The DWmegawad Club plays: Japanese Community Project

[antares031]

masajin8 said:

I personally updated my map28 HeLLport...

Thanks for uploading! I'll make sure to play the updated version on Saturday.

MAP26 - Embodiment of Maliciousness
ZDoom, UV - Pistol Start, KIS(%): 100/100/100

Okay, this one doesn't play around. The previous level presented a giant fortress, and now we have a series of small rooms with more demons and intermediate actions. But don't worry, you will find some larger areas later. While the combat wasn't bad at all, this level managed to trigger one of my pet peeves, and it's spawning arch-viles wherever I go. Every fierce combat situation includes those bastards, and one of them is even hiding behind the small gap below the wall so I can't manage to hit that devious bastard while he can cast his magic spell to me (I was expecting a fake wall, but a small gap below the wall was outrageous). But at least this level has a mercy to give me a plenty of supplies to carry on, so I must say that the arch-vile placements, except the one behind the wall, are actually acceptable. I can say it's "challenging" in a positive way. The architectural detail is kind of a mixed bag. While most parts are drawn elaborately with adorable details, some parts are just boring to see. Take a look at the exterior of the dark building(with a blue skullkey inside) and the valley with lots of red BSTONE texture, and you'll see what I mean. This is not a bad level, but putting some more efforts will definitely make this level even better than now.

[dobu gabu maru]

Ancient Aliens is probably the only thing that I'll slot aside time to join in for next month, so that's secured my vote.

[Havoc Crow]

MAP26: Embodiment of Maliciousness

This one begins approaching Sunlust levels of challenge, which I don't really enjoy. By the end I all but ran out of ammo near the end of the huge wave of spawning hell knights. One memorable part was returning into the building where I had fought an arch-vile/revenant ambush... only to suddenly trigger an exact repeat of that same ambush! Sure had me confused for a moment, haha.

[baja blast rd.]

Map26 is great. Many of the encounters remind me of something I'd do (multi-stage fights, often with a change in map geometry between phase A and phase A+1, albeit not quite as automated here; general liking of AV + backup fights), but most of them are quite Death-Destiny-ish. Sunlust is the obvious comparison -- even the music would fit -- but there's nothing really too Ribbiksian that isn't "Ribbiks by way of D-D". The very last fight (pre cyberdemon -- much easier two-shot here!) is absolutely dreadful, though. I wasn't killed because the need for BFG use is telegraphed so clearly, but I frequently got caught in those random stakes while moving around the playspace. Very very uncomfortable feeling. I don't even mind the bumpy archvile-rev wave fight because the bumpiness is very predictable, but that one is plainly horrible.

[mouldy]

MAP25 - “Cakravartin’s miscalculation” by Nanka Kurashiki

Epic map, really mind boggling interwoven routes around the edge of the central arena. Very stylish visuals too, I love the neon glowing floor patterns. I did get a bit confused at times but with the whole map fitting around a circle its impossible to stay lost for long. Very good.

[Capellan]

Map26
Found the heavily structured nature of the map very tiresome - big fight, silence, big fight, silence, big fight, silence, repeat ad nauseum. The lack of incidental combat and the cheapness of some of the set pieces was irksome. Archviles behind one-way walls you can’t see through, for instance. And then there was the interminable ‘checkerboard climb’. Because if an encounter is worth doing once it is worth doing three times, right? No, wrong.

Anyway, I got to the yellow key, pressed on a while longer, and then got to a point where none of the doors or switches I could find were actually activatable. Which is where I stopped caring and quit the map to do something more fun, like my taxes.

Since I play continuous, this is where I stop.

[rehelekretep]

MAP25 - “Cakravartin’s miscalculation” by Nanka Kurashiki FDA here (UV, no deaths)

really enjoyed this - although i dare say it was slightly too easy...

