The DWmegawad Club plays: Coffee Break & Fava Beans & Double Impact

[Capellan]

Honestly, I'm good with any of those 3 :)

[myk]

E1M5: Engineering Station
Skill 4, Doom+ longtics, demos attached below (the second demo, dbimyk5c, needs "registered" vanilla behavior, such as -complevel 2 or -gameversion 1.9, and not Ultimate).

Double Impact's fifth level, the "engineering station" may well be where our protagonist feels most at home, he just needs to get the right tools to get the job done. Like in the previous level, the start can be the toughest part of the task at hand. All the way to the yellow key there are a good deal of zombies which can deplete your health before you have a chance to get to the armor. Both now and in 2011 I needed three attempts to finish the level. Two short ones ending before I got the key prior to the successful one, and I attempted to play faster now after being rather slow in E1M4.

There are two yellow doors, and interestingly, the more hidden one offers an easier approach into the area. From the main door, the monsters are mostly facing you or flow at you easily, while the lift door gives you better vantage points from where to shoot the monsters through windows and the like, as well as some monsters that may be facing away from you. My first successful attempt used the lift door and it was safer and more laid back, while the current one went through the main door and ended up being more tense. I'm guessing I was more familiarized with the level in 2011, after having played in coop.

As for coop, the two yellow doors offer an interesting approach with two (or more) players, although when we tried it things turned out a bit chaotic to take advantage of an organized attack from both sides. In addition, if one guy dies dropping into the mini computer maze to the switch that raises the bridge, it can get hairy if the cacodemon there remains by the dropping point, blocking the way and damaging players trying to get down. The halls in this level aren't too wide, either. It was still cool for coop, but it's not as ideal as E1M4, and I even accidentally killed my partner in one instance. I noticed that in coop there's an extra cacodemon in the red key room The chainsaw secret can also be easier to spot where there's more than one player. I was standing by its door while it got activated from afar by my buddy, I think.

The red key room can be rough. I handled it rather smoothly swapping between the chaingun and the berserk in my first exit (in 2011) but this time I was less prepared and it turned out more frantic and I lost a lot of health.

While the level offers optional paths (such as through the two yellow key doors), it also more or less requires you to face every area. This may explain why both single player exits resulted in 98% kills (235 of 239 monsters) and had about the same duration (20:46 now and 20:36 in 2011). But they were different, the first was more relaxed and directed, the second more intense between moments searching where to go. I found 44% of the secrets (4) but I think a couple were easy to remember from 2011. The backpack secret stands out in how you can see into the area from two sides.

dbi_myk5.zip

[purist]

I will be stubborn and argue none of the three options for next month's megawad are recent releases because they are not yet released.

I would prefer the club to only play /idgame released megawads in the contemporary month rather than act as beta testers but if they really are the only options I will vote D2tWiD.

[Steve D]

@Dobu -- I certainly have no problem with the selections, though I'll have to study up on Monochrome and Hellbound. I really know nothing about them.

You have to keep in mind that I am the time-capsule guy, with very limited Doom activity between 2000 and 2011, so I fell way behind on everything. Pretty much the only things I will ever nominate, now that Fava and Double Impact have been done, are Realm of Chaos and Memento Mori 2 for the "classic" months. And let's face it, things really went my way this month with Fava and Double Impact. If we had done Dawn of The Dead, too, that would've been the trifecta of notable E1 replacements. If we ever do another "episodes" month, expect me to nominate the usual suspects, Dawn of The Dead, Classic Episode and Osiris (only 5 maps in that one -- damn! ;D)

Anyway, I'd lean, based on nothing more than the known excellence of the mappers, toward D2TWID, even though, personally, I'm not a huge fan of Doom 2 the way id did it -- so many butt-ugly maps. And I do mean shriekingly fucking hideous. Thus, it follows that I'd be a bit suspicious of a mapset that tries to recreate the original game. Further, I was not exactly over the moon about DTWID, either, though it had some beautiful maps, but their E1 made Fava look hard. ;D I mean, I think I only died once, on E1M6, and that purely because I kamikazed an otherwise easy fight. This was a real disappointment considering how huge some of the maps were.

