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dobu gabu maru

The DWmegawad Club plays: 50 Shades of Graytall & Erkattäññe

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MAP11: Erkattanne

The setting for this one is a vast and almost circular reservoir of slime, around and above sit various catwalks and complexes through which the player has to travel, tracing a route in and out of the slime at multiple points as you retrieve keys and locate the appropriate doors. There's no point at which the map obfuscates your objective, but getting to it may involve some backtracking; rarely is a direct route available, and this last level has plenty of tricks in its hand to keep you on your toes. After facing some of its more exhausting encounter I just rushed past the final couple of arch-viles guardians to the exit and called it a day. This is a strong note to end the WAD on, with a very distinctive environment that breaks just enough from the now-familiar techniques and style of earlier level to provide fresh challenges without losing track of what makes Erkatanne what it is.

I'll be using the last couple of days of the month to go back and finish up 50 Shades.

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MAP11 Erkattanne

Title map is a city map! order of the day involves getting rid of ground floor enemies plus sniping hitscanners. I find it funny when I shoot one and they fly out of the window onto the ground. after that, it's building time, starting in the center and going for the spiderdemon and spectres to the west. Easier than it looks, since a BFG right before makes for bait. cleaning the perimeters of the map Living-End style has its moments of fun, but with some minor backtracking too to make it feel a bit meh. Oh well, I at least didn't get too mad at this map and it's alright for a finale.

Overall, the maps in the set were very varied, some fun, some weren't, cool set IG.

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MAP11: Love the tense opening where the player has to ride up the lift in silence. Erkatanne’s closer isn’t quite as good as the last few maps, but it’s a decent one to end the set on. It’s a cityscape, meaning there’s a ton of angles of attack, and with only one path through the map it can get both confusing and irritating; I felt everything beyond the blue key was mostly pointless and needless to play. None of the encounters here really stand out more than any of the previous ones before… if anything, it’s by this point where the player is fully aware of Monti’s motives and tricks, so it feels similar to the rest of the set. Again, not bad—just hohum.

Overall, Erkatanne is a lot of fun and I totally commend kmxexii for vouching for it in last year’s cacowards. Arbitrary accolades aren’t just there to say which [things] are the best of [thing category] for that year—they also provide substantial visibility for those that win or are nominated. I wasn’t going to play Erkatanne based on Monti’s Favillesco (that set basically made me swear off Doom E1 maps for good), but I’m glad it got some time in the spotlight and pushed me to experience it for myself. It’s a really solid, freeform set that was a wonder for me to explore. Sure there are some nuisances, like the reliance on hitscanners from afar and unapologetic AV placement (and the soundtrack—while novel!—doesn’t flow with Doom constant stream of abstract action for the most part) but it presented some tricky situations I had to manually outwit, which was totally unexpected going in. I also enjoy health/ammo starvation maps so it was fun to play through something that looks basic, but is extra deadly. Good work all around!

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MAP11: Erkattanne
97% kills, 4/7 secrets

So, it all comes down to this, the eponymous level named after the whole WAD. Whatever that name is supposed to mean, I don't know... I certainly don't have any better idea after finishing it.

Right away we start off by needing to wait for a horrendously long lift. Dobu likes it for being "tense", I personally just found it a boring waste of time... the boring room (and boring room afterwards) as well as music don't create any tension for me. Anyways, outside and ... yeah, more chaingunner and far-off revenant snipers, hooray. After clearing out the scads of arachnatrons outside and gathering the weapons, its onto a linear path going between buildings in a sort of Monti-ian Downtown style. Not much to say... there's nothing really different from the rest of the maps, still some bullshit blind teleports or badly designed fights (the Mastermind/spectre fight, especially if you take the secret out before killing off all the spectres and need to drop back down again). I will say that I liked the yellow key 'trap' with the cadre of revenants just ambling around the corner.

Overall Thoughts:

Reading the other reviews, it seems like I'll probably be the most negative one, but here goes anyways. First off, I'll say that I echo Demon of the Well's comments regarding the non-existent texture alignment: I don't think it helps 'echo' the IWAD maps or 1994-era PWADs, which usually made the attempt even if they weren't always successful. Instead, it coats everything with a layer of amateurishness, done on purpose, almost as if a moviemaker purposely recorded a blockbuster with his old VHS camcorder.

