The DWmegawad Club plays: Serenity & Eternity & Infinity

[Walter confetti]

E1M5: This level contains lots of beautiful lighting effects and a pretty atmospheric theme, also the level plays a little better than the other levels in this episode, layout is again too rectangular in some parts but it fells better than other maps. Good map!

[Capellan]

Infinity 6
Well that was no fun.

Adding ‘puzzles’ of the ‘try every switch until one works’ variety to these levels kills what flow they have and just makes the pedestrian gameplay of the series more obvious.

I’ll stick to mentioning the bright points: the blue key room combined damaging floors (albeit ones with water textures) with small spots of safety to actually put pressure on, and the walkway to the exit, while simple enough in execution, looked quite nice with the strong contrast of light and shadow, and also put enemies all around you to force a little bit of target prioritisation.

I also at one point noticed a baron fairly close to the room entry and sergeants further back, making the baron - possibly unintentionally - into a meat shield for the actually far more dangerous hitscanners.

Without the switch gimmickry of the level it probably would have been passable enough by the standards of the wad, but they do it no favours in my book.

[Magnusblitz]

E1M5: Dungeons of Doom
98% kills, 8/8 secrets

So far this continues the "odd maps look good, even maps not" pattern. Thing are a bit oddly blocky in some areas, but aside from that, it looks pretty nice - in addition to the usual lighting effects, there's also some nice pillars and ceiling work. Combat gets a bit of an upgrade as well, with enemies being clustered into hordes instead of spread out one or two to a room (though that does happen as well... the solo imp 'ambush' after returning from the red key is... interesting). Unfortunately, barrel placement has gone back to being subpar (they're often shielded by enemies or tucked away in corners) and I'd really like some rockets to splatter those hitscanner hordes. Ah well.

E1M6: Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue?
96% kills, 21/23 secrets

Okay, I'm actually a fan of the Van Halen song "Jump" here, but... dear lord, it does not work well as a MIDI or a Doom song. More like something I would expect in a WOO level...

This is certainly a bit of an adventure, lots of hitting a switch without knowing what it'll open, and just blindly barrelling ahead... but it actually drew me in a bit, so, that's good. There were a few things I didn't like - being forced to grab a green armor (wiping out the 71% blue I had), and I also unintentionally locked a baron outside the yellow door, which AFAIK can't be opened from the inside. Still some bad mis-tagged secrets and block monster lines, of course.

[scifista42]

E1M6 - "Who’s Afraid Of Red, Yellow And Blue?"

Good music as always. Visuals were subpar, and predominant stringy layout consisting of narrow corridors + square rooms also felt as a step backwards. Progression was too linear. On the other hand, there seemed to be at least an attempt to make the gameplay balanced and add some interesting combat setups (ambushes, lifts, damaging floors with a few safe places). The very first ambush killed me on my first attempt, and drained most of my health on my 2nd attempt. The entire map was pretty tight on health, and that's what made it interesting for me. Doom can turn into a survival horror game when you're constantly below 10% health, and that's what I was. It created many interesting situations with damaging floors and lifts suddenly dropping me among sergeants, but somehow I've survived! Later on, I literally had to use the secret invulnerability to be able to progress further, but that was an interesting moment too. I've enjoyed playing this map. Either way, though, it's overally a weak one, for the reasons I've written earlier.

[ETTiNGRiNDER]

Well, I guess I've got some catching up to do...

ETERNITY.WAD E2M5:

It's very... colorful. Lots of blue wires and blue water, with some red and silver areas as well. Another one of those "not really that bad but definitely dated" looking styles. The blue water does damage, which I don't exactly like, but I think I'll take water that hurts over nukage that doesn't.

The puzzle with the red key area was kind of interesting, there were also some other quirky/interesting constructions.

Towards the end there's an area that reminds a little much of the end of the original E1M1, but blander-looking.

I liked it all right.

[Walter confetti]

E1M6: Cool map, fun to play, nice layout and gameplay, theme is coherent and the midi is nice. I found a mistake in the rising stairs for the yellow skull... It was a cool map.

[Capellan]

Infinity 7
Hub Spokes
Hub Spokes
No better way to bore folks

I’ve not a lot of good to say
When you make me play this way
It isn’t very fun you see
It doesn’t fill my heart with glee

Hub Spokes
Hub Spokes
Run from door to door rotes

Linear as all get out
It makes me want to yell and shout
“This wad’s combat is all the same!”
(By that I mean it’s really lame)

I’d like to keep up with this rhyme
But you’re not really worth the time
So I’ll just say it once again
Your players: make it fun for them!

