you all the right nudges to understand exactly how each weapon and enemy fits into the overall scheme while making it feel like a true trial by fire.

19. Infraworld: The Hatehammer by Stormcatcher77

In a year dominated by huge, nonlinear megamaps, Infraworld is far from being the most smooth and cohesive of the lot, but it's certainly among the most jaw-dropping. Though its many paths and branches sometimes feel loosely cobbled together into a whole, the flip side is that the entire "infernal diocese" (to borrow a phrase DotW axed) is rendered with all the chaotic detail and sweeping scale of a Hieronymus Bosch painting, a sort of apocalyptic "Where's Waldo?" spread that makes you yearn to search out every nook and cranny in the way that all the best megamaps do. The real showstopper here is Stormcatcher's incredible midtexture work, including a spinning marble cube that lords over one of the setpiece battles and the floating Hatehammer itself, both of which are among the best tricks I've ever seen in Boom format.

18. Point of Accident by @Dragon_Hunter (Bloodspeed map 09)

Dragon Hunter is one of the names I always watch for eagerly in a Russian community project; he created most of my favorite maps in the Whitemare series, not to mention some great entries in Sacrament and other projects. Built around caches of radsuits and a flood of chest-deep poison slime, "Point of Accident" is one of those glorious haunted base maps where the rare pockets of bright, functional tech highlight just how isolated and powered-down everything else is. The broad swaths of darkness hide more secret passages than you'll likely find in one attempt, and although the low monster count and jump scares are perfectly in keeping with the creepy atmosphere, the final encounter manages to kick it up a notch without losing any of that immersive, story-driven flair. This map feels like a long-lost gem of the 2000s—and yes, of course there's a bathroom with sector toilets, what kind of question is that?

17. Technology by @Capellan (Spectrum E3M5)

The looping layout of this deceptively small map frames a nonstop running battle with a focus on desperate survival tactics and tight maneuvering rather than simple bloodshed. In a surprising twist of fate, ammo is brutally tight whether you're playing from pistol start or continuous, forcing you to constantly scramble for replenishment and prioritize targets with the utmost care—and just as you think you've started to gain a foothold, the map floods with more enemies and puts you back at square one. "Technology" is the best and cleverest use of the episode's Imp-free monster roster: hitscanners swarm like wasps, demanding quick reflexes and eating your hard-won ammo, while the various melee enemies flush you out of safe havens and the tanky, hard-hitting Barons and Cacodemons hunt you relentlessly, dominating the tighter spaces and mocking your inability to retaliate. If you can find all the heavy firepower, vengeance is sweet indeed.

16. Grove by Zan (Hedon map 05)

It's hard to pick a second-favorite Hedon map, just because there's so much going on in every level in the game. Though it doesn't have the environmental manipulation and apocalyptic chaos of "Crystal Heart" (map 10), the Hexen-style item puzzles of "Technical Space" (map 04), or the thick wintery atmosphere of "Pale Wind" (map 08), "Grove" is just...a really nice map all around. A hilarious journal entry from a hapless disciple of darkness, the "surprise, motherfuckers!" drowning of the enemy's strategic command, an assault on a phalanx, a running battle through the trees, a multi-story tower climb, the crescendo of the big inventory-oriented finale, a miniature secret sanctum hidden in a coded message, a missing leg that reappears four maps later...what more could you want?

15. Clash by @Lorenz0 and @UgiBugi (Alienated map 06)

As a whole mapset, Alienated is intelligently paced: two quicker maps and then a big odyssey full of dramatic setpieces, the same mini-arc repeating three times. Despite the kickass crusher battle and floating cages of "Seatooth," "Clash" ended up being my favorite of the larger maps for both combat and aesthetic style. This neon tech sanctum best captures what Alienated is all about—the Boom lighting effects and streamlined AA-tex look combined with the 3D architecture, soft light transitions, and fancier transparencies of GZDoom, and accessible slaughter-lite combat in a layout that takes advantage of floor-over-floor maneuvering.

14. Division by Jaska (Lost Civilization map 11)

The second half of Lost Civilization's dream interlude delivers a huge spike in intensity, with grand combat puzzles and survivalist gameplay that stretch across three surreal landscapes. Even a continuous playthrough will leave you ill-equipped to deal with the opening siege, especially as the whole landscape starts sinking into lava, forcing you to find safe havens and dimensional gateways into other lands—not that they're any less hostile. You're not really expected to kill everything, and the map is more than fair in giving you myriad options to evade or outsmart the entrenched mega-threats and their minions...as if the difficulty of confrontations is almost beside the point. The real fun is in ogling all the cool sights of the dreamworld, from floating inverted pyramids to exploding buildings, exploring even as you dive for cover from danger, tackling whatever you can manage or just leaving pieces behind as a mystery better left unsolved.

13. Elysium by @Eris Falling and @Dragonfly (Eviternity map 29)

This palatial sky city is among the best-looking of Eviternity's heaven maps, but there's a lot more to it than that. In between roaming combat through the forested gardens and big battles among the towering buildings, you'll literally soar like an eagle as you hit the many jump pads that throw you up along invisible sky paths between the floating islands. A festering hellhole squats like a wound on one side and leads deep into the bowels of the earth, where you face a seemingly climactic horde-as-boss fight that (finally) draws heavily on Eviternity's roster of custom monsters—but even that's not the end of your journey, as the map's true finale takes place in a now-corrupted version of a very familiar scene.

12. Assembly Line by @Amuscaria (Hell-Forged HF1M5)

Hell-Forged has a strong Heretic-esque fantasy adventure tone, a sense of continually digging deeper and facing more and more imposing opposition as the episode builds steadily toward its finale. The explosives-laden blood factory of "Assembly Line" is where that feeling begins to become strongest, with a layout that showcases the imposing scale of architecture and opposition that presents as intimidating without being too difficult to overcome—including the game's first boss fight. Amuscaria is also brilliant at using his formidable spriting talents to create unique storybuilding pieces that help define the episode and build on its lore. My favorite of these is pictured above, but it's not the only piece of decorative storytelling you'll find in "Assembly Line" alone. I can't get enough of stuff like this.

11. Urban Sprawl by @Steve D (Shotgun Symphony E1M5)

Even more than any other map in Shotgun Symphony, "Urban Sprawl" has all the hallmarks of a bigger, better Knee-Deep in the Dead: bright outdoor courtyards with lots of action; deep, dark interior crawls full of suspense; optional sidepaths that reward you with better gear; big secrets that are broadcast for miles so that you can spend the whole level searching for them. The first three-quarters of the map savors its popcorn shotgun gameplay, but lets you spend your rockets however you want to, like weekly pocket money or college elective classes—and then the last leg rips off all the bandaids and throws you into a gigantic battle down in the toxic pits, which offers a challenge in clever ways but is mostly about having buttloads of fun splattering the hordes with heavy weaponry.

10. Iced Sanctuary by @StormCatcher.77 (Bloodspeed map 29)

Stormcatcher had three excellent maps last year that were all released in separate projects, and it's a shame that the best of them is the one you're most likely to miss. An adventure map of an exceedingly high caliber, "Iced Sanctuary" offers a winding but pleasantly paced tour through beautifully detailed wintery temple ruins and their surroundings. One of the coolest things about the map is how layered that environment is: the ring of ancient monoliths hidden deep within the gray-stone temple, itself surrounded by arrays of newer town construction and storage facilities, all nestled within the icy landscape. The gameplay intensifies gradually but remains moderate and easy to enjoy throughout, with smart monster placement and fair traps that are steadily engaging even for players whose skills outclass the opposition.

9. Mechanical Embrace by @Ribbiks (Finely Crafted Fetish Film map 07)

"What do you mean I've become a ghost!?" you ask, five seconds after starting this ineffable and unfathomable final leg of FCFF's journey, which could just as easily be a vision quest as an afterlife. The question lingers with you but is never answered, setting the tone for a mind-bogglingly vast puzzle box of a map that only offers more questions the farther in you get. Starting out amid banks of old, brooding machinery, it's up to you to determine what your quest is, when it ends—and whether it ever really ends, perhaps—amid a stark, mechanical emptiness that may or may not be the most disturbing metaphor for the human experience since Tetris, or at least Sheer Poison. The no-hints puzzle hunting of Eternal Doom and the emotional symbolism of A.L.T. combine with all manner of hardcore combat, platforming, and even rocket jumping—assuming you can find the whole map, of course.

8. Remnant by @Aurelius

I couldn't very well not include this one, could I? Remnant is a jack of all trades, a beautifully rendered and painstakingly detailed canyon/temple crawl that gradually builds up over the course of the first half and becomes a maelstrom of violence in the second, where nearly every battle is a serious test of the player's mettle. A cinematic arc worthy to be counted among the greatest linear-ish megamaps culminates in not one but two back-to-back boss fights against custom monsters, which is exactly the sort of satisfaction you'd come to expect after giving the map over an hour of your life. Rivaled only by the top few Eviternity maps, Remnant is certainly among the most impressive uses of OTEX to date.

7. A Sickly Earth by @Tango (Paradise map 05)

If "Hyper Safari" was the vicious pop quiz that culls the unprepared from the class's ranks, "A Sickly Earth" is the final exam: a blazing inferno of brutal combat that calls on everything you've learned so far in a mad scramble to stay upright as the ultra-fast-paced Supercharged mod is fully brought to bear to create a seemingly effortless climax. It's the ultimate example of why I should have played the mapset on Casual instead of Tough, but it's a fantastic map regardless, with excellent fight tuning and some really fine displays of just how much the built-in mod is capable of.

6. Transcendence by @Xaser (Eviternity map 26)

"Transcendence" is Eviternity's most compelling heaven map in part because of its thematic juxtaposition: the grand utopian architecture, its highest tower haloed by a golden gateway into another sky, all on the verge of crumbling into nothingness as a sinister Hell-fortress forces its way in through a dimensional rift. The stunning palace-city map gives you tons of room to roam and plenty of reasons to explore despite its contained layout, which encompasses a single large area that you can view in its entirety from almost any point. It's also willing to make bold moves with its combat, tossing you the BFG as your first weapon out of the episode's pistol start and requiring you to strategize with it against wide spreads of monsters, with a few scattered rocket launchers and Berserk packs as your only backup. Like Saturnine Chapel, it's one of the great examples of how to make a map incredibly memorable and fun within a smaller space and short runtime.