So I'll take a look into Monochrome and Hellbound. I know Suitepee has his sights set on Monochrome. I'm honestly excited about playing new mapsets, after all the fun I had with Hadephobia and Coffee Break. I'm even quite willing to do what Capellan wants and playtest unfinished megawads. I believe he's right in thinking that outside views can be useful to a team. So we'll see what happens.

Now, back to Double Impact!

[Capellan]

e1m7
Man, the RNG hated me on this level. Lots of super-accurate hitscanners.

Not much else to say, really. Another well-executed tech base, with plenty of exploration and some nasty traps. It's all well executed stuff, but I am perhaps a little weary of the E1 style after this and Fava back to back.

[Urban Space Cowboy]

dobugabumaru said:

My vote is torn between D2TWID and Hellbound currently :/ I'll see where the tide is turning and throw it towards one of them.

Since the D2TWID public beta isn't complete (it's missing the secret levels for "surprise" factor, apparently), I vote for Hellbound.

[Capellan]

Urban Space Cowboy said:
Since the D2TWID public beta isn't complete (it's missing the secret levels for "surprise" factor, apparently), I vote for Hellbound.

That seems as good a reason as any to pick a candidate. I'll vote Hellbound too, since Monochrome only has about 18 levels at the moment.

[cannonball]

E1M8 - Launch Bay
I broke the map. The end. I hit the four switches which crush the 4 barons which open up later areas of the map except nothing happened. Not impressed :/
I have no idea how this happened as I'm sure others including Alfonzo will probably see the map play perfectly fine.

[Demon of the Well]

Yeah, Cannonball, same thing happened to me the first time I played it. Switching to ZDooM resolved the issue. Whether it's actually a 'ZDooMism' or not I can't say, since I didn't bother fiddling around with all of the different comp settings on the first port I used at the time.


Of those three new betas, I definitely am most interested in Hellbound (though I do have a good gut feeling about D2TWiD, like it'll be more consistently interesting than the first project was)....that's a WAD I've been looking forward to for a while now.

You sound like you're thinking of a specific finalized recent release you feel we should try, Purist. I'm curious what it might be....I'm kind of drawing a blank on very recent megaWADs the Club hasn't already played (e.g. Interception and Hadephobia). There's BTSX E1, and I'd love to play that one for the Club, but it's far from finalized in its current available version, as well. The only others that keep jumping into my head are DTS-T and that "EvilTech" Ultimate DooM WAD, and somehow I doubt it's either of those you have in mind.

[Capellan]

e1m8
Wad's text file says 'advanced port' required. Last level does not work in PrBoom+.

Fail.

[Demon of the Well]

So it really is a ZDooMism in the proper sense of the term? Well, at least don't feel quite as foolish, now.

Anyone reading this not using ZDooM is advised to switch over for this one map and try it out anyway, though. It's a wacky gimmick map, with some fun to be had.

[cannonball]

Right played the map through the command prompt and set to complevel 3, which is the ultimate doom compatibility. The map works fine. The map doesn't work in the standard pr-boom format aka just loading the wad up through the pr-boom launcher. Given it works for the correct demo recording settings. I can't really have a go at the authors for this.
So no this is not a zdoomism here.
So the map itself. Great concept but questionable execution. There is very limited ammo and killing cybers with the shotgun/chaingun is just not that fun. Perhaps the pillars which lower or the room which opens up after you hit the four switches could hold a decent ammo of rockets to take the cybies down or something like that.
Right double impact as a whole. A very good wad consisting of large techbases which are well laid out and present a solid challenge. I guess the gameplay could get a little boring to some and perhaps more rockets would have been nicely to inexplicably take down tonnes of monsters but it's only a minor gripe.
What will June bring - you decide :P

[Demon of the Well]

Oh, right, I just now realized that somebody said that the door to the exit actually works on a mechanism made out of Barons being crushed outside of the map, which of course is a painfully obvious line of reasoning, given the mapslot (and now I really do feel foolish). Kind of odd that a very standard E1M8 action doesn't seem to want to work right in default settings in several ports, but easy to work around, nonetheless.