Hub Spokes
Hub Spokes
No better way to bore folks

[Demon of the Well]

Time to play catchup...

Infinity E1M3 -- Beat It! - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Perhaps the most playable level in the entire trilogy up to this point, I was pleasantly surprised. Speaking of surprises, the particular pop song on feature here works disturbingly well as a Doom midi.....

Thematically, it doesn't stand out nearly as much as some of the other levels. It's an anonymous wood/concrete/marble sort of place, puts me in mind of the look of something from 'Eternity' more than anything, although the increased sophistication of Nathrath's construction techniques compared to what was in that episode is evident in small (but meaningful) ways. My favorite little detail was in the darkened kiosk juncture that acts as a simple hub for the level's two wings--initially, the circular hallway is irregularly illuminated by blinking striplights, but after you've entered the kiosk itself, you'll find that light from its interior spills out into the darkened hallway, presumably a brightness change activated by passing a trigger on the doorway's threshold. Clever ("especially for 199x", blah blah blah). Other than little bits like this, the layout itself isn't actually terribly interesting--apart from the open marble yard with the blue key gazebo, it's pretty much just another series of orthogonal corridors and rooms.

And yet, it's more playable than many of the other levels, like I said. Again, this is something I'd chalk up largely to the relative scarcity of monster-blocking lines. While one still sees them here and there, and they're still generally as unnecessary/harmful to play as ever when one does see them (e.g. the monsters in the back half of the marble yard don't seem to be able to easily cross to the front, and vice versa), here Nathrath makes much more prominent use of monster closets as his primary means for controlling/timing the flow of combat, springing clots of monsters on the player when objectives are reached or when backtracking through an area is necessary. None of this is very complex or threatening, but the fact that monsters can actually leave their closets to attack, and that they seem to be coming in larger numbers now, certainly adds to the impression of action, something these maps have generally been sorely lacking--this was the first time I felt like bringing out the rocket launcher wasn't total overkill, used it to score some hearty group-kills against the closet-legions.

Hopefully the upswing continues.

Infinity E1M4 -- Everybody Frag Now - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
This particular pop song, not so much. IDMUS'd to the one from E1M3, in fact.

A lot of ups and downs in this level. The more pronounced level of violence continues and maybe even escalates a little more, which is good, but some of the trilogy's unenviable traits (excessive monster-blocking lines, pointless little mazes, etc.) also have a stronger showing here, and the whole thing seems generally less polished both aesthetically and conceptually than the rest of the episode so far. This sense of scrappiness and relative incohesiveness is probably a result of the level being very heavy on discrete concepts--we have the waist-high metal 'hedge maze', the strange silver ziggurat pool where the blue key is found, the BFG 'prison', and the bafflingly ill-advised red key gate-maze. Some of these ideas are vaguely interesting to behold if nothing else--the silver ziggurat, for instance, is a whimsical construction that can be conveniently used for immobilizing the meatier monsters roaming that room--but some also drag the proceedings down, ala the aforementioned red key maze, which plays like a pale, patronizing rehash of the infamous door-maze from the trilogy's E2M2. I did approve of the exit room, as it presented something that's been quite a rarity in these episodes: a room that is both large enough and well-staffed enough to make charging in with guns blazing seem like a relevant endeavor. It's not without fault--the rear monster closets are held back by yet more monster-blocking lines, for instance--but to some degree I reckon it's the 'thought that counts', especially when dealing with an old, old chestnut like this.

Also, a general observation true not only of this level but of most of the others in Infinity as well: is it just me, or is the presentation of the signature "Letters" getting less and less dramatic (and interesting)?

[scifista42]

E1M7 - "Blaze Of Glory"

This map consisted of a central hub and 4 sections. The central hub was rather well done, in its simplicity - the player's initial spot was actually a safe place, but as soon as I've moved, I've exposed myself to some baddies in cages, although they weren't difficult to kill. The map's 1st section sucked, it showed oldschool style in all of its blandness and uninspired-ness. The 2nd section, the one behind the red door that didn't need red key (!), was okay - IWAD-inspired, yet still interesting idea of a 2-floor combat against a few hitscanners. The 3rd section was good, I liked the idea of the raised room with 2 exits, one of them to get the key and one to escape the area - in fact, these were like one-way paths, executed through lifts and drops. The 4th map didn't have that much in it to be any impressive, but it was okay - well, it had a "T" and an exit.

