The DWmegawad Club plays: THT: Threnody & No Rest for the Living

[rehelekretep]

map06 - fda

another very enjoyable map. the area just before the YK, and the BK blueroom stand out as fun little fight-puzzles.

rather embarrassing but i didnt suss the SSG secret despite triggering the ledge to lower twice inadvertently :(

im beginning to sound like a broken record/parrot (just the record, not the parrot) by agreeing with ardeewhupa re: withholding the SSG; it's an awesome weapon. if you want to mix up the gameplay, give me a berserk or another mid/high tier weapon (PG/RL/BFG) not the single version against mid-tier enemies!

[rehelekretep]

Doomkid said:

Oh, I almost forgot - When the time comes to start on NERVE.wad, I recommend using it with NERVEMUS.wad. After having beaten it several times on the console, playing it on PC felt wrong with the generic unchanged order of the tracks. Even though it's all stock music, it gives the mapset more of it's own identity.

i just looked up some more info on this; if you're loading the WAD in PrBoom/GlBoom it actually recognises the wad and makes sure the tracks play in the correct order :D

[Doomkid]

That's an excellent feature I never knew of!

[Spectre01]

Map 07: Fort Halderman

We've got a new night sky and some large, rocky outdoor areas in addition to the usual techbase theme seen so far. There are also many low-tier enemies to shoot through here, similar to the likes of Map04 in AV last month. What I will say though, is that the good weapons for clearing stuff quickly are given very late in the map and I ended up grinding through multiple Mancs and whatnot with the Chaingun or regular SG. The first SSG I got was in a crate near the helicopter pad, an RL in a secret in some cave and the Plasma Rifle when there were a few spiders and a Mastermind left. Not a fan at all of the item distribution here, which reminds me of the worst parts of Estranged. This isn't a hard map in any way either, far easier than the two Doomkid maps prior in fact which armed you really well. Playing with crappy weapons aside, the monster placement was fine and that red key conveyor near the end was quite cool. The visuals are also pleasant and clean, as has been the case in the wad so far. Good midi once again.

Memfis said:

It's maybe a bit worrying that so far I haven't encountered a single map with, like, truly cool gameplay... -this is not how I see Doom, or TNT, or Ty Halderman's style.

I'm interested in what you find to be truly cool gameplay since you've been the most critical of this wad so far.

[baja blast rd.]

Map 07: Fort Halderman

Bonus points for not being a Dead Simple clone that takes place in a fort. I bet some of you expected that. :)

I think I'd like this map a lot if it had a few more halfway intense fights, on par with the trap released with the secret blue armor. I don't need the map to be harder at all, or care, I just feel it could have been more exciting. Quiet strolls can be pleasant in Doom, but they don't really work for me in this map, partly because the layout flows somewhat poorly. The silent moments are just as likely to be occasion for feeling irritated as for appreciating the scenery.

The storage area makes the map, though. Really cool design there, with the simulation of the automatic box mover, and all of the shenanigans over there with the conveyor and the random big stack of crates that is moved behind the glass. I bet some people might call this a 'gimmick' and out themselves as being opposed to the normalization of actual creativity in Doom levels! The glut of ammo is cute too. It might look like a misjudged balance or something, but I think it is clever, given the setting and all. :) So, not a bad map overall, but an underachiever, as least for my tastes.

[baja blast rd.]

Bonus video for map06. A RJ that skips all three keys, at the cost of a tough ammo-sparse finish.

[Fonze]

rdwpa said:

Bonus video for map06. A RJ that skips all three keys, at the cost of a tough ammo-sparse finish.

Nicely done!

[Demon of the Well]

Map 06 -- Cut Throat - 101% Kills / 100% Secrets
I'd rather you didn't. Thank you.