5. Errant Signal by @Zan (Hedon map 06)

Coming out of the climactic fight at the end of "Grove," sailing through portal space, you're suddenly overtaken by a strange force and, propelled by the power of a cosmic metal riff, find yourself...back where you started? You seem to have been thrown back in time, mere days before the apocalyptic invasion, but the taste of a second chance quickly unravels as shit gets weird really fast. This eerie, dreamlike map is brilliantly choreographed, its roller-coaster sequence of emotions slotting itself perfectly into the narrative like the puzzle piece you never knew was missing. The mysterious figure you've been chasing finally offers plausible answers to many of the questions you've been given, just in time for a really trippy chase sequence and then the first and best of the game's two mega boss battles.

4. Verdant Citadel by @exl

In many ways, Verdant Citadel feels like GZDoom's answer to Brigandine—no one aspect of it stands out above the rest, and even the runtime is modest compared to its competitors, and yet every detail is just so, the whole picture so finely and lovingly crafted that it sticks with you long after you beat it. The things that make it a great map are often subtle: the use of natural and architectural silhouettes to boost the twilit mood, the gentle curves of hallways, the golden light streaming in through windows. Well-layered 3D architecture and understated, realistic environmental design combine to make every space feel inhabitable and thoroughly interconnected, giving it excellent mileage as a sandbox map despite its relatively compact size. Though the final multi-tiered lift battle could perhaps have been more climactic, it's a great change of pace from all those perpetual motion Boom-compat lift fights, and a fitting end to a map that seems to suggest the "neverending story" vibe of the Quake community's best output.

3. Cryonology by @AtroNx (Eviternity map 15)

You could be forgiven for being under the impression that all my favorite maps are nonlinear, but "Cryonology" is the perfect counterexample. Built around verticality and high-contrast lighting, this map essentially takes you on a guided tour of its serpentine layout, giving you one tailor-made scene after another along the way: the way a long swath of torchlight falls here, a view through a metal grating into a long courtyard between coils of the fortress over there, a roaring fire in a cozy interior to contrast with the falling snow outside. Each piece feels achingly flawless, and the whole comes together to create a gorgeous setting that's shrouded in mystery. The gameplay has a quirky sort of sandwiched feel to it, with a relatively short buildup before an enormous battle at the yellow key that dumps well over half the map's monsters on you, and then a long and wily denouement that throws dangerous enemies at you in tight confines—though of course it's not really over until you find the secret exit. Where has this been all my life? I need more AtroNx maps post-haste!

2. Anagnorisis by @ukiro (Eviternity map 32)

One of the great mega-sandboxes of 2019 (though not quite the greatest), "Anagnorisis" is a map that manages to seem almost endless while still being worth every minute of the time you spend. Designed as a showcase for OTEX by none other than the creator of OTEX, the map is reminiscent of ukiro's classic Darkening 2 work, but on steroids, with denser, more rigorous level design, thicker world-building, and exploration on a scale that makes any mere player seem insignificant by comparison. The enormous base complex wraps around a lava-filled canyon but, far from being a simple ring of buildings, feels intricate enough to be its own microcosm, a worthy reward for breaking through the walls of the megawad's themed episodes and finding yourself on the outside of them. The word "anagnorisis" refers to the revelation that serves as a turning point for a literary hero's character arc, and—perhaps taking some inspiration from its lengthy, prog-like metal MIDI—"Anagnorisis" feels more like a hero's journey than most Doom maps, full of powerful feats and scenic treks through towering scenes. Though the promised realization never arrives, the map's atmosphere is so thick with the taste of it that you'll likely come to the end wondering whether you missed some super-super-secret exit that will take you to a place even more deeply hidden.

1. Laboratory by @Jaska (Lost Civilization map 20)

Between this and "Anagnorisis" (and some of the other selections on this list), you can probably tell that I have a type. Both of my top 2019 picks are about as vast and nonlinear as you can get away with in the Doom engine and still keep the player's undivided interest, but where "Anagnorisis" feels like a set of distinct (but interconnected) locales that can be visited in any order, "Laboratory" is more like a brain-bending freeform sprawl, one that would be impossible not to get lost in if it didn't obsessively link back up to familiar territory (or territory that will soon become familiar) at every turn—a labyrinth without the maze, if you will. The coolest thing about the map is its two-layer construction, with the laboratory itself forming an underworld beneath the overgrown, monster-infested techbase ruins of its overworld, the two halves connecting in a good half-dozen places at least, with the whole shebang likely being the most complex layout I've ever seen in Doom. Though it strokes my explorer/secret-hunter instincts even more than "Anagnorisis," Verdant Citadel, or Infraworld, it doesn't simply rest on its nonlinearity as its sole driving force; it's got multiple brilliant showpieces, including a double-edged teleport/crusher setup in the heart of the laboratory and an awesome light show when you turn off the green forcefield generator, to say nothing of the final fight setup. To create such a broad feeling of complexity while also remaining deeply story-driven and having great individual fights at key points is the most complete (and inspiring) form of level design I can imagine. "Laboratory" may be my favorite map of the year, but in broader terms, I think it's roughly my third-favorite Doom-engine map of all time, surpassed only by "Wild Bleu Yonder" and "Culture Shock," if anything.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Capellan · March 1, 2020

Glad you enjoyed "Technology"! I'm pretty proud of all of SPECTRUM, myself :)

Not Jabba · March 1, 2020

46 minutes ago, Capellan said:

I'm pretty proud of all of SPECTRUM, myself :)

You should be!

StormCatcher.77 · March 2, 2020

@Not Jabba, my big thanks and appreciation! My day hasn't started so well in a long time.

Jaska · March 2, 2020

Whoah! Thank you very much! It warms my heart :)

Firedust · March 2, 2020

Amazing picks :)

Matthias · March 2, 2020

Thanks for mentioning the Map 23 Made By Crates @Not Jabba

But I made only half of the map, the second half was made by @damned :)

Not Jabba · March 2, 2020

16 minutes ago, Matthias said:

Thanks for mentioning the Map 23 Made By Crates @Not Jabba

But I made only half of the map, the second half was made by @damned :)

Fixed the credits.

damned · March 2, 2020

15 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

Fixed the credits.

To be precise, Matthias did the map, and I made all the detailing and tweaked the gameplay. I hate when the map has potential, but it is missed because someone is lazy to spend more time on it :-P

Matthias · March 3, 2020

7 hours ago, damned said:

To be precise, Matthias did the map, and I made all the detailing and tweaked the gameplay. I hate when the map has potential, but it is missed because someone is lazy to spend more time on it :-P

Oh it's not only laziness, but also lack of talent :)

Tango · March 8, 2020

many thanks for the writeups @Not Jabba, it was really fun to read :D

I'd always kind of felt Paradise map03 was the weakest map in the set, so I was (pleasantly) surprised to see it on your list. I didn't really realize until after I'd made all the maps that they're pretty jam-packed with arenas and discrete combat scenarios (which sounds silly because, well, it should have been obvious), with map03 maybe being the most blatant offender. which is generally ok with me because I do really enjoy that style of combat, but yeah, map03 especially felt like one or two of those fights should have been replaced with some more incidental stuff to break up the pacing a bit more

Not Jabba · March 16, 2020

Violence by @AD_79

AD_79's Most Promising Newcomer year was dazzlingly prolific. Everyone had spent the whole year watching the development of 50 Monsters, which saw a full beta release that October but wasn't finalized until 2017—and then little more than a month after that beta came out, he dropped Violence on our doorstep. The nerve of some mappers, racing like hares and yet still showing up those of us who work at a tortoise's pace.

The cleverly punning title of course refers to the map's color scheme as well as its gameplay. Released in a time when color-themed mapsets were still a relatively new gimmick, Violence may have faced a bit of skepticism (from me, at least) for being "the other purple mapset," but it bears little resemblance to Stardate. Even the purples are different. Where Stardate's purple range is deep and saturated, Violence's is more soft and pale, like a lavender (though my memebrain insists that it should be referred to as "light urple"). If the whole aesthetic looks familiar, that may be because the Purple half of Mayhem 18 was basically a love letter to it, reusing the palette and many of the textures from AD's mapset. One thing I like about Violence's aesthetic is that it's not a one-trick pony, though. Although purple is dominant, particularly due to the sky, there's a lot of work done to make the color scheme into a trinity, with bright yellow and red standing out as strong highlights almost everywhere you look; the more purple-focused Mayhem did this too, but usually not as strongly. So as with most maps in Stardate, you get an overall look that's a lot more focused on color than it is on architecture, but Violence handles the aesthetic in its own way.

As always, AD's gameplay is firmly in the Alm/skillsaw camp, and Violence does a particularly good job with the fast pacing and bloody verve that characterize that style. What's really nice about it, for me, is that it's never very difficult, even though it has plenty of surprise attacks and moments of heavy combat. The monster population is rarely dense, the vast majority of enemies are fodder, and there's almost always plenty of cover to run for if you have to. But at the same time, there's always something happening—more enemies popping up or teleporting in as you grab items, and still more enemies around the next corner for you to barge into while zipping around. You're constantly well-equipped, but also constantly poised to use your big ammo for the sheer fun of it, as the mapset presents you with opportunity after opportunity to kill a whole cluster of enemies with a single shot of the SSG or rocket launcher. And that's just the incidental stuff—I'm not even counting the times when it practically begs you to rocket your way through small armies of Imps and zombies packed into tight spaces. The speed and tension of the gameplay go hand in hand with the ubiquitous placement of popcorn zombie hitscanners, which are the epitome of ~~unfair level design~~ glass-cannon combat, never a severe threat but always ready to take a bite out of you if you're not on your toes every second of the way.