All in all, the level wasn't great, but some parts were interesting at least. Combat was easy, but I've actually died on my first go. No need to talk about other aspects, they're the same as before, as it seems to me.

[Demon of the Well]

E1M5 -- Dungeons of Doom - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Hmm, the level of violence is definitely more pronounced at this point. A short map, and relatively light on concepts-for-the-sake-of-it stuff (completely optional 'torture room' notwithstanding), this one appears to be all about action, which is something that can't be said for....well....pretty much any other map in the trilogy up to this point, really. The combination of a relatively modest amount of real estate with a significantly augmented monster-density (still almost entirely E1 fodder, which is pretty much what you have to do when making a map for the original game, granted) leaves this feeling almost as bloody as something like a dodgy old King REoL map or something of that nature (and it's much more appealing to the eye than any of Fiffy's early stuff, to boot), which certainly represents a refreshing change of pace. It's not just the increased bodycount that makes the difference, though, the staging of the fights themselves is also noticeably better than it has heretofore been--teleporting into the soulsphere yard potentially represents what is by far the most harrying crossfire of the trilogy up to this point (although if you're a conservative player you can blunt it by sniping away at many of the monsters out there from a lookout point earlier in the map, something I myself neglected to do), and the enemy-staged killzone in the antechamber to the red key dungeon feels like the first boobytrap in what feels like forever that doesn't shoot itself in the foot--not having monster-blocking lines shat everywhere absolutely does wonders for this kind of thing. Whodathunk?

The pistol-start here leaves me wondering about something, incidentally. Played this way, essentially the only weapons you have to do all of the killing with are the handgun and shotgun; although a plasma gun is present, it's available at the very end, when there's only 3-4 monsters left to kill, most of them lone imps that try to backstab you from their little closets. This limited arsenal doesn't really lend the level any aspect of hardship, though--ammo is plentiful, there's more than enough to get the job done with buckshot alone. But, I have to ask myself, does this convenient balance really seem premeditated? Infinity is often credited with being much more reasonably balanced for pistol-start than Serenity or especially Eternity, but I wonder if this was really a conscious design decision that Nathrath made (as it has often been interpreted to be), or more of an accident....on UV skill, all of the levels in Infinity present ample ammo to pistol-starters, but it occurs to me that this is largely a result of the player getting a lot of extra ammo (particularly shells) off of zombie corpses--in terms of placed weapon and ammo pickups, well, they seem just about as spartan as that in the Eternity, and more skewed towards a continuous-play placement philosophy (e.g. the plasma gun at the end of this map). Did Nathrath create more 'conventional' pistol-start gameplay in response to feedback about the previous episode, or did this result organically/accidentally from his apparent determination to make this last episode the bloodiest of the three? Food for thought.

[Steve D]

Capellan said:

Infinity 7
[i]Hub Spokes
Hub Spokes
No better way to bore folks

Gazes at some of his own maps with a sense of deep apprehension followed by the telltale dampness of flop-sweat. ;D

[Capellan]

Demon of the Well said:
Did Nathrath create more 'conventional' pistol-start gameplay in response to feedback about the previous episode, or did this result organically/accidentally from his apparent determination to make this last episode the bloodiest of the three?

My money is on accident.

SteveD said:
Gazes at some of his own maps with a sense of deep apprehension followed by the telltale dampness of flop-sweat. ;D

While I think hub spokes tend to make for poor map structure, there are hub spoke maps that end up being good to play because other aspects of the map are strong.

Not that I would ever admit that about one of your maps, of coourse ;)

[Demon of the Well]

^Yeah, my money's on "accident", too. Most would probably call it a happy accident, I imagine, but IMO the weird pistol-starts in Eternity were some of the more interesting scenarios we've seen this month, and I kind of miss them in this episode...

Infinity E1M6 --Who's Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue? - 99% Kills / 95% Secrets
Yeah, IDMUS'd to E1M3's track again, after about, oh, say....30 seconds? Don't judge me!