E1M7 -- Waste Treatment - 100% Kills / 80% Secrets
Double Impact's penultimate map is a return to the sprawling nature of the maps in the first half of the set. While it's not obvious from the start, there's a certain degree of objective-based verisimilitude here, not unlike some of the layout in E1M5--the blue keycard will allow access to the exit, but getting said card involves running all around the expansive facility trying to reach the purge switch, allowing you to decrease the slack level of the toxic waste in the facility's holding tanks so that you can ultimately access the booth where the card sits. It's actually one of the set's most linear maps, although it still has a notable aspect of being to explore a significant distance in the 'wrong' direction at some points.

This is one of DI's best-looking maps, I think. Shadow/light contrast is really striking here (especially in some of the outdoor areas), and texture usage, while still very KDiTD, seems more consistent/planned out than in some of the previous selections. Given that the end of the episode is nearing, there are also some more intrusions of otherworldly flesh-growth and some other Hellish touches, last seen in E1M6. Some of the areas are quite large by the standards of the set, which makes for some nice vistas when you're able to find some high ground.

Fortunately, the action remains a steady montage of murder, perhaps a bit corridor-heavy, but again with a few notable set-piece battles. I really dig the frantic struggle for the yellow key in the creepy makeshift torture gallery--this is one of my favorite parts of the whole mapset, a fine example of using a large number of lower-tier monsters in combination with disorienting/tactically inconvenient terrain to create a multifaceted battle. This is also a good use of the Baron--as the thing with the most HP involved in the fight, you have to be careful not to be cornered by him (either against part of the cage or by becoming sandwiched between him and some other demons), as you won't be able to blast through him in time to avoid being eviscerated. The final wave of Barons and other miscreants near the exit, by contrast, gives you the choice of running away or duking it out. Naturally I chose the latter, but it's nice to have the choice from time to time. Apart from that yellow key area, I think this is actually one of the easier maps in the set, with a few more stimpacks than usual, and several instances of unhidden armor vests. Oh, and more delightful barrel usage!

Another fine outing to set us up for the zany finale.

[purist]

Demon of the Well said:

You sound like you're thinking of a specific finalized recent release you feel we should try, Purist. I'm curious what it might be....I'm kind of drawing a blank on very recent megaWADs the Club hasn't already played (e.g. Interception and Hadephobia). There's BTSX E1, and I'd love to play that one for the Club, but it's far from finalized in its current available version, as well. The only others that keep jumping into my head are DTS-T and that "EvilTech" Ultimate DooM WAD, and somehow I doubt it's either of those you have in mind.

Yes, I'm thinking final as in /idgames release. I know Interception and Hadephobia have had updates since the club played them but they were considered finished at the time and, at least in the case of Hadephobia, the update contained only minor fixes (for demo recording purposes mainly) so it's not like anyone who played it as part of the club will miss much by not playing the final stable update.

My original vote on this basis was 3 Heures d'agonie, which was released this year. My other suggestions was DTWID: Lost levels but I'm not sure that's on /idgames now I check (however, I don't see there being many changes to the maps considering how long ago they were made).

In terms of other megawads released this year the only ones in the archive I have heard of are the Doomword Mega Project and Hell Awakened - I'm not sure how well they were received on release however.

[Jaws In Space]

Just so you all know, the Monochrome Mapping Project is about to be released, about the only thing left to do is finish up the text file.

[Demon of the Well]

purist said:

Yes, I'm thinking final as in /idgames release. I know Interception and Hadephobia have had updates since the club played them but they were considered finished at the time and, at least in the case of Hadephobia, the update contained only minor fixes (for demo recording purposes mainly) so it's not like anyone who played it as part of the club will miss much by not playing the final stable update.

My original vote on this basis was 3 Heures d'agonie, which was released this year. My other suggestions was DTWID: Lost levels but I'm not sure that's on /idgames now I check (however, I don't see there being many changes to the maps considering how long ago they were made).

In terms of other megawads released this year the only ones in the archive I have heard of are the Doomword Mega Project and Hell Awakened - I'm not sure how well they were received on release however.

Ah, yes, 3 Heures d'Agonie, it slipped my mind. I played that when it was posted on DW by one of the French community members. It went by fast, because it's got a lot of really tiny maps in it, some of them it's hard to call anything other than 'map shrapnel.' There are some cool (and a few rather tough) maps in it, though. You're correct about the DTWiD Lost Levels--not on idgames, and still with some organizational work to be done, if memory serves (something about the secret levels or the like).

