What are you playing now?

[dannebubinga]

Nice trolling memfis. ITYTD next time maybe?

[Memfis]

Nah, not trolling, just some kid is unable to control his emotions while playing a computer game. :)

[j4rio]

Heh, I have to admit I find joshy's way of setting higher difficulty rather irritating as well.

[soner du]

Enjoying Demonfear, a classic vanilla megaWAD with short, intense maps.
Good stuff for a casual doomer like me ; HMP really hurts plenty !

[Memfis]

Today I replayed the first 15 maps of btsx in ZDaemon with a little help from my friends. I think now I understand Jimmy's point about some people initially disliking the textures just because they are new. Today I was already completely used to them when I started playing, and they looked pretty great to me and worked well I thought. The gameplay seemed pretty dynamic and enjoyable for survival with no item respawn and 4-6 players. So I kinda like btsx now I guess and it doesn't seem so samey to me anymore. It was an entertaining and atmospheric session.

[Demonologist]

Phobus said:

It wasn't, but it is now

Well, I can give you a review of Godforsaken Hole in case you care. First of all - I really dig the looks of this thing, the start isn't very inspiring but once you're in for the real deal - it's compensated for sure. Nice complex interconnected layout, even though the map itself isn't very big. All in all, both aesthetically and gameplay-wise this map is heavily reminiscent of Use3d's style for me. Not a bad thing, mind you, I have a soft spot for Use3d's stuff, he is (was?) dickishly sadistic in his works (however, this is not a kind of sadism that's on display nowadays, you know, associated with the names like Death-Destiny, Ribbiks etc.; no, it's on a different level, inescapable pits, lots of damaging floors, multilayered snipers, tight ambushes... neverending glory!), but there's something charming in his evil ways for sure. This map holds challenges in similar vein (well, kinda ironic that his map follows yours in this project), i.e. it's pretty clever and hectic but it does what it does without going overboard with monster quantity or raping you with archvile squads and cyberdemon platoons. In the end, my only major concern with this map is notable ammo shortage. Secrets alleviate this issue, and they're easy enough to find, but it's still there. Not really a dealbreaker though. Definitely one of the better maps in CC3, and decent effort on its own. Good work.
Yeah, I played it before many years ago, but my memories faded with time, so I could hardly remember anything until now (to my shame). Pretty much the first time, heh.

[DeathevokatioN]

On Map20 of Resurgence and it's fvkking amazing so far.

[Memfis]

Tried Plutonia 2 Map24 and ragequitted after many many fails just like I did 3 years ago. :) Cool hard level but the cyberdemon is so evil!

[kmxexii]

i been playin some stuff

the Uca series is a cute trip back to '94. I think the first map is the best but the others have their good points.

it was cool to get the ODESSA series, evans has an uncompromising attitude that toes the line as far as frustrating me when it comes to map progression

Plasmaplant is fuckin rad and I hope sverre makes more maps of its caliber in the future. the theme is gorgeous and it's hard as balls

Secretdoom was blah, it had a couple of good ideas but beginner gzdoom mapsets are bland as all get out

Chapel of chaos was a nice big level, I do like nice big levels with lots of action.

monster hunter ltd 1 & 2 were also kickin rad, i know i want to play the rest of didy's stuff now based on the polish in those. if you haven't seen them, you simply must

the T_DUNNXX series had some interesting gems. the Doom II stuff is better than his orig Doom material and there's even a heretic map in there, fun early stuff from travers

also dicked around with RCK and RCK2, a couple of incredibly '94 maps from Something Awful's own lowtax

[RadTang]

Still playing vanilla Doom(s). Closing to end Plutonia - lvl 20. Then maybe some good PWADs from Cacowards or 10 years of Doom list. And ofc Doom 3 + RoE. Plutonia is hard for me. On Hey, Not Too Rough. Hard at times but not impossible (yet). So far, used YT as walkthrough just once or maybe twice.

[40oz]

DOOM32.WAD

1994 maps from hell. Had to skip MAP01, didn't even know how to beat it. The music in the rest of the wad is haunting my dreams.

[Salt-Man Z]

Taking a break from BTSXE2 to delve back into the official WADs for the first time in forever. You wanna know my dirty little secret? I've never played the original games on UV before...until now. (Normally, I play everything on HMP, but my guess is that back in The Day I played the originals on HNTR.) Last year I was playing through Wonderful Doom, but didn't remember enough of the levels to get the true impact, so I loaded up KDITD and figured why not give it a go on UV this time?