This did not leave much of an impression on me, perhaps because the action ends up downgraded again relative to the last few maps (although it's still handled better than it generally was in the first two episodes, I suppose). Other than the very first ambush, which is actually pretty painful when all you have at your disposal is a popgun, harsh language, and maybe some karma, it doesn't really assert itself anywhere near as decisively. Partially this is a result of a few untimely monster-blocking lines that nullify some of the monster closet setups that worked well for maps like E1M3 and E1M5, but I don't think the explanation is as simple as that....the actual number of opponents isn't numerically reduced or anything (in fact, it seems this map has the highest monstercount in the episode, and thus probably in the whole trilogy), but they seem less numerous because they inhabit a number of very large, very simple rooms, where the main threat isn't so much a risk of encroachment as it is simple chip-damage from distant hitscanners when RNG is unfavorable.

The other main troublespots unfortunately seem to be of the metagamey variety, e.g. getting infinitely-talled into taking damage (or even being physically prevented from progressing at all) by restless zombie sergeants in the early parts of the dropping-lifts sequence en route to the blue key, or indeed, being shot in the ankles by zombies milling around at the bottom of caged walkway before the exit, some of which the player is entirely unable to reach/target. Other than the larger size of rooms, the level's other running theme seems to be combat that takes place in and around damage-floor, ala the red key and blue key rooms--most of these you can neutralize if you cautiously locate yourself a radsuit beforehand, but the harmful water in the blue key are is a little more relevant because there's no radsuit to mitigate it, requiring you to either subdue most of the opposition in the limited window of grace afforded by the dubiously "secret" V-sphere, or to stick to the limited amount of safe ground available in the room, perhaps a legitimately big ask of the combat skills of the average player in the 90s.

Not without ideas, but maybe a little too big/long for its own good, maybe?

[dobu gabu maru]

Hub spokes are fine every now and then.

E1M5: Really liked this map—there was plenty of health and ammo to go around, but what made it here was the lighting and texture use. It’s probably my favorite in the set just for that (the red key room is really pleasing) and the fights were half-decent.

E1M6: Pretty good ballbustery map here. There’s a lot of action (and a LOT of sergeants) with a couple questionable design choices (like the elevators into point-blank sergeant scuffles), but it was pretty fun overall.

E1M7: This is an alright penultimate map, having some good ideas in here bogged down with some weird design choices. The room past the red key door (which… doesn’t need a red key) has a decent trap and the chokepoint design of the exit room with an evil barrel in the corner that the baron can hit is deceptively clever, but otherwise there’s nothing to write home about.

[Never_Again]

walter confalonieri said:

E1M4:... also the midi rendition of that Snap song mocked in the title of the map

C+C Music Factory, not Snap. If you are going to keep dropping musical references get them right, at least.

[Demon of the Well]

Infinity E1M7 -- Blaze of Glory - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
What stood out to me the most here was not the hubspoke layout, but rather that it seemed to contain a number of homages to parts of Knee Deep in the Dead:

* Room behind the initial unlocked door in the hubspoke = Central server bank from E1M6, 'Central Processing.'
* Room behind the yellow door in the hubspoke = Elevated server platform from E1M7, 'Computer Station.'
* Exit room = Start of E1M5, 'Phobos Lab?' (Granted, that one's maybe a bit of a stretch.)

I must say, IWAD homagery is about the last thing I'd have expected from one of these mapsets, whose whole schtick has generally been in presenting the player with quirky/innovative (at the time) room concepts, which I suppose are not entirely absent here (e.g. the weird 'wardrobe room' where the first key is found). IWAD references (and to a lesser extent, references to famous PWADs) are generally not something liable to warm the cackles of my cold, dead Doomer's heart, but it certainly does set the level apart from all of its predecessors, I suppose. In fairness, I kind of liked what Nathrath did with the ambush in the Computer Stationesque area behind the yellow door, easily one of his larger trap setups in the whole of the trilogy.

Other than this notable design aspect, though, again I don't feel that this level really acquits itself as well as those from the middle stretch of the episode. I know I'm really beating a dead horse at this point, but monster-blocking lines once again spoil a lot of the encounters, and even those without them obviously in evidence tend to feature a theme of constrained monster movement, e.g. the bank of caged monsters in the spoke behind the blue door, or the simple duel across the small sludge stream in the exit room. About the best thing I can say for it is that it doesn't actually run very long, and so the hubspoke layout doesn't really end up being a particularly problematic progression issue per se.

