The DWMiniwad Club Plays: Uplink, Woodcraft, Crossing Acheron, The Eye, and Oberon Base

[baja blast rd.]

 

 

 

What is the DWMiniwad Club? 

 

It's like the DWMegawad Club, but we'll focus on single maps and smaller mapsets. Where the DWMegawad Club aims to fill most of its days, this club won't, so that you can still maintain an active slate of other Doom obligations.

 

How will maps be selected? 

 

I will pick them, drawing almost entirely from a pool of user suggestions. My goal is to maintain at least some diversity in the selections (along vectors like difficulty and art style) -- so I won't simply choose the wads that get the most votes. Please hold your suggestions until the 26th of the month.

 

How do I participate? 

 

Play, do write-ups, etc. You can play any or all of the month's offerings. When a set contains multiple maps, you can do a single write-up for the set or one for each map.

 

What are those dates beside wads? 

 

To help with organization, the month is staggered: wads are "unlocked" for commenting on a certain day, on which they become available forever in case you're late.

 

Why aren't the dates spread out evenly over the whole month?

 

This is to satisfy a balance between keeping discussion tidy while not forcing someone to wait until late in a month if they are only going to play one or two things. If you're playing everything, feel free to stagger out your play more evenly -- you don't have to play a wad on the very day it becomes unlocked. 

 

What are bonus wads? 

 

Bonus content might require a lesser-used source port or iwad, involve a niche game mode (such as multiplayer or rocket jumping), or even focus on a gameplay mod rather than maps. It is designated as bonus content to acknowledge that not everyone might want to go to the necessary lengths to play it.

 

 

 

Wad 1 (June 30): Uplink (3 Boom-format maps by Katamori)

 

 

Wad 2 (July 4): Woodcraft (1 vanilla map by Roofi) 

 

 

Wad 3 (July 6): Crossing Acheron (1 vanilla Doom 1 map [e1m3] by Dr. Sleep)

 

 

Wad 4 (July 8): The Eye (1 Boom-format map by Mouldy)

 

 

Wad 5 (July 10): Oberon Base (1 vanilla map by Simo Malinen)

 

 

No bonus stuff this month! 

 

Previous Threads

 

Spoiler

2020

 

• Violence, Swim with the Whales, Waterlab GZD, Warphouse, and Vaporware
• Remnant, Mercury Rain, Breach, Ray Mohawk's Manic Monday, Grime, and Return to Daro
• Lunatic, Boom-Stick in the Mud, Abyssion, Syringe, The Sky May Be, and The Iron Forge
• Suspended in Dusk, The Unholy Trinity, Port Glacia, Bauhaus, Castle of Evil, and Village of Rotten Bones

Edited July 30, 2020 by ‹rd›

[plums]

Cool shit indeed, I should try to join in this month. I've been meaning to replay The Eye, especially since the last time I played it my computer could barely keep up at times.

[Roofi]

Oh nice , I didn't expect to see one of my older maps in DWminiwad club. :)

 

Thank you @FrancisT18 for nominating it !

 

 

[plums]

UPLINK

Some nice, fairly easy maps with a cyberpunk theme, complete with all-blue statusbar. Cyberpunk as an aesthetic in Doom is such a clash of anachronisms; it's a theme very grounded in the 90s, and yet the map doesn't look at all like Doom maps in the 90s did, but it's still Doom so it doesn't look like anything modern either, and the use of MP3 music furthers its distance from "classic" classic Doom.

 

Anyhow it all works together pretty well. The visuals/aesthetics are the clear highlight of these maps, and they do a good job of getting a retro-future feel across. The open areas in MAP02 and the very end of MAP03 are the highlight, with large techy columns floating in the air. The occasional STARTAN or other stock texture feels out of place in all of this; at some times it seems like it's supposed to be a boundary between the "real world" and cyberspace, but other times it feels like it's... just there? But it doesn't detract too bad.

 

I've played a Katamori map or two before, but the thing I remember him most for is watching his video playthroughs of Going Down when it was in the DWMegaC, and generally hating the non-stop onslaught of monsters, though I think the pushed through the whole wad regardless. So I wasn't expecting any major gameplay challenges, and indeed there weren't any. But that's fine, combat was interesting enough with a surprise AV now and then, and it's clear that that wasn't the main focus.

 

Unfortunately the whole thing is soured a bit by the bulk of MAP03. The start is very promising -- nomo exploration and platforming in the dark, and then a Cyberdemon you need to evade -- but once you get into the glowy maze everything just crashes down. It's not just a flat and monotonous looking area, but the glowing gave me a headache, the combat was grindy and trivial (there were like a dozen berserks but I never fell below 100% health), and mazes rarely work in Doom at the best of times. The end section was at least nicer looking, but evading lost souls and PEs until you can exit the map (or just BFGing them all, if you play continuous) is not a very climatic finish.

 

Apparently these maps were originally supposed to be part of a bigger mapset; the way MAP03 falls flat suggests that it was maybe just finished like that in order to release it.