For a mapset with such a strong sense of gameplay cohesion, though, it also has solid mapset anatomy, with each map presenting different sorts of fights. "Excavations" (map 01) is light and open, resembling typical introductory fare except with the nonstop ambushes and strings of bonuses that characterize the whole mapset. "Sinkhole" (map 02) has some close-quarters brawls in side buildings but mostly revolves around a single big fight in a sinking arena, while "Offshore" (map 03) is more of a whole-map-as-arena rampage across a concrete-and-metal construct reminiscent of an oil rig (the whole setup reminds me so strongly of a map in @A2Rob's Running Late 2 that I'm 90% certain the RL2 map is an homage to it). "Offshore" throws in some nice variety to the color theme as well; the rig sits in a sea of bright yellow liquid that, somehow, you just know is poisonous without having to be told. And then there's the title track, "Violence" (map 04), a loud and visceral rocket/plasma-fest that weaves in and out of tight spaces and keeps coming back to explosive battles down in the more open blood canals running through the map's center.

The low-stress, high-energy gameplay is backed up by a synthwave OGG soundtrack, which seems like a natural choice in retrospect, though it feels unusual when you first start up the mapset. There are even lyrics in the last track, which again takes a minute or two to get used to before eventually becoming something that you take for granted as part of the map's character. Since the flow of gameplay is so fluid, the trancelike nature of the tracks is a comfortable fit, and seems to osmose into your bloodstream and become a part of whatever driving force keeps you moving forward. The music even appears to become a literal part of the map for one beautiful moment in map 04, where the lights shut off and the walls drop and you're suddenly thrown into the middle of a rave with your rocket launcher and dozens of shreddable low-health enemies.

Having finally played it, I think Violence may be my favorite of AD's work. Stylistically, it's more distilled and exciting than 50 Monsters, but the fact that it's a solo release where all the maps can play off of each other as a cohesive whole makes it easier to appreciate the depth of AD's mapping than any single community project map. Back in 2015, I was perhaps put off by the music choices and the way the aesthetic was handled vs. Stardate, as well as the casual semi-speedmappy nature of the set, which made it seem like a throwaway release that was piggybacking on AD's creative energy from the megawad he'd just finished. But nowadays it feels perfectly at home with many of the more contemporary releases I've played, and it's so energetic that it would probably still be noteworthy if it were released today. Maybe that just means it was ahead of its time.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Not Jabba · March 23, 2020

Yeah, I'm doing another irregular feature, and a long one at that. So sue me—I'm quarantined!

Anatomy of a Megawad:
Whispers of Satan by @pcorf and @Kristian Nebula

One aspect of game/level design that I find really interesting is what I referred to in The Roots of Doom Mapping as the "anatomy" of a mapset. I'd already been thinking about doing an "Anatomy of a Megawad" series, but it probably wouldn't have gotten off the ground for another year or two if I hadn't used some of my extra free time to replay my favorite pre-2010 megawad: Whispers of Satan.

So what is mapset anatomy? In short, it's the way the various individual maps and clusters of maps complement or play against each other to create the whole picture—the in-game narrative of the mapset, essentially. Setting, map length, pacing, implied storytelling, and variation of gameplay styles are often the most important elements here, but the overarching story can just as easily draw meaning from non-map elements such as the flow of the soundtrack from level to level. It can even be about seemingly tiny choices—like how the decision of where to place the first rocket launcher defines the entire first third of STRAIN. Though the anatomy incorporates many (maybe all) aspects of individual level design, none of them are particularly important on their own; strictly speaking, a component of a level's design is only part of mapset anatomy insofar as it affects your experience of playing other levels. It's pretty ineffable stuff—which may be why I find it so fascinating—but I'm going to take a crack and see if I can't eff it after all.

To give you a better sense of what I'm getting at, allow me to quote liberally from the Roots article's description of Alien Vendetta:

Quote

While Plutonia forgoes any sense of story or connection between its maps, and Eternal Doom provides a deep feeling of overarching narrative but lacks a sense of order or pacing, Alien Vendetta balances its narrative at both the macro and micro levels—playing the distinct feel of individual maps against the broader sense of progression to make the long journey feel memorable. The map progression goes beyond Doom 2's basic base-city-hell and builds in a stronger sense of how the player is moving from place to place. ... Very few maps seem randomly inserted, and the fact that the megawad is broken into a series of distinct chunks, often with logical transitions between them, helps to create the narrative. This quasi-episodic progression is given further definition—a sense of purpose, if you will—through the placement of individual standout maps. "Hillside Siege" serves as a mini-climax at the end of its episode, conveniently placed before the requisite post-map 06 story text; "Nemesis" and "Misri Halek" serve a similar role in the map 11 and 20 slots. "Sunset" (map 01) is specifically placed to establish the overarching sense of aesthetics for the megawad and stands apart thematically from the maps that follow it. "Toxic Touch" (map 10) provides a deeply atmospheric, eerily enclosed interlude to the sprawling outdoor maps of the medieval episode without departing from the theme; "Clandestine Complex" (map 24), by contrast, is a complete thematic departure, a sudden lurch into an apocalyptic earthly setting between the pure Hell episodes.

Although you can easily find counterexamples, narrative progression often becomes most important with larger mapsets, which is why I think megawads are a useful focus of study. And thus we finally come to Whispers of Satan.

On the most basic level, the anatomy of WoS is as follows: It begins with a run of dark, decaying mountain bases, culminating in "Basement Jazz" (map 08); hops through the transitional, Petersenesque "School" (map 09) to begin a series of one-off medieval/Plutonia/Earth-Hell vignettes that lasts through "Temple of Water" (map 15), building up and leading into the famous four-map Hexen/ice episode (maps 16-19); and ends with 11 (not 10) maps of pure, straight-faced Hell. The secret maps are not part of the main progression and are instead treated as screwball bonus maps, which is common for 2000s megawads but rare in the last decade (see Speed of Doom, Ancient Aliens, or Eviternity, where the secret maps are an important part of mapset anatomy). Because so much of the megawad hinges on the progression from "Temple of Water" to "Undervilla," I would strongly recommend skipping the secret exit (assuming you can find it, which I never have) and then warping to the secret maps after beating the rest of the megawad if you wish.

WoS uses the length and intensity of individual maps as an effective means of pacing throughout, and it's especially noticeable in the first half. The vast majority of the first 15 maps are short, with monster counts under 150. "Basement Jazz," "The Wasted Dens," and "Temple of Water" (maps 08, 14, and 15), and to a lesser extent "Pumping Station 083A" and "Playgrounds of Caesar" (maps 05 and 10) are longer and more fleshed out, adding strength to the narrative and making it feel like some areas are more significant than others, while "Death Alley" and "Cyberfunk" (maps 07 and 11) serve as small, dramatic boss maps. With all that in mind, the mapset still creates a sense that it is gradually, deliberately increasing in intensity over the course of the first half, at least in terms of monster strength and density. It should be noted that Whispers of Satan is never a very difficult megawad—nor is it trying to be—but its presentation of the opposition still becomes more dramatic and potent relative to its own progression, which is what's most important. The second half of the megawad is more uniform, with mostly medium-length maps and a challenge plateau throughout the Hell episode for reasons that make sense in context; I'll get into that more later, but essentially the homogenized pacing lends a steady, inexorable feel to the challenges you face and gives more weight to each of the two late-game episodes as a unit, rather than as individual maps. Nonetheless, "Cryosleep" and "Vulcana" (maps 19 and 25) serve as major mini-climaxes, and maps 27-29 function as a climactic buildup to the final encounter as per usual, which again strengthens the overall pacing and narrative of the megawad. Map 30 has an "eye of the storm" feel to it, with an atmospheric monsterless opener, a very small population of mostly powerful monsters, and an Icon of Sin battle at the end.

These points should come as no surprise to anyone who's played a good megawad before, though they're still worth paying attention to. The varied pacing and flow help WoS to be a fun megawad, but other megawads have handled it better, and I'll probably write about some of those megawads another time. None of that is really the point of Whispers of Satan.

One of WoS's strongest assets is its soundtrack. A hypothetical strawman who doesn't enjoy the megawad might say that it uses music as a crutch, leaning too heavily on an element that is technically separate from level design, but I think that's narrow-minded. Music choices are hugely important for any gaming experience, and WoS plays to the strengths of its soundtrack almost as well as BTSX or Ancient Aliens; it's one of the best OSTs in Doom history. The most powerful tracks are used to play up the most important moments in the megawad's progression—something almost any good soundtrack should do, whether it's original or compiled—but it also establishes the baseline mood that the bigger moments play off of. Soundtrack choices and megawad anatomy go hand in hand for pretty much the whole 30 maps.

WoS's maps are generally constructed as a series of trials: very trap/ambush-oriented with lots of mini-setpieces and surprises, and mostly linear but with branches so that you're allowed to complete certain clusters of trials in any order you want. The result of these isolated branches is that combat is often focused on the front and easily escapable, and the layouts often rely on some symmetry, which many people consider to be the megawad's major flaws. On the other hand, the player's expectations of symmetry are sometimes used to create traps, as in map 30 where one side of a two-branch symmetry delivers Revenants from a closet next to a switch while the other teleports them into the hallway behind the player; whichever one you're expecting to happen the second time, the actual result will blindside you. The combat often favors gimmick scenarios as well; for instance, pcorf's "Cyberfunk" includes both a Berserk/Pinky mosh pit and a close-quarters Cyberdemon duel with a window behind you to mitigate the threat of splash damage and turn it into a tight dodge-fest.

In the first half of the megawad—the part where most of that "baseline mood" happens—the sum of all these gameplay choices registers as lighthearted and whimsical; pcorf swings between serious story pieces and maps where he's clearly just having fun, while Aro's maps are mood pieces, but are simple and fast-moving in nature. Accordingly, the soundtrack generally consists of lighter, simpler pieces with a bit of a weird bent. Maps like "Caesar's Playground" that are more geared toward fleshing out the setting tend to have more moody tracks; high points in the progression like "Basement Jazz" and "Temple of Water" tend to have distinct, memorable tracks with a tone that's harder to place; and particularly oddball maps like "School" and "Cyberfunk" tend to have the quirkiest tracks. It's not treated as an exact science, but the range of emotions that's established here is an interesting one, and it toys with your perception without drawing too much attention to itself. There's an overall strangeness to the proceedings, an odd sort of ethereality, and perhaps underneath it all a subtle sense of uncertainty that pays off later. The megawad actually eases you into this strangeness by focusing the first leg on Aro's base maps, which play more conventionally on the whole, and in the meantime getting pcorf's weakest few maps out of the way. As soon as you leave "Basement Jazz," Aro disappears completely until map 19, and you're ready to go full pcorf; here, the underlying oddball tone of the gameplay kicks into gear as a complement for the soundtrack. But the really important takeaway here is that stylistically, the first half of the megawad plays as a low boil, gradually building up all of the many facets that make it feel so unique but in no way truly preparing you for map 16. And this is where things get really interesting.