+ MIDI is great - i never thought Breaking Benjamin could inspire something so atmospheric!
+ fantastic, foreboding atmosphere (although this ties into one of my negatives below...)
+ great colour use/architecture

- enemy encounters lacked teeth - im not a great Doom player but i feel you could only die in this level if you do something silly
- i was a little lost after i hit all three keys to enter the circles centre exit, only because the first staircase up to the plinth i approached had a dip in it and seemed impassable. this made me remember passing the yellow & blue bars earlier, which turned out to be the BFG secret (presumably for the cyberdemon encounter) which i didnt need, and then i went BACK to the centre circle and exited
- the foreboding atmosphere, plus the circlular thing revolving made me hyped that hell was going be unleashed once i hit all 3 key switches but 1 archvile teleporting around made for a not so epic ending. i would beef up the enemy numbers completely on UV

[Pirx]

MAP22 - “A den of vice” by burabojunior

starts quietly with a ruined, very dark base, reminiscent of doom3. an archvile starts resurrecting stuff when you return with the blue key from a cavern. this way you leave the bunker and continue deeper into the realm of hell. it's advisable to get the bfg first, or you likely won't get past the first roadblock when pain elementals rise from those lava tubes, mancs block your way, and revenants throw missiles from the battlements. passing this... well, the hellish castle looks sinister and intimidating with the skull cubes floating over it. then there's this nice little secret which gets you a soulsphere from that blue "ribbiksian" area. demon of the well shows again how to find such secrets. i didn't see it and at least could boast with two-shotting the tower's cyber guardian. the rest is a rocket massacre of nobles and finally of a mancubus army while climbing toward the exit.




large version because it looks so cool




MAP23 - “Thermal disposal place” by Guna

sounds like hell revealed and looks very much like its first maps: a bit flat, square and brown. doesn't play like hr though. which doesn't mean it plays bad: on the contrary, this simple architecture provided a mostly relaxed, enjoyable gameplay. it's a bit stingy with ammo in the beginning and requires some running around, and there's some action again at the final showdown. in between i insisted on using the berserk fist on many occasions, both for conserving ammo and for fun. just the end is a bit anticlimactic: i guess that mastermind was stuck in the exit to prevent the player from just running through, so what: park your ass sideways where it can't hit you, rocket the imps and then pump buckshot into the spider until it falls.




MAP24 - “Probably Maybe Certainly” by Tyousen121

has this 1994's map look, a disjointed collection of plain boxes with random monsters. first that part with the ssg where retreating and shooting the mob through the door is the safest alternative, then a "my school" part and a warehouse. all with some elevator music. couldn't care too much about it.




MAP25 - “Cakravartin’s miscalculation” by Nanka Kurashiki

the more impressive this one. now that's a huge hellish castle, mostly built with red marble in a circular shape. so imposing that i expected a slaughter of sunlust-ish proportions. there's some skeletons and a vile here and there. but no slaughter. instead, the map relies on visuals, like "remind" before it, and creates an interesting variation of the hell style in muted recolors of doom2 textures. piles of skulls and gore contrast with technological remains, like tubes hanging out from walls, metallic grates and glowing parts, plus a fitting music track.




that opening shot




wow




hell-tech

[KBlaney]

Map 24: I really like the feel of this level. It is how I imagine a teleportation facility would be laid out (that is, largely disconnected, perhaps not even really near each other). I don't think I'll ever get tired of the “normal science base when suddenly demonic alter” design choices in a number of levels. The switch is always sort of surprising and shocking even if you know it is coming. No major difficulties here except the area with the rooms connected by doorways only some of which open. Moving became annoying and frustrating so I eventually just BFG'd the last room of archviles and moved on.

Map 25: An impressively huge level which is surprisingly not hard to keep track of. Although I often didn't know where to go, I rarely didn't know where I was. Probably the only time I really got click-on-every-wall lost was after the cyberdemon fight when I didn't see the IoS brain opening to kill the Keen. Good use of what Disney calls “weenies” to always keep you going somewhere. However, probably my favorite detail is that after killing the cyberdemon and stealing the red key, all of the power conduits in the level go out as if we've turned off the demonic power that was keeping this hellish temple alive... and then a bunch of monsters are let loose.

*************

With the voting so far it looks like we are playing Ancient Aliens. I saw JP LeBreton play it a bit on his channel and I had just finished Skillsaw's other megawad Valiant, so I'm looking forward to it. That said, what else is in the running?