Even aside from the visual presentation (which is purposeful), things are a mixed bad. It pretty much goes without saying that Monti has a very interesting layout style, and I think there's a lot of good ideas that can be learned from it. However, there's some aspects that I don't think work as well, such as the huge height drops (especially those super-long lifts). Monster placement is also pretty poor, with lots of reliance on annoying snipers, bullshit blind teleporter traps, or bad AV usage. One could also say the same about secrets being a mixed bag - some of them are pretty cleverly hidden, but dear lord is there a lot of reliance on tripwires and shootable switches.

In the end, while it's certainly an interesting set of maps I can't say it's one that I actually enjoyed playing most of the time. Playing it felt a lot like reading some dusty old classic for literature class, where if you take the time to study it you can find some effective techniques, but the overall product is slapdash/boring in places that just reading it is a chore.

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Map 09 -- Abudhnas - 104% Kills / 100% Secrets
Nostalgia bomb! For the duration of the mapset, Monti has been trying to capture the essence of PWADs from a much older time. Frankly, while I have enjoyed playing his mapset, I don't think he's been particularly successful in that venture--one might say his concept is too focused and his idiosyncrasies too consistent and specific to really get the job done on that front--but I have to admit he got me here, for a few minutes there I was again myself of many years ago, tooling around in slackjawed wonderment at the strange place my Doomguy had stumbled upon. For this I must largely credit the MASSIVE height differences and the many loooooong drops during progression they betoken, which instantly reminded me of a WAD I was very fond of in my youth: Daniel Hornbaker's Apocalypse Project, an atmospherically-inclined '94 episode where massive height drops appear on more than one occasion, most notably in the singular stygian wonderland presented in E1M9/map 09, where the initial drop could easily crash the game if you took it at the wrong angle (something visplane-related, IIRC, and a potential issue Monti mentions for "Abudhnas" in his textfile).

Massively overscaled geometry in idtech1 has always held an ineffable fascination for me, I suppose; to my younger self, there was something intoxicatingly dwarfing and morose about the DooM universe in general--you wouldn't believe (and I would be embarrassed to recount) the impact that the original game's decisively downbeat ending had on me when I first saw it--and gigantic peaks, titanic chasms, and vast expanses that one would occasionally encounter in PWADs of the time always seemed particularly apt for capturing that fleeting sense of a great mystery (and thus, a great adventure) far beyond the self, where no matter how many battles Doomguy fights, he is always merely scratching the surface of what's to come. Thinking on it now, it occurs to me that in a bass-ackwards sort of way it was probably relevant that so many of the projects that the internet and shovelware comps were flush with in that day were broken or unfinished or both (my first experience with the aforementioned Hornbaker WAD, for example, was not its proper/official version but rather an unauthorized, dysfunctional Doom II conversion of it where much of the intended progression was broken during the process, e.g. E1M8 becoming map 08 and thus losing its special tags), which often had the side effect of deepening the mystery where none was even intended in the first place, but nevertheless certain exaggerated mapping traits of the time will almost inevitably bring a smile to my face, and I suppose ridiculously overpronounced spatial differentials are chief among them.

From a more purely practical point of view, huge drops and spans of course present a lot of problems for the flow of actual moment-to-moment gameplay, and particularly where monster encounters are concerned, which Monti tacitly acknowledges (as if he had a real choice!) with the way play is set up here. The long drops and vast spaces are almost wholly a cinematic element; even exploration is fairly subdued (you end up on a pretty straight course from one objective to the next after you reach the first tall chrome lift with skeletal overwatchers)--in a sense, all of the redundant falling and refalling and constant long lift rides that would likely feature in a more non-linear layout with these same physical traits would probably be a recipe for exasperation before long--though I like that he played with long leaps and unexpected teleporter lines (some baited by the enticing prospect of said leaps!) to vary the pace of the route a bit. A lot of the combat is purely incidental in these surroundings, featuring small numbers of larger monsters which fall quickly to your fairly steady rocket supply, with the few more specifically designed encounters naturally found in more modestly-scaled junction points in the layout, ala the first arch-vile's unexpected appearance outside the red door at the top of that first long lift (still not quite sure where he actually came from, in fact).