The Hexen/ice episode that runs from map 16 to map 19 ("Undervilla," "Mines of Despair," "Elements," and "Cryosleep") is the turning point of the whole megawad, the sudden roller-coaster plummet into a latter half that's far more serious and atmospherically intense. Though the gameplay remains similar to what you've come to expect, the lighthearted whimsy of earlier maps is abruptly gone, and never comes back. Even if you've browsed the maps or played the megawad before, stumbling from "Temple of Water" into "Undervilla" is disarming, like crossing a threshold into a completely different world that's only been hinted at before. The four music tracks used here are the most powerfully emotive in the megawad, and all are gloomy, sad, and beautiful to varying degrees, ranging from contemplative melancholy to stark mourning to reeling despair; in "Undervilla," "Elements," and "Cryosleep," the music is so wrenching that it threatens to overwhelm the entire experience of playing the maps. When I first encountered the episode as a depressed college grad, it swept me straight off my feet, which was not an experience I would necessarily recommend; it felt a bit like falling off a cliff. Even now, I grapple with the feelings and memories that these maps call to mind, but the plunge feels more natural and controlled, like it's the way the maps are supposed to be. There's no question that the episode is the emotional climax of the megawad; why they chose to put it between half and two-thirds of the way through is, for me, the great enigma of WoS's progression. It makes a lot more sense to me now, but I'm still working through the details.

The first three maps in the episode are all striking and lovely as individual moments in the progression, but it becomes abundantly clear that they're just a buildup once you get to Aro's "Cryosleep." The icy, tomblike map was created in memory of Aro's fiancee, who passed away during the project's development, and its symbolism weighs heavily on it; it's a powerful requiem that carries a palpable feeling of wanting to freeze a moment in time, to encapsulate the memory of something that's lost forever. The music, also written by Aro, is a teetering dirge, an emotional brink that threatens to topple at any second and take you with it, but instead remains steadily, monotonously, at the verge of collapse. As a result, you go through the whole level almost desperately wanting to pull the whole thing back upright, to somehow make the impossible return journey to a better place, but at the same time constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop—which it ultimately does, though perhaps not in the way you'd expect.

The end of "Cryosleep" has you descending into a flesh-filled cavern, an obvious warning sign that you're about to cross into Hell, where you'll remain for the entire rest of the megawad. It's another turning point in the narrative, and there's a lot of tension in it—not just for me, I think, but for any player who's properly immersed. As much as I love what Petersen did with the place in Doom 2, the fire-and-brimstone imagery of classic Inferno, which the Doom mapping community generally favors, has always been my least favorite setting for the game. For me, it's always a bit of a disappointment to leave behind the elaborately creative city maps of Hellbound, the mysteries of Alien Vendetta's "Misri Halek," or the fantastic space maps of Community Chest 4 and then trudge through typical Hell settings for an entire episode (though I'm sure for some players, that's what it's all about). In Whispers of Satan, though, that feeling seems far more deliberate. Entering the flesh cave at the end of "Cryosleep" is downright uncomfortable. As a memorial map, "Cryosleep" carries such unique and powerful connotations of a moment frozen in time, and yet the end of it finds you descending into the most disgusting, horrific setting that the Doom universe has to offer. You could draw some pretty obvious metaphors to the experience of trauma and grief. And it's worth noting that Hell in WoS comes early, here at the end of map 19 instead of the end of map 20 as is conventional. It's unwelcome, a transition that's entirely imposed upon the player. If it seems like I'm reading too much into this, fast-forward to map 30, where you can see an even clearer message scrawled in sectors beside the infinite abyss: "Hell is a state of mind."

In any case, Corfiatis and Aro both made every effort to make their 11 maps of Hell as creepy and loathsome as possible, and you can tell they both got really into it. It's telling that when they contributed to CC4, both of them made spiritual successors to maps in Whispers of Satan, and both of them chose the Hell episode. WoS's Hell weaves in and out of darkness and light, claustrophobic interiors and open outdoor wastelands, but as a setting it's consistent to the point of being basically homogeneous across all the maps—more so than any of the previous episodes, even though it's the largest episode in the megawad. It even has certain visual motifs that pop up again and again, most notably strips of flesh stretched over the floors and pinned down with heavy iron nails, which appear in something like half of the maps. The uniform, unending horror of the place, combined with the fact that most of the Hell maps are longer than average for the megawad, makes it feel all the more oppressive. The soundtrack becomes more sinister throughout the episode and features a number of grim ambient tracks, as though the atmosphere is leaning more toward that of a horror game. Virtually every moment you spend under a ceiling is dim to pitch-black, the overall darkness punctuated by pockets of high-contrast feathered lighting—and some maps are almost entirely interior, which is always subtly more intimidating than being out in the open. A few of them even border on true abysses, vast stretches of blackness without end—not a very common aesthetic choice for Doom maps back in those days, four years before Stardate.

The blackest abyss of all is the latter half of map 30, "Verge of Revelation"; first an eerie campfire-like setting where you face Spectres and Arch-Viles, and then the gloomy platform where you confront the Icon of Sin, both appearing as lone islands in the dark. And that's the last vision you get of the megawad—the Icon crumbling in the darkest, deepest abyss of Hell. The end text (which is probably pcorf's) is deliriously, obliviously happy, but the finale and the whole arc of the megawad seem to bely that, or at least call it into question. The title "Verge of Revelation" hardly seems like an accident, particularly when paired with the message written in the margins of the map itself, but I don't know whether we're meant to feel like we've found that revelation—killing yet another Icon of Sin certainly doesn't seem like much of an anagnorisis, in and of itself. In part because your experience of playing it is fueled by the feelings you've carried with you through the ice and Hell episodes, the ending of the megawad seems to leave you hanging, dangling suggestions and promises somewhere in the darkness but never actually taking you there. It's a feeling that I've encountered surprisingly often in Doom maps, perhaps because the medium is so much better at suggestion than at offering concrete details, or perhaps because all of life is like that. Ultimately, whether we overcome Hell as a state of mind or remain in the abyss is up to each of us, as players and as people.

All of this is the sort of stuff that I find endlessly intriguing as a Doom player; it's the reason almost all of my favorite releases are megawads or larger mapsets, and it's no surprise that all of my favorite megawads have particularly interesting mapset anatomy. Are these types of choices intentional, or do they just happen by accident? I doubt that most mappers sit down and plan out the kind of emotional arc I've described for Whispers of Satan, map by map; rather, I think these decisions usually happen intuitively—which is certainly not the same as saying they're accidental. I do think there's plenty of room for happy accidents as well, though. Consider A.L.T., my favorite megawad of all time, which achieves a lot of its powerful delivery by interspersing a carefully plotted story arc with completely random community project maps. That said, I think it's worth making the point that you can approach megawad anatomy scientifically, if you want—and think of what you could make if you did.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

pcorf · April 9, 2020

Thank for your review. Had a blast reading it.

Here is the full OST to WOS for anybody who enjoys it.

Kristian Nebula · April 9, 2020

Hi thanks for this awesome review! Was a really good read and spot on in many things! Much appreciated! :)

Not Jabba · May 19, 2020

Deathless by @Jimmy

Deathless doesn't need much of an introduction. Whatever you think of the megawad, its development saga is nearly mythic. The story of the -Less series began with the summer 2018 release of Griefless, an E4 replacement Jimmy knocked out in two nights, speedmapping each individual map in around 20 minutes or less. During the NaNoWADMo event that November, when everyone else was struggling with the one-month megawad challenge, he followed up with Deathless, an E1/E2/E3 megawad constructed in nine days. That is a crazy feat of dedication and skill that, like propane tanks and reality stunt shows, should come with a warning label: "We know what you're thinking, please don't try it at home." After the initial nine-day ironman, the megawad was polished up and saw its final release at the end of November, meeting the NaNoWADMo deadline—and if you've ever watched a Doom megawad go through an RC cycle, you know that's pretty impressive too. Fittingly, Griefless was appended as E4 of Deathless, creating a full Ultimate Doom replacement.

Like everyone else, I consider Deathless to be quite well made for its short time frame—exceptional, even—but the "for its time frame" part has always been the rub. That's my biases showing, perhaps, though I know I'm not the only person on the judging team who feels that way. The competition in both 2018 and 2019 was too strong for something of this nature to squeeze through, but we were willing to actively consider Deathless for awards in both years, and it's the only case I know of where that's happened with a single release. Forget my opinion, though—ask practically anyone in the forum community what they think of the megawad, and they'll practically tie you up and force you to play it.

The thing people love about Deathless is accessibility, not just that it's easy enough for virtually anyone to play but also that it delivers fun in such a direct, easily digestible way. The layouts are compact and smooth, with freedom of movement akin to Romero's E1 or the early maps of Scythe. Where most Ultimate Doom replacements follow the idea that E1 should be reminiscent of Romero and later episodes should take on the dungeon crawler tone of Petersen's work or the tight combat puzzle gameplay of Thy Flesh Consumed, Jimmy delivers Romero-esque gameplay across the entire four-episode structure, which is probably something that Romero's fans had been yearning for for 25 years. Right out of the gate in E1M1, the first thing you do is turn slightly to the left as a couple of zombiemen appear and take them out with a barrel that's delivered in the exact right spot for you to do it without blinking. Recovering from that, you turn back in the opposite direction to make sure you're not being flanked and see a couple of Imps, now approaching another small group of barrels at the exact right time for you to give them the same treatment. That being finished, you either open the door or approach the window to take shots at more easy targets or barrel arrays, depending on instinctive preference. You don't have to think; you just do. The fluidity of the movement and shooting is easily the megawad's greatest strength.