I played some of DW MegaProject, too, but didn't have the heart to give it a comprehensive, proper playthrough, to be perfectly honest--some of it's really dire (and I don't scare off easily, let me tell you), although you've got some buried treasure by a few accomplished mappers in there. Also played Hell Awakened, in fact. I liked it, and would be willing to play it again for the club. Be forewarned that it's pretty grueling and could be hard to see through to the end, though. It's loooooooooong, and very dark (something I like, but that a lot of folks don't), and extremely nasty at points. It's also not balanced to support a pistol-start on the UV skill level, although supposedly it can be played that way on HMP or lower.

[cannonball]

The dooomworld megawad project would be tough to get through given there are 40 maps and a lot of them are quite long. Would be fun, might disappear on the 1st June though :P

[purist]

Well they were just my thoughts. I'll wait to see what is decided and probably join in with whatever we're all playing. I do want to play the D2TWiD beta so that would be a convenience but as a rule I don't think it's what the Club should be for.

E1M7

Great map. Really long but mostly easy to follow (just got lost once, quite briefly) so is mainly action packed. At the start of the map I was well stocked over the course of the episode so I could choose my tools at my own leisure. By the end I was firing rockets liberally to fend off the large hordes of cacos you get here.

The baron swarm deserves it's own separate mention, that was great fun. Another highlight was another dark midgrate maze.

Great fun altogether. A step up in difficulty without being too hard.

E1M8

I didn't play this properly -- and I'm glad. I had a few forays and got blasted by the cybs before I could hit more than a couple of the switches. Not really feeling like a bit challenge I IDDQD'd to see how that level pans out and even then could not complete it as for some reason the brown wall didn't open (I assume it's supposed to). This was in ZDoom too so I don't know what the issue is.

I'd have been really annoyed to have played earnestly that far only to find you're stuck due to a map error. It's bad enough to warrant an update.

If they do update they should also go ahead a remix the rest of the midis as the E1M8 mix was really cool.

Also, what happened to the Spiderdemon? It teleported away and never came back in my playthrough. A strange and disappointing end.

EDIT: Having read the comments this looks like it was perhaps a case of my ZDoom compatibility flags being incorrect so I take back my comments about an update. I still did not feel inclined to fix the settings and play again though so I stand by my comments that it was a successfully executed level.


Double Impact

To be honest I didn't think this would be my sort of episode from what I heard of it and the first couple of maps did not do a lot to endear me. But credit to Ralphis and ROTTKing for doing a good job of implementing difficulty levels as HMP was about right most of the way through.

Highlights? It's difficult to pick maps due to them quite similarly themed and having repeated motifs (oh OK, E1M7 then). I'd rather pick bits of the style that I really enjoyed such as the use of darkness/flashing areas, high amount of secrets, scant health, the great use of barrels and the multi-angled traps. Things I was not so keen on was the amount of switches, the sometimes non-intuitive map flow, the lack of thematic contrast and E1M8 - for being seemingly broken and too sharp a difficulty curve in HMP.

[dew]

e1m8: the troll map. ammo shortage is intentional, how else would you foolproof the gimmick against patient troglodytes that'd nibble 4 cybs to death with a pea shooter, given enough peas and a safe spot? think of it as pacman, except the cybs don't start running away when you grab plasma. and hey, think of the story - the mechanic isn't destroying hell, he's getting away from an overrun base, so clearing it out is not his goal. you'd be surprised how fast you can take them down anyways... here's my max in 5:35, heh heh. and i just adore that secret. also cool remix by ralph.

i gotta say i'm surprised to see so many people fail it with incorrect comp settings, weird. afaik it is actually possible to break the baron action even in udoom/prboom+ with correct complevel, but the RNG really has to hate you. if the last baron gets squished by the crusher, as in evaporating the body instantly instead of going into the death animation, the boss action won't trigger. it happened to me just once or twice out of many, many replays, so it's improbable that all of you guys are dealing with this bug.

[Walter confetti]

E1M1: As i wrote above this episode starts in a great way, very catchy rockabilly theme that reminded me of River City Ransom themes, lots of cool detailing on all the level, fluid layout and intense gameplay... maybe too intense in some parts. Also, i liked how indirectly this episode quotes the original e1 in room shapes or architecture....