There is of course some good action-oriented stuff you can do with huge open spaces in Doom, but stylistically most of it is beyond the ken of the mid-90s vintage Monti is aiming for here, so all we get are occasional distant nuisances, e.g. the lone mancubus behind the false wall in the central chamber, or the arch-vile on the walkway beyond the red door, who is difficult to get away from precisely because the closed path is so long. Some made mention of the 'unfair' cage-vile/demons room near the end, which is intractable played straight; the more I see of Monti's strangely cruel jabs like this, the clearer it becomes that they're done specifically to incentivize secret-hunting and learning or intuiting level flow, which is an interesting way of going about things (although not one realistically likely to be wildly popular, of course). For example, you're pretty much expected to find/use the V-sphere secret (and ideally the BFG as well) for this encounter, which sees it wrapped up quite neatly, but without it that little bit is probably more than a bit of an awkward mess to sort out.

I won't bother talking about aesthetics too much here, they were a serviceable backdrop for what I experienced, nothing less, certainly nothing more. Given the nature of the environment, the whole alignment/misalignment thing sort of reaches escape velocity and ceases to matter much here, I think. Texture scheme, such as it was, was reasonable enough, ditto lighting scheme. The lowering water near the end was a treat, though, added a bit more life to the presentation (and the totally casual placement of the spiderdemon in the area made me chuckle as well). My greatest regret here is that, because this is a 'vanilla' project, instead of being able to gawp at the environment during freefall we have to take all of those long drops inside of enclosed 'chutes' in order to preclude crashes and other problems; the vestments of nostalgia have their price, I suppose.

EDIT: Oh, and for the record, I did once again use IDMUS here, but this time it was to map 07's track, which at least was one of Nick's own selections. That's got to count for something, right?

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I thought the music was decent, not just compared to some of the earlier atrocities, but in general. Would have been better if the dance beat didn't start up.

Map09: "Abudhnas"

While I was falling through one of those big long holes, I turned around, and I swear the wall reversed direction, like in the wagon-wheel effect. Maybe I was just hallucinating, because maybe I'm insane, but I'd bet all the pennies in my pickle jar that it happened. Falling made me dizzy. I usually looked away from my monitor, and then glanced at my watch. Just kidding I play Doom in the nude: I don't wear a watch.

Kidding about that too. I actually do wear a watch -- a big 18th-century style pocket watch around my neck.

After the confusing non-linearity of past maps, I'm glad this one was pretty straightforward. I still took 20 minutes to reach the exit, however, with eight or so of those spent riding lifts and another 15 just falling, falling, falling. The BFG placement made me chuckle -- Monti just places it right out there, and it's easy to miss unless you're the type to hunt down every armor bonus, because ITEMS. I found it though, and thus didn't have much trouble with the two-vile setup. It struck me that there isn't much special in the map besides the big vertical drops and the usual Monti-isms. But I enjoyed it!

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Map 10 -- High Voltage - 101% Kills / 66% Secrets
Le sigh. IDMUS 23.

Like the similarly-themed "Dead Signal" before it, this was another level that seemed to come and go very quickly, leaving my recollection of it somewhat of a blur, although in this case I think it's because the level has a more of a scrappy, fast-moving action focus to its gameplay than what has characterized most of the previous maps, or at very least more natural potential for such, at any rate. From the starting room, there's a fork in the path; the righthand road leads to a bunch of corpulent meatsacks you're not really well-equipped for dealing with at that point (and, dishearteningly, a dead end shortly thereafter should you insist on stubborning your way past them), whereas the lefthand lane leads to a series of open chambers crawling with enemies and dotted with crucial weapons and ammo. It's not so much that monster density here is higher than it has tended to be thus far in Erkattäññe (though it is to some degree), as that it's easier than before to find yourself pressured into their midst before you're quite ready, in contrast to the more careful/deliberate pace that Monti's frequent focus on hitscan/attrition-based play tends to invite. This is achieved largely through the return of the backstab-fishing monster-phasing ploy seen earlier in "Dead Signal", where powerful enemies approaching from what can initially seem to be a comfortable distance (e.g. the eastern bunker yard) can suddenly blink right into your face, or worse, a few steps behind you, forcing you out into crossfire, which can see you running from area to area trying to find enough munitions and eventually a decent place to wheel and fight back from, often only rousing more enemies in the process--rather "Refueling Base" in flavor, as someone else mentioned. Given the looseness of the setup and the deceptively 'stringy' nature of the layout things may not always go smoothly in this regard--i.e. sometimes you get the scenario I described above, but other times you might just get a passageway clogged with high-HP meat that you have to tiresomely slowball through to resume progress.