The whole megawad is built on that same easy conveyance and fast pace. It's easy to just sit back and get in a zone while playing it, and I think that's probably why it makes so many people happy. Aesthetically, the megawad sticks to its classic guns and is pretty close to being stock textured, with just some minor edits, new skies, and cool new torch orb decorations; you'll catch lots of little nods to Ultimate Doom maps, but always in the context of totally original layouts and that open, free-flowing style. The exceptions are the secret maps—E1M9 is a condensed tech-skinned play on the main ideas from "Gotcha," while the other three are theme-swapped remakes of "Circle of Death," "The Waste Tunnels," and "Underhalls" (which goes to show how much a simple texture theme contributes to the feel of a map). There's also occasionally some more experimental stuff, like E2M7's D2-like city block layout or the more platforming-oriented E4M5, which help to break up the set a bit while staying true to the quick and compact ideology of the rest of the megawad. Personally, despite the super-quick nature of the individual maps, I still felt some fatigue over the course of the set due to how similar the gameplay was across all episodes. On the other hand, that consistency means that if you love E1M1, you're probably going to love the whole megawad, nonstop. There's also no denying that the set feels alarmingly polished for having been constructed in such a short time span—it goes to show how natural the whole process can be for a mapper as experienced as Jimmy, though for my part, I'm more likely to appreciate the greater depth and variety that comes from applying that experience over a longer development time.

The -Less series is an ongoing project for Jimmy. I've heard tell that he's working on a Sigil-inspired E5 (called Sightless, if I recall correctly), and has considered creating a Doom 2 megawad using the same general creative process. The entry that really interested me was last year's Faithless, a Heretic E1 replacement. Being the Heretic zealot that I am, and given that Faithless has a much more unique design philosophy behind it than Deathless does, I loved the episode. It was my favorite thing that wasn't awarded last year. So why aren't I writing about it alongside Deathless? Well, if you've been watching Jimmy's posts in the screenshot thread, you're probably already aware that the Faithless story isn't done yet—and you're probably as excited about it as I am. I don't think you've got long to wait, either. But in the meantime, give Deathless a try and see what all the hype is about.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Not Jabba · May 21, 2020

Spectrum by @Capellan

Capellan has been mapping for nearly as long as Doom has been around, but he's clearly not afraid to reinvent himself now and then. And if Requiem was a pragmatic (albeit inaccurate) acknowledgement that Quake was going to subsume the Doom community, then Spectrum is basically a huge "fuck you" to the influence Quake has had on subsequent games, and the reasons that Doom has lived on and to some extent outlasted it. Specifically, Spectrum flips the middle finger at the color brown. The experiment of this E3 replacement was to design Doom maps without any brown at all, as a love letter to what a colorful game Doom is. With no brown getting in the way, the mapset becomes liberated, reveling in the full rainbow of colors available in Ultimate Doom: gray, green, light gray, pale green, dark gray, dark green, red, very light tan, and the occasional splashes of blue tech or pink flesh.

Okay, so maybe it's not that broad of a spectrum. Moreover, these tend to be the colors I associate with Doom 1 anyway—brown is more the domain of Doom 2—and so if you open up these maps with the -nomo setting, you might well miss the fact that there's an experimental theme at all (not that they aren't nice-looking, and not that Doom isn't still markedly more colorful than most post-Doom FPS games). But here's the thing: no brown means no brown monsters too. And that's where Spectrum gets super interesting. It removes the most basic element of Doom's combat—the bland but virtually essential Imp—thereby giving Capellan the challenge of building gameplay solely from the more interesting but less obviously flexible elements of the bestiary: two hitscanners, three melee enemies, and two basic projectile-throwers that have the drawback of being too tanky for their threat level.

So you may well be wondering, are these just regular Doom levels with a ton of peppery snipers filling the holes in the fodder roster, plus sporadic ammo sponges to grind your way through? And in truth, there is a bit of that in the first few maps. M1 is straight-up shotgun vs. zombies, and M2 relies heavily on sniper surprises and health starvation (though both are pretty easy maps, and shouldn't take you long to get through). M3 is the turning point, both the source of greatest frustration and the place where the monster usage starts to come together into something more interesting.

The main combat mode that dominates the rest of the set is a fast-moving scramble, but at the same time, no one enemy is that much of a threat; it's more of an ensemble thing. The spongier Cacodemons and Barons serve as intimidating space-hoggers that try to push you around and corner you, the melee enemies support them directly by crowding you from multiple angles, and the hitscanners serve as an ever-present sting that keeps you on your toes and makes you keep moving. You have to prioritize the hitscanners as targets, leaving the bigger enemies to keep harrying you from room to room as you try to maintain the resources you need to survive. Meanwhile, trickling teleporter waves keep showing up in areas you've already visited, ensuring that you can't easily gain a foothold to use against the enemies you haven't killed yet. The whole span from late M3 to M7 is like that, and I found it really injoyable; it's intense, but still fairly low-stakes due to the enemies used. "Technology" (E3M5) is the best of the bunch at honing that combat style to perfection (which is why it was one of my top 20 maps of 2019), but M7 isn't far behind.

There's a solid amount of health in these maps to keep you going, but ammo tends to be quite limited, to the point where a continuous player will often question whether or not it's a good idea to pistol start, trading in their armor carryovers and chainsaws for 50 bullets and, occasionally, the full 100 health. In that way, it's very similar to Sigil. It works in Spectrum's favor, though, since it goes in hand with the scrambling, resource-gathering combat style. Capellan has noted that he wanted to make the secrets really count, and they certainly do, either for a planned max run or for continuous players who go back for them after beating each map to prep for the next. The benefit of this, from a level design perspective, is that it makes the map feel like every scrap counts, and gives a true sense of reward to people who are able to hunt down the secrets. The place where this is most apparent is the midpoint of M3, where an insta-pop shotgunner horde ambush creates the real threat of a ragequit for players who haven't gotten to the best parts of the episode yet. I actually managed to survive that fight on the first try (but not the second, third, or fourth) by reacting quickly and having already gotten a plasma rifle. That said, the real fun is for observant players who've already found the sequence of secrets that circumvents the entire ambush, allowing you to flank the shotgunners and take them out through a window. Sorry-not-sorry for the spoilers there; you still have to find the secrets for yourself, of course.

As great as the overall style is, it's also nice that M8 and M9 add a little bit of variety to the mix and round out the episode. M8 is a tense arena fight featuring a custom boss (always a welcome addition, imo), a variant of the classic r667 Overlord with a few different attacks that push the player's retreat and emphasize the unfriendliness of the assembled Barons who want to keep you from doing so. M9 reverses Spectrum's whole schtick hilariously—an entire map of nothing but brown, populated mostly by Imps and a boss fight with the episode's only Cyberdemons.

In the end, Spectrum isn't just about having no brown. It also spits in the face of the idea that shooter gameplay needs to be built around basic, conventional building blocks, which is perhaps also a legacy of the Quake series and the era of brown FPS games. By challenging himself to use a strange and diverse array of niche enemies without the bread and butter, Capellan was able to create a unique, dynamic gameplay style. In doing so, he shows another thing that Doom mostly does better than Quake, and another reason we're still here playing it. I can't help but wonder whether this whole idea would be even more interesting in Doom 2, which has quite a bit more brown to prune. The more colorful elements of the D2 bestiary that would remain—Arch-Viles, Revenants, chaingunners, Arachnotrons, and Masterminds—would play pretty well with Spectrum's combat style, I think. In any case, Spectrum's limitation is the kind I like to see—not just simplification for simplification's sake, but a conceptual obstacle that forces the mapper to engage with the level design process in a totally new way.

Edited April 24, 2022 by Not Jabba

Capellan · May 21, 2020

Thanks for the review! I had a lot of fun making SPECTRUM. Glad you enjoyed it, and that you appreciated the very deliberate decisions to challenge the traditional fundamentals of Doom gameplay (even the ones I agree with and like!).

Three reasons I did this in OG Doom instead of Doom 2:

1. I'd never* done an OG Doom episode

2. an episode of 8 maps +1 secret map seemed like the right length, and doing that in Doom 2 would mean starting on map12 or so, which seemed weird;

3. (most importantly) the absence of Imps is much more significant - Doom 2's wider bestiary would have obscured this a lot more.

* not technically true, but the one I did was made before Doom 2 came out, and it was awful, so let's pretend it never happened

Not Jabba · May 27, 2020

Boom-Stick in the Mud by @NaturalTvventy

Transplanting ZDoom elements into classic Doom is an idea that NaturalTvventy has been playing with for a long time, but it seems like he's picked up more steam as that style of mapping has gotten more popular in recent years. His first such map was the 2010 release Awakening (one of Xaser's favorite maps), an invasion-style level in which you hold a big circular complex against teleporting waves of progressively more powerful enemies. Bunker, released in 2016, didn't get a lot of attention (probably due to its very small size and ammo balance issues), but it seems to have heralded NT's current wave of ZDoom releases—three standalone maps in the past two years.

Boom-Stick in the Mud is the biggest of these, an 800-monster techbase romp that you can expect to take you about an hour. The enormous complex is nonlinear in the sense of branching paths, where you can get funneled in a certain direction for a room or two but will then come to another branch; by about halfway through the runtime, you'll probably have completed a circuit of the map, and then you have the choice to go back to various branches and search out areas you missed, most of which will probably be optional. Weapons are plentiful—there are tons of rocket launchers, plasma rifles, and SSGs to ensure you don't end up coincidentally missing any of them for too long, but the branching layout still ensures that any two playthroughs will be pretty different in terms of what fights you're tackling with what resources—that's part of the fun of a map like this.

It's simple enough to find both keys you need to reach the exit area, but it's pretty rewarding to explore and find everything. The map is primarily constructed from big (but moderately challenging, non-horde-based) setpieces: a fast, violent sewer crawl, a giant muddy moshpit with Arachnotron turrets, a back-alley brawl revolving around crushers and Hell Nobles, a mechanical tower full of huge lifts, and so on. Once you've got the keys and are satisfied with your exploration, you can head to the big final section for a bloody climax.

