The DWmegawad Club plays: Moonblood (it's our 5 year anniversary, golly!)

[Grain of Salt]

+++ Stardate 20x7, Crumpets, Rush

[Spectre01]

^ Incoming discord raid from the usual suspects.

[Nine Inch Heels]

^You got that right

 

+++ Stardate 20x7, Crumpets, Rush

[NuMetalManiak]

+++ Newgothic 1, Equinox

 

I changed my side to the side to the side.

[Nine Inch Heels]

3 minutes ago, NuMetalManiak said:

I changed my side to the side to the side.

You mean the side of the other side's side, or rather the actual side of the aformentioned side of the other side's side?

[rehelekretep]

+++ Stardate 20x7, Crumpets, Rush

ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

[Deadwing]

I'm probably not going to play next month, so please record some videos haha :D

 

+++ Stardate 20x7, Crumpets, Rush

[dobu gabu maru]

Guys, it's time for +++ Hell Revealed 2!!!!!.... guys?

[rehelekretep]

i honestly would vote for HR2; it intrigues me

[SleepyVelvet]

iirc Map25ish is where moonblood started being more enjoyable on HMP instead of UV for me.  Just a note for those who are hitting a wall.

[Salt-Man Z]

+++ NDCP (because I love it so)

[galileo31dos01]

I would like to see other people share their thoughts about Eviltech here sometime, as it would serve as a guide for players.

 

Now for the obvious future winner, a contribution by me:

 

+++ Stardate 20/7, Trumpets, Push

[antares031]

+++ Hell Revealed 2

[Magnusblitz]

MAP25 | E5-5: Helltown

95% kills, 0/3 secrets

 

Like last map, despite the theme, doesn't feel much different from some of the middle maps. This could've slotted right next to MAP13, for example. The main mechanic at work here is the cyberdemon that teleports from place to place, stalking the player around the map. I actually found him quite easy to ignore and didn't even end up killing him, although he does teleport around pretty accurately. What really stood out for me was the post blue-key fight, pretty good use of lighting and fear-inducing encounter there. The rest of the map was pretty forgettable though, feeling so similar to what we've seen before.

[Spectre01]

8 hours ago, rehelekretep said:

i honestly would vote for HR2; it intrigues me

Hope you like shooting hordes of Barons with an SSG! I'm cool with the 20x7 etc. vote though.

[TheOrganGrinder]

MAP25, E5-5: Helltown

 

I'd like to echo @Magnusblitz's sentiment that this feels like a map from the midsection of the WAD; in particular, aside from some elements of its texture scheme, this wouldn't feel out of place as the bigger, tougher brother to MAP13 or MAP15, with a similar sense of the whole thing functioning as a single cityscape playground with enough windows that, even when you duck into a building in search of cover, supplies, or a clue to progression, you're never truly safe from outdoor menaces.  And what menaces they are!  There's no shortage of snipers waiting to reach out and touch you from halfway across the map along unexpected lines of fire, and of course there's that pesky teleporting Cyberdemon who can follow you around wherever he pleases to rain rockets on the unwary, the careless, or the distracted.  The map's fairly generous with health and green armour, and I think that's a good thing since this is a level where mistakes can quickly become very costly.  Honestly the double arch-vile doorstop encounter on the way out of the blue key room and the revenant dance party right before the exit were more memorable and threatening encounters to me than the Cyberdemon's antics.

 

One thing I'd observe is that the secret areas felt somewhat backloaded; I don't believe any of them are accessible under the player has retrieved the blue key, and in terms of playing time and kill count I'd put that at about two-thirds of the way through the level.  Which isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but compared to how the WAD has treated secrets so far I spent a fair bit of time with a worry at the back of my mind that I'd been blundering along missing things that were right under my nose.  It's a way of changing things up, if nothing else.

[Capellan]

MAP22

Another map where I mostly just kept poking in corners, without much sense of what I was accomplishing, until I stumbled across some new area and made my way to it.  The exceptions to this are the keys, obviously, which are good sign posts to the next area you have to visit.  Speaking of which, I quite like that Moonblood often has multiple, separated keys doors of the same kind, as it's a nice variation from the common trope and makes things a bit less linear, since you don't know if you need to do one or both of them to progress.