E1M2: same as above lvel, just a little bit longer and harder, i remembered the underground computer section maze from the first time i've played this map... however, i just give up at this point playing without cheats...

[Kristian Ronge]

E1M8 -- Launch Bay
I can see where the authors were going with this: make the player frantically leap from side to side, down the corridors, desperately scrambling for some ammo or health, to find the switches which open up the way to the exit, and freedom. :-) I have one major problem with the execution: it's not very fun. And concept maps like these cannot afford that.

The first thing that struck my mind when I realized I was going to have to play Cyber gauntlet was "oh, cool, a Cyberdreams style map!". By the way, if you haven't played "Cyberdreams" then you need to play it. As soon as possible. NOW. Go go go!

Where was I? Oh, yeah, I thought this would be a map in the same vein, wherein the player needs to rely on reflexes, wits, and a little luck to destroy the rocket spamming bastards... but no. It's just a bunch of corridors filled with some Cyberdemons and an assorted array of minions intended to impede the player's progression. Unlike "Cyberdreams", where you kill the Cybers in the most imaginative and rewarding ways (without almost all of the weapons, actually) here you will most likely be forced to sneak about taking pot shots at several of them with the shotgun and chaingun, like Cannonball said, since you have to find the plasma rifle secret and the extra rockets in the other real secret, as well as ammo hoard by having the Cybers kill off most other monsters for you (while trying to stay relatively healthy -- this one doesn't dish out an overwhelming amount of health or armour powerups), to be able to clean house with the plasma rife/mop up with the rockets. Too much hassle, too little fun.

Also, this map had probably been better off as the secret map, as it's a complete clash with anything else in the WAD. Hey, it's so small I finished it in less time than I did E1M1! ;-) The joke-WAD secrets at the start made me chuckle. --2/5


Overall Impressions
I got used to the style of these maps over the course of playing them all through, and towards the end of it, E1M6, E1M7, I was expecting the traps and monster placement. Consistency is a keyword, yeah, it's very consistent. The authors have taken an old concept and made something unique, genuinely enjoyable, and challenging, and for that they deserve all the praise in the world. Some of the maps were a bit too long and slightly confusing for a grumpy moron with ADD such as myself, but they all looked marvellous (old-schoolish marvellous), with special care for lighting, had some very clever secrets and the consistently best monster placement I've seen for ages. My favourite map was E1M5, if I could change anything about that map, I would change nothing. Not a thing. Least favourite map was E1M8, but even that was bearable. :-)



I'm out for June, guys, be back in July maybe...? :-)

[Magnusblitz]

E1M8: Launch Bay

Well, luckily this map worked for me on my first time through. It's definitely more of a concept map than the parade of long E1-style techbase maps before it, but I kinda like it. Yeah, getting pasted by a rocket isn't fun but the Cyberdemons create a good sense of "oh shit gotta run fast", somewhat akin to the spawn shooters in MAP20 of Hadephobia (it just doesn't work as well because the spawn shooters aren't as one-hit-kill, and obviously won't end unlike the Cyberdemons). I did end up killing the Cyberdemons after making them infight with the Spider Masterminds, although I had to use all of my rockets and plasma to do so and probably would've ran out of ammo had I not been hoarding my plasma from previous levels. The progression is also a bit strange - while the "hit the four switches" was clear right away, the fact that the switches open up a brown wall at the back of the map rather than the door with the 4 pistons in front of it... not so clear. I also liked that the map had a lot of small corridors to run into and out of to avoid the Cyberdemons, but a lot of the switch areas don't have these, making it easy to get trapped (especially the ones with multiple switches, such as the one with the bridge to raise). And after killing the Cybers and Spiders, the rest of the map is a bit of an anticlimax (and almost makes me wonder if we're never supposed to kill them at all). So, definitely some flaws, but I'll give it points for trying something fresh. And the music remix is awesome.