Part of what makes this layout neat to explore is the huge amount of verticality, which creates some scenic views but also enables some pretty interesting movement puzzles and gives you lots of foreshadowing of higher tiers of layout that you can't reach yet. NT is also really good at providing little windows into other areas, which makes the whole complex feel bigger and more connected. There are even some optional sliding windows that (if you realize they're there) you can use to gain a sniping vantage against enemies in adjacent areas. The various windows and nooks in the map reward thorough exploration and also give you lots of glimpses at the map's many secrets, which are well broadcast but difficult to find. These visible but brain-bending secrets are one more thing that makes the map feel complex and fleshed out by adding more "layers" to its construction. The sense of mystery and the rewards of exploration are compounded by multi-part subquests, e.g., finding a hidden blue key door but no key, or rare ammo for the powerful rifle weapon before you find the weapon itself.

Almost all the ZDoom features in this map are custom actors (my personal favorite use for Z-ports), especially monsters. The most common are the two super-Imps: the spiny and aggressive Fiend and the Obituary-style variant that shoots Hell Knight/Baron fireballs. Neither is particularly important from a gameplay standpoint, but besides increasing the variety of the bestiary, they add a bit more threat to mobs while remaining similar to the regular Imp in hitpoints so that they don't get grindy. The most intimidating custom enemies are the tough winged Barons that serve as sporadic minibosses and then form the backbone of the final fight—but probably the most dangerous are the ceiling turrets, which are difficult to spot until they start firing at you. The one new weapon is the aforementioned KDIZD Rifle (slot 6), a highly accurate hitscan weapon that one-shots most low-tier enemies. This is a pleasure to use, though ammo is relatively rare for good reason. The only environmental ZDoom feature is the chest-deep substance that fills the floors in many low-lying areas, which slows player movement. You might prefer to believe it's mud, but...well, tough shit. Read the textfile. Some people will probably hate the hindrance to mobility, but I think it's used well and provides an interesting tactical element.

I played Boom-Stick for the second time for this review, and I enjoyed it more than the first time. I probably didn't give it quite enough credit last year, but the team's view of it as a high-ranking non-awardee would be unlikely to change, I'm sure; it was up against some really tough competition from many similar maps that were released during the year, most obviously the formidable Infraworld: The Hatehammer. The reason I found it more fun this time may simply be that I took a different route than the previous playthrough, which points to the variability of the experience. Boom-Stick does at times feel like a pretty loosely assembled collection of separate ideas, though that can also be what makes it fun. In any case, I recommend it for anyone who hasn't played it yet—specifically the ZDoom version, but if you're not into that, you can always try the scrubbed Boom-compatible version of the map.

Toxic Containment

In some ways, I like Toxic Containment better than Boom-Stick—I appreciate how much of a cohesive, self-contained experience it is. This map has 300 monsters but is deceptively small and fast despite that. It's a strange little piece of work—a mini-sandbox complex full of tight spaces and dangerous detailing, populated by rampaging gangs of popcorn monsters—mostly Doom 2's famously lightweight assortment of hitscan zombies, but also lots of Imps and Pinkies. All you have to do is survive long enough to kill everything that's roaming through the complex, but the layout leads monsters to constantly appear from all sides, no matter where you go, and at any given turn you may run into an explosive barrel that may or may not be a perfect setup for blasting some monsters or a deadly double-edged sword that some zombie blows up in your face if you're not careful. The complex is full of odd little teaser pseudo-secrets—click on a suspicious wall and it opens, leading you into some random nook where you previously killed a clutch of zombie snipers; these secrets don't mean much beyond the possibility of collecting a bit of extra ammo and maybe health, but they're still fun to hunt around for, either while you're in the middle of scrambling around in survival mode or after you've killed everything.

At some point, you grab a megasphere and hit a switch to power up the base, and the chaos resumes. Enemies flood the mini-complex all over again, and you're back in survival mode. The conveyors start up, sending out more barrels across the middle of the sprawl. This stage unleashes the map's only custom monsters, the rocket zombies—which appear to be immune to their own splash damage, making them legitimately interesting and threatening enemies. They're a fantastic addition to the map's survival rush gameplay. This also unleashes a couple of Barons and their Hell Knight entourage to serve as "bosses" to finish off the map. I really love the way this map uses enemies—the bottom third of the bestiary and that little wave of hard-hitting tanks, coming together to create a combat spree that feels frenzied but also very consistent and intentional.

Though this map only takes about ten minutes, there's a lot of pleasant variety to how it plays—which sections you uncover, how the roaming monsters come at you, whether you find the SSG and BFG in time for them to be really useful, whether you tear through your bullet supply to stunlock enemies with the chaingun or use the slower but more reliable stopping power and ammo-efficiency of the custom semi-auto rifle, and whether you dare to risk the rocket launcher in tight quarters. It's a ton of fun, and effortlessly replayable.

Bad Religion

Bad Religion is built a bit like Boom-Stick, in that it's a big nonlinear sprawl where you can take lots of different approaches. It's also the opposite of Toxic Containment, in that it throws an enormous amount of stuff into the pot seemingly at random and revels in the randomness of it all. Bad Religion is very much a giant playground, and practically anything can happen while you're playing it. You can run across a sphere that multiplies your damage, allowing you to shred hordes of monsters in no time. You can turn a corner and find yourself back in the central hub with mobs of Mancubi coming out of nowhere and no ammo to fight them, or fall into a gigantic boss arena with no warning whatsoever. You can walk over a dead Mancubus and suddenly find yourself weilding its arms as weapons. You can open up the exit door after killing everything in the map and find a single SS Nazi, which drops a brand new weapon that you have nothing to use against. There are at least a dozen custom monsters, some of which are common and others of which only appear in a certain area of the map. There are multiple custom weapons of questionable usefulness. I've been through the map twice and I still have no idea how most of the layout works because I felt like I was just riding a tornado the entire time I was playing it.

But as you read between the lines of all that, you can probably imagine what kind of bizarrely fun wild ride it is. If you want the joie de vivre of giving absolutely no fucks where you're going or what you're doing because there's so much happening and you can go anywhere and do anything, of being swept away in a roller coaster of speed and uncertainty because it is physically impossible to have any expectations about what might come at you next, you got it. You know you want it. Just say a bad little prayer and brace yourself.

Edited April 25, 2022 by Not Jabba

NaturalTvventy · May 27, 2020

Wow, thanks for the great reviews!

Not Jabba · July 12, 2020

Legend of the Hidden Tech by @Big Ol Billy et al.

After picking up from a hiatus, the DBP series ran through the entirety of 2019, with a new mapset released monthly. As far as the Cacowards team was concerned, the year's best was the award runner-up Cyb's Freaky Colonoscopy, which despite (and because of) its fixation with toilet humor was an extremely unified set with a focused, well-realized aesthetic theme, some solid Dehacked work, and a lot of really neat concept-driven maps.

If you enjoyed CFC for those reasons, Legend of the Hidden Tech is probably the next closest thing so far. For most of the year, it was discussed as a probable runner-up, and ultimately was only ousted because Freaky Colonoscopy showed up and did the same thing a little bit better. The story of Hidden Tech is that you're a prisoner in the far future, forced to entertain the populace by competing in a brutal game show where the prize is not dying (and, as an added bonus, an upgraded prison cell with toilet paper in it). Thematically, it takes its cues from the Mesoamerican ruins and foam death traps of the '90s Nickelodeon show Legends of the Hidden Temple, but as far as the stakes are concerned, it's obviously more like The Running Man or The Hunger Games.

Hidden Tech has some extra care put into the assets, and there's a particularly strong connection between those assets and the direction of the level design, either because they inspired the mappers or because the project lead gave the other people involved a bit more of a directorial nudge than usual. Either way, I think this is what separates a strong themed mapset from a weak one. When mappers dive deep into the theme and let it guide their map design rather than treating it as visuals alone, the whole set ends up finding a more unique voice, which is what made Freaky Colonoscopy so good as well. In Hidden Tech's case, I think many of the mappers probably drew on nostalgic memories of the TV show a little bit, but the more practical influences are adventure movies like the Indiana Jones series and its B-grade imitators with their lighthearted lethality, and the long tradition of jungley temple Doom maps going back to Eternal Doom. The maps tend to exaggerate the contrast between big, outdoor plaza-like spaces with huge vistas and galleries of perched attackers vs. tighter corridors with traps, ambushes, and enemies that get up close and personal. The forbidden temple theme also lends itself to maps where the environment itself is a hazard, and there's basically lava all over the place, and some low-key death-defying platforming over said lava. All in all, it's a nice set of murder gantlets, but the murder gantlet elements are most often played just strong enough to intensify the atmosphere and rack up a few pelts in the process, with only a few areas being truly murderous for seasoned players. It's a nice balance.

Of course, these are fake forbidden temples, which is where the other side of the theme comes in. The scattered tech elements—banks of computer terminals, bright strips of techlights, screens advertising the game show, and so on—are a nice added visual touch that makes the theme feel more distinct. But they also play well with the exploratory gameplay of many maps, as stumbling into a "hidden" tech room gives you the feeling of moving between the staged temple setups and the thinly veiled behind-the-scenes, a steady reminder of the sadistic corporate artifice of the whole thing, that creates a slightly more complex cocktail of visceral feelings than the forbidden temples alone would do. A couple of my favorite decorative/interactive elements are explicitly related to the game show as well. In every map, crowds of spectators calmly watch you from safe ledges outside of the playable space, most likely silently rooting for you to die. And then there are the semi-hidden cameras, which replace Commander Keens; blowing them up is a nice little "fuck you" to the spectators, but destroying all of them in a map tends to grant you access to secret areas as well. Though it may only be tangentially related to the theme, there's also a reskinned SS Nazi as a zombie/human enemy, which is a pretty natural addition to the bestiary that I always appreciate on the rare occasions when I come across it.