 

Although I spent a lot of time not really sure what I was accomplishing, I still had fun with this map, as the moment by moment action was pretty enjoyable.  Lots of revvies, of course, but sensibly not in places where they could dominate the map's wide open spaces.

[NuMetalManiak]

11 hours ago, Nine Inch Heels said:

You mean the side of the other side's side, or rather the actual side of the aformentioned side of the other side's side?

it won't matter as long as there is fish and pizza involved.

 

8 hours ago, Salt-Man Z said:

+++ NDCP (because I love it so)

thank god it's not the sequel. I actually hated NDCP2 but really enjoyed most of NDCP1

 

MAP25 Helltown

 

Surprisingly enough we still have the city sort-of theme going on with this map. And just when it was over with. This one got hard quick too. There's no place to hide from the 103 or so monsters fought here, especially from teleporting cyberdemon who thankfully isn't too unpleasant, but there to make your life the way it should be. Also the blue key area's crushers are made to work in anyone's favor. My goal here was as simple as it ought to be, maniakally running around taking out whoever I can with as much firepower possible, a strategy that works any day. The last building got pretty hard, like "fighting the horde of revenants from Monster Condo" except there you could've used an invulnerability in that fight. This level doesn't contain one, so it's still pretty nasty. A worthy challenge all the same though.

[DAZZER]

MAP23: The Archipelago

Time: 11:52

 

You start in a red hell rock mountain landscape with different caves, temples and tech bases around. It's not easy every time to find your way or to know what you have to do next. But I kinda liked that. The Fights were sometimes hard and other times easy. You have to be careful not to fall over the cliff cause everything is surrounded by lava and Teleporters which get you back up are rare x) Running out of Munition is pretty much impossible in this Map. Everytime I had 80 or more Shotgun Shots left I found an Box of Shells. Plasma Cells are also not rare which is good cause I used the BFG often in this one. Especially against the Spider Mastermind at the End. You get 2 Soulsspheres very easy and so you most of the time have over 100 % Health. I also love it how in this Map you see nearly no Revenants haha. I guess the author knew most people would have enough of them after the previous level ;)

[Demtor]

 

MAP25 - "Helltown"

gzDoom - UV – pistol start/saves

 

This seemed a lot like map 13 “The Village” to me. Just on steroids with a very harsh looking red bricked starting area and a teleporting cyberdemon that can really catch you off guard if you aren’t careful. Boy did it feel good being able to scrape together enough plasma to finally take care of him.

 

Oh dear. Didn’t see that coming.

 

I noticed the bloody bodies displayed on the walls in maps before this but they really stood out to me here. I don’t know (or can’t remember) if the texture on the left is new a texture art or what but it sure is gruesomely awesome. Much like the sort of dead body shrine around the corner. You can easily imagine the pink demons feeding on them.

 

I played 3/4’s this map without finding the RL. Ugh. It’s even out in the open begging to be picked up. Oh well. I managed.

 

I really enjoyed the “L” shaped tunnel you jump down in to with the crushers and thin pillars for cover that goes dark and unleashes a pack of AV’s and a baron once you reached the end. Quite a remarkable setting for a such a deadly encounter. Perhaps the crushers should be faster though? They seemed quite useless but I suppose with the brain texture they were more decorative and atmospheric than they were meant to be effective.

 

The end fight was pretty crazy. Nice to see the BFG having a real purpose here though the gracious amount of rocket ammo came in handy as well. Is this possibly the largest grouping of one enemy in this wad so far? You don’t see hordes of anything used in these maps. Zombies don’t really have a large presence to mow down. Which is a shame. Perhaps the imps in the caves on MAP19 - "Obstructed Zone" would outnumber the revs here. Kind of crazy to see this many rocket skeletons at once. In any case, a very fun fight in a very sparkling hellish looking enclosure with baron snipers and a manc turret.

 

These later maps have no two exits alike. Considering the first few episodes were very vanilla, I like them more than I normally would.

 

Tough open spaced map that was a lot of fun to run around in between varying spots of intense fights. Nicely done.