Anyway, over the weekend I played through Shores of Hell and Inferno on UV and was surprised how little of the levels I actually remembered. I'm guessing it's been at least a dozen years since I last played the first game. And I'm not sure I ever played E3M9 before. (I'm skipping Thy Flesh Consumed because I've played that much more recently.)

I also plowed through the first 10 levels of Doom II on UV, and man is that eye-opening. Refueling Base in particular was brutal. Looking forward to the rest, though. And then TNT and Plutonia (which were my go-to OG wads 10 years or so ago.)

[Memfis]

40oz said:

DOOM32.WAD

1994 maps from hell. Had to skip MAP01, didn't even know how to beat it. The music in the rest of the wad is haunting my dreams.

Ohhhh, that one is horrible! :D

[40oz]

I'm up to MAP21. There's actually been a few gems in the mix, but I have to take a break after every 5 maps or so. Too much mental energy, exhausting all my secret hunting skills to find the required ways to go. Many maps are easily broken, needlessly nonlinear, and loaded with inescapable pits, teleports into areas flooded with monsters, and overcomplicated puzzle solving. Having a lot of trouble completing many of the maps in under 10 minutes too.

[Steve D]

Salt-Man Z said:

I also plowed through the first 10 levels of Doom II on UV, and man is that eye-opening. Refueling Base in particular was brutal. Looking forward to the rest, though. And then TNT and Plutonia (which were my go-to OG wads 10 years or so ago.)

Ah, Refueling Base. I've never beaten that map on a UV pistol-start because I get starved of ammo. The Pit is a bitch, too, though I haven't tried either map in at least 5 years. Most of the other early maps are a breeze, though.

[yakfak]

luckily Refueling Base has three separate berserk packs and areas you can clear out with them! it's a great adventure from pistol start if you approach it with a plan!

edit: ok it only has two berserk packs lol

[Salt-Man Z]

SteveD said:

Ah, Refueling Base. I've never beaten that map on a UV pistol-start because I get starved of ammo. The Pit is a bitch, too, though I haven't tried either map in at least 5 years. Most of the other early maps are a breeze, though.

Yeah, The Pit was right up there (holy crap, somebody at id loves their Pain Elementals). I may as well have pistol-started Refueling Base, for all the ammo The Pit left me with.

[T-Rex]

Just beaten Khorus's Speedy Shit. Fun, quick levels, yet very tough, almost as hard as Plutonia and HR. I've noticed a bug in Map22, where the teleporters to exit the pits are tagged in UV, rendering the map unplayable in the lower skills levels. There's also another bug in Map31 where one of the teleporter traps don't work, making it impossible to get 100% kills. Still, great mapset, and while Khorus's maps were a blast to play through, I enjoyed more Snakes's and Tango's secret levels.

[Demonologist]

Finished replaying Newdoom community Project 2 (here's the latest bugfix version known to man, looks like Russian forums is the only place that still houses it) for the first time after ~5 years, barely remembering some things from the original playthrough. It's actually quite funny how the attitude may change with the passage of time, ~6 years ago I thought that ndcp #1 was a friggin' masterpiece, and when ndcp2 came out - I thought it was vastly inferior, even though not entirely dismissive. Nowadays, the former seems like boring turd to me, even though it may look quite appealing at times, with only one map that I can call a day (fortunately, it's got a separate release, all good for me), while the latter could actually go with some cherry-picking, even though it's clearly rushed in parts and riddled with bugs and zdoomisms, so that I had to occasionally switch to zdoom and then back to glb+. Even the bugfixed version didn't address quite a bunch of issues, including the gamebreaking ones (in non-zdoom ports, that is).

Well, cherry-picker I am, never denied that. So here's my little "research" in case someone's interested or wishes to give this wad a go without swimming in dirt for too much.

The highlights of this wad for me are:
01 & 11 - A decent opener (and also quite a looker) and somewhat slow-paced but still fine semi-adventurous map, respectively, all courtesy of Dutch Devil; in general his maps aren't masterpiece-grade, but they provide some decent fun anyways and are well worth giving them a go pretty much always when they appear.

07, 08 & 26 - Logan MTM gets immediately associated with his cacoward-winning Legacy Of Suffering, a work that has proven to be somewhat divisive. Well, I can't say anything really bad about it, even though I admit that it does become repetitive eventually. I liked his stuff here, 26 the most. All three are neat-looking and pretty fun to play, what else to say?

