Ten Years Continues: Part Three

fp again, man this is embarassing

Linguica said:

fp again, man this is embarassing

you win this round, trebek

Doomjr should have been on the infamous top ten.

Assmaster said:

Doomjr should have been on the infamous top ten.

I actually think the infamous top ten is the best list out of all of the ones we did. DoomJr is just a shitty WAD, that is nothing new really, however Cyb in his usual way went overboard and made it a shitty megawad. If it were to replace something it would be wow.wad and I think wow.wad is worse simply because it's so obviously retarded and worthless whereas doomjr shows a depressing amount of genuine albeit shoddy effort.

If it was top 11 I would have liked to have added dwango5 which would have been funny since it's listed as one of the best wads ever. Because really, dwango5 ruined casual deathmatching since every fucking server not running doom2 Map01/Map07 would be running dwango5 which isn't even really all that wonderful. I'd like to play some other WADs occasionally, hello?!

Should've had succubi.wad instead of Imp Encounter in the "infamous" section.

Oh, and Vrack/Vrack 3 (which are both better than Vrack 2) in 2000/2003 ;P

Wow, my "Congestion Control" made it into the Best 10 list of 2002! I am very much honoured by this!

It's nice to see an Espi map on the list, but Laitos was far cooler than Ruma imo.

<@SargeBaldy> ruma made the list
<@SargeBaldy> but laitos didn't
<@SargeBaldy> i always liked laitos a lot more heh
<Espi> So do I.
<Espi> Even the name means "ugly". :P

Osiris?

Vegeta said:

Osiris?

Kicked ass. Or so I remember it doing.

I think he was asking why it wasn't on the list.

Yay. Number 9 of 2003 r0x0rz! :P

Linguica said:

Because really, dwango5 ruined casual deathmatching since every fucking server not running doom2 Map01/Map07 would be running dwango5 which isn't even really all that wonderful. I'd like to play some other WADs occasionally, hello?!

Even though it's far from meeting most people's expectations, I'd like to recommend CGArena. It's not much, but it's all I've got to offer to those tired of the dwangos. In the spirit of Doomy goodness inspired by the 10 year anniversary, I'd suggest giving it a shot.

Chainsaws and Boomsticks is the best Deathmatch I've ever played. I reccomend it.

well all I can say is that it's really hard to pick 10 wads per year, especially in the later years where there were way more than 10 great wads per year. Off the top of my head stuff that could have been there (but wasn't) includes marine assault, community chest, rebirth, real world, southern cross gold... well the list goes on for a while.

If we had done a top 100 wads overall (ie, not ten per year), a good amount of the early wads from like 94 - 97 would not have been included because they simply show their age in terms of detail. While they may play as good (or better) as some wads out today, they certainly don't look as good, even vanilla maps. For instance compare one of the maps in TVR or Scythe with UAC_Dead or a map in Enigma.

At any rate there are some issues with the list, I'll admit, but for the most part I'm pretty happy with everything on it though there are some wads I wish I could add to it, and a few I'd like to remove, but you can't win them all I suppose.

edit: oh yeah call me crazy, but I really like ruma ;)

OK, maybe I missed it, but where the hell is Inferno, by Chris Lutz? How could you possibly forget it? It deserves a place somewhere on that list.

Anyway, I like the list. And I'm happy that my two favourites wads are there (DOOM 64 TC, and RTC-3057 demo).

It's nice to see that Ling agreed with me that Scythe is "cute". :-D

Overall, a great selection of WADs, guys! You overlooked almost none of my all-time favourites. All in all, a tremendous effort!

Kristian Ronge said:

Overall, a great selection of WADs, guys! You overlooked almost none of my all-time favourites. All in all, a tremendous effort!

Likewise, and it appears I have many recommendations to try soon, weeeee.

I'm glad it hit The Talosian Incident, thought that one would get overlooked. But I think Tantrum should have been in there (and there definitely was room in '95 for that, someone try actually playing Nostromo's Run) instead of sticking Tantrum 2 (which I didn't like as much anyway) in the '98 list, a year that had a lot to offer.

I also would have tossed Galaxia and put Dead Base or Mount Fire in '94, which I found were far more innovative (dummy sectors, teleports as fake ROR) than even UAC Dead in many respects, as well as being even older. There's quite a few other cases where things seemed not to have been included for being better, but rather for just being more played. License To Spell Doom being a primary case. If you look, it only has 3 1/2 stars on dw/idgames. By comparison, Motion 2 has 3 1/2 stars.

