I just beat Memento Mori!

[PasokonDeacon]

Requiem has its ups and downs, some of which is prefigured in MM(2). I find it hard to care for most of the maps in Requiem by I. Keranen and Czerwonka due to their hostility towards pistol starts and overly cramped combat (even if the technical feats are still cool and Czerwonka usually did a better job with flow and pacing), but then you have much more palatable stuff from Windsor, Worch, Thomas Moeller, Dario Casali that made my playthrough feel worth it. This up-and-down quality defines these early CPs to such a high degree; it keeps things interesting at least. You can feel the push from "let's make adventurous maps to play with our friends!" to "we earnestly feel the game's dying, so let's do one big hurrah [after another, as we now know]".

[Astronomical]

8 hours ago, Doomkid said:

I have no idea why I was being so harsh. I've only ever played Requiem a number of times in old ZDaemon/Skulltag servers years ago, and I honestly thought it was decent despite the cramped style, from what I remember anyway. Maybe I didn't have my cheerios that morning..

It was probably cramped, but I didn’t care because it made it easier to not get lost in most cases 

[ReaperAA]

You know, there is a part in me that really wants to go through each of them one after the other and see how I rank them. Maybe one day I will try them after talking off my modern mapping lens.

[Rudolph]

11 hours ago, Andromeda said:

If you thought that about MAP07, wait until you see the following one ;)

Oh yeah, MAP08 is pretty good too! I do not know exactly why, maybe it is the level architecture or the textures being used, but those levels really feel like they are part of an extra official Doom II mapset made by Id Software, again much like Thy Flesh Consumed for Doom 1.

 

EDIT: MAP09 is fun too, but alas, the inclusion of custom textures does shatter the illusion a bit. Oh well...

Edited March 3, 2022 by Rudolph

[Matthias]

I beat MM recently too and I honestly didn't like it :D I hate being negative. I wish I could love it, but unfortunately I didn't. Why is this megawad so popular? Am I missing something? :)

 

I understand it's old, like really (1996?) and some mappers are significant people but even the original Doom II maps were more fun, more memorable, and so on. MM was mostly just many boring corridors with brown textures.

 

Hope MM II will be better.

[valkiriforce]

36 minutes ago, LiquidDoom said:

I beat MM recently too and I honestly didn't like it :D I hate being negative. I wish I could love it, but unfortunately I didn't. Why is this megawad so popular? Am I missing something? :)

That's too bad - it reminds me of what's happened with a lot of other classics in gaming slowly becoming archaic, but there are few people who remember when it was all we had and it was the greatest thing at the time for some of us.

 

I could write a colorful review of it sometime and maybe shed some light on what I see in it at least - though the gist of it for me is the variety of map authors with their different personalities shining through different map themes that are quick and punchy, and that meant every map was going to be different in some way. I would always look forward to playing the next map because I didn't know what would be coming next, be it a techbase, a marble brick fortress or some arena battle - every map was a gift of surprise for me and it kept me engaged with the experience. Orin Flaherty is very Romero-esque with his designs, Jens Nielsen likes his puzzling combat, the Möller brothers like to be artsy with their trap encounters. And then of course you have a few Casali maps and Mustaine's creations feeling more arcade-like in their pacing. It's like a multi-genre action game contained in a set of short to moderate-length maps that can be played through in a few sittings - add to that a fantastic soundtrack from Mark Klem and it's one of my most revisited wads I play for enjoyment.

[LadyMistDragon]

19 hours ago, valkiriforce said:

 

 

I could write a colorful review of it sometime and maybe shed some light on what I see in it at least - though the gist of it for me is the variety of map authors with their different personalities shining through different map themes that are quick and punchy, and that meant every map was going to be different in some way. I would always look forward to playing the next map because I didn't know what would be coming next, be it a techbase, a marble brick fortress or some arena battle - every map was a gift of surprise for me and it kept me engaged with the experience. Orin Flaherty is very Romero-esque with his designs, Jens Nielsen likes his puzzling combat, the Möller brothers like to be artsy with their trap encounters. And then of course you have a few Casali maps and Mustaine's creations feeling more arcade-like in their pacing. It's like a multi-genre action game contained in a set of short to moderate-length maps that can be played through in a few sittings - add to that a fantastic soundtrack from Mark Klem and it's one of my most revisited wads I play for enjoyment.

I can't pretend I've revisited it extensively with so many other wads out there to keep some track of, but I must agree with how each map sort of felt like a different experience. Not to mention there's a certain quality to it that I think makes it appeal to 90s game fans more specifically.

[Maximum Matt]

Haven't played this in a while, so I took a quick look at the mapset, and yep the names Not That Simple (map07), High-Tech Grave (09), Mountain Depot (20 hell yea), Showdown (23), Diehard (24), City Of The Unavenged (28) and goddamn Viper (30) all jump out at me.  

Reading this thread made me want to play through this again, but at the last second I instead downloaded Alien Vendetta and am currently absorbing that one for the first time.  Gotta keep moving...

[roadworx]

22 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

Haven't played this in a while, so I took a quick look at the mapset, and yep the names Not That Simple (map07), High-Tech Grave (09), Mountain Depot (20 hell yea), Showdown (23), Diehard (24), City Of The Unavenged (28) and goddamn Viper (30) all jump out at me.  

Reading this thread made me want to play through this again, but at the last second I instead downloaded Alien Vendetta and am currently absorbing that one for the first time.  Gotta keep moving...

ooooh, have fun!! alien vendetta is SO good

[ReaperAA]

23 hours ago, Maximum Matt said:

at the last second I instead downloaded Alien Vendetta and am currently absorbing that one for the first time. Gotta keep moving...

 

Good luck. If before this, you only played 90's wads such as Icarus,MM1, MM2 and Requiem etc, you will AV to be quite a step up in aesthetics and level design quality. But you better also be prepared for a big jump in difficulty, especially at mid of the wad (Maps 14, 31, 32, 16, 17) and the final hell stretch (Maps 25 and onward).