Same author as map 05, and same somewhat antique aesthetic, though the feel of the action here is quite different. WADs that shoot for the old-fashioned aesthetic of capricious texture schemes and exuberant non-themes (i.e. here's a silver computer room with a dirt floor, and next to it there's a hellish lava-palace, and next to that it's a room with riveted metal walls and nukage on the ceiling) don't offend my sensibilities, and I might even go so far as to say that you're probably more likely to encounter certain aspects of vibrant design in these sorts of presentations than in self-affectedly 'modest' modern maps--lots of contrast in scale between areas, blinking/wildly varying light levels, etc. The big drawback to maps using this kind of visual style, though, is that they often struggle to capture anything remotely resembling a sense of place/location, something that bugged me a little in this map (map 05 felt a little more 'together' because it used so much grey cement as a base for everything else, I suppose)--sort of contributes to the gameplay feeling a little more segmented/piecemeal than it may actually be, though I suppose wanting maps to have some kind of arc or underlying theme in how they play is itself a matter of personal preference. You definitely CAN do sense of place in a chaotic/abstract 90s visual idiom, of course, it's just tricky and requires a lot of intuitive attention to general ambience, something that Sandy Petersen arguably still doesn't get enough general credit for outside of a scant few of the community's pet maps.

Anyway, that rambling aside, the pacing here is a lot more measured than in 'Nukevil', and as the first encounter with chaingun snipers overlooking the first room from directly behind and above the player start point suggests, there's certainly more of an emphasis on traps and designed encounters rather than the loosely structured comic book bedlam of the previous map, though a few persistent predilections perhaps begin to become apparent here--enemy sightlines that create a chain-reaction of pulls in larger areas, arch-viles placed in really cheeky jump-scare positions, and so forth (quite like the second fellow in the middle of the chain of blue doors, incidentally). Much of the actual combat is actually purely incidental and lacks the manic energy of that in map 05, and given the somewhat piecemeal, door-heavy layout I have a recollection of fighting a lot of things through thresholds, but the more structured encounters help to carry things along, I felt--I liked the 'trail of helmets/potions guides the way' trope being subverted for a boobytrap early on, and the room with the twin staircases flanking an ooze pool with a bevy of teleporting nobles crammed into a tiny room behind an innocuous-looking door nearby presented a very quirky but quite memorable scenario. On a blind play you may think to hit the switch behind them in order to get the BFG, which activates the cage monsters (both should be arch-viles, not just one, IMO) and complicates the situation, and when you know what's coming you can try to subdue them in a limited space using the RL. Both are fun.

As to the thing about the SSG being secret, I found it at first opportunity in my first playthrough (and then re-found it in this one) and ended up having 600 cells by the end of the map. I'm not the sort of player who won't spend hi-test ammo when it's available (and indeed, in both plays of this map I found good ways to spend most of the rocket ammo), but my ingrained survival instincts tell me not to blatantly burn it on fights that can be handled easily enough without it either, and if you get that SSG there's not much here that ever really behooves you to use the (un-hidden) plasma rifle (the BFG, being near the end, doesn't really factor in). Without the SSG, though, the rifle likely naturally sees a lot more use for the sake of convenience if nothing else (and the steady supply of cell ammo seems to subsidize this), and so my impression is that the level might have a more unusual feel that way, which is sort of a roundabout argument in favor of the SSG being secret, I suppose....dunno, hard to say what I'd say is 'best' in this situation. Maybe the PR should be earlier and there should be no SSG at all?

[The_SloVinator]

Map 07: Fort Halderman

At first I was quite confused with how the level was design. You go there & it requires a key. You go somewhere else, it requires a key. But after a while, I got used to it.

I like the music & that conveyor belt part was sweet. The last part was meh. Wish there could be a cyberdemon on HMP. But ok.

Good map.

[Doomkid]

rdwpa said:

Bonus video for map06. A RJ that skips all three keys, at the cost of a tough ammo-sparse finish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8oI6PkjXUA

I knew about this one but figured, hell, if someone can beat the map with so little in the way of supplies, they deserve the shortcut! You'll find little shortcuts like that in quite a few of the maps I've made over the years :)

[Tristan]

MAP06: Cut Throat - Doomkid
Time: 11:55 (56:43) | Deaths: 0

Another decent offering from Doomkid, but not as strong as MAP05. Visually, it's more interesting than 05, because although it's got the same oldschool minimalist look to it, it plays with more themes and different kinds of aesthetics. The COMPBLUE room was probably the best of these, and the big marble area at the end was the most out there, given that the rest of the map was a techbase.