 

Anyhow, 2 and a half out of 3 maps were quite enjoyable, so that's pretty good overall.

[baja blast rd.]

Uplink

 

+ each map attempts to do something markedly different structurally: m01, small conceptual intro with a 'pick your poison' structure to the content in the big lower area; m02, more of a traditional abstract three-key hunt in the mapset's virtual-reality setting; m03, linear this time, a chain of concepts and concepts and concepts, most being pretty interesting. 

 

+ an uncommon concept/setting. virtual reality is not entirely unheard of (lupinx-Kassman's second map in CChest4, Valiant's secret map, and Doom 404 by Capellan come to mind immediately) but it's definitely not in the roster of traditional Doom themes. that adds a degree of novelty that makes Uplink more interesting to play. not really a mapset that amazes aesthetically, tiny bit rough in craft in places, but overall it was decent, and the texture combinations and sky choice was pleasing. apparently server data is stored in big collections of UAC crates. 

 

+ cool MIDIs. map01's is really dancy and catchy; map02 is pleasant and has a techy 'retro Science show' vibe; map03's is great and suits the dark, spooky mood well. 

 

+ the start of map03 was easily my favorite part of the mapset. the concepts there are pretty clever. just about everything in that half of the map works for me, but my favorites were the monsterless server climbing and the cyber hallway. 

 

- combat can be grindy. map02 tends to place lots of stuff in front of you that you chew through with the SSG. pinky hordes in map01 and map03 are too big and it seems like they were designed with a bit of naievete -- that technique where you induce a pinky's melee attack and back up slightly keeps them from ever being threatening.

 

- the entire blue hallway zone is 3x too long to justify itself -- find switch in eyesore maze, reveal block of monsters, repeat several times -- and hurts what would have been a pretty cool finale. 

[baja blast rd.]

Woodcraft

 

This is an early Roofi map that focuses more on the encounter design and gameplay but doesn't entirely neglect aesthetics. Instead of finer detailing (which is possible even in vanilla, since the rooms and hallways without many connections aren't much of a visiplane-overflow risk), the outdoor design leaves on recurring motifts -- like sector-detail trees (you'll see these in many pwads over the years) and Scythe-like midtex step bridges (those remind me of Kama Sutra). Indoor areas tend to be brown, rectangular hallways, with textures like METAL2 that are pretty HR2-like to me. It still feels like a very gameplay-oriented map, but going the extra step above STARTAN-clad rooms always helps. 

 

While the combat has a bit of throwing blocks of monsters at you like its main inspiration, a lot of the similarities are just visual. Since 2003 people have gotten a lot stronger at gameplay design. This map avoids the grindy excesses of HR2, and it also has surprising choreography wrinkles in even its cruder-looking fights. Take the fight after the start as an example: three barriers lower after you grab the SSG and RL, and monsters pour down that hallway at you. But you're given just enough rockets (without the secret in the start area), and the hallway is just short enough, and that one vile is just safe enough behind its fatso bodyguards. It's tricky to keep pumping rockets down the hallway with the vile occasionally attacking you, and you do want to hold your ground and prevent the monsters from spilling into the start area. Unless you get lucky -- the vile, extra thirsty for you, dodging its protective squad of mancs, because maybe you were dressed nicely -- that vile is probably going to alive when you have no rockets and you'll need to SSG it down in a hurry before it rezzes stuff. 

 

Or on the red key leg of progression, there is a crew of low-tier monsters -- sergeants and spectres that bunch up near a lift that is monster-blocked. Bad encounter? Not quite. Look at the BFG. That is an optional early BFG that can only be grabbed with a vile jump. If you kill those low-tier monsters near the lift, near the 64-wide door on that side of the room, then they form a roadblock of corpses that makes it tougher for the vile to get into a good spot to vilejump you. It'll happen but slowly, and you'll chew through lots of shells killing the rezzed monsters. So odds are you want to avoid hiding in the "safe" lift region, and instead bait those low-tiers into infighting, then kill most of them away from the door. You're given a berserk and green armor to heal and make the vile jump every time, but you probably want to soften up the vile with two or three SSG shots before it jumps you, so that you can kill it quickly afterwards. 

 

Cyberdemon usage throughout is quite cheeky (not in this way), and that is also one of the defining traits of the map. I loved the surprise one in an extemely tiny corridor. There is a cool fight with one on a narrow bridge with two viles overhead (btw these viles are awkward to kill imo, fidgety enough that you need to wait for them to stop moving and then hurl rockets, which is tedious). 

 

Other minuses: I think the spider mastermind along the red key path is an unnecessary grind (unless you have the BFG from another path or the early vilejump here -- at first I didn't). The popup HK in this area is so close to its trigger line that as I moved into that corner, I ended up getting scratched when it was still rising from the ground. The very last fight in the map is maybe the easiest fight in the map, which is fine, but I'd have liked more 'satisfaction' from it -- maybe more low-tiers to gib -- in that case. The rest is a matter of taste. I'm on record as thinking 'just add more rockets' is sometimes a lazy improvement when encounters themselves might be tweaked to play better, but when I got to the outdoor region on the red key path, I found myself wanting more rockets for the stuff clumped in front of me, before that big group of revenants with two viles. (I didn't find the early rocket secret and I ended up using most of my rockets on other things earlier.) 