Things do eventually settle back down into a more self-consciously oldschool pace--the map closes on an undemanding 'throne'-style cyberdemon fight (e.g. where he occupies a more or less fixed, slightly elevated position and tries to keep you from proceeding past him), a fairly common sight in older WADs--but there's some real spice to proceedings earlier on, again a welcome change of pace. Oh yes, and about those vile-twins in the little box....I suspect they are probably what the V-sphere is for, in line with the whole 'finding secrets is a regular/intended part of level progress' I think I see going on here, but in this run my usual penchant for secret-findery took a bit of a nosedive (missed 3 of the 9 this time), and so I can't say for sure, and thus probably can't rightfully make as many excuses for it as I might have done otherwise. ;) Suffice to say I was lucky I had the BFG (which again is just sitting around somewhere in the level, not hidden per se) and the soulsphere from its wonky quasi-parkour secret; I guess by this point Monti expects (and WANTS) us all to have a Pavlovian reaction of anxiety and distrust every time we see a teleporter pad, if nothing else.

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Map 11 -- Erkattäññe - 103% Kills / 100% Secrets
.....IDMUS 29. And I don't even like "Shawn's Got the Shotgun" that much, you hear me Monti!? Huh? HUH!?!

Ahem. We close with what I suppose you'd call another 'city'-type map, although any impressions it may give of being a sandbox are entirely illusory in this case; both route and itinerary are effectively 100% linear, taking you on an area-by-area tour of each of the buildings around the periphery of the open central yard, at one point teasing you with the exit before subjecting you to one last gauntlet (such as it is) before divulging an alternate path to the game's final switch. Despite the totally prescribed series of events, progression is not always entirely clear, with some somewhat abrupt backtrack-forks at points, but it shouldn't be anything that most alert/attentive players should have a whole lot of trouble with. Biggest concern is that every time you reenter the central space (inevitably by jumping down from some convenient aperture on the periphery at the end of a key 'leg') there's only ever one lift and one passage you can take to get back on track, which after a while does start to seem perhaps more than a 'mite' inelegant. Aesthetically, it's in the same general mold as the thematically similar map 07 from earlier, with each individual building (or each individual wing of the larger structures) painted in a different handful of textures, although overall I reckon this one's a fair bit neater in presentation--vertical alignment's not as much of an issue as one might expect from previous outings, and I think I even espied spots of texture-based detailing(!!) here and there, ala the brown/green duplex look to the southwesterly sniper nests, or the the use of pipe textures to differentiate the exposed interlock faces of the path beyond the yellow barricade before its bridge is raised into place. That exit room, though....really, Monti? Significantly less intricate in layout than some of the previous maps (again, a lot of its apparent depth and complexity is purely cosmetic), it's also a bit more broadstroke in construction (e.g. fewer, larger sectors in as opposed to more, smaller ones), the better to house its pile of demons.

Yes, as for the combat/action element, I'd say the map does a respectable job of seeming like the natural culmination and conclusion of what we've seen from the mapset along our way, marrying a sniping/attrition-based element with the generally heavier monster composition and somewhat higher frequency of traps (incl. the ever-popular "vile probably hits you unless you're psychic and/or have catlike reflexes" angle) that has marked the second half of the game. Hitscanners only really dominate the initial foray into the large central yard, mostly fading from view as the level progresses (with the issue of tall/hard-to-target sniper nests tending to naturally resolve itself as you move along), allowing larger monsters in the context of the more constricted paths around the periphery to come to the fore. All of the tricks Monti has tried in earlier maps show up in one form or another, from the aforementioned spiteful vile-usage (just make it a point to be holding the BFG when you hit a major progression point and you should be fine) to continuing backstab-teleportation shenigans right on down to "suddenly spiderdemon right next to you somehow" (<--which was my favorite bit, actually) before concluding with another traditional cyberdemon boss-battle, this time featuring two together in the central space.....not something we think of as very remarkable in this day and age, of course, but this was AAA climactic battle stuff back in the days Monti is referencing, I suppose. Through all of this, the health/ammo balance remains fairly tight (though I did build up a goodly stock of cells by the end); you get more hi-test ammo and probably a lot more healing to work with than in previous levels, but of course you're up against heavier hitters for a somewhat longer duration, so it about evens out. I did manage to find all of the secrets this time, but failed to make any really relevant use of either V-sphere, and couldn't see as much of a clever 'combo sequence' to the secrets as in some previous maps, which I suppose is in line with the level's more straightforward pacing.