For me the gameplay on HMP felt more difficult than MAP05, despite both monster counts and monster densities being lower here, though that said, this seemed to have a bigger proportion of mid-tier monsters, with plenty of Hell Knights, Mancubi and Revenants throughout the map, as well as several arch-viles, one of which nearly ruined my day at the end of the map, the bastard.
Once again, all the weapons were given out over the course of the map, though as a continuous player that's somewhat less relevant to me, but this time the BFG did come in handy for that room with like 10 knights and barons crammed into it, which was fun to atomise with a couple of BFG blasts. Also relied on it again to get through the marble area without much problem, I remember having a nasty time the last time I was there, and maybe it's not as extreme as it was, but that area in general was a close call for me.

It might be down to the higher proportion of mid-tiers, though I honestly can't truly figure out why, that this map just felt like it was missing something that made MAP05 really shine. I generally enjoyed this map like any other good map, but when doing these write-ups, maps by the same authors are usually compared to each other, and this just doesn't stack up to MAP05. The only real annoyance for me in this map was that I found two of the three secrets, I think they were both blurspheres, and there's enough mancubi in this map that really I just wished I hadn't found them. I think everyone here knows that mancubi + blurspheres don't mix well :P

As I've only seen nerfed MAP09 in UV and on multiplayer I'm not sure what I'll make of that map when we get to it, but I think it's very possible that Doomkid's best map in Threnody was the first one we played, but I'll stay open-minded.

7/10

[rehelekretep]

rdwpa said:

Bonus video for map06. A RJ that skips all three keys, at the cost of a tough ammo-sparse finish.

Spoiler

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a8oI6PkjXUA

[Tristan]

MAP07: Fort Halderman - Gothic
Time: 16:55 (01:13:38) | Deaths: 0

Ah, Control.mid. "I can handle this on my own," but that's not much at all to brag about with this map.

This looks like it might have been loosely inspired by Crater from Evilution, but that wasn't a Halderman map so it's probably coincedence. The biggest map so far, both in size and in monster count, starting out with 269 I think on HMP, but most of this is lower-tiers, and even the mid-tiers that show up later on are completly nulled by the fact this map just offers acres of open space. Every projectile can be dodged with ease, and hitscanners are often far away enough at first that they're of little threat. So basically, the largest map so far is one of the easiest, but this at least comes with the advantage that if you're someone who tends not to save often - like me - you're probably not going to die anyway so there's little risk of having to start the entire thing all over again.
It's not the fastest paced gameplay either, so it all really falls under the banner of not necessarily boring, but not particularly exciting either. Combined with a quite disconnected layout in that you'll likely have to traverse massive empty areas a few times means that sadly this map is the worst so far, where gameplay is concerned. Used to have a massive issue with getting lost in this map in early playthroughs, but it was less of an issue here.

The highlight of the gameplay for me is the red key fight, which utilises conveyor belts in a way that we see very rarely, by which I essentially mean that they're actually IN the map and not ferrying voodoo dolls in some elaborate Doomified breakfast machine :P
I had quite a lot of fun with this fight by staying on the belt and picking off the monsters as they appeared out of the tunnel, and using the motion of the conveyor belt to help manoeuvre out of the way of some projectiles, which was particularly effective when the revenant showed up. One thing I would criticise about this fight is that on a first play it's very easy to not notice the monsters coming from behind you and you end up sodding off to some other region of the map looking for the red key, not realising it too had come out of the tunnel with the monsters that you didn't notice. Ugh, took me ages to figure that one out when I first played, and I was pretty confused when I eventually returned there and found it.
The other highlight would be charging the spider mastermind with the BFG. I used to able to consistently 1-shot them, but it always seems to take 2 nowadays, weirdly. Lost a bit of a health in my outburst of Leeroyism, but that room was full of it anyway.

Fort Halderman does have a very nice visual theme going for it though, as we now shift to a nighttime theme, and it's captured very well here with a great contrast between a brightly lit techbase with some strong TNT vibes and big rocky expanses in the dark outdoors, and I guess that's where my Crater comparison ultimately stems from, and it's simple enough in concept that actually it is likely a coincedence. A pretty great looking map, I just wish the gameplay was there to support that.

6/10

Uh oh, dobu map up next, prepare for deaths.