 

Overall this is a solid early-career map that takes inspiration from an older style while avoiding many of its common pitfalls. (You will not SSG a baron in this map unless you spawn one via the console.) 

Edited July 4, 2020 by ‹rd›

[DoomguyMurdersTheseBarz]

Uplink

 

Don't remember the first map too clearly, but it sets up the style of the mapset admirably: Medium difficulty, with tight movement through corridors, but not ridiculously so (though there was a brief moment in map 2 that reminded me of Linear Doom, it was only populated by like 3 shotgunners and was over in a few seconds). Nothing too overpowered, everything fair. Don't think I died once, though this club has put me in a habit of savescumming constantly anyway. Very glad nothing this month is labeled "hard," by the way.

 

Map 2 is both very fun and pointlessly obtuse. Maybe it's because I've seen "bring 3 keys back to a central hub" map design done better, and more clearly, elsewhere (Lost Civ springs to mind), but I was never sure how I was supposed to find anything without spamming the automap. I found the BFG secret a few minutes before I found the intended progression, and I'm not sure that was designer intended. That said, once I knew where to go, combat was fun, even if the map trolled me back-to-back with two pop-up Revenant spawns.

 

Map 3 is probably my least favorite. Starts with platforming in the dark, turns into a series of encounters that don't feel like a reasonable escalation from the previous map, and spends most of its time in a switch maze that wasn't bad, but wasn't great either. And the ending, with nothing but pain elementals filling the room, was just annoying. If I wasn't able to just walk out after a set time, I would have probably just turned god mode on to get through that.

 

Still, last map shortcomings aside, it wasn't bad. A neat take on techbase design, that often feels as cramped as I imagine a place like that would feel in real life. And the aesthetic touches, like light fixtures that change color after switches are pressed, are always welcome.

[DoomguyMurdersTheseBarz]

Also, looks like a nice selection this month. I'm glad 1994 maps are still being included, as jank as they can be. Good palate cleanser after getting brutalized by something modern. 

[Horus]

Funny that it's the month with short map names and no bonus maps that you decide to use [various things] in the thread title! :P

It might help to add the month and year to the thread title or something if you're going down that route, to make the thread titles distinct from each other.

 

I plan to play everything over the course of the month. For now:

 

Woodcraft

 

I had always planned to play this on HNTR on HMP (knowing the author's mapping style) and for some reason I ended up on UV. Well in the end it wasn't so bad, of course I died a bunch but I didn't find it 'too hard' at any point. It plays like a 'Hell Revealed-style' map, but more fun than your average map from that WAD or its sequel. 

 

The map starts fierce right from the start with a tight encounter followed up by a bunch of revenants. Once cleared you basically need two keys and can do them in either order. I elected to 'go down' first (I played it yesterday so I forgot which key that direction is :P) into a frantic battle where I completely chanced upon the invuln sphere that makes it so much easier. Later in that section we have a particularly nasty quad-cyber section where blocking midtex curtails the two-shot technique.

 

The other section is just as evil, I found the SMM and caco combo tricky to deal with thanks to the limited real estate, and the multiple arch vile area probably killed me more than anywhere else. 

 

Both keys and a somewhat uninspired revenant trap later, we are in the final area with the use of bridges much like those seen in HR2. The gaps however seem very big - Doomguy may as well be flying here!

 

Overall a decent map, don't have much else to say, really should be writing these straight after playing them like I usually do lol

 

Crossing Acheron

 

And now back to 1994, with an early Doom map from Dr.Sleep, who also made E4M7 and a bunch of maps in the Master Levels. This is the second in the canto of inferno series that includes the aforementioned maps. It is a simple map as one can expect from the time, it also presents a decent amount of non-linearity, with many secret paths and closets (even if the actual secret count is low). 

 

The core progression of this map was so perplexing to me that I near enough found explored every inch of this map before I found the areas that raised the bridge to the RK door, and the RK itself (not that the bridge is needed because you can use the rising platforms). The RK is in such a place that it's easily missed - in an inescapable poison pit for which the RK sector itself actually rises to reveal it, if you approach it from the right direction.

 

So yeah although the exploration was nice, the map was pretty confusing and the combat nothing to write home about - Dr. Sleep did better maps in the Master Levels, such as with Minos

[baja blast rd.]

4 minutes ago, Horus said:

Funny that it's the month with short map names and no bonus maps that you decide to use [various things] in the thread title! :P

It might help to add the month and year to the thread title or something if you're going down that route, to make the thread titles distinct from each other.

I'll edit the thread titles, likely to the usual list of things, after the month is done. 