OVERALL THOUGHTS

Well, playing this right after Fava Beans, it's hard not to compare the two, especially since they're both E1 techbase replacements. Double Impact blows Fava Beans out of the water (as it should given the date of manufacture). Except for E1M8's flaws, all of Double Impact's levels are exceptionally strong, with lots of good design both from a gameplay and a visual standpoint. Some of the levels are a bit long (this is especially apparent on E1M3 and E1M7), but this might bother me more than other people. The other downside is that the levels start to blend together, being all cut from the same techbase cloth (and interestingly, both Coffee Break and Fava Beans had the same problem of "all these levels feel the same"). Still, there's lots of good ambush design, secret design, etc. Double Impact was definitely the best of the three we played this month.

[Capellan]

Double Impact Overall Thoughts
DB is a generally well-constructed E1-style wad, and around e1m5 I was really enjoying myself.

Having reached the end though, I'm much less pleased with it, overall. I found the dark/blinking 'mazes' to be way overused (I put 'mazes' in inverted commas since they're actually not very maze-y, generally just being linear if snake-y sections ... which frankly makes them even less interesting). I know the original e1m2 blinky light maze was a seminal Doom experience for most of us, but it frankly gets very tiresome when it happen as often as in this wad.

I think the liteblu trim on the entrance to the e1m3 secret wing is an inexplicably bad texture choice, and given all the playtesters listed for the wad, I'm not sure how it wasn't picked up as an issue.

Additionally, the text file really needs to be updated to specify the compatibility settings required for e1m8. Again, I'm really surprised this wasn't encountered as an issue in playtesting, given how many people ran into it here.

Of course, even if e1m8 had worked OK, I wouldn't have liked it much. If you don't know my opinion of gimmicks in Doom by now, you haven't been paying attention :)

Of the wads we played this month, the only one I'm likely to revisit is Fava Beans. I'm much less enamored of it than SteveD, but it's architectual inventiveness is very impressive in a 1995 map, and the lightweight gameplay makes it easy to blast through.

[Demon of the Well]

E1M8 -- Launch Bay - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Right, now that I know what was going on, got the map to work without a hitch, this time. It's a crazy gimmick/concept map with a lot of personality, from the delightful secret chain with some trolling at its end (should've been a specter, though!) to the ridiculous cyber/spider infight jamboree which eventually breaks out. I'd say aesthetics are its weakest point--texture use is kind of haphazard--but there's nothing worth complaining about specifically. It's not like you'll have much time to be scrutinizing the scenery, anyway.

If you come into this map loaded up with guns 'n ammo from the rest of the set, you could probably kill some or even all of the cyberdemons before going to around to hit the four switches which open up the next area of the map (and release some spiderdemons, which will probably just promptly scuffle with each other in this scenario). It's really a lot more fun to play it as intended, though--try and stay a step ahead of the cybersquad as you haul ass all around the complex, looking for an opening to clear out some switch guardians without being boxed in. The switch areas all have more than one entrance/exit to help in this regard, and the main hub is full of dingy little sheds with several doors (which stay open permanently, mind) to help you dodge the Big Four. Even from a pistol-start you can eventually scrape together enough resources to kill off the cybers (as dew's demo and my own tallies show), but doing so requires finding at least the plasma rifle secret and allowing them to be gradually worn down by having killed just about everything else in the map themselves.

It's certainly true that this setup is vastly out of step with everything else Double Impact has offered over its duration. But since this is the final map, I see no problem in this. Indeed, quite the contrary--I want an E1M8 (or an E2M8 or a map 30 or whathaveyou) to offer me something strange and memorable, something drowning in atmosphere, something that changes the game a bit right at the end to remove any semblance of complacency, and of course, something at least reasonably challenging....and Launch Bay succeeds in most of these regards. If I have any real complaint about this map it's that, like many highly conceptual maps, it's at its most fun the first time you see it. I still botched my deathless playthrough by getting squashed a couple of times here (and once being embarrassingly raped by the crowd of imps that surrounds you after emerging from the teleporter, actually) , but foreknowledge of the layout does remove a lot of the tension and the adrenalin rush of making it to the exit. At least there's an element of the unpredictable in the monster pathing, and really, this aspect of the player experience is hard to avoid in this kind of map, so I wouldn't call it much of a failure on R & R's part. It probably is more fun to try to max as fast as possible, though, since you'll have to play in an extremely risky fashion.