[gaspe]

Memfis said:

It's maybe a bit worrying that so far I haven't encountered a single map with, like, truly cool gameplay. But it's a community project so there is always hope. Or maybe I can just choose to not play further? Hmm... I IDCLEVed a bit, and it seems like most later maps are complex, highly detailed, and have fights mostly in large areas rather than small ones. Yeah, I'll probably stop here. I'm too old-fashioned for these 5000 sector maps with hunderds of enemies, this is not how I see Doom, or TNT, or Ty Halderman's style.

I suggest you to stay at least for MAP08 and MAP09, maybe you'll find something more appealing. I liked the maspet on the whole but I think those are the most interesting maps for the gameplay, on the other hand I can't say I enjoyed so much MAP12 and MAP19.

[Memfis]

No thanks, not really interested in playing dobu's map... Don't like this messy visual style with frequent weird use of ugly iwad textures (reminds me of Going Down - not a good sign).

rileymartin said:

I'm interested in what you find to be truly cool gameplay since you've been the most critical of this wad so far.

I don't know, when playing some of these maps I had this feeling that monsters exist to slow down my progress rather than to entertain me. Like there are time sinks placed all over the levels that you have to endure in order to get to the good parts. For imo cool gameplay maybe try Escape From Deimos. Anyway, I think we should shut up about me.

[baja blast rd.]

The DWmegawad Club plays: 32 ILs selected by Memfis

[baja blast rd.]

rehelekretep said:

[/spoiler]Kraflab is doing some runs of this so I suggest you get in fast unless you want him to 'steal' this trick :p

It's not such a big deal. 4shock will get the best time if he wants it anyway.

Eris Falling said:

my outburst of Leeroyism

LOL

[Steve D]

Map05 – Nukevil by Doomkid

I love the way this map started. It was like playing one of my own maps. ;) Yeah, give me an evil start with hitscanners, and plenty of 'em, on my plane and above, from multiple angles, and I'm happy. I'm also usually dead, but I die happy. ;D The Arachnotron did a great job anchoring the combat, because not only is it a vicious beast you must avoid until you build your firepower, it also takes up a lot of room and dominates the open area. My first death showed that best pathing was to run around it, get that Sergeant on the other end towards the back, and use his single-shotty to get the Chaingunner, and use his Chaingun to kill spiderbaby.

You also had to be careful of all the dribblers that came out from the far door, including a Baron who seemed to materialize out of nowhere as I was killing those overhead snipers behind the midtexture. And watch out when it comes to running recklessly through that door, with 2 Revvies in the corner to your right. I actually died when I ran back out, thinking I'd eluded a homing rocket, only to turn around and catch it right in the face. Note to self: make tighter turns next time. ;)

Unfortunately, that area was the highlight of the map for me. Before you can say Jackie Robinson, I was armed to the teeth and looking through a fence near the blue door after wiping out a herd of zombies with my Chaingun. There I was, scratching my head and saying, "WTF?" as I rocketed Cacos and a Pain Elemental who were nothing more than helpless victims because they couldn't fly over the fence. Isn't there a way to make a fence so these things can fly over it?

I was now in the ultra-easy part of the map, which is every part except the beginning. Doomkid says that Chris Hansen had him tone down these maps, but the way this one went, I want to see Doomkid Unchained!

You have to keep in mind that I'm not a strategic player, so it never occurred to me that the fun way to attack this map is behind your PG or BFG, spamming cells all over the place as you fry hordes of enemies. I'm so accustomed to hoarding my hi-test ammo because I'm thinking with this many cells there must be Cybs around somewhere. But there aren't, only easy, mostly shooting gallery combat, so to me this map seemed . . . weird. :D

Doomkid was also too kind in giving alternate ways to attack an area. Don't have a key for the red door? No problem, just take that side path down to the water and kill every one of those jagoffs up there on the ledge, plus the Pinkies and Cacos, too! Well, not all of the jagoffs, because there was a corner alcove with some bad guys and an Archie, so suddenly my BFG found itself useful. Indeed, that time I charged in so fast I was damaged by barrels I set off with my plasma. ;D

Aside from enough ammo to win The Battle of Kursk, this map had enough health to open its own field hospital. Want a Soulsphere? Be my guest. A Blue Armor, too? It's yours. I have to admit I never figured out the secret Soulsphere until I reached the exit and opened DB2 so I could grab it and kill that Sarge before leaving. The other 6 secrets were all quite easy. I'll admit that I didn't understand the God sphere. When I saw that Invuln behind the red bar, the area screamed, "Cheese me!" So I did, unloading on the monsters in the other room with my Chaingun and killing a bunch of them. I later grabbed the Invuln to beef up my secret count. Remember, I'm watching the monster count dropping and I say to myself, "I'm getting closer and closer to that Cyb!" So I saved the sphere for later, a later that never came.