 

[Horus]

Uplink 

 

Using GZDoom for this one just because I've used prBoom+ for everything lately and fancied a change

 

Map 1: Login

 

Well the music on this one is most unlike that what you normally see on a Doom level. It's like being in a bar or nightclub lol. Also the HUD looks very odd. The map appears well detailed right from the start and leaving you in no doubt as to the theme of the three maps (as if it wasn't already obvious from the name). The lift down from the starting area is needlessly slow though.

 

Afterwards is the combat highlight of the map, with a bunch of demons, hell nobles and other monsters swarming at you in a small arena (I triggered everything at once, it was more fun that way). The berserk and chainsaw are both provided, but neither are needed because ammo is so plentiful that the SSG does just fine. The double revenant trap is sneaky but after that the map underwhelms with filler battles such as the lone arch vile and lone pain elemental.

[Horus]

Uplink Map 2

 

This only reinforces my thought from the previous level - this mapset is great on the visual front and lacking on the gameplay front. This is a classic three key hub affair, that save a sticky situation at the very beginning and end, has combat that just 'exists'. The traps were generally predictable and thus had no threat. What also didn't help is that a lot of the progression was narrow corridor-based, there was a distinct lack of wider more free-flowing areas, and no real exploration. The end offers some threat, but in one of the worst ways possible (at least when playing blind), the sudden insta-pop right in front of the player.

 

Also not a fan of the music. The last level's music was different but interesting, this one was different but boring, and made me want to reach the exit faster. Like I said though, visually this is pretty good, use of decoration, flickering lights and an interesting sky.

 

Uplink Map 3

 

Well if the previous map had good visuals and not so good gameplay, well this map fails to deliver on both fronts. When I got to the first dark platforming section, the first thing I did was change Sector Light Mode to Standard - no way I'm navigating that without seeing what I'm doing. A few skirmishes later and you're into a blue maze that starts off decent enough, a few monsters to keep you on your toes and then a cyber dodging section - but once you're out of the cyber's reach, you are into a monotonous labyrinth (both visually and in gameplay) where you keep having to search for the next switch which reveals one monster type, that save for the final revenants, are merely a matter of holding the shoot button without any movement required. Then the final area which is just (thankfully skippable) pain elemental spam. Yawn

 

EDIT: I took a quick sneak peak at The Eye. Very interesting - I recognise this level (don't know when I played it exactly, a few years back at least), I clearly remember the first couple of rooms. Did not expect that. At 540 monsters, I'm saving it for another day though

 

Edited July 8, 2020 by Horus

[baja blast rd.]

Crossing Acheron 

 

This is a relatively short map from 1994 by Dr. Sleep, a very well respected level designer from the '90s. It is the second map in his Inferno series of maps, many of which are part of the Master Levels. Made in 1994, some of its strongest qualities relative to its era, mainly the clean and tidy texturing based around the marble set, might seem very unremarkable by today's standards. I think the lighting, which is regarded as one of Dr. Sleep's strengths, is solid anyway, as the screenshot in the OP hints at. 

 

I'd describe the map design as 'quirky' (which might be 'normal' by the standards of a '94 map that isn't a hex edit or collection of boxes). If you just wanted to make a beeline for the exit, and you knew where everything was, you'd have to visit well under half the map. (In the last area you don't need to raise the bridge to the exit; you can jump off of one of the columns as it raises, which I did in my almost-'full' playthrough since the area I missed the network of tunnels with the bridge mechanism.). Around these core areas, though, there are a lot of narrow tunnels and small chambers and balconies and perches and secret passages (the contrast between mid-sized areas and small ones seems deliberate). A lot of these are optional or sort-of optional. The map is laced with tripwire floors that lead to traps or grant access to some sort of chamber. Despite a short runtime, Dr. Sleep employs a high frequency of linedefs actions: 'toggleable' lowering-and-rising floor gizmos, push-lifts, trap lifts, a whole heap of teleports. Basically, it's far from an 'enter area A -> enter area B -> etc.' sort of map. A lot of the means of getting from place to place are a bit fancy. Many of the weapons are optional or accessed late, but this dovetails neatly with the monster presence, which can be divided mostly into small fry that are satisfying to kill with your starter weapons, and cacodemons and barons that are non-threatening for most modern players but for which you still want bigger guns to dispose of quickly. That rewards exploration. I got to the exit in 10 minutes and found it pretty engaging. 

[plums]

WOODCRAFT

 

Like ‹rd› said, this feels and looks like a refined HR2-style map. It's got a hot start, lots of things to shoot, and a classic brown-and-metal aesthetic that's just a bit too square at times. I've played some Roofi maps in Deadly Standards 2, which I mostly liked, as well as his contributions to Isolation, which I mostly didn't, so I knew to expect some pretty intense combat and probably a lot of cyberdemons. UV wasn't overly hard though, and I certainly died a bunch but found it very doable.