[Spectre01]

KBlaney said:

With the voting so far it looks like we are playing Ancient Aliens. I saw JP LeBreton play it a bit on his channel and I had just finished Skillsaw's other megawad Valiant, so I'm looking forward to it. That said, what else is in the running?

Bloodstain has been in the running and getting sabotaged for the past four months or so.

[plums]

My primary vote goes to Perdition's Gate again, to try to get the ball rolling on that, with my second place vote-that-actually-matters choice being Bloodstain.


MAP25 of JPCP was awesome, a beautifully textured, intricately-connected affair that felt like it needed twice as many monsters as it had but was quite enjoyable nonetheless. Strange how Nanka's two later maps emphasize the visual presentation much more than the earlier two, while also being much easier. Whatever the reason I still like this map a lot.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP18: Space Port Panik
93% kills, 2/6 secrets

This one has a very old-school feel to it, with the abstract futuristic truck/spaceship designs, the overly large rooms, and general texturing scheme. Interesting use of the light here, with good use of the lightamp visor as a needed power up. The hardest part of this map is finding weapons, I definitely died a few times on pistol start trying to figure out where everything was. There's a bunch of rockets and shells around the corner, but no weapons; the SSG is stuck inside the freezer and the RL comes after using a key. Ammo is sparse so I ended up running from everything at the end. In the end, it's alright, with some interesting gameplay setups.

MAP19: Remind
100% kills, 2/5 secrets

And after the old-school aesthetic map, we have a decidedly modern aesthetic one, with lots of curvy cavern walls and recolored textures. Despite what appears to be a looping layout, the procession here is quite linear (with the only real choice being early on, between a path that leads to the blue door, or the path to the blue key) but it is nice to see how the areas connect with each other in the end. Nothing too tough or inventive here combat-wise, with monsters almost always in front of the player and one smallish arena at the end, but it gets the job done. The music really helps sell the atmosphere here, as does the dimly-lit settings. I'm a big fan of the 'hell portal' corridor with techbase rooms on one side and hellish marble/wood on the other.

[NuMetalManiak]

warning: rant post ahead

MAP26 Embodiment of Maliciousness

Another very uncomforting map, the space really is cramped to fight some of these guys in and the layout annoys me to no end with zero sense of direction and some mandatory backtracking. These secrets are the worst of the lot, but there's some rooms that annoy me too, there's the one where you wait and wait for enemies to lower, and the one where you wait and wait for your lift to lower, and the one with all those bonuses, urgh. Lift waiting! Platforming across rocks! Weird backtracking to rooms I don't want to go back to! What does this switch even fucking do!!! There's just so many horrible ways of progression and every one is required! Oh look, I even head back into the start just to open the exit room. God damnit, literally one slip-up in this map and you spend like five fucking minutes trying to get back to where you were! Man I'd never thought I'd find something more annoying than MAP10, but since this is by the same author, I can see EXACTLY why this is the fucking embodiment of maliciousness.

[Masa]

antares031 said:

Thanks for uploading! I'll make sure to play the updated version on Saturday.

Thanks !
I've updated my map28 again,
to the version_6_0, from my previous post version_5_3,
because I've found bugs. Sry :)


http://www.mediafire.com/download/6huf3wy2khvb1dz/map28_masa_v6_0.zip
Current Version: 5.3 6.0 (updated again because of bugs)

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP26: Embodiment of Maliciousness

Aww, yeah, The Legendary Beast. I know VIII isn't most people's favourite entry in the Final Fantasy series, but its soundtrack ranks as one of the best IMHO.

Even though it's the work of a different mapper, I think this level suffers from the same lack of thematic consistency as MAP24: the player is directed through fleshy nodules, grimy industrial sewers, gleaming space-age techbase areas, and Hellish castles, each so vividly and competently rendered that it feels less like a hybrid theme (such as the fusion of technology and Hellish subversion in the original Doom's Episode 2) and more like the map author couldn't quite decide what to build. I think the very directed progression and orchestrated quality of much of the combat contributes to this sense that a more focused effort, operating within a single theme or trying to set one particular tone, might have produced a better result than this epic but inconsistent offering.