Not the most winsome of the set's maps for my taste, but nevertheless it is a credible/sensible selection for a set-closer.

***********

So, Erkattäññe, as tastefully summarized by DotW: The music fucking sucks.














I liked a lot of the maps, though. :D
Like Dobu, I was not particularly enamored with previous works by the author that I had played (the whole of Eviltech and E1 of Favillesco in my case), but I found Erkattäññe to be pretty consistently entertaining, something that presented a very coherent creative vision without belaboring any one aspect of it too much, something that his older work struggled with, IMO. Erkattäññe, by contrast, is pleasingly varied in execution, indicating an author that has moved past the point of simply identifying and reiterating the things he personally likes about Doom, and onto to spinning and cajoling and wrangling them into something new that is distinctly his own--where the good stuff (for the rest of us) really begins, in other words! As Magnusblitz summarized earlier, I reckon Monti's choice to make his mapset purposefully very shabby-looking as, I don't know...some kind of goofy expression of 'crushing' on PWADs of yore?...was probably his biggest misstep here; whatever he thinks he made it look like, the assertion that it's "like the IWADs" or "like great old PWADs of the halcyon days" simply does not ring true for me, and if I didn't already know that his affection for that old stuff is completely sincere and heartfelt, some of what I see here would make me believe otherwise, if you catch my drift. On the other hand, my favorite thing about the mapset was its capricious construction, and thus the moment to moment sensation of moving around from place to place in it, looking for all those weird little secret gunswitches and the like--there is nothing else out there right now that is built quite like the way this is, and for a mapset to gain so much of its feel from its pure structure, wholly independent of thing placement, is more than a little remarkable, and something a lot of mappers with aesthetic aspirations far more grandiose than Monti's own might learn from.

My personal favorite maps from this set were 05, 08, and 09.

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MAP11 - "Erkatanne"

Despite being a "city map", it didn't feel much different from the other techbase maps, which is good, because I liked those a lot, and so this final level was satisfying for me. Except a couple moments that basically required having the BFG prepared, like the Archvile behind a pile of Hell Knights trap. I've found 5/7 secrets, and then found the remaining 2 (Invisibility ledge + Invulnerability yard) with only a little cheating.


Overall

The level design, architecture, gameplay, music, atmosphere and even visuals were very unified and yet varied throughout this mapset, and totally impressive to me, particularly the irregular shapes, colorful-ness, non-linearity, interconnection, secret hunting and "casual" feeling. This wad absolutely deserved a Cacoward. Very well-made one.

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I kinda enjoyed Erkattäññe. It definitely nails the 1995 era, and in that respect the ill-fitting music is somehow perfectly fitting. I just wish he didn't push the 1995ness up to superfluously turning them into MUS, and neglecting from giving any sort of credit.

The maps were ugly but the combat encounters were okay and there were always a lot of clever secrets to find -- mostly trick jumps, timed lifts, and shootable switches that are relatively easy to detect on the automap even though it's not always obvious from where one should go to get them in the line of sight. It was fun to just roam these weird, misshapen levels and try to force them to reveal their secrets.

If I replay this map set, however, I'll use a custom xlat to increase greatly the speed of the lifts, because of one map in particular...

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gaspe said:

About the music, does anyone knows the tracklist?