 

Having a choice of paths at the start is often a neat idea, but in this case it seems like the red key path is much safer/easier to approach first, especially because of the early BFG you get. I'm normally not a fan of AV jump secrets, but having a BFG on a ledge that practically spells out "AV jump to get me!" combined with the interesting consequences of letting that AV out as if can resurrect all the shotgun guys made for a fun way to do it. I guess if you don't get that BFG, the yellow key path might be better since IIRC there was a normal BFG midway through that one.

 

Visually it's pretty good especially for a vanilla* map, though there were some uses of STEPTOP that felt pretty chunky -- the big bridge towards the red skull key could have definitely done with some custom textures, for instance.

 

The end did feel a bit underwhelming, after getting a BFG just in case you missed all the others in the map and then having a revenant trap (lol at "Ah!" though), followed by a relatively tame fight, even though it was the most visually interesting part. I felt that some of Roofi's other maps (E2M8 of DS2 in particular) go on a bit longer than they need to, and this follows suit, but it didn't detract too much from the map overall. All-in-all, a solid enjoyable map.

 

* This map crashes Chocolate Doom for me. Anyone else experience this? In vanilla it loads just fine at least, though I didn't play for more than a few seconds.

[galileo31dos01]

Woodcraft playthrough from six months ago:

 

Spoiler

 

 

My two cents on the final area are that at first I thought it was optional, because I run straight to the exit as soon as I got covered in fire not knowing where the archvile was. Watching the final bits of the video, it does look like you can exit at any point, I mean a pop hell knight is just one last jumpscare. On the other side, that "ghost archvile" idea reminiscent of Plutonia comes with the downside that it's always annoying to dispatch. Moreover, I'll add that it wasn't the only annoyance in the map, there were a couple more, likely the two perched archviles in one cave tunnel which autoaim neglects their existence, one which must go in the first few seconds or else be fucked in an eternal cover shooter mini-game, then some random instapops rd mentioned as I'm very skeptical with how point-blank instapops are used in so many vanilla maps.

 

Roofi shared this map back in the HR2 month of the DWMC, where I believe I didn't go much into details but my thoughts aren't too different from other folks here. I'd say, had this been an official HR2 map, it would have been in the upper echelon of quality imo, if not surpassing the best maps in it. That said, those interested should try out "Corrupted Industry", another vanilla map by the same mapper.

 

... Might or might not skip Uplink, will definitely have to skip dead.air (can't use gzdoom, unless it works in zdoom as well?), but I need to put my hands on "The Eye" one of these days :p

[plums]

CROSSING ACHERON

 

Harken back to the days when mappers chose a mapslot based on the IWAD music they wanted to play, when kills and secrets weren't revealed until you'd beaten the level, when 320x200 was the only resolution you could choose. I played in Chocolate Doom to keep the to 94 feel. Dr. Sleep is a renowned early Doom mapper, and for good reason - this map still looks great, and the interweaving, nonlinear-but-directed flow is very nicely done. Combat is quite easy, maybe even by 94 standards -- there's really no need for a BFG in a map like this, even in a secret.

 

The map itself is fairly short, and if you know where to go I'll bet you can beat it in 5 minutes even if you're not a speedrunner. The teleporter bits are a little annoying just because most of them are destinations and don't actually take you anywhere, but other than that it's pretty easy to breeze through, though you can explore it more if you want.

 

There are several versions of Crossing Acheron. The version that @‹rd› linked is I think the first version, which I assume was intentional? The last version is at https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/achron22 and was updated to use Doom 2 monsters, and features a lot more hallways and things around the main area. I'm not sure how much of an improvement it is -- a lot of the visual appeal of the original map was the large open areas, and most of what's new here seems like just optional detours in small corridors. I'm pretty sure you can still beat the map without going into any of them. The map is a bit harder on account of using some Doom 2 enemies, and the BFG has been moved to a harder to find area, but it's still nothing hard by today's standards at all.

[baja blast rd.]

Yeah the original version seemed to be the one people were playing and treating as definitive (93 reviews for it vs. around 30 combined for the other three). 

[Horus]

The Eye

 

It must have been a long while since I played it, because as clearly as I remember the first couple of areas, and the arena after the three keys, the rest of the map is a blur, as if I played it anew. This is a marble/flesh hellish map which contains an interesting structure in that you first need to find the three skull keys within the outer circle, but you can approach the level from either side, which gives it replay value. I elected to head right and continue down that path, where the sniper revenants gave me a bit of a headache at first.

 

From there onwards is a series of ambushes, all of which presenting reasonable difficulty, even if a couple of conveniently placed invuln spheres helped to an extent. The secrets were rewarding and were more interesting than the bog-standard 'press the fake wall to get the secret closet' kind of secret (see for example the platforming required to get the soulsphere). 

 

Then after getting all three keys, into the inner circle, or a megasphere first if you explore a bit. The ambush here I remember pretty well, as well as the staircase climb that comes after. For all the ammo you get, you can't waste it, else the end of the level becomes very tricky. The revenant rockets and mancubi projectiles can pose a problem in the first battle. The staircase battle is not so bad at first, but definitely escalates once the arch viles and cyberdemon appear - here I elected to get the invuln sphere which netted me the cyber and most of the archviles. 