The fights themselves are a bit more choreographed than I really care for, and I found myself itching for more in the way of incidental combat; the streets between the various buildings of the Hellish city in the east of the map, for example, feel very underused in their utter lack of opposition. The set-piece battles themselves are a mixed bag; the progression of different combats in the south-east corner of the map especially, and in particular the last wave of hell knights with an arch-vile playing combat medic, really bled a lot of the sense of fun from the map for me.

[Dylan Jarvis]

MAP22:

A very dark map is what my first impression was. It is kind of unnerving for me, because there is little light variation here. This might of been the most difficult map so far. Towards the end I didn't have armor so the barons and hell knights tore me to pieces constantly. The cyber demon fight was kind of annoying to because there is so little space to dodge and the rocket splash just hurts like a mother. The last secret was really difficult to find because it is a small switch floating in midair. It was worth it though because the area it's in was gorgeous. I noticed a lot of texture misalignment with the brick castle towards the end of the map. Not a bad map, just pretty unforgiving at moments.

[Dylan Jarvis]

MAP23

This one has quite a simple layout and design, but I liked it a lot anyway. The gameplay is fun, the monsters were well place and there is a lot of space to run around. My particular favorite encounter was the last with the MM revs and imps. I thought it was well executed and put the pressure on fast. Even though it is mostly flat and boxy. There is enough detail here to keep it interesting looking. Really enjoyed this one.

[Dylan Jarvis]

MAP24:

#Boxcratemaze

All jokes aside there's always a box crate maze map in a wad. It's like a must apparently in wads lol. Anyway the map wasn't too bad or difficult for that matter. I thought it was going to be a tad harder because the beginning killed me pretty quickly, when I wasn't expecting a huge teleporting trap of revs and hit-scans a couple feet away. I do have an issue with two of the annoying secrets though. One being a AV jump. I hate these because if you are like me and like to do UV max runs. These can really spoil a map if you screw up. Second secret is a W1 door close permanently trigger. That's a real low blow too especially for a first timer but I can see that happening again because I most likely might forget about it. I had to just clip through the door to take it. Other than that though I liked the map for what it's worth. It is very generous with basically everything though lol.

[Crusader No Regret]

Hell Port updated. Good news as I've completed my playthrough and that was the only map I found monsters that couldn't warp in.

Map 20: 100% kills, 5/5 secrets

Instead of monster density in space stations, we find being shot by faraway projectiles in space stations. A hectic start though things settle down somewhat and snipers stop being an issue fairly early. I also remember mostly free mobility with only the final guardians locking the player in. That I found memorable due to how much I died before finding an approach. Kill the revenants on my side then deal with the ones on the other end of the room. Those thin pillars near the entry end up being rather important.

Without the density gimmicks, this feels like a normal map. I'm not sure what I did to unlock the BFG or the soulsphere secrets; my exploration tendencies led to the others. The music felt out of place though IDMUS exists.

Map 21: 100% kills, 2/2 secrets

With a small monster count, I assumed this would be a pushover. Nope. Those demons accompanying the cyber can be surprising effective too; getting in the way as one is trying to dodge a rocket. That switch sequence too; seems very much intended to deny a quick escape for dealing with the cyber.

Got really lucky on my first attempt. Cyberdemon entered the segment I entered the arena from so the only way out is past. RNG decided to let me dash by without sending a rocket into my back.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP20: Escape From UAC Space Base
100% kills, 2/5 secrets

Oh look, another floating space base from burabo, how surprising. This one is actually the most "open" of his levels so far, which is still pretty constrained, but at least this one actually has some room to move. It's also the most straight forward - while there are some barrels here and there, it's mostly gimmickless. I admit I had some trouble after the yellow key (and starting with the manc corridor above the yellow key lift) because I had completely missed the RL, and actually needed to open DB2 to find it (sad, I know) since I figured it was supposed to be given at that point given the monster setups and my ammo. Once I found it, a lot more fun. Good Vile placement and I like the 'airlock' style doors. A fun map to blast through.

MAP21: Search and Destroy
100% kills, 2/2 secrets

And now something different from the same author, a series of four little killboxes. The first is some imps in close quarters with an AV overlooking things; the second a large cavern with revenants, arachnatrons and mancubuses; the third is a mancubus gangbang, and the fourth a cat-and-mouse game with a cyberdemon. They're all okay, I suppose, though none really excited me too much like the setups we've seen in burabo's previous maps. The second is far too easy given it's size, whereas the third in particular felt a little bullshit as there's nowhere to hide, so it's a bit RNG to survive.