Oh yeah, and I agree with Fredrik that succubi.wad should have been on there instead of impsecx.wad. I also found it amusing Cyb released an updated copy of imp encounter specifically for the article. Why did you even bother marking it anonymous :P But on the whole it's a pretty good guide.

bloody hell all this doom@10 info is taking up my entire time and i've done no work at all today.

map:phobos (1998?) is rubbish, yeah it has some pretty fx but on every map i had no idea where to go next and on the second it took me forever to find the red/exit door (bloody hidden around the corner from the start) not to mention the repeated back and forth through pitch black twisty hilly caves argh

demos: that ocelot/BahdKo 50:3 map01 deathmatch spanking was great, i only wish i could have watched it from ocelot's POV. i LOVE the moment he dodges not one, not two but THREE consecutive BFG blasts by ducking behind walls at just the exact moment, classic.

ep1-0511: blimey!

every fucking compet-n speed/trick demo: wow!

i'm sure i had more feedback and critique but my friday has been a blur of doom and i cant pick out many particular moments. er, Romero's run through ep1 was pretty cool, also brought back some memories from my first play(s) through it too, more so than speed demos do.

thankyouthankyouthankyou for all your hard work compiling this lot guys, really


right, for the next two hours you'll find me watching nm30-4949 and the infamous 30nm6520, (though i'd be interested to hear more specific/in-depth details/theories and analysis of the cheatedness of it and it's brethren)

cycloid: "blimey!"? aw, thanks :D

you'll enjoy 30nm4949. it's definitely worth watching henning's most recent run too, you'll see how much has changed to cut the time down by 15 minutes.

as for the cheatedness of the girlich / winterfeldt stuff, well it's a while since I watched 30nm6520 so I can't give you specific stuff from that, but I can mention some others...for instance, Uwe released a run of e1m5 in 0:59 in 1996. The closest legitimate time was 1:08, and it took nearly four years for someone (well, er, me) to replicate 0:59 without cheating. If you watch Uwe's demo, he hardly even straferuns at all, and to a speedrunner (I don't know how obvious it would be to someone who doesn't run) it's obvious at certain points that he's playing in slo-mo - he pauses for tiny split seconds at crucial points, not long enough to notice something in real time but definitely long enough to notice something (an enemy movement, normally) in slo-mo.

Much more obvious - by far the most obvious of the lot - is a speedrun of Doom2 MAP01 to MAP10 Uwe did. There's lots of stuff that's very obviously cheated in it, but the most blatant is that in MAP07, every single arachnotron is killed with just two rockets. Normally it takes three rockets to kill an arachnotron. Occasionally (because of Doom's partially random weapon damage) you can kill one with two rockets - someone's calculated the exact probability somewhere, but I reckon it's something like one in ten or one in fifteen. If we take one in ten, there's twelve trons on MAP07, so the chances of them all dying with two rockets in an uncheated run is 1 in 10 to the 12th power, which is an EXTREMELY large number :). (In all its glory, it's: 1,000,000,000,000 - one trillion). So it's basically proven that Uwe must have used some kind of cheat, most likely some form of TAS executable which allowed him to stitch runs together like tasdoom and mbf do nowadays, to make that run. There's lots of other stuff he does in the run which would be very hard to explain in any way other than "he was cheating", but that's the most painfully obvious.

I think it's a very good list of wads. Sure, there are some cases where I can't understand why certain wads were omitted, but there's obviously no way any consensus can be reached on something so much based on personal preferences. Still, most of my personal favourites (including some that I thought no one else liked :) ) are in there.

cycloid said:

demos: that ocelot/BahdKo 50:3 map01 deathmatch spanking was great, i only wish i could have watched it from ocelot's POV.

I don't know exactly which demo you're referring to, but doesn't pressing F12 switch between POVs?

the infamous 30nm6520, (though i'd be interested to hear more specific/in-depth details/theories and analysis of the cheatedness of it and it's brethren)

Try searching the compet-n forums or usenet. BTW, 30nm6520 has rather a special significance for me (despite everything that is wrong with it): it was the first demo I ever watched, and it was curiosity to see if the time had been beaten that brought me back to Doom following a period where I had been playing other games.

yer i've got 30nm3413 one too, ill save that until last. ahh, so much doom, it'll take me another ten years to catch up with it all, heh

as for the map07 things, it's a bit "old" now anyway with that 6 second time isnt it, heh.

i'd consider tool-assisting personally if i knew how, obviously i'd say so. e.g. i want to beat my own hell to pay run and have had several hundred tries but it's a bitch for missed monsters and then there's "the jump". mind you, if i tool assisted it then i'd have an unequivical benchmark to attain for in a true run, and then i'd have to do that, or get close as i'm a perfectionist... obviously.