Map01: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcf_rj3N8Yc
Map02: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UFX3gQHIroU
Map03: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR8D2yqgQ1U
Map04: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2A4SIazQRDc
Map05: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OFpfTd0EIs
Map06: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yca6UsllwYs
Map07: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rws0CMfkGxE
Map08: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi1BmjU00eY
Map09: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QEPrDBMqJ0
Map10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9b4F_ppjnKU
Map11: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyxpXVUy81o

BTW, thanks to all for playing this, and for the constuctive criticism, I'll try to avoid some things in the future, like long elevators and no cover AV traps among others, I'm working on a new wad, but 32 maps require some time :)

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nicolas monti said:

I'll try to avoid some things in the future, like long elevators

Nah man the insane verticality is what made that map really memorable—I liked it. Also thanks for the track list, was curious about MAP10's tune.

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dobu gabu maru said:

Nah man the insane verticality is what made that map really memorable—I liked it.

I agree with this, but there could have been teleporters or instant-moving floors in place of the elevators taking forever to ride between floors, and the drop-downs could have been much smaller or replaced by teleporters or instant-moving floors not to take forever too.

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Map 10 was a Fleetwood Mac song? How on earth did I miss that? The ravages of midi-fication, indeed....

I also liked the massive height differentials in map 09, and in truth not even the long lift bothered me much. Just glad I didn't have to ride it more than once!

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Demon of the Well said:

Just glad I didn't have to ride it more than once!

I did, when looking for secrets... I rather cheated than to ride it again. :(

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As someone who was on the 'hated it' side of the long elevators... well, there's good and bad verticality. Good, for me, is when you can actually get the sense of it by moving through it and/or seeing it. So the huge jump (both horizontal and vertical) near the single shotgun in MAP09, for example, is good, or the lift lowering in MAP08 by the invuln secret.

Examples of bad usages would be - having to wait for that lift for forever in MAP09. Because I'm just sitting there watching a lift lower, there's no sense of verticality, just a sense of wasting time. Long drops are more interesting, since the player is still moving, but also can get a little wearisome after awhile. But really it was just sitting at the bottom having to wait for that one lift.

Also thanks for the music list, not being able to remember the name of MAP03's track was driving me nuts for awhile.

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Finishing things up...

50 Shades of Graytall MAP16: Mr. Graytall

We start the map looking up into the stern face of the level's namesake; this is, I think, going to be a silly one. It actually feels like a step down in difficulty compared to a lot of the maps shortly before, with a focus on claustrophobic encounters that announce their presence and declare their rules too audaciously to be called traps or ambushes. It feels almost like a cooldown period, concluding with the shoveling of rockets into Mr. Graytall's exposed, Romero-head-shaped heart.

MAP17:

...The intermission text is delightfully silly, after which the player is invited to remember the preceding levels in this gallery-like space. One heaped helping of GRAYTALL is yet to come, and so we move on at last to...

MAP18: Killer Color Blindness

I CHOOSE THE STAIRS

...Ahem. The music's fitting for this big brawler of a map, in which the player proceeds in sequence through staged combat encounters before returning to the hub of a teleporter-linked arrangement of spokes. There's seldom any question of where to go next, just a succession of tough fights in which the only way out is forward and through. It's a louder and punchier note on which to end the WAD than MAP16 and the denouement of MAP17, but doesn't seem to embrace the project's definining limitations to the same extent as some of the wackier hijinx the player has previously experienced.

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MAP09 - "Abudhnas" - UVMax after 4 or 5 tries

So I guess Abudhnas should mean chasm or hole in some language, right? Well, this may be the only level I used saves only because of long drops and *that* particular lift featuring a teleported archvile during the ascension... Geesh.

Oh, and there's a way to skip like 80% of the map, but from pistol start it can be tough without having picked up the appropriate weaponry. And I got the invul sphere secret very early using the same trick. I gave up trying to strafe to get the computer map secret, and the map prohibits me to backtrack finding another way to it as soon as I open the exit.

Not the most memorable map despite the gimmick, sadly.

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Oh, that's how that arch-vile was supposed to work? He didn't show up until after the lift had reached its destination when I played (guess I was standing in exactly the right/wrong place?), I thought he must've come out of the 'zerk secret or something.

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Demon of the Well said:

Oh, that's how that arch-vile was supposed to work? He didn't show up until after the lift had reached its destination when I played (guess I was standing in exactly the right/wrong place?), I thought he must've come out of the 'zerk secret or something.