In a lot of sets that Big Ol Billy is involved in, his maps are standouts in an otherwise decent package. In this case, though, the quality is pretty high across the board, and BOB's maps are the meat of the set, the ones that most completely exemplify the main ideas while other mappers add some variance. Hidden Tech doesn't have any maps that tower over the rest, which feels like a good choice for this particular set, although "Nightmare Crucible II" (map 04) is particularly beautiful and glenzinho's "Cacolmec" (map 07) makes a good end to the set with its heavy-fire turrets and bigger arena fights. Glenzinho's other map, "Lake Titicaco" (map 05), also deserves a mention as a goofy pacer map that's just a single plaza with a giant Cacodemon swarm and a funny title that lampshades that fact. Those sorts of little gimmick maps can be surprisingly effective for pacing a mapset. Jaxxoon's "The Stonemarker" (map 02) is also a nice short but moody snippet, almost a counterpoint to "Lake Titicaco," with the two forming the opposing boundaries of the mapset's range of tone. The set as a whole basically falls somewhere in between, simultaneously dark and comedic. And so it's no surprise that you go through the whole seven-map gantlet for no real purpose; all your victory does is to land you back in your prison cell, having gone through a lifetime's worth of violence in a day just for the dubious relief of still being alive in a tiny room in a ruthless dystopia. But after you let that sink in, make sure not to miss the secret exit, which takes you to SuperCupcakeTactics's bonus map, "Risk Blazer." This map is the true gantlet, essentially an on-rails speedrun where a fast enough and bold enough run will get you to the exit and anything less will land you a fiery death. Chances are good that this isn't intended to be a part of the mapset's main story at all, but you have to break out of prison to get there, and the all-or-nothing tone of the map makes it feel like an accomplishment to beat it, so who knows—maybe there's freedom on the other side of that exit portal at last.

Alien Bastards! by Big Ol Billy et al.

Award considerations aside, the most popular DBP of 2019 (and my personal #3) was Alien Bastards, which makes sense, because in many ways it's the quintessential DBP, one of the ones that is best suited to the series' target audience. The whole series is classically minded—if not nostalgic exactly, then at least based on the idea that '90s-esque mapping, particularly in the style of STRAIN, is a way to connect back to the things people liked about Doom when it was newer, in contrast to the community's more modern releases. It's a philosophy that's had a stronger presence in the last few years, and may have begun in earnest with Mutiny. In any case, if you add a more direct sort of '90s gamer nostalgia into that formula, it ends up being right at home. Alien Bastards references the cheesy cartooniness of 2D games from the Apogee era, with a protagonist based on Halloween Harry, a title screen reminiscent of Wolf3D, and futuristic textures and items that look like they could have come from practically any platformer made between 1990 and 1995. If you're new to the series but have already played the recent Spaceballs set, AB is very similar, though slightly more serious or at least straight-faced in tone. Only slightly, though.

The alien-infested partial conversion comes with a silly storyline where the world's accountants have been kidnapped by aliens (I've forgotten why, and it doesn't really matter), and you've been sent to rescue them. You have to beam out all the hostages in the map in order to exit, and some of the hostages are even used as keys (i.e., the hostage is carrying the key, and you get it when you pick them up). Most of the monsters are reskinned as aliens, with the various zombies, the Arachnorb-Cacodemon, and the adorable arachnotank being the most fun and well-designed for the theme. There's also a monstrous plant that serves as a stationary Pain Elemental replacement, as well as another nice SS Nazi replacement (this one flies!). The remaining monsters are basic reskins or recolors, which is true of a lot of the DBP partial conversions. If I have one pointed criticism of the series (ignoring my personal tastes on the mapping philosophy or the overall quality of any particular set), it's that the asset-driven sets tend to feel unfinished in that way, with a lot of attention lavished on modifying or skinning some monsters and the rest as more of an afterthought, and with Mancubi and Hell Nobles being particularly prone to receive the "what color do we recolor it this month so we can call it an alien instead of a demon?" treatment. For projects that are designed to be completed in a month, there's clearly an impressive amount of work that goes into the assets that do get completed, but...well, there's always a lot you can do with more time. The short dev cycle has its pros and cons.

The maps themselves have a nice islands-in-space aesthetic that combines the cartooniness of the resources with the ever-popular void theme as you hop around between space stations or traverse a single large spaceship with periodic glimpses out into the depths of the cosmos. Being able to see large portions of the map at a time is great for this particular set, since it's got so many shiny lights and gizmos and secret item nooks with goofy reskinned powerups to preview from afar and then try to find later. It also feels like it helps to divide many of the maps up into several bite-sized sections, each of which is quick to shoot through. Though I'd hate to imply that bigger is always better, the standout of the mapset is map 07, which is bigger and more adventurey than the others; it's great to have a showpiece map, although in this case, part of why it works so well is that all the other maps are so fast-paced. It feels very different from the others, an interesting detour into a darker, more eldritch sort of void, with some really impressive views and strong detailing. But it's also interesting that even though it's the most climactic map, it's not the final one, and you get one last trip through the more conventional futuristic space stations to remind you that the set doesn't take itself too seriously and allow you to end on a lighter note.

Mindblood Genesis by @SuperCupcakeTactics et al.

MBG has more of a traditional Doom flavor, essentially classic Hell on Earth. But again, the quality of the maps is high, similar to that of Hidden Tech. The set doesn't really have any story at all, but each setting has a bit of its own in-game narrative; the invasion hits while you're out camping in the woods, and then you travel though different wilderness, city, and base settings where things have gotten alarmingly demonic and weird extremely quickly—not the slow, creeping wrongness of Petersen, but more like the entire planet grew giant flesh tentacles in thirty seconds and this is our life now (except also most of us are dead). MBG seems to be the mapset where SuperCupcakeTactics elevated "sandbox Hellbase full of barrels and health/armor bonuses" to an artform and a recurring theme throughout most of his DBP contributions—there was a really good one of these in Coffin Curse as well, but there are 2.5 of them in MBG, and whereas the Coffin Curse map was more of a pure barrel gimmick map, the general playground formula is more established here. "The Blood Zone" and "Tethered Homunculus" (maps 03 and 07) are fun to blaze through, and "Minerva" (map 08) is a solid finale, one of those maps where it's just one arena but it keeps opening up larger. The other two best maps are "The Day They Came" and "Spiral Insana" (maps 02 and 06), both by Big Ol Billy, the first a tiny map with a really great doomcute sector demon and the second a spiral layout with thick Hell imagery and a ton of geometry morphing.

Lilywhite Lilith by @Jaxxoon R et al.

This one has a really interesting theme, though I feel like you have to have watched a ton of '80s music videos and be a huge Genesis fan to truly "get it." Personally I don't even know whether this is about Gabriel Genesis or Collins Genesis (or both), but the creepy abandoned Victorian houses and gardens do have a certain appeal. The best parts of it definitely have glimmers of those Meatloaf/Kate Bush/Labyrinth-era MVs where the female protagonist is wandering around a haunted mansion and it's all sort of glam-spooky and the head vampire or whatever is enchanted by her beauty. The maps are of mixed quality, but there are a couple of particularly good ones here. "Cascade" by project leader Jaxxoon (map 07) lays the magic mansion mood on really thick, particularly in the huge section where you end up outside, but it's also noteworthy for its verticality. Big Ol Billy's "Cynthia and Henry" (map 08) is a grand story-driven tour full of obscure references that I can't even begin to pick apart, but it's worth playing regardless, both for its gameplay and its haunting bizarreness. Although the full project isn't as strong as the others I've listed, it's not bad either, and the texture theme and music choices help to make it a nice coffee break set.

Fall of Society by various

Fall of Society isn't a DBP proper, but sort of a gaiden project that involved a bunch of DBP mappers working in UDMF (or in one case, Boom-compat) instead of the usual limit-removing Doom format. Though the maps are loosely tied together by a post-apocalyptic story (kind of like 99% of all Doom releases), the added freedom of feature choices means that each map is a bit of a world unto itself, and the full set plays more like an anthology than a collection, if that makes sense. Jaxxoon's "We Lived in a Society" (map 01) channels a lot of the same energy as Lilywhite Lilith, with the textures and music contributing a lot to the atmosphere as you wander around the old, overgrown, sparsely populated building. "The Time Lost" by glenzinho (map 02) is a big watery canyon map with more aggressive combat and some nicely detailed decorative structures (sector boats are always good). "Tragedy of the Commons" by Big Ol Billy (map 03) is a nice meaty base map with lots of stylized use of Z-features like bobbing platforms, as well as a backstory that's gradually told through readable computer panels ("use" them to read the text). My favorite map in the set, @A.Gamma's "Escape From Hell City" (map 04) is a gigantic nonlinear city map where you can climb up multiple levels of a construction site, visit a colorful flashing nightclub, swim in a pool, and other fun stuff, but it's mostly about mazey urban combat against demon swarms street by street and building by building, which can be great fun when it's done right (and here, it is done right). The whole set also has a set of custom apocalypse-themed monsters like a suicide zombie and...a baby Cacodemon for some reason?...and a bunch of well-chosen decorations that fit well with the theme. Like its DBP cousins, it doesn't take itself that seriously and focuses on classic styles of action, though in this case its retro-ness is definitely going back to the early days of ZDoom.

------------

As I said, the DBPs have been coming out monthly since the beginning of the 2019 season, and I've played almost all of them, but I won't list them all here. Alone, the Aliens-themed set, has some pretty nice atmospheric maps. After the Fall, which is actually the sequel to Fall of Society (but limit-removing, as per usual), has a pretty cool thing at the end where there's a sequence of multiple end maps with a fakeout, a climactic fight, and then the real ending. There's a lot of common ground between the many entries in the series, and most of the less thematically distinct ones could be described in pretty similar terms. If you like the series, then basically you are assured a fun new release to play every month; if you're not such a huge fan, then you can probably skip all or almost all of them. But if you're in the latter camp and want to cherry-pick the handful of best releases or if you're new and looking for a place to start, then hopefully this curated list will help you find your way.

Edited April 25, 2022 by Not Jabba

FrancisT218 · July 12, 2020

Incidentally my top two 2019 DBP's are the last two to be released in 2019: Umbral Platinum and the Christmas one. The former one is not a partial conversion, but it has some of the best mapping work, worthy of beating out MBG I thought. But the ones mentioned here are in the better batch, too (along with CFC).