13 - A bit on the irritating side, but still fine piece of Pluto-mania from Joshy.

23 - Oh, that's the whole story behind it. I had pretty clear memories of this map, yet I completely forgot where did it came from. I was pretty confident that I saw it in ZPack (yeah, I like it, too), but during my re-playthrough discovered that nope, not there. And now I've finally found it, yay. It really has a zdoom-esque appearance, not a bad thing at all. However, there are some troubles in terms of weapon distribution that hurt pacing directly, looks like consequences of rushing or lack of proper testing. Still, it's fully beatable. And to be honest, I don't care much, this map's got a tight grip on me, and I like it despite its nuances.

27 - This offering from Joshy screams out loud of his future endeavours (SoD anyone?). While it has some obscure moments and not very good moments (looking at you, pool of lava with cybers, platforming and switches... ugh), it's still a remarkable map, definitely worth giving it a go, and probably not just a single one.

28 - My personal favorite in the whole megawad. Top-notch design, again something zdoom-like (and that sky is like an extremely tasty icing on the cake, fits like nothing else), and lots of fun in gameplay department (though that mass of nobles near the end was completely unnecessary). I admit that I rarely stumbled upon DooMAD's maps, yet when I did - I witnessed high level of quality and lots of care. I guess it's a good idea to keep a note of his stuff...


Stuff I consider worth noticing:
09 - Neat looks and some eye-candy, but gameplay sucks; I guess oldskool-type players will disagree with me, so this map may suit their tastes just fine.

19 & 22 - The former is a bane for blind playthrough, yet it's short enough so that it doesn't become too off-putting while the player learns its lethal surprises even without savegames; the latter is a bit more forgiving once you realise what the gimmick is. I don't believe I'm typing this, but these are really interesting gimmick maps, and an interesting experience as well, even though I can't say I want to play more maps in similar vein.

21 - Now, this map's looks and theme are VERY appealing for me, sadly the gameplay is nowhere near as great, on the contrary - it's pure fucking boredom. Could've been ballbustingly good, as it's finely crafted and pretty inventive in its approach to switchhunting routine (that tainted mirror, man, it's really scary, I like it).

29 - Probably the most underwhelming map in this whole mapset. Design-wise it's truly impressive, with Scythe 2 tones in it, yet the gameplay is clearly rushed and raw, there are very few monsters overall for such gigantic locations, and even they are distributed in an utterly dull manner. I'd say that gameplay is nonexistent actually. Awful lot of wasted potential here. A shame, this map could've been a blast, such scale begs to be filled to the brim with tough opposition. Oh well.

32 - Neat-looking, but could've used some work gameplay-wise, as many areas feel sort of wasted. Well, overall it looks much more sinister than it really is, heh.

Regarding jetflock's stuff - originality of his maps is undeniable, and you'll surely remember them for quite some time, yet they aren't really fun to play, more like a demonstration of designing skills and gimmicks (it also seems that voodoo sequences are fucked up entirely and only zdoom can handle them correctly in their realisation). 19 is an obvious highlight among his works.
25, however, should've been thrown away, as it's quite idiotic. Also the worst usage of conveyors I've ever seen, that jump above the inescapable lava pit with all those suicidal wankers around is beyond frustrating, and the whole thing looks and feels like a fucking circus. Blergh.

Rant's over.

[Salt-Man Z]

Finished up DOOM II on UV over the weekend. A lot of good stuff, but man, the second half really felt disjointed. I never noticed when I was younger, but so many of the levels seem like gimmick or concept maps. The first handful of maps felt the most cohesive, which was good. Refueling Base, as brutal as it is on UV, was probably the highlight of the wad for me. Fun fact: after telling my son how difficult the IoS was to hit, I IDDQDed and proceeded to plant 3 rockets in the sweet spot in 3 attempts. Heh.

Next up will be TNT and Plutonia, probably in that order. I'll go UV for the first time, again. Looking forward to these, as I probably played them more than 1 or 2 back in the day, and thus many of my iconic iwad moments come from them.

[Hambourgeois]

SteveD said:

Ah, Refueling Base. I've never beaten that map on a UV pistol-start because I get starved of ammo. The Pit is a bitch, too, though I haven't tried either map in at least 5 years. Most of the other early maps are a breeze, though.

Fuck Refueling Base. I want to learn the speedrun route for that map because I hate playing it. It is probably the first Doom II map I actively dislike.
I actually like The Pit though. I have been playing Chocolate Doom lately and the lost soul limit makes it waaaaaaay less bullshit.