I liked the look of the map. Some nicely-shaped rooms with oldschool texturing along with some detailing ideas I'm going to rip off. ;)

There were irritations. Doors – other than key doors – which don't open tend to bother me and I wish they were bars instead. The single most irritating door was the one that had to be opened with an overhead switch, and which closed again. That should have stayed open.

In the end, this was, to my eyes, a peculiar but pleasant map, proudly oldschool in its aesthetic. I think it's less oldschool in its gameplay, which I would describe as "Doomkid School" gameplay, because it seems very individual and quirky and not something you could pin down as, for example, a '90s style. I was around in the '90s, after all, and I don't remember a lot of maps which played like this. So it's pretty unique, in my experience. I would have preferred a more flowy layout and more viciousness – like the beginning – and fewer Archies.

[yakfak]

which ever level does the Wormhole tribute recasting the place as a garage and industrial yard is bloody fantastic. watching Suitepee complain his way through it was kinda intolerable because he totally wrote off how explorative and well-designed and playful the map was because he got lost and then died a bunch (cue repeated rant about how blind Doom streaming isn't the best way to showcase Doom)

give that designer a Cacoward

[Tristan]

That would be Wormhell by Z0k and Fonze (MAP12). I've seen that one criticised a fair bit already, so that'll be another map I look forward to seeing people's thoughts on, as I remember quite enjoying it.

[Fonze]

SteveD said:

Map05 – Nukevil by Doomkid

Unfortunately, that area was the highlight of the map for me. Before you can say Jackie Robinson, I was armed to the teeth and looking through a fence near the blue door after wiping out a herd of zombies with my Chaingun. There I was, scratching my head and saying, "WTF?" as I rocketed Cacos and a Pain Elemental who were nothing more than helpless victims because they couldn't fly over the fence. Isn't there a way to make a fence so these things can fly over it?

Yes, with boom you can make a raised invisible floor with midtexture at the same height to serve as a fence; didy and I did this a couple times in 19. The problem with this is that the while the fence would look like bars, it would in fact be 100% solid; no projectiles or hitcans would pass through. Otoh, with a tiny bit more time invested, that fence could be easily made up of many invisible bars poking up to the correct heights.

yakfak said:

which ever level does the Wormhole tribute recasting the place as a garage and industrial yard is bloody fantastic. watching Suitepee complain his way through it was kinda intolerable because he totally wrote off how explorative and well-designed and playful the map was because he got lost and then died a bunch (cue repeated rant about how blind Doom streaming isn't the best way to showcase Doom)

Yeah, go figure one of the designers of this level was a fan of (Spidersilk) your most recent map's "Painful and Stupid" difficulty level, heh; featuring extra pain elementals!

give that designer a Cacoward

Hey; thanks! Lol. I know a lot of people are gonna be put off by the level; it seems mean and is long. Indeed, some encounters are set up to punish players for retreating; every one was designed to be fought then and there, where it happens, but that's partly the reason HMP doesn't include the Hell dimension. UV is also much more rocket-centric, which is another thing I know many players will not like. Difficulty levels are there for a reason! That said, WormHell's bark is far worse than its bite, or at least that was the intent ;D

I'm enjoying reading the experiences of players with this map set thus far; it's an interesting perspective having gotten to see these maps during development and seeing how they turned out in the end. Given I'd love to run through this map set again, I might try to catch up this month if I can make the time, assuming that wouldn't be tacky of me. Idk lol, I gotta think about that.

[Suitepee]

https://www.twitch.tv/johnsuitepee/v/93573739 = part 3 of my playthrough, covering the rest of map 12 followed by maps 13-17. (UV, pistol starts)

Wormhell was tough and confusing, but I made it out alive in the end. (liked the Ty tribute) The rest of the maps covered in this part were pretty decent as well.