 

That left me with only rockets for the final switch section which was easily the hardest part for me. The single arch vile wasn't so bad, but the double and triple was really hard with very minimal cover, you had to get your timing absolutely perfect and hope for a stun lock at times. Finally I managed it and exited the level with a secret and two monsters unclaimed.

 

Even if the final encounter frustrated, a pretty enjoyable level overall and my favourite of this month's picks so far.

[SP_FACE1]

I have not participated in these before. All the maps seem to be interesting picks. I had only played dead.air before and need to check out all of the rest.

 

Since it's the 10th of July, I will start with...

 

Oberon Base

 

Played in Ultra-Violence with GZDooM. I had not played this map before, however I have played two maps from Simo Malinen previously and I must say this was a trademark Malinen map. Cramped corridors, narrow staircases and claustrophobic rooms filled with never ending hordes of demons to kill. There are occasional broader areas that give you a little room to breath – sometimes you may even see a glimpse of the sky. The layout feels almost nonsensical. Or the layout makes the gameplay feel that way. Malinen's level editing reminds me somewhat of the stream of consciousness technique which was a hipster thing to do in the early 20th century western literature. You constantly find yourself in a new area before you have had the chance to fully explore the previous one. You are in a room, enemies start teleporting, there's not enough space to maneuver, you try to run away, come to a switch, press it, escape to a corridor that just opened, come to another area, which again quickly fills with a set of teleporting demons, in panic you press another button, jump to a new area...

 

But somehow you don't really get lost even though you don't know where you are. The design subtly guides to the right path and at the end you find yourself at the exit teleporter and enter it with a confused mind. How did I manage to play through all this? Half the time I didn't even know where I was? But it was fun, I crushed a lot of enemies, saw them driven before me and heard the lamentations of their women. What more can I ask?

[plums]

THE EYE

 

This map is literally responsible for getting me involved in the Doom community. I played Doom and the other Doom engine games when they were new over a few years, and came back to it for short periods once or twice in the late 2000s, and while I played a bunch of mostly older wads I didn't really keep up with what other people had been doing in the burgeoning Doom scene.

 

Mouldy was well known as Cyriak, "the guy with the videos," long before he was making Doom maps though, and so when he released The Eye, it got enough attention that it made its way to my twitter feed even though I wasn't specifically following anyone Doom related at the time. (Thinking about it, it might have been @JPL that posted something about it and someone else retweeted it?) And it looked interesting enough that I got Doom set up once again -- in fact it looked unlike anything I'd ever seen in Doom. It blew me away. (Despite my computer barely able to handle it; I was using GZDoom to play it, unaware of the world of source ports and their differences in speed.) This lead to me checking out more current-at-the-time goings on in Doom, lurking here a bit, and then kind of going off the deep end and submerging myself in Doom for a good year or two.

 

But enough reminiscing -- how does it play now?

 

I remembered The Eye as being a lot bigger than it actually is -- despite the grandiose structure in the centre, it's really not that big a level, and I managed to get through with an end time of a little over 30 minutes. I also remembered it as being a lot harder, no doubt because I wasn't all that good at Doom the first time I played it. I'm not exactly good now either, but I'm not as bad at least. Anyhow the start is pretty oppressive with fire coming at you from both sides, but once you pick off that revenant to the right and some of the hitscanners, you can mostly take it at your own pace. There's no shortage of things to kill, but for the most part you don't really get locked in to fights without some easy retreat, and you can often just skip killing things if you wanted. Compared to Mouldy's later maps, a lot of the monster placement just seems like a lot of meat to hack at; not unfun by any means, but not too many encounters that are particularly hard, unique, or devious. (There are definitely a few AV dick-moves though -- if you run out of cells for the end switch sequence, like I did and Horus apparently did too, you might be in for some trouble.)

 

Visually it's got lots of characteristics of a Mouldy map - highly detailed, lots of blood and marble and flesh, a few bookcases even. Some fun touches like a Baron examining a bookcase in a demonic waiting room. A lot of the combat takes place in smaller rooms around the center area, but there are lots of windows and things from which you can view the ominous tower.

 

All in all, I think it still definitly holds up as a great map. I don't think this was the first map he made, but it might be the first to get a release, and so it feels like the start of his consistently amazing levels. @mouldy might be done creating Doom maps (though it seems like he still regularly logs in to Doomworld and so that's why I'm pinging him ;p, Hello!) but he left a terrific impression on Doomworld, and on me in particular, with what he made.

 

edit: One thing I forgot to mention is that there's a fair bit of platforming-type areas here. Nothing very difficult, but given how much Mouldy has said he dislikes (or maybe is just not good at) platforming I was a bit surprised to see it all. The running across columns to get the soulsphere was a particularly nice moment; for me, things like that always help to give a map a sense of place instead of just being a pretty arena to shoot things in.