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP27: A resplendent emerald green

Nice use of forced-show lines on the automap to provide structure and direction here. This level reminds me of the latter chapters of Sunlust, taking place in a vast cavern of dark stone and masonry with a single, strong contrast colour (in this case brilliant green) all suspended above a vast toxic reservoir. Gameplay consists of navigating from platform to platform in search of the candles that mark the presence of hanging Commander Keen dolls, some of which are more thoroughly hidden than others, all of which culminates in a pitched battle against a cyberdemon turret and his arch-vile attendees (though it's easy enough to drag them into his rockets and coax them into slowly burning him to death while you pick them off at your leisure). This one gets brownie points for adding a teleporter than lets the player bypass the platform section at the very beginning of the map once it's been solved at least once; I do like levels that use features like this, letting a hazard or challenge play its role once and then step aside before it can become an annoyance. The architecture is such that distant cyberdemons and revenants can present a threat to the unwary player, without becoming a constant nuisance and distraction to players who keep their wits about them. Overall it's a good balance of a central puzzle, strong combat encounters, and the architecture/layout of the level itself presenting its share of challenges. Very much liked this one.

[NuMetalManiak]

MAP27 A Resplendent Emerald Green

You must kill 13 Commander Keens. Seek Candles, thanks now we've got a puzzle in Sunlustland. Fantastic looks, but the low monster count might actually be deceiving. I've got three of those Keens on the eastern side, one requires, well the lift. The automap clues help out quite a lot, that is if you actually use them. Some of these Keens are in very weird spots, like just on the ceiling of something. The regular combat is fine as it is and should be, and I am glad enough to enjoy it. Kind of a bad ending though, I was expecting something bigger than an archie and a revenant before the exit.

[KBlaney]

Map 26: Another map like 25 where the level is somewhat open and continuously loops back upon itself. The map designer does a good job detailing the map and gating off sections of the level while hinting that more lies that way eventually which is a great open world design strategy in general. I think my favorite set piece in this level was the hell knight ambush after the blue key. My strategy was to kill a few hell knights, then kill the archvile while he's resurrecting them, then finish the rest of the knights all while dancing circles on the middle platform. It was just hectic enough to be exciting but didn't feel unfair to the point of frustation and multiple attempts. I had maybe a few moments of getting stuck and there were a few times when the level looped back in on itself that made me say “okay... so what was the point of all that?” This, I think, is slightly part of the limitation of the Doom engine with only 3 keys. It means that progress through hitting a switch can be forgotten in larger levels since it doesn't appear on the HUD anywhere.

Map 27: This level is very green. It is also extremely frustrating and hard. Fighting 3 archviles and a cyberdemon is not generally my idea of a good time, neither are jumping puzzles in general. The gimmick of finding the Keens is cute and, luckily, they aren't too hard to find, but the ones locked by timed switches are rather annoying, especially when one of the switches also activates an elevator. Use of the automap is crucial here since the Keens are marked (but there is no way to mark them as killed). I like the experimental nature here, but chalk this up as a failure.

rileymartin said:

Bloodstain has been in the running and getting sabotaged for the past four months or so.

Sounds good. I'll vote for Bloodstain then to help it get its moment in the sun.

[mouldy]

MAP26 - “Embodiment of Maliciousness” by Yullie

Wow, that was a map and a half. Took bloody ages, and up to a point is was a constant barrage of action that led me through a never ending variety of locations. Then there was a period in the middle where I ended up at a blue key door without the blue key, and I had the yellow key but the yellow door was miles away, and the fun ground to a halt while I searched around the map a few times. I'm not sure the key stuff really works in this map, because while it is great fun to stumble through it from one fight to the next, its annoying as hell to backtrack and navigate to specific areas, and hard to remember where the locked doors are. Things picked up again once I had all the keys though. Visually its a strange mixture of styles, almost like the work of a few different mappers joined together. Lots of traps and moving scenery which I like. Jolly good.