Not Jabba · July 12, 2020

3 minutes ago, FrancisT18 said:

Incidentally my top two 2019 DBP's are the last two to be released in 2019: Umbral Platinum and the Christmas one.

Just to clarify in case it's necessary, those are 2020 DBPs for the purposes of this thread, because of how the Cacoward year works.

FrancisT218 · July 12, 2020

That makes sense then...so I'm assuming 2019 begins with MBG (DBP08) and ends with Alone (DBP17)

Phobus · July 13, 2020

That's a very nice write-up of a solid year for the DBPs, @Not Jabba. I'm glad I took that year out from community projects to refresh my batteries, but I did miss out on some great work whilst I was at it. Alien Bastards and Legend of the Hidden Tech in particular are favourites of mine. @Big Ol Billy deserves all the plaudits and praise he gets - his productivity on these projects has been incredible and he's definitely elevating the form!

I can at least be thankful that they were there to play, and unsullied by having been a tester, a lot of the time!

SuperCupcakeTactics · July 13, 2020

Thank you for experiencing the pure awesomeness that is MINDBLOOD GENESIS! Glad you enjoyed it! About my map for Legend of the Hidden Tech I've been wanting to release that map separately as an isolated challenge but I haven't gotten around to that yet.

Big Ol Billy · July 13, 2020

Wow, thanks @Not Jabba! A write-up retrospective like this is something every mapper probably dreams of. With the relentless pace of DBPs (I'm leading a fairly ambitious one this month), there hasn't always been a lot of time for me to sit back and reflect, so this brought back a lot of memories!

While I'm thinking about it, here are some somewhat random reflections for each of the projects touched on here. I figure NJ and readers here are the most likely to be (marginally) interested, so here goes. TMI incoming...

DBP08: MINDBLOOD GENESIS

Spoiler

This is a really cool one that I myself had nearly forgotten somehow! @SuperCupcakeTactics deserves a lot of credit for putting this together and, in a sense, launching the DBP series Mark II after the hiatus and the fairly impulsive DBP07 Xmas project, which was initially approached as more of a one-off farewell.

In a lot of ways, I feel like I'm always trying to catch up to Cuppy, who just seems to have an endless stream of cool, fun ideas. I think you can see me being both really inspired by--and also trying really hard to measure up to--SCC here. I remember banging out all four of my maps in a fairly manic post-Christmas break two-week sesh.

DBP09: LOTHT

Spoiler

Obviously a special one for me as my first outing as a project leader of really any kind. The write-up really helped me appreciate how the theme came together in a neat way. My original inspiration was trying to think of a novel way of doing a Mesoamerican set like one of my old faves, Brotherhood of Ruin. No diss on sets like that, but as I thought about it I wanted to put some kind of spin on the premise that didn't have that, shall we say, problematic subtext of "rampage through this non-Western civilization and slaughter everything in sight." I also think it's generally just good practice to have some kind of x-meets-y element to a visual theme for contrast, narrative progression, etc. So I started throwing in tech elements and it just really clicked.

EH4omAR.jpg.28fe593002a6b0cdfb856fc01d550d7d.jpg

(My original crappy concept sketch for what a LOTHT map should feel like--some elements here did work their way into my map "The Steps of Knowledge")

It also made me feel slightly more comfortable with the inevitably exoticising element of this well-worn theme, which tends to collapse various distinct old civilizations into a vague mush of "otherness." Here, of course, we get that, but are constantly reminded through the tech elements and pseudo-backstage scenes that this is an artificially constructed aesthetic put together by a malevolent corporation, not a real human culture. And you're not a colonizer wiping out the indigenous population, but instead a little contestant trying your best to survive and resist in whatever small ways you can.

The game show idea was always vaguely suggested by the title, I guess, but the name choice was mostly impulsive. Making the bookend "prison" maps really made it feel like there was actually a story, though. If I remember correctly, almost all of the maps were made without any clear sense of that framing, and mappers were even somewhat surprised by the bookend maps. So on Not Jabba's question of "inspiring assets or strong directorial hand?" I think it's mostly the former. Indeed, as I've said before, it really can't be emphasized enough how intensely collective the DBP process is, regardless of who's leading. The core group is constantly working out stuff on Discord where 95% of DBP stuff happens, and these map sets really just bubble up from that constant creative, collaborative energy.

On "Risk Blazer," I'm amazed in retrospect that I almost rejected it for being too hard and gimmicky! Now I feel like it may be the ultimate and most ideal "bonus map" in all Doomdom (admittedly, I'm kinda biased). It's another model of Cuppy ingenuity, and I think it's just so impressive how many different little mechanics are strung together in this rollercoaster ride of a map. I'm also slightly amused that it lets you escape into.... Doom 2.

I'm still kicking around the idea of a LOTHT: SEASON 2 and even have some resources gathered for it. One of these days...

DBP11: LILYWHITE LILITH

Spoiler

I love the description that this is set in that 80s-music-video-fantasy world ala Meat Loaf, Total Eclipse of the Heart, etc. I really thought @Jaxxoon R was gonna bring home the first DBP Cacoward for this one! The aesthetics are so strong and pretty distinctive even in the vast realm of Doom content. Real DBPheads--if such creatures exist--notice we half-reused this theme in Biotech is Godzilla. Needless to say, we're all waiting with bated breath for Scrangus' next DBP! (fingers crossed)

As an old-school prog rock fan this was easy to get inspired by, as you can see from Cynthia & Henry (which riffs in a loose, free-associative way on Genesis' "The Musical Box") and the boss map (which obliquely references the Gabriel-era epic "Supper's Ready"). Both were made largely in my typical manic creative bursts, the first while visiting my significant other (and Doomguy Gets a Puppy co-author) and the latter in a single night after listening to the inspiration song.

FALL OF SOCIETY

Spoiler

Fun project, we should really do something like this again--I think targeting ZDoom 2.8.1 is an interesting space to work in. It was also cool to have the tools to indulge a bit more in narrative ideas. Here the terminal texts are adapted from one of my old professors' ethnographic studies of Pennsylvanian communities that have been effectively ransacked and turned against themselves by fracking companies. Here I tried to do a sci-fi twist on the well-worn idea of capitalism-->atomization-->environmental devastation.

DBP13: ALIEN BASTARDS!

Spoiler

This is a very personal one for me, believe it or not, even though NJ is right saying that ultimately the background narrative doesn't really matter. For the curious, though, the basic premise is that the loose extended universe of 90s Apogee games has become so politically corrupt and hyper-capitalist that heroes, especially older ones, now work in a contract-based gig economy with little in the way of benefits, stable employment, or good pay. Consequently, you're Halloween Harry, and you've been living on a tiny spaceship with other ex-90s heroes--Duke Nukem, Doomguy, and Cosmo from Cosmo's Cosmic Adventure--bidding on odd jobs, working constantly, and barely making ends meet. (You'll see an early poster notifies ship residents that they're independent contractors, and you end the set by finding the US-number tax form for independent contractor income.)

After you-as-Harry fall asleep at the wheel one day, tired from stress and overwork, you accidentally stumble onto a secret alien base. They attack and kill your co-heroes (each has a corpse and a few mementos in their respective bunks). But you set out to investigate and get revenge. In the background, TV screens suggest a developing political scandal back on Earth: a familiar-looking Earth President is caught up in some kind of financial scandal, but all of Earth's accountants have been abducted so that it's hard to prove or prosecute anything. It seems awfully suspicious that these alien bastards pulled off a scheme that was so helpful for the president, but he insists that there was "no collusion." For struggling gig workers like Harry and the other heroes-for-hire, though, it's hard to make much sense of the news because it seems so removed from the crushing economic conditions that discipline the daily lives of members of the working class.

(Can you tell this project was made during the height of Mueller investigation media saturation in the US, led by someone who's spent a lot of time trying to grind out a living in the gig economy?)

I'm glad NJ pointed out the truly epic MAP07 here. I'm still hoping to do a sequel someday that mostly takes place in this evil-alienworld-type setting and possibly wraps up the story in some suitable fashion. Tentative title "Alien Bastards! 2: A Space Audit-ssey."

DBP16: CYB'S FREAKY COLONSCOPY

Spoiler

Also a weirdly very personal one, maybe even more unbelievably. The inspiration here was trying to put a positive spin on a very negative situation: my own experience with the US health care system. No, really!

To make a long story short, some time before this project I was recommended a medical procedure to with chronic stomach pain I'd been suffering. Unfortunately, my insurance and financial situation made it such that it made more sense to live with the pain than get medical care. I'd often used Doom as a natural pain-killer since there's something about the game that's incredibly absorbing to me in a way that dulls the pain I often have to deal with. Here the animating idea was to take it one step further--using Doom to construct a little virtual world with actual universal health care and brave doctors like Doomguy who will really go the extra mile, no matter how evil the patient or how gross the malady. So whereas LOTHT and AB! both had fairly standard dystopian settings, CFC was an interesting experiment in trying to come up with a utopian game world (particularly one I would rather live in!).

Dressing it all up in gross toilet humor and imagery was a great way to sidestep the pitfalls of either making the medical imagery too disturbing or the utopian setting too goody-goody/boring (the classic challenge of utopian fiction, of course). For example, I like the subtle reframing of Doom's central demon-killing gameplay: here you're only superficially destroying things--more fundamentally, you're healing another creature with each "kill" (which is why I thought it was important to replace the "Kills %" with "Infections %"). But with the scatological imagery, that retheming doesn't remotely feel like we've tried to sanitize (heh) Doom's combat or make an overearnest First-Person-Careworker/Universal Healthcare Simulator type experience.

The Krew really helped out on this one, coming up with some imaginative concept-driven maps that found cool hooks like Walter showing off the goofy Chaingunner-with-Cyb-body replacement in a puzzly Cyberdreamsesque map, the damage-everywhere gauntlet of Vert and Zedonk's collab, Scrangus' ingenious mechanic of shutting down the unkillable turret enemies, Glenzinho's high-wire act finale, etc. They were also especially invaluable helping out with some truly maddening bug-fixing--unfortunately, there's still a truly (maybe appropriately) bizarre bug that's holding up a proper idgames release. It can't all be joy, folks...

Edited July 13, 2020 by Big Ol Billy

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