[riderr3]

MAP24
Starting area feels dead-simplish in some ways, monsters start to shoot me from all directions. RL is helping me here.
In the south part of map there is some catwalks, and player must come close to evil eye to reach the yellow key further.
Cyberdemon guards the red key. And I stuck in this area until I found the switch for lift operating.
Lost souls coming from small closets reminds me Well of Souls from Plutonia.
Invulnerability sphere is very useful to fight with 2 archviles and mastermind.

MAP25
Whew... shotted in the back instantly.
This map have almost no safe places, so it is need to clear every new area.
I got rocket in the face by cyberdemon. But he can be killed by circlestrafing, around his pedestal.
The roaming revenants here is more bigger threat than cyberdemon.
I knew there will be serious ambush in crushers area. Also, getting berserk secret needs moving very fast between those crushers.
Blue door is again hidden in the dark.

[riderr3]

+++ Hell Revealed 2

[NuclearPotato]

Oops, fell behind again.  One of these days I'll manage to complete a MegaWAD club writeup in a timely manner. :P  Thankfully this time it was because of school starting up; let's keep going from where I left off.

 

MAP10 - Toxic Treatment Lab
95/99 kills, 1/4 secrets

While the last level was probably my least favorite of the set so far, this one might be my favorite.  Like the much maligned trap in Delta Labs, this level uses hurt floors extensively, the key difference here that makes for a fun level being that you have this wide open, deceptively non-linear level out in front of you (and no timed switches to make navigation a pain in the ass).  It helps that there's a copious amount of rad suits spread out throughout the level to keep the chance of getting melted to death low, with the level preferring to let the enemies do that job.  Once more, blind corners and monster closets are the weapon of choice for Deadwing's monsters to do their dirty work, with the latter being especially prevalent on this map.  While the fights are intense throughout, the award for meanest trap on the map goes to the final encounter, where three monster closets open up in an enclosed space.  The pinkies in the rear trap nearly killed me when I tried to make my escape; luckily I had left a few medkits behind in the level for retrieval.

 

As for the map of choice for next month, I'm going to pull a wild card out of my ass and vote for +++ZPack.  You're probably asking yourself, "Nuke, why on earth would you vote for ZPack?  NOBODY wants to remember ZPack."

 

I will tell you why.

 

I decided to look through the list of WADs that have been done over the past 5 years or so, and while we have done all manner of maps, large to small, atmospheric to slaughtery, professional to amature, we have never, EVER, done a mapset that requires ZDoom to run in all that time.  The closest the MegaWAD Club has done to that end is stuff like No End in Sight, which had a couple of ZDoom exclusive levels. No full ZDoom megaWADs, and certainly none that attempt to show off the tricks exclusive to ZDoom that ZPack tries to do.  (Whether it does that well, of course, is a matter of discussion, which is the whole point of a club like this, I reckon).  In addition, there's almost certainly a number of maps that could use some reassessment as to whether or not they're worthy of being remembered (Who remembers that Skillsaw did some maps for this?).  But let's be honest, doing this is really the only way we'll ever get to talk about Thunderpeak, and that's a worthy enough reason in and of itself.

[antares031]

MAP26 - Coliseum
ZDoom, UV - PS, KIS(%): 100/100/66

 

Obviously inspired by the ancient amphitheatre, as you can see from the name. You start the level from the bottom of the arena, where you can grab some helpful items. Pressing the button will let you show yourself to the crowd; some mid-tier monsters and a few imps afar. Most of monsters are not that difficult to deal with, if you don't play carelessly and grab other weapons to use, like a super shotgun. The difficult parts are, not surprisingly, related to arch-viles. Like the MAP20, about 1 of 10 monsters in this level are arch-viles. So expect to see at least one of them before you grab a skull key, especially the blue one. Nice concept, cool non-linear layout, annoying arch-viles, a pretty good level to finish the fifth episode.

[Capellan]

MAP23

Another 'open space' level.  Sniper pressure was considerably more intense here than on the last map: more of them, often from much wider angles, and less room to dodge.