Also, no IDMUSing this time, at least. Also also, it's definitely not just me, the 'T' here is totally phoned-in. One wonders if Nathrath considered this particular gimmick a chore by this point...

[Walter confetti]

Never_Again said:

C+C Music Factory, not Snap. If you are going to keep dropping musical references get them right, at least.

Oh, really? I always thinking that song was made from Snap until now. I'm not kidding you.

E1M7: Another nice map, similar to E1M3, lots of nice details and a nice circular layout, (i used this layout trickery also in one of my older maps) gameplay is good and fluid, and.. nothing, is a good map. Nothing more or less to wrote about it.

To the next map!

[Capellan]

Infinity 8
If ever there is a level that summed up Infinity’s problems, it is this one. There are horrendous block monster line issues, and the complete absence of threat from anything except sergeants is made transparently obvious in pretty much every battle.

[dobu gabu maru]

E1M8: Ahahah the blockmonster lines here, good lord. This is a pretty simple boss map, requiring you to hit switches rather than barons, and its over relatively quickly. Unfortunately, the decision to put sergeants behind the stained glass was the dumbest thing ever, and really dragged down my feelings on the map.

Overall: The Serenity trilogy is… interesting. I feel that it’s always tough judging older maps, especially since we (as a group) tend to jump around so frequently that one moment we’re beta testing, the next we’re back in the glory days of the 2000s, and then we’re observing Doom’s infancy in '94/95. I was really impressed with visual design of the Infinity maps, but overall the wads felt like design concepts that were barely playtested. Granted, this was because it was meant to be played continuously, but even then that doesn’t excuse the lack of health & amount of unavoidable damaging sectors you have to trudge through. I was thankful it wasn’t another blatant Doom 1 clone though. Favorite map was E1M5, with E3M7 being the most amateur.

------

With the holidays soon closing out, what should we ring in the new year with? I know a couple of people are going to be voting for Resurgence, so I'll throw my vote in for that too.

[mouldy]

E1M5 - "Dungeons Of Doom"

Nice effort in using lighting in this map, and on the whole it looks good enough and plays ok, barring the usual shooting gallery issues. Pretty easy, maybe pistol start would make things harder, but it would probably also make things more of a chore with the limited weaponry. I liked the ornamental pinky squashers.

E1M6 - "Who’s Afraid Of Red, Yellow And Blue?"

Interesting trappy puzzly map, not a lot of health - i was playing a bit rambo reckless so ended up dying at one point. Again the visuals do a pretty decent job, though any atmosphere the map might have had is instantly vapourised by the cheesy music.

E1M7 - "Blaze Of Glory"

Good old fashioned hub. I quite liked this one as well, despite the reluctant monsters. Visuals were ok again and the traps were sometimes interesting, especially the blue key one. I'd say the last 3 maps have shown an increase in design competence, even if the author still seems to be learning how monsters work, in particular the ones that don't shoot and need to actually get to you to cause any damage. Lets see what the finale has to offer..

E3M8 - "StarGate Into Infinity"

These monsters have a real OCD problem with stepping across shadows. Its gets pretty ridiculous in this map, to the point where they are basically used as walls of meat. Also there is the issue of invisible hitscanners behind stained glass windows, very naughty. Otherwise it was ok, and I can't help wondering how all of these maps could have been improved by allowing the enemies to wander freely. Or maybe it would have messed them all up. I think its clear that the map maker was still getting the hang of how the monsters work, and felt like they had to block them off everywhere to keep them under some kind of control. At times it seemed quite arbitrary, as if maybe there was an artistic purpose behind it, or maybe it was accidental. Who knows.

That is the end of that I guess. I am curious as to whether the author improved their mapping skills since making these episodes, though not quite curious enough to seek out any of their subsequent creations. Its been an interesting little history lesson though.

[Magnusblitz]

E1M7: Blaze of Glory
100% kills, 8/8 secrets

Ah, a hub-spoke map. That has a red door that doesn't actually require a red key, so feel free to skip the first section of the map. In addition to the E1M7 elevated computer section that Demon noticed, I'd say that the area that leads to the red key reminds me of E3M3 (with the overlapping squares creating steps). The yellow key area rips off the WAD itself, as the elevator there is very similar to the one in Infinity E1M3.