 

More stuff I was going to talk about: The map has a two-path branch similar to the previous wad by Roofi, but it's a little different here: you're never committed to one path, and while they eventually meet since it's essentially a large circle you can ping-pong between directions as much as you want. In fact this seems to be the best way to do things if you want both the PG and RL as early as you can get them. Going for the RL first saves you an AV from spawning there; I presume he shows up somewhere else, but I didn't especially notice where, whereas in the RL fight it can take a lot of ammo to carve a path to him. Since you have lots of space to retreat, it's not that big a deal though.

Edited July 10, 2020 by plums

[Horus]

Oberon Base

 

Well, I didn't expect to play a D_RUNNIN map, but here we be. I didn't change the music, as I actually find the MIDI fine and I'm not yet fatigued by it. It did make me take the map a little less seriously though. 

 

This is a simple techbase affair full of cramped rooms and teleport traps, some of which had some bite, mainly thanks to the revenants, but also thanks to the damaging floor in a couple of sections. The level of detail perhaps points to a post-90s map, but otherwise it does feel pretty 90s (D_RUNNIN of course contributing to that). I found two secrets although one of those just seemed to be a teleporter in clear sight. Overall a solid if unspectacular affair.

[Smite of Disrespect]

 

I didn't even know you could put monsters on sprites like this!

Woodcraft (2018), by Roofi

Pistol start no saves, skill 2, all kills, no secrets, level end time 16:13, Crispy Doom
This map is really tough on skill 2; as someone who usually plays everything on skill 2 first, I should know! I died a bunch around the area in pic related, including getting chaingunned, arachotron'd, cyberdemon'd, and falling into the lava twice, but after this section the map wasn't nearly as difficult and I didn't die again, so difficulty is not consistent throughout the map, though it could also be because I had heightened senses from not wanting to die and start all over again. I dunno what else to say since I only did one skill 2 run so I'll leave it at that.

The text file says this is vanilla-compatible but Chocolate Doom immediately crashes upon starting a new game so I played this on Crispy Doom.

Edited August 1, 2020 by RonnieColeman

[plums]

50 minutes ago, RonnieColeman said:

(if anyone has any recommendations on how to make PrBoom mouse controls the same as Chocolate/Crispy default mouse settings pls help)

Try moving the acceleration slider 3-4 notches from the left. Also for me, the mouse feel PrBoom+ really changes depending on whether VSync and/or Uncapped Framerate it on, and even depending on what resolution you're running, so maybe try playing with those things. Lastly you could try Eternity which should run any Boom map no problem, as long as you're not trying to record a demo.

 

It turns out that Woodcraft is a slightly broken map and Chocolate doesn't handle it properly.

https://github.com/chocolate-doom/chocolate-doom/issues/1305

 

[Smite of Disrespect]

It's beautiful.

Crossing Acheron (1994), by John W. Anderson (aka Dr. Sleep)

My first reaction upon seeing the first two rooms was a big smile came across my face. I really dig playing maps in Chocolate Doom, and the opening sections look great, even for today, and especially for a map made in 1994. I playtest anonymous maps from /vr/ and sometimes you get strokes of genius like this: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1E9A1iI-9YNx7ENOlm7FdfME6PPUbQpsQ/view?usp=sharing (For They Defiled Our Waters by LunchLunch, part of an ongoing community project, 2048 Units of /vr/, where the rules are the player area is limited to 2048 map units, and the texture pack is the GOTHICX texture pack), but most of the maps are babby's first map which do not look as good as the starting sections of this map, which makes me think Dr. Sleep is just a naturally gifted artist (or maybe he copied something from the IWADs but I'll give him the benefit of the doubt). But at least the anonymous maps aren't mazes so they have that going for them.
 

Anyway, after clearing the open areas in the start, I got lost and I got frustrated. The open sections still look great, but the cramped mazes are frustrating. And teleporter mazes?

I made a mistake by loading this map in skill 2 first; I should've known better. I knew it'd be virtually empty by today's standards, but I like to playtest maps in various difficulties, so I started in skill 2 first, but I didn't expect a frickin' maze map. After beating the map on skill 2 I ran through it as quickly as I could on UV just to see the differences.

 

In summary, looks cool, especially in Chocolate Doom, and I'm glad I played it.

[Smite of Disrespect]

22 minutes ago, plums said:

Try moving the acceleration slider 3-4 notches from the left.

What about the sensitivity slider? I'll have to do some testing but I think the closest I got to emulating the default Crispy mouse settings are, +1 from zero mouse sensitivity and +2 from zero acceleration. Also, slightly unrelated, but the mouse settings for the new UMAPINFO fork of PrBoom are different to those of PrBoom 2.5.1.4 so it'll take even more testing to get those two to feel the same, if they can at all

 

>the mouse feel PrBoom+ really changes depending on whether VSync and/or Uncapped Framerate it on
Yea I remember reading somewhere that the frames per second impact the mouse sensitivity, but I can't get any more specific than that since I am a techlet. The mouse in Crispy Doom is the same whether the framerate is 35 or uncapped, I think. I've never had any problems switching between Chocolate and Crispy, except for one moment when it briefly felt weird playing with an uncapped framerate after playing Chocolate for so long.