On a related (and on topic) note, I have been replaying the Doom I and II iwad levels lately.

[Salt-Man Z]

I've played through the first 10 maps of TNT: Evilution (first time on UV) the past two nights. Holy man, but I love this iwad. Maps like Human BBQ, Hanger, Stronghold, Redemption...just classic stuff.

[Demon of the Well]

Evilution's got stuff all over the board, from maps I hope to never play again (though I know I probably will someday anyway) to stuff I like a lot and revisit in isolation from time to time. My favorites are the secret maps, 'Open Season', 'Storage Facility', 'Steel Works', 'Mill', and the one-two punch of 'Central Processing' and 'Administration Center.' Odd thing about those last two, as fond as I am of them, the same author made 'Mount Pain', which I feel to be one of the worst maps in the game, or indeed, in any of the IWADs (a weak third episode in general is perhaps Evilution's biggest shortcoming, IMO). Just goes to show you the devil's in the details, I suppose.

[Memfis]

Today I discovered miem32.wad - a 1995 wad by an unknown author based on the main building of Moscow Institute of Electronics and Mathematics. I was like holy crap, that's my university! :D It was super fun to walk around my uni in Doom, recognize all rooms and hallways and blast everything inside. Big props to the author, too bad we don't know his name but I guess I understand why they wanted to remain anonymous. I wonder where the hell the uploader found it, I can't find any mention of it on the internet anywhere besides iddqd.ru.

[kmxexii]

you dig - i wanna see more maps like this one. admittedly idk how much you can draw out the concept of digging out the maps layout. on the other hand, i dig it, and i want more of it. i was kind of sad to see that the revenant fight was gone

going down - very fun and very fast. some hard maps, some fantastic boom scripting. some incidental cheeky humor. play it

shadows of chronos - fantastic hexen maps. loved the garden of gaea. if kaiser made more hexen hubs id def play them.

gene tech - like a brand new late 90s shooter. the level design isnt crazy pretty but killing strogg is way more fun here than in quake 2.

[Salt-Man Z]

So I finished TNT on UV over the weekend. What a trip. There are only a few maps that I had distinctly remembered as TNT maps ("Processing Area" for one, along with "Habitat", "Storage Facility", and "Shipping/Respawning" to name a couple more.) Most of the maps had a bit of "Oh yeah, this level" factor to them. Some, however, I had forgotten were here, like "Crater" (which I mistakenly recalled as maybe being from HR) and "Deepest Reaches" (from Caverns of Darkness, maybe? Nope.) "Redemption" always makes think it's a Heretic map, for some reason. The one level I didn't remember at all was "Ballistyx", which is not a particularly memorable map, anyway, but still. "River Styx", oddly enough, remained fairly fresh in my memory, so I always assumed it was a vanilla DOOM2 map (same with "Power Control".) There was also some levels I assumed were here that weren't, so I assume they're part of Plutonia.

As for "Last Call"...it's a clever take on the IoS that you have to stand on the stairs to shoot the brain, but it feels like a huge bug that the icon graphic is misaligned to make you think the hole is higher up than it should be. That's just a terrible oversight. I had to go to the wiki to figure out how to beat it.

[Salt-Man Z]

Now I've moved on to Plutonia. Again, on UV for the first time. Once upon a time, my default setting was HNTR. The last 5-6 years since having gotten back into DOOM big-time, HMP is my default, but now I'm not sure I've even done Plutonia on HMP. It's brutal.

Anyway, I've just start MAP04: Caged. It sure looks a lot like DOOM2's Abandoned Mines right off the bat.

[mouldy]

Just revisited community chest 4 maps 20/21. Dazzling and inspiring stuff.

[Katamori]

Ah yiss, I remember those. Played the day I went back from university freshman camp.

[Khorus]

T-Rex said:

Just beaten Khorus's Speedy Shit. Fun, quick levels, yet very tough, almost as hard as Plutonia and HR. I've noticed a bug in Map22, where the teleporters to exit the pits are tagged in UV, rendering the map unplayable in the lower skills levels. There's also another bug in Map31 where one of the teleporter traps don't work, making it impossible to get 100% kills. Still, great mapset, and while Khorus's maps were a blast to play through, I enjoyed more Snakes's and Tango's secret levels.

Oh cool, glad to hear people are still picking up my maps. :) There's probably a lot of bugs in there, I depended a lot on other people to notice anything after I released the maps one by one with rather little playtesting on my end.