Not much else to say - it looks fine, plays okay, with most of the threat coming from lack of health/ammo and slowly being whittled down by hitscanners over the course of the level.

E1M8: StarGate Into Infinity

The block monster lines are indeed reeeeeaally bad here - when they create narrow triangles that the monsters can't move out of because they've got other monsters stuck behind them, there's a big problem. Not a fan of the hitscanners hidden behind the stained glass windows, either. Still using STONE2 as the main texture for the finale, which seems oddly boring to me (I can't help but think of it as a 'default' style texture). Gameplay isn't much either, just some monsters in rooms, with there only being three barons across two rooms - not a big deal when we've already had barons scattered across E1.

[scifista42]

E1M8 - "StarGate Into Infinity"

Yet another bad final map. To name a few annoyances: Contraproductive monster-blocking lines, tedious shotgun-only gameplay from pistol start, pointless damaging water, square-based architecture, monochromatic texturing (grey bricks), anticlimatic exit (it's also a bland square room), random monster placement, switches that can be activated prematurely... It's too much.

So, it's finally over. Infinity didn't show that big improvement as I've expected. These wads might be interesting for their historical value and as a proof of pioneering creativity of the authors back in 1994, I completely admit this. They have their appeal and their place in the archive, and it was (uh...) an experience to play them. Still, next time I want to play something at least a bit more competently made and better playable. :)

[Walter confetti]

E1M8: A very open and large boss map, also is pretty straightforward to play, the layout is simple and nice (no, unluckily -or not- this map don't have the puzzle nature of the other episodes boss maps), maybe too simplistic but, hey, that's the way they do it, money for nothing and chicks for free.

Ah! I get my musical reference almost right, now, even if out context! Time to party like there's no tomorrow!

But before party let's talk about the music, i think the authors recycled the Blade Runner theme from Serenity E3M8, the circle is closing? I don't know...

Gameplay follows the simple approach of layout style, lots of easy\medium monsters are sets in the place, and barons hides into a huge arena is relatively easy expect for the toxic water a la "Pandemonium" in the first part of the map, and the invisible snipers in the sky at the eagle glass window, also the last it was the "wtf?" moment of the map...

Overall, this was a nice episode and megawad for 1994 standards, it could be some hidden gem unluckily ruined for some bad maps and nowadays it could be looking rather annoying, but personally i liked it!

FINAL VOTE: 3 stars out of 5 for all episode.

[Demon of the Well]

I vote for Resurgence next month, too. ;)

Infinity E1M8 -- StarGate to Infinity - 100% Kills / 100% Secrets
Infinity has generally been more consistent (in terms of playability, I mean) than either Serenity or Eternity, certainly, but its final map is weaker than its counterparts in either of those. Aesthetically, it shoots for (and succeeds in attaining to at least some degree) a sense of reminiscence and closure by once again adopting a theme based on cold grey masonry and the signature falcon/cathedral stained glass, and a return to the Blade Runner track (previously heard in E2M7 if memory serves) sets a less lighthearted tone, again in keeping with previous episode climaxes. While it's probably more pleasing to the eye on a basic level than E2M8 was (not that it's hard to trump a series of boxes with letter reliefs on the floor, of course), nothing here is anywhere near as cool as the grand hallway reveal from E3M8, and just like both E3M8 and E2M8, it ends on a bit of a bum note with a bland yard at its finale (albeit with a somewhat ostentatious teleporter exit).

Not very interesting to play, either. The monster-blocking lines, Holger. The monster-blocking lines. I've already said enough about them, and so has everyone else, so I won't go into depth on that matter yet again. Treating E1 as E3 but still using the E1M8 bossmonster convention is also something of a self-defeating design decision; the Barons here are just bumps in the road that pass by almost entirely unnoticed because they have appeared with some regularity in earlier maps in the episode; even though the spiderdemon and cyberdemon from E3 and E2 were not exactly nailbiting encounters (especially not poor lame Cybie), there's still some sense of disappointment when all that the final map of the trilogy offers me is a couple of Barons and some other goobers in a huge flat hall, and then a lineblocked Baron at the end.