PCorf's map 13 was certainly a nice break after the last two complex maps as a short breather.
Liberation's debut(?) map 14 was pretty good on the visual & atmospheric front, but lacked some bite in its gameplay, particularly in the final skirmish.
Didy's map 15 was architectural fun (as expected); reminded me a bit of Monster Hunter Ltd 1.
A somewhat pointless Cyberdemon in map 16 I felt, but otherwise an alright map.
And a nice Morrowind tribute from Angry Saint in map 17 to close the stream off! Wasn't a big fan of the prop mess for the final encounter though.

I've been told that map 19 is quite something, so with 3 maps to go I'm expecting......something big.......

[baja blast rd.]

Map08: Fightnancial Crisis at Enwrong

I feel this could have used some SS Nazis. How often do you hear that?

Really cool design everywhere. Creativity! My favorite parts were the car garage (lol), the skyscrapers overlooking the outdoor area, and the little Hitler area. It does remind me of Going Down, or a yakfak map, but it is definitely a dobu map, which you can tell from the way that it is. Texture combinations are quite garish, but I get the sense that it's deliberately garish, and that dobu was like, "Mwahaha, what silly texture combination can I use next?!?!".

I was afraid of this map from the reactions in the THT blind race over at the DW speedrunning community's Discord. I can handle tough combat, and I can handle progression puzzles, but both, at the same time? Noooo! Thankfully, the combat was quite sedate, though, leaving enough mental space to marvel at the intricacy of the layout (seemed like half of the rooms could be approached from multiple directions) and the various cool areas. The teleporter maze wasn't very difficulty to navigate either, at a casual pace.

Maps with a lot of secrets always run the risk of gratuitousness, *cough* speaking from experience *cough*, but most of them were clever or interesting in some way. I particularly like the last one that lets you let off some of the steam in the exit fight, but the means of unlocking it is very odd in its obscurity, humping a panel that doesn't even have a switch sound. Anyway, here is a casual UV-max, a lot slower paced than the rest of the demos because I constantly had to think "Okay, what do I do next?" even after a -nomo practice run. All of the moving floors are hilariously cacophonous, especially at the intersection of the array of little cubes and some other automated insanity.

[rehelekretep]

map07 - fda here

a bit of a breather after 05 & 06 - a doom-racer level :D

all jokes aside this is a wide open map, with a lot of nice touches (awesome RK conveyor belt!) but im not a big fan of wide open maps like this in doom. it almost feels absurd racing around at 40 mph through these caverns etc.

i also got lost a bit, par for the course but the extra distance between everything makes it more onerous.

top midi, again

[rehelekretep]

rdwpa said:

Map08: Fightnancial Crisis at Enwrong

I feel this could have used some SS Nazis. How often do you hear that?

Really cool design everywhere. Creativity! My favorite parts were the car garage (lol)

[Steve D]

Map06 – Cut Throat by Doomkid

An apt title. An equally apt title would be, Knife In Back, because this map had so many monsters popping out of odd corners behind you.

I much preferred Nukevil to this map, with its many strange features. Like the Light Amp secret. Why? This was either not really thought out, or it was deliberately designed to leave players disoriented when they went past the blue door. I just opened a save and left the goggles for later so I could fill my secret quota – got all of them this time. ;)

This one looks more like a '90s map thanks to its themeless texturing. It didn't bother me, but it resulted in a less cohesive feeling than what one otherwise expects, with the GStone room seeming genuinely out of place.

But let's start at the start. I liked the opening where you run for the Chaingun – and get immediately chaingunned by overhead snipers. :D Oddly enough, I didn't hate the all-too-common-nowadays Rocket Launcher Auto-Select Trolling. After all, I did this myself in 1996, inspired by Antoni Chan doing it, and both maps ended up in the same megawad. And then for a long time it seems I never saw this kind of thing again, until Skillsaw did it multiple times in Ancient Aliens – albeit softly for the most part – and Foodles dipped into this well several times in Estranged. The Rocket Launcher Auto-Select Troll is really one of the most despicable things mappers can do to players, because the whole point is to either get that "Good at Doom!" suicide, or force the player to select another weapon, thus putting them through two selection cycles while they're open to attack. So it's a dick move, plain and simple. And of course we mappers chuckle over that. ;D