 

The map looks nice and mostly plays well, though it has a couple of issues.  Firstly, the long raising times on some of the platforms means that action comes to a halt while you wait for them to come up.  Secondly, the mastermind fight is something of a waste of time.  I SSGed the poor helpless schmuck.

 

There's good use of lost souls here, though.  Assuming "being really annoying bastards" was the intended use, anyway!

 

[Capellan]

MAP24

With the exception of the ridiculous way you get the yellow key (seriously, just put a frickin' switch there.  A blinky light and a decoration is for secrets, not core progression) this was a pretty fun map.  It eschewed the more open style of the last couple of entries to give us a mostly tunnel and room experience, though some of those were pretty big spaces themselves.

 

The cyber fight can be cheesed relatively easy if you expect a trap - and with a juicy key stuck out in the open like that, why wouldn't you?  I slipped inside the red door, went upstairs, and pointed and laughed at old bullface as he futilely pounded the wall with rockets.  Then I killed him.

 

The invuln makes the spiderdemon set-piece completely harmless as an actual battle, but on the other hand it is gonzo fun, and there is something to be said for that.

 

The exterior areas needed more cacos.  But what map doesn't need more flying tomato monsters, really?

 

[riderr3]

MAP26
Well, my megawad have coliseum map too, but this have more complex design.
There are different height elevations in this map and monsters scattered around many ledges.
The overall gameplay of this map feels plutonic in many cases.
Last fight with lost souls are fun, I even telefragged a PE.
My only complains is the yellow key obtaining when touching flaming skulls object. Because I collected armor bonuses earlier than platform rises, so I wandered a little more.

[Spectre01]

MAP12 - "Mining Site"

Large and open outdoor/subterranean map with a rather hot start and plenty of wrong turns to take early on. Once you get your core weapons, progression becomes much easier. I liked the 'Tron trap after grabbing the blue key from the bottom of the quarry, although it felt like it was sprung a bit too late as I was half-way out by the time they appeared.

 

MAP13 - "The Village"

Abstract hellish city-type map with a good degree of freedom and another rude start until you grab the SSG. That caged Hell Knight in the first building seems to be there to pilfer 8 valuable shells from you and nothing more. The surprise Cyberdemon was also a bit of a headscratcher, mainly because I didn't have sufficient ammo to kill him with and using rockets on boss monsters always feels wasteful.

[Capellan]

MAP25

I dealt with the cyberdemon on this map by just plasma-hosing him while standing to the south of the eastern pedestal.  That approach pretty much insures he won't teleport away, though I won't pretend I figured that out by some clever observation.  I more or less just got lucky :)

 

This is a mostly nice looking map, though some of the scrolling textures don't seem to tile properly which is a bit distracting at times.  The action felt generally quite manageable to me, though the map can generate a surprising amount of pressure with a relatively low total monster count.  On the other hand, the exit area just felt like standard revenant-spam.  I pretty much ignored the monsters there to hit the necessary switches and run to the exit.  Took some damage in the process, but much less tiresome than actually fighting them.

 

[Spectre01]

MAP14 - "Hellish Shrine"

Aptly named, as the setting is, in fact, a hellish shrine. Cool puzzle intro with the player having to navigate a maze full of enemies with no weapons or ammo. This is also the first level where I didn't find any secrets, which I'm usually decent at.

 

MAP15 - "Decaying Industries"

Hardest map in the set so far and reminded me a lot of a condensed Urania level. The intro is interesting. You're given two rockets, after which you're promptly lowered into a rather nasty mess with Mancs, hitscanners and a pool of nukage. It's quite a mess but there's enough health around to recover from near-lethal damage. The bulk of the level is an open town area with perched snipers of every kind manning the buildings and cliffs around the perimeter. There's a right and a wrong way to play this part; the right one being to grab an early SSG. Guess which order I ended up doing things in? For some reason, there's an overabundance of green armour, with at least two that I happened to skip. On the other hand, there isn't enough health to accommodate all that armour so that part's a bit strange. The platforming puzzle to raise the secret exit bridge was cool, although the actual entrance ended up being a misaligned wall-hump near the normal way out. On that note, there were texture misalignments everywhere, which was visually jarring compared to Deadwing's generally polished visuals in earlier maps. Good map overall though.