MAP27 - “A resplendent emerald green” by burabojunior

This map went from beautiful masterpiece to annoying platform pain in the arse in the space of few seconds. I was so close to noclipping past that stupid first bit, I'm sure there are people who love that kind of thing though. After that it was an intriguing puzzlebox of a map, with a number of keens to discover that you hope will do something obvious at some point. Checking the automap reveals all their positions thankfully, as well as a "keen door" message that I only found after it was already open. My main criticism is that after the first platforming bit I was saving before doing anything in case I accidentally stumbled into a similar scenario. Having said that, I was so low on ammo and health a lot of the time that every encounter was fairly lethal. I did survive the last battle in one go though. And hooray, another bit of platform hopping at the end, just because. Really is a gorgeous map.

[Havoc Crow]

KBlaney said:

the Keens are marked (but there is no way to mark them as killed)

Uh. Press M?

[Demon of the Well]

Map 26 -- Embodiment of Maliciousness - 104% Kills / 100% Secrets - FDA
Hmm, not surprising to see that players that disliked map 10 also disliked this one, and conversely, that those who got a kick out of 10 were entertained here. It's very much the same sort of dish, really; simply a larger/spicier helping.

Like Yullie's previous map, "Embodiment of Maliciousness" is an unusual mix of decidedly newschool gameplay sensibilities with decidedly oldschool visual stylings. There is no apparent overriding aesthetic theme at work here, each area or zone featuring its own particular suite of textures, running the gamut from bright shiny techbase to Plutonian wood/bricks to seedy snuff-dungeons to Hawaiian Punch (TM)-flavored Hell-ravines and everything in between. Because gameplay pieces are so starkly segmented here, one gets the impression that the panoply of differing visual themes are starkly segmented as well, though in truth they actually bleed into one another rather fluidly in most places, which has the uncanny (and rather 'early 00s') effect of making for a level that has no real sense of place about it, even though a few places within it have this to some degree. Architectural flourish and time spent on window-dressing is fairly limited here; this is a practical presentation foremost (though it would probably appear less so if it weren't in the same mapset with stuff by tooooasty or burabo or Nanka et al). The overall effect actually reminded me of something fairly specific I had trouble putting my finger on for a while, but it eventually struck me that this looks a lot like something out of the Czech megaWAD Zones of Fear, which in many ways is quite analogous to JPCP in form, intent, and authorship, come to think of it. Anyway, I'd say it's serviceable enough overall, little to offend the eye, though it probably could have done with more/different lighting choices in a number of its deeper areas, and I think the lack of any consistent theme or meta-theme (ala map 10's Final Doom mashup angle) does hurt it a little bit, though players generally inclined towards older stuff may find its laissez-faire approach to theme/texturing refreshing. I did not care for the music track and soon enough IDMUS'd away from it, though this is more a reflection on my own gradually growing distaste for maps aiming for stressful gameplay featuring loud/boorish 'final boss' tracks as a generality than it is on how well a fit this particular track is for this particular map.

As mentioned earlier, combat here consistently frames the level as a 'trial of ordeals' of sorts, where more or less every single encounter has some angle or twist to it that either attempts to entrap the player, handicap him/her, or both--a decidedly modern conceit. As with map 10, I felt that the monster usage was consistently smart and academically sound; very few of the 220+ monsters are present simply for emphasis or spectacle (some of the HKs in the ledge-swarming trap in the BK area excepted, perhaps), and for the most part each foe plays a relatively impactful role in the battle in which it features, be it high-tier or fodder-tier. Not everything here is terribly original in thrust, but the vast majority of it works well enough, and there are some more novel bits here and there that stick in the mind, such as the strange little freestanding chapel in the 'village' area where you perambulate around the periphery before dropping into the center for a 'confused' scuffle with Daddy Longlegs, or the hemming/hawing rising floor sequence in the shiny tech area. Throughout, proceedings are held together by what I felt to be a pretty agreeable thing-balance; you seldom feel really in control or like you're kicking the level's ass, but at the same time there's enough healing and the like around that you can afford to make a mistake or two in each major setpiece without essentially dooming the rest of your run, an asset to the experience considering that this is a fairly lengthy outing.