And to give credit where credit is due, Doomkid really piled on the dickishness here. This is one of the most vicious auto-select trolls I've seen. A lot of these trolls rely on putting demons up in your grill, and Doomkid has them, but he also uses a Caco and – perhaps the ultimate terror weapon for this troll – a Pain Elemental! Skillsaw did the same in one of his Ancient Aliens maps, but it was farther away and you had cover. No cover here, baby! And to top it off, you have trees to get stuck on, and 3 Sergeants spread out so you can't kill them with rocket splash, and Imps on ledges, and Imps behind you in a barred area. Oh, this was painful! :D What made it even more painful soon became a theme for this map – the RNG hated me. I mean like I had raped its mother or something. As a general rule, I can take out 2 Sergeants with 1 single shotty blast if they're reasonably close. We're talking about an 85% success rate on that. But in this fight, no matter how much I savescummed, NEVER!!!!! :D So I always took at least 1 shotgun blast, with no armor, which set me up for disaster. Then you have the 3 Sergeants that get revealed once you grab the RL, and with a PE and Caco flying, it's hard to hit them because auto-aim was designed by a sadist who decided that anything which flies is the priority target, even if something more immediately dangerous is right in front of you. Aaaaaaaarrrrgggggghhhhhhh!!!!!!!!

So for me, this was by far the most challenging encounter of the megawad up to this point. I can't say I enjoyed this fight because IMO it's meta-gamey in using the engine against you, but I do admire the sheer audacity of its nastiness. Bravo!

The rest of the map IMO suffered from crampy spaces, lack of open-field combat, and far too many single encounters with Archies, which again became all the more onerous because right up through the blue key Archie I couldn’t get even one flinch. After that, every one of them flinched. Go figure. :D

Then came the GStone room, with heavy snipers overhead. "Time to pitch camp, kids." :D It was so slow, this room, right down to the 4-sided switch and all the little items you had to grab from all those little places.

I hardly know what to make of the BFG fight. I had to use my Plasma Gun on a mass of Nobles, and ultimately killed all but 1 monster prior to getting that BFG. What? You get a BFG and then immediately exit the map? Where's my Cyb? :D Okay, it's not a rule that acquiring the BFG mandates a Cyb fight, so how about trash mobs, or a bunch of Revvies, or anything? I guess it's obvious now that continuous play is the standard, either that or this is a joke, one I've already seen in BTSX E2.

I don't want to sound too harsh. I think that in terms of look and feel, Doomkid has really captured the Evilution vibe. Evilution was a rather odd mapset, IMO, with unusual rooms, strange encounters and sometimes freaky mechanics. Cut Throat has all of that. I also rate it as more difficult than Nukevil because you had to fight so many Archies up close without a BFG and usually in situations not conducive to SSG work, so it was try to get a flinch with the PG and usually, that didn’t happen. Hmmm, maybe I should have tried the SSG after all. It couldn't have been worse. ;D

In the end, this map limited my movement too much for me to really enjoy it, had encounters that were more sloggy than exciting, and used too many Archies for my taste.

[Tristan]

SteveD said:

Then came the GStone room, with heavy snipers overhead. "Time to pitch camp, kids." :D It was so slow, this room, right down to the 4-sided switch and all the little items you had to grab from all those little places.

What? You get a BFG and then immediately exit the map?

That's an unfortunate order of tackling things, the BFG made the marble area much more fun, yet still pretty tight. But I guess this kind of thing is inevitable when it's not forced into a linear progression :I

--

MAP08: Fightnancial Crisis at Enwrong - dobu gabu maru
Time: 18:37 (01:32:15) | Deaths: 0

Hah, survived! There's hope for my Ironman performances yet.
To be fair there seems to be massive difference between UV and HMP with this map, or perhaps it's just the continuous play helping me out, but I tried this out on ZDaemon recently solo and it was incredibly difficult to beat, took several attempts, but I guess there's also co-op monsters to consider in that context too. So could this be, an only mildly difficult dobu map? Do those normally exist?

The first time I played Threnody I think I skipped this one after dying on the damaging floors here and being promptly covered in salt consequently, but it was my own fault really, there's enough of those ! RADIATION ! signs to convey the message, provided the player actually pays attention.
Aesthetically the strangest map in the set, and feels very much like something out of Going Down. Some areas look kind of ugly, but there's enough nicer looking areas, including the big radiation floor room that it balances out. What I know of dobu maps is that they definitely stand out visually, but I don't think I've seen anything quite like this from him before, compare this to say Astral Nausea from 50shades, or the collab with cannonball in NOVA II.