Yep, the AV is supposed to "fill" the time gap of the elevator although I always knew that if the player was standing over the teleport destination it wouldn't work, sadly 2 teleport destinations do not work. Should I've tried with a 2 sector lift in order to give the AV a second chance to pop up? not sure if that is possible (2 contiguous sectors lowering and rising simultaneously) XD

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You can prevent the platform from going back up by just standing on the border, half on the platform and half under the low roof of the lift's surrounding tube. If the elevator were made of two different sectors, it'd split up at that moment, with one sector moving back up unimpeded and the other remaining at ground level. And you'd likely get a giant HOM through lack of lower textures on the boundary between both halves of the lift.

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ok, just to finish this, as the others have left already


MAP08 - "Peri Physeos"

another map in the style of map05's cavernous look, but darker and more decayed. mostly filled with toxic sludge, but plenty of radsuits as before. obvious ambush when you drop onto the red key, but that vile is rocketed away easily. i saved the invulnerability for the room with chaingunners and revenants. i too ran around for a while, not noticing that i could access the blue key, why block the way to the soulsphere? as for the archvile trap, it's better to have the bfg ready whenever you enter a lift or teleporter here...



MAP09 - "Abudhnas"

perhaps someone know if this is the doom map with the longest drops? which reminded me of quake's "wind tunnels", because of how you fall through brown pipes. however, it would have been MUCH better without that annoying AV use with not even pixel-thin cover, and if it used teleports instead of lifts! point for the robert miles midi, the only track i didn't change immediately, as it made falling through the map seem somehow relaxing.



MAP10 - "High Voltage"

indeed a mix between d2m10 and e1m7, or between doom2 city and base, interconnected as all maps before, and you can see parts of it through windows (i really liked how romero did that, in e1m1 or the soulsphere in e1m3 for example, and erkatanne follows this example. one can grab a rocket launcher in the starting area, or get a secret berserk pack and save ammo. from here, most of the map can be done without getting into much crossfire. i'm rather pleased that i learned monti's style well enough to survive both the double archvile box and the hell knight wall at the red key by simply having the bfg ready



MAP11 - "Erkatanne"

whatever that place's name means, it's a large city-like build in the style of map07, a weird colorful place where every building has its texture. first run around to get some weapons, ignoring the enemies, then the drop into the spiderdemon's underground ended hilariously, with the spider getting blocked and chewed up by specters. there's again some of this "enemy teleportas into your back" and a large tower with a platform for the yellow key, stand on it watching the mob of revenants and arachnotrons tear each other apart. trying to reach the exit reveals 2 cybers, in the open... well that's 4 bfg shots in these days ;)


overall, i liked the unconventional shapes and interconnected layout, leading to maps which were really fun to explore just to get into all those places! that's probably the mapset's strongest part. texturing was so-so, many players are trained to hump the wall where they see a misalignment which can hint to a secret, here they're mostly just misalignments. then there's the annoying part with chaingunners hidden in darkness and behind whatever (more than the archvile traps, because i survived those) and the music choice, which, except "children", was just grating my ears, but that's what idmus is for.

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Haven't got to complete them as I'm on Hell Revealed, but for completeness' sake...

MAP10 - "High Voltage" - DNF

Died to the small dual archvile room as I was almost done with it, my save was too early to make me go back and finish it. So yeah, unfair moments such as this one or the green falls archvile teleporting to the open courtyard you came from, but it's also a good open ended map with a E1M7 feel on it that I liked.


MAP11 - "Erkatanne" - DNF

That one is the most challenging map for sure, and also a bit confusing at the beginning. My first few tries ended up on ammo shortage as I shot almost everything outside before getting my way into the first building I only found after five minutes running in circles in the outside... I guess I might come back to it someday?


Overall - It seems January was the off-the-wall month packed with the abstract mapsets of 2015 that got granted a Cacoward. As for Erkattäññe, I must say I am still quite puzzled about the unconventionnal design, ignoring many basic map rules such as texture alignment on purpose. Encounters seems quite randomish outside of the early hitscanners too. The music selection only adds up on the sheer overall strangeness of the mapset. After playing a bit of Hell Revealed's early maps I must say I was a bit shocked to see orthogonal figures and aligned textures again (!). So I guess it's this excentric design that rewarded Monty a Cacoward and I can't agree more on that.

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