Come to mention it, for a minute there I was afraid that Nathrath was going to use the map special and insist that those two caged Barons in the silver room early on be killed in order to open the exit, but this was fortunately not the case. I, uh, still killed them anyway, though......mainly because I was curious to see if the pistol-start ammo balance would allow it (which it certainly does, although trying to kill them when you first see them is probably not wise). On that point, whereas E2M8 was really rather tacky conceptually and less aesthetically polished than this map is, it was at least more legitimately interesting to play than this one is considering the ammo issues involved in its pistol-start. Likewise, it lacks the presentational flair of Serenity's E3M8, and it doesn't really have anywhere near as distinct a play concept as either of these two (e.g. the hard/easy path split in E3M8, the letter-sequence and secret cyb-nerfing deal in E2M8)....almost feels like a filler map, and there is no worse place to have a filler map than at the end of an episode, IMO. About the best thing I can say for it is that it may be one of the trilogy's most dangerous maps, relatively speaking--health is really tight, and sometimes the obscured shotgunners that fire in through the stained glass windows are real dicks (incidentally, there's apparently a demon or something out there with them, WTF?).

********

On the whole, Infinity is obviously a little more polished and sometimes plays a bit better than most of what's in Serenity and Eternity, but the actual degree of qualitative difference between any two parts of the trilogy really isn't very large--I'd say Eternity is actually the most interesting visually/thematically (even if Infinity is more polished in terms of concourse and technical sophistication), and it's Serenity that arguably makes the strongest showing in regards to the angle that the whole trilogy hangs its hat on, that being the display of concepts-for-the-sake-of-it. None of the three are something I'd personally consider to be particularly strong or interesting WADs, the primary downfalls they all share being absolutely piss-poor action and flaccid exploration elements (including by the standards of the time, I mean), though it's not hard to understand why they are still remembered 20 years down the road--for all of the various gameplay faults, the Serenity trilogy offers us a smorgasboard of coherent concepts and complete ideas strung together in a more or less legible way, which is something that simply can't be said of the vast majority of contemporary PWADs, which tended to be broken/unfinished disaster zones, variously chaotic and empty.

While being in the top 10% of contemporary WADs certainly deserves some measure of respect, as I opined when the Club played Fava Beans, no amount of appeal to the generally low standards of the age or to the arcane/unwieldy nature of editing tools available at the time can truly excuse unsatisfying gameplay, and these levels have unfortunately suffered from that in spades--ironically, I often felt that where the mapset is at its most interesting is at those points where the authors' assumptions about end-user playstyle and preference clash most directly with common practices in 2014, and that really says something....if, when and where your maps are fun, it's mainly by accident (e.g. the effectively unsupported pistol-starts to some maps in Eternity), can one really conclude that the overall package is very strong? I think not, but your mileage may vary, I suppose. Also ironically, most of the stuff that Serenity does that you aren't 'supposed to do' in 2014--forced traversal of damage floors, secrets mandatory for progression, things like that--doesn't negatively impact my impression of the trilogy (quite the contrary in some cases), but man, those monster-blocking lines....I've seen enough of those this month to last me through all of 2015, I reckon.

[kmxexii]

if holger and Bjorn had finished their doom 2 project it would have kicked ass. holgers scraps got shopped around to various projects, including STRAIN, but the one that metabolist put on the archives shows a lot of development as an author. bjorns stuff is cool and I wish he had made maps for the trilogy, he has a great imagination.

[TMD]

There is a Single player 32in24 being worked on. :0

Just putting it out there.

[Steve D]

On the eve of oral surgery which is guaranteed to give me at least one more week of sheer misery, but which may ultimately leave me healthy enough to actually play Doom again, I concur with others in casting my vote for Resurgence. There's no question that I'm gonna get my ass kicked and kicked hard in that one, but being a "designated victim" is what I'm here for, so let's go! ;D

[Salt-Man Z]

Just a quick bump because I finally blew through the rest of Infinity tonight. I was worried that my enthusiasm for this WAD(s) was rooted solely in nostalgia, and y'know, that's probably the case, but I must confess I still loved the last 5-6 maps of Infinity. And no one can tell me that that "Jump" MIDI isn't the best run-and-gun DOOM music ever.

[Demon of the Well]

It isn't, though. You see, I know for a fact that somewhere out there, there's a midi/MUS rendition of that alien ragtime song from the cantina scene in Star Wars. Now THAT's the soundtrack to some white-hot action, right there.

[Salt-Man Z]

Mind=BLOWN. :O