On that point, while I did like several of the fights here, I can certainly understand where players disappointed in the level's lack of any incidental/free combat are coming from. These 'gauntlet' levels are often better served when they aren't particularly long, I think; this style of fightmaking can make for fun choreography and edifying tactical workshopping, certainly, but by its nature it is also more or less necessarily heavily contrived, thus predictable, and so tends to hit a saturation point on the palate more quickly than more mixed/free styles of action. In "Embodiment of Maliciousness", I spent the first first few minutes getting my ass handed to me (had a 5% health moment or something like that very early on), but upon acclimating to the level I quickly began (quite rightly) assuming that everything in it was either a trick or a trap, and after a certain point I was preemptively defusing the snares before they sprung, making me feel something like a smug Jerry in a Tom & Jerry cartoon. And I've always been one more inclined to root for Tom, dammit!

[Demon of the Well]

Oh, and call me a kid who wants to skip dinner and move straight to dessert, but I vote for Ancient Aliens for next month's WAD. Bloodstain would again be my second choice.

[Crusader No Regret]

Casting vote for Bloodstain. Because I can and Eternal Doom is already done.

Map 22: 100% kills, 3/3 secrets

A continuation from the previous map, something not yet seen in the set so far. It's on the difficult end of the scale too. The blue key setup is rather uncomfortable and of course there's the skill gate cyberdemon in the ramparts. It can't pursue but the tight space carries a high level of danger; one is highly unlikely to make it through without damage. The welcoming committee upon entering the battlement proper may actually be harder with restricted space, mancubi, and pain elementals that activate at first shot. Though if one somehow manages to escape without attacking (getting mancubi killed by other monsters and lots of save scumming), well they were the last two monsters for me to hunt down for 100% kills.

I believe this is the only map with no way whatsoever to return to the first part (in this map, the base). Got to me a bit since I left the blue armor behind. The darkness is atmospheric and fits the setting but seeing items was difficult. The long lifts do get in the way of the pacing though at least they appear to serve some purpose (even the one at the start; it's a deep underground base after all).

I did find the floating switch on my own eventually. Had I gotten my 100% kills without it, probably would leave without finding it. It's quite well hidden.

Didn't really enjoy the map, mostly felt like a chore to get through. Not that it's bad, just not my personal taste. Tripping over items I don't want to pick up because it's too dark to see them is one of my personal pet peeves.

Map 23: 100% kills, 2/3 secrets

Doom comfort food is my description for this map. It's an underground base. Overall, well done but doesn't have that "wow" factor. Other than the ammo situation (which I didn't experience on continuous), feels leisurely. I don't consider this a problem, by the way. After the last map left me rather beat up, a lower key outing that lets me restock my depleted ammo is welcome.

The "useless" lost souls are an enjoyable inclusion. They are highly unlikely to reach the player when they appear and are thus likely to turn one's attention away from an actual threat. I'm guessing the secret I missed is in the red zone since I figured out the rocket launcher at the start and one in the blue zone.

[Magnusblitz]

MAP22: A Den of Vice
96% kills, 2/3 secrets

Third map in a row from burabo, and I'm starting to agree in thinking that the space maps were donated from a project of his, since they all looks so similar but he's clearly capable of making different stuff. Anyways, this was really a tale of two halves for me. I absolutely adore the first section, the dimly lit techbase - it's small but plays tightly, making great use of the darkness and going well with the MIDI (which, btw - is it a remix, or just sounding different on my new computer?).

The second half for me was both a downgrade in looks (basically going to an all-black brick structure in a redrock cavern) and gameplay. It's probably the most annoying setup in the mapset (so far)... cramped settings with tons of high-hp enemies, then top it off with a bunch of pain elementals in a massively high ceiling area. Now, I probably did make it tough on myself by trying to rush ahead without clearing everything out, but staying also felt like certain death. But the end result was a million goddamn lost souls flying around the goddamn level divebombing me from infinite Z-axis above my head where I can't even see them. Things do get better at the end (I liked the final staircase) but oh vey those damn pain elementals.

[Magnusblitz]

I've been hammering the vote for Bloodstain the last few months in vain, but Ancient Aliens is something I just can't pass up taking a whirl, so it gets my vote this time.