Double Impact is a superb E1 replacement, offering up all of the idealized strengths of that general episodic idiom (interconnected, non-linear, flowing layouts / compelling secrets) while also addressing its main shortcoming (fairly tepid, pressure-free gameplay). It's a hearty helping of bloodletting from start to finish, and I really admire it for that reason. On Alfonzo/Tarnsman's stream, RottKing was saying that in hindsight he wasn't sure about some of the design decisions he and Ralphis made during development--Are the maps too big? Are there too many monsters? Are there too many "asshole traps?" And so on and so forth. My answer to those questions is this: "No, absolutely not!" These are the things that give DI its character, and for me, a lot of its fun-factor. Incidentally, I'd be really interested in seeing you two dudes collaborate on an E2 replacement (or an E3 replacement, or whatever you'd like!) in the future; your avowed Deathmatch sensibilities are in no way preventing you from making killer SP maps.

**********

Edit: As for comparing the three episodes, I'm going to take essentially exactly the opposite tack in comparison to Capellan. I know damn well that I will probably play Double Impact again someday, as I find so much of it so fulfilling on a fundamental gameplay level that I'll inevitably end up throwing it on someday when I feel like some (Ultimate) DooM but am not particularly interested in any recent releases. Fava Beans, by contrast, is something I will probably never play again, outside of becoming engaged in some kind of discussion on it in the community, like we've had here. I would liken it to an elementary highschool course; it's something that one is probably well-served in having experienced at some point, and it does have valuable lessons to teach, but it's so lacking in depth and substance in certain crucial areas of design that it's something it's almost impossible for me to honestly appreciate on a visceral level; all I can really do is show it some charity/good faith given its age, and appreciate its structural prowess on the intellectual level. Coffee Break, for its part, is an enjoyable mapset with a couple of missteps, but I think I would've been a little more enthusiastic about it if my second playthrough (which this was) hadn't followed so soon after the first. As it is, if Mista T. builds on it in a future release, like James Paddock did with various stages of Jenesis, I'll doubtlessly revisit it again happily enough.

[RottKing]

Yeah the baron glitch is something me and Ralph knew about, but after a bunch of testing we concluded it was just a bug with the game and there wasn't anything we could do about it. I think certain comp level settings do help like what's been said in this thread, but for the most part it's just a matter of luck whether it works or not. Doom really doesn't like barons being squished on e1m8 I guess. We probably should have made mention of it in the text file, looking back on it. :/ Other than that, glad you guys have been enjoying the wad, and thanks for all the feedback(both positive and negative)!

[cannonball]

given the glitch happening with the barons a possible fix would be to trap the baron in a circle of barrels in which the barrels get crushed instead of the baron and the explosion kills the baron instead.

[Suitepee]

RottKing said:

Yeah the baron glitch is something me and Ralph knew about, but after a bunch of testing we concluded it was just a bug with the game and there wasn't anything we could do about it. I think certain comp level settings do help like what's been said in this thread, but for the most part it's just a matter of luck whether it works or not. Doom really doesn't like barons being squished on e1m8 I guess. We probably should have made mention of it in the text file, looking back on it. :/ Other than that, glad you guys have been enjoying the wad, and thanks for all the feedback(both positive and negative)!

Since I really enjoyed Double Impact, I have to ask: have you two done any other Doom wads? I'd love to play anything else that you've made if it's anywhere near as good as Double Impact was to play through!

[RottKing]

The only other things me and Ralph have collaborated on is UDMX, but that's deathmatch, so not really I suppose! We have talked sometimes about making another episode, but I'm not sure if I have it in me to put out another ultimate doom episode. I suppose if the maps were small enough, then maybe...

[Ralphis]

RottKing said:

We have talked sometimes about making another episode, but I'm not sure if I have it in me to put out another ultimate doom episode. I suppose if the maps were small enough, then maybe...

Do you really want to disappoint the people Rott?

[Steve D]

Ralphis said:

Do you really want to disappoint the people Rott?

I sure as hell hope not. I'm partway through the secret level now, and I'm thinking, "Gotta beg, beg, beg these guys for at least an E2 replacement," but natch, I want it all!!!! ;D

BTW, no way there's too many monsters! Only 2,948 in the whole episode on UV. That's what makes it fun!