certainly, though, attempting to do some speed running myself has upped my respect for the mad nutters who perform 4000 attempts at a map before they are happy with their final spectacular lmp.

sargebaldy said:Oh yeah, and I agree with Fredrik that succubi.wad should have been on there instead of impsecx.wad. I also found it amusing Cyb released an updated copy of imp encounter specifically for the article. Why did you even bother marking it anonymous :P But on the whole it's a pretty good guide. [/B]

... or the real author just released a fixed version when they uploaded dwforums2?

on a related note I didn't agree with ling's inclusion of impenc.wad either, but he pretty much picked and reviewed all the wads on that list himself and I was pretty impartial to the whole thing

cycloid said:

demos: that ocelot/BahdKo 50:3 map01 deathmatch spanking was great, i only wish i could have watched it from ocelot's POV. i LOVE the moment he dodges not one, not two but THREE consecutive BFG blasts by ducking behind walls at just the exact moment, classic.

Hit f12 for the quick and dirty way to see his POV but not hear his sounds, or use coolmp (http://www.doom2.net/doom2/colmp10a.zip) to swap the point of view of the demo to his perspective.

That game was hell, to be on the receiving end .. yup .. eh ... he was thoroughly warmed up from the LAN all weekend and shit. It doesn't get much harsher than that. At least, I hope it doesn't. Well .. okay, it could have been 50 - 0 if my luck had been worse. But, I don't want to think about that.

--BahdKo
Supreme DoomG-- -- - DoomPeon

I'm very happy with this top 100 list. Everything I was looking for seems to be there. (I'm also relieved I'm not anywhere on the infamous list)

In a strange way, seeing some of these wads that I reviewed for newstuff, or beta-tested, or in one way or another contributed to, made me feel like a part of doom's history.

The list neglected nothing, and in fact is an inspiration to strive harder to be part of the next top ## list with future projects.

In the words of The Worm: "Very excellent work!"

uaclabs.wad: i actually rather enjoyed these two maps, i liked the use of lighting and subtle verticality of them, especialy the secrets (of which there are about 1000), for example the one where it's a plasma cell on a shelf, using the shelf causes it to drop not to your floor height but right down to another room, nice. i found myself taking mental notes for my own mapping efforts. on the other hand i thought "only a psychopath could make a map with so many knights/pinkys/archviles per square inch". but then i found lots and lots of plasma, and lots and lots of rockets and completed both 100 kills 100 secrets. heh.

and speaking of MSI: nuts.wad: i thought "oh well my computer's running ok" ... until i pressed fire... griiiiind!

cycloid said:

yer i've got 30nm3413 one too, ill save that until last. ahh, so much doom, it'll take me another ten years to catch up with it all, heh

as for the map07 things, it's a bit "old" now anyway with that 6 second time isnt it, heh.

i'd consider tool-assisting personally if i knew how, obviously i'd say so. e.g. i want to beat my own hell to pay run and have had several hundred tries but it's a bitch for missed monsters and then there's "the jump". mind you, if i tool assisted it then i'd have an unequivical benchmark to attain for in a true run, and then i'd have to do that, or get close as i'm a perfectionist... obviously.

certainly, though, attempting to do some speed running myself has upped my respect for the mad nutters who perform 4000 attempts at a map before they are happy with their final spectacular lmp.

haha yeah, I did once figure out roughly how many attempts I've made at episode 1 overall, it was a very scary number :)

yeah there's nothing wrong with TAS runs at all, just that they're not supposed to be sent to COMPET-N :). I love TAS runs actually, you can do lots of stuff you'd never manage in a real run - the 18 minute nightmare run of Doom2 is one of my favourites, as is Sedlo's sadly unfinished TAS run of Plutonia...

and yeah for doing MAP07 speed now you don't need to kill ANY arachnotrons at all, hehe. that's an absolutely sick run, btw - it was known that the trick was theoretically possible for a long time beforehand, and me and adamh both (and some others) spent *ages* trying it, but of course it was sedlo who managed it...but what completely blew me away is that he did it in 8 seconds and decided that wasn't good enough to upload. only sedlo...:D. of course, it's so hard no-one would use it in the episode run. i don't think anyone but sedlo has done it yet, actually.

oh btw, i posted this in the first day thread but seems no-one else is reading that, so can i point out that memento mori 1 should be in 1995, not 1996? it came out december 1995, I remember playing it on Christmas Eve.

oh, and I always find the best way of flicking perspective in demos is just to play 'em in prboom - then the F12 trick works and also switches the status bar and sound effects. yay for prboom.

cool, i've never watched a multiplayer demo before... now all i need to do is run it twice at the same time so ican watch both at once! prboom rox0rz!