>you could try Eternity which should run any Boom map no problem, as long as you're not trying to record a demo
:( I like to record my noob PB's so ports that can't record demos like DoomRetro are out of the question

[plums]

7 minutes ago, RonnieColeman said:

What about the sensitivity slider?

Probably about 10 spaces from the left? I use much higher than default sensitivity so I can't be sure.

 

Crispy Doom is "just" a large set of modifications to Chocolate Doom, so they should feel the same other than differences from VSync/Uncapped.

 

Eternity can record demos but they won't normally play in anything outside of Eternity (unless you record a vanilla demo but vanilla maps aren't the problem). Apparently there's a Boom-compatibility demo option but I don't know anything about it. (@printz?) If you do try it get the most recent version from https://devbuilds.drdteam.org/eternity/ instead of the last stable release.

[plums]

The Eye casual max in 26:53. And I do mean casual: I didn't play for speed at all, my route and playing were 100% safety-oriented, I got all the little items on the bookshelves, etc. This is more of an "A few years ago I never thought I'd be able to do this" kind of thing. Someone good could probably max this in half the time.

 

The Cyberdemon in the central tower got pinned and punched to death by the revenants :D. From trying this a few times it's not super rare if you walk around the outside of the spiral, near where the switch to lower the invuln is.

 

 

eye_plums_casualmax-2653.zip

[Smite of Disrespect]

Oberon Base (2003), by Simo Malinen
This map is weird. It reminds me of lilith.pk3, and I don't mean that as a pejorative. I like it's quirkiness, but I got lost a bunch in it. I like the visuals and the out-of-this-world feel of the map. I would play more stuff like this if it didn't involve so much wandering around. I couldn't find a single screenshot that captured the look of this map as it is all over the place, so I took a pic of the starting area.

[baja blast rd.]

Oberon Base

 

Oberon is a moon of Uranus, so this map exists in the super long tradition of naming things after various moons, with standouts like Khorus's "Base Ganymede" and antares031's "The Kerberos Complex," but generally lots of maps with Deimos or Phobos in their name. 

 

It's kind of a 'messbase'; a lot is off-kilter about the design in some way. There's the density of different architectural features in the start area just sort of piled into the same space. There's the chaotic bands of monsters that warp in and the scattered-about resources you're given to fight them. And there's the unusual angles of the map geometry dressed in a pretty diverse set of textures (marble freely used in a techbase!). Doors are bent, walls are twisted and warped, the automap looks like a paper scribble. Feed a standard Doom techbase to an algorithm made to fuck around with it, and this map is what I'd imagine you'd get. The detail and architecture craftmanship can be pretty good, especially for the era. 

 

I played a handful of other Simo Malinen's maps after the month started, and they tend to have a similar abrupt, dreamy feel in the progression of their ideas as the path winds around itself mostly linearly. It's even better at larger scales. You can imagine long, dim, desolate hallways that feel like they might flash away any moment as reality proves itself an illusion -- interrupted by occasional comical explosions of monsters. 

 

Gameplay of Oberon Base is messy and fun early on -- big groups of low-tiers, a handful of their mid-tier supervisors, that are fun to blast away with the SSG or RL, spawning very busily around you. The action eventually becomes pretty SSG-dominant in tight spaces filled with grindier mid-tiers. In 2003, mappers still had to pay a royalty fee to the e2m8 cyber to use large numbers of rockets (the abolishment of which went a long way towards increasing the viability of slaughtermaps) so we don't get tons of those. The plasma rifle is secret. But the map is too short for all of that to hurt too much. Overall I liked it. 

[Roofi]

Woodcraft

 

 

The first thing I have to say is that I'm very happy that this level is being brought out of the grave and played by a bunch of people. I welcome any criticism, both good and bad. :)

 

Anyway, Woodcraft has not been my most ambitious level yet, but it was a very nice experience during my mapping debut. I did this level in 2017 and decided to put it on idgames the following year.

 

This level was directly inspired by HR2 with deliberately very minimalist scenery and a rather wild gameplay with big weapons and enemies. Hell Revealed 2 is one of my favorite wads and I like it despite its many "flaws" compared to the current wads. I think this opinion could be considered unpopular today. :) At the time I was experimenting the joys of mapping and specifically the vanilla tricks. I always used to like the use of invisible sectors in the wads and the famous STEPTOP texture which gives a rather childish look to the bridges.  

 

Anyway, the level as it is now is OK for me but I'd like one day to revisit the theme and ideas to incorporate them in a more modern and  detailed level with a much elaborate gameplay. 

 

About compatibility, it's strange that the level doesn't run on Chocolate Doom. At the time, I tested the level directly on DosBox and it was ok.