Gameplay, as I mentioned earlier was way easier than I expected. Ammo in particular seemed pretty generously given out, and health was always enough to keep me above 50, but the map is not without its tight spots, and I imagine the difficulty is orders of magnitude higher if you're doing this from a pistol start (have fun guys), but as I was expecting to be completely sodomised by this map, I did play very carefully, so I can't really comment too much on the pacing, but I enjoyed it enough. What I did find strange is that I never found switch 2 in the 1-2-3 puzzle, and I wasted a bit of time looking for it as I was under the impression it was mandatory to complete the map. What's stranger is that I found it no problem just a few days ago in that ZDaemon server and I still haven't a clue where it is and what it's ultimately for. And how did I manage to find switch 3 before it? Is my memory deteriorating already? Damn it dobu :D
The first time I properly played this map, I fell into an inescapable pit at some crossroad type of junction in the map, which was kinda lame, and I expect I'm not the only one who fell for it at first. I guess at least it's not that easy to actually fall in to, but I'd still rather it wasn't there in the first place.

Anyway, after the apparently optional 1-2-3 segment, there's another puzzle which you do need to get the all-important yellow key. It confused me at first because I thought I was getting randomly teleported to different parts of this two-tier maze-like section, and then I noticed the teleporters are marked with strips of grey tiles running across the blue floor. While in this section you go in to a side-room with many barrels, which can gib a crowd of unfortunately positioned zombies, and take down a hell knight (or an arch-vile on UV, I believe) in a mere second. Cool stuff. The other thing that got my attention here is the corridor which leads to some seemingly small and inaccessible hellish room containing a dormant IoS. I still wonder if that's anything to do with a secret area or it's just for decoration, either way it looks cool. Regards secrets, there's a grand total of 12 on offer, but I only found 2 :( I guess the standard approach of a computer panel or slightly different texture or hidden switch is much more likely to go unnoticed in a map with such a crazy look to it, and anything more elaborate than that and I'm probably never going to find it without looking in the map editor anyway :P Maybe at some point I'll come back to this map and look properly for them, because 10 missed secrets makes it feel like I've missed a huge chunk of the map.

Definitely a map that will stick in the memory, and for some it may well be the map that first springs to mind when they think of Threnody. Not my favourite of the set, but part of me expected not to have a good time here, and happily, that turned out not to be the case.

8/10

[Steve D]

Eris Falling said:

That's an unfortunate order of tackling things, the BFG made the marble area much more fun, yet still pretty tight. But I guess this kind of thing is inevitable when it's not forced into a linear progression :I

It was more of a "savescummers order of tackling things." ;D I did go to the BFG room first, opened the room with 16 tons of Nobles -- and whaddaya get (sorry!) -- said, "I don't want any part of this right now," opened a save and went to the GStone room. I had the PG, the RL and plenty of ammo. Arachnotrons killed 2 Mancs for me, I used rockets on all the Revvies and overhead Mancs, and PG on the Hell Knights. What really slowed things down was taking out the Imps with single shotty. I suppose the BFG would have helped a bit, not sure how much. I just reckon that if I have a BFG, I want a BIG fight out in the open, not a bunch of heavy perched snipers. Then again, I have a well-known antipathy to that kind of setup. I admit my prejudices. ;)

[Doomkid]

SteveD said:

I was now in the ultra-easy part of the map, which is every part except the beginning. Doomkid says that Chris Hansen had him tone down these maps, but the way this one went, I want to see Doomkid Unchained!

:)

Be warned, the word "work" is right there in the title. Take that as you will!

[Steve D]

Doomkid said:

:)

Be warned, the word "work" is right there in the title. Take that as you will!

Challenge accepted, Doomkid! And my, what a wimpy first map -- that I died 3 times in. ;D

I'll keep you posted through PMs.

Now, if you wanna pick on me, head on over to the Shotgun Symphony thread and sound off on those horrendous maps. ;D

Edit: You can always wait for the official idgames version, of course. It seems that testing has shown the need for some changes . . .