kmxexii

Its amazing how many Halloween birthdays I know.

Happy belated birthday to you!

SavageCorona said:

15 and 18*

The dark markers are at a gap of 4, and part of the slider is obscured. Thus it is reasonable to assume that one marker is obscured if the pattern is followed.

thanks for the kind words and all the effort you put into writing this

This was certainly a long read. I enjoyed it a lot, even if I thought you went on too many tangents with the global scope examples, haha. Felt like you were scratching an itch that's been bothering you for a while. There's a lot of... feelings and vague ideas that are hard to put into words about lilith and the... events around it, so I'm glad you tried for all of us who loved the project.

@dew i think that the reason that I went on so many tangents is because I was making inferences and wanted to feel that I had "earned" them, so to speak, rather than say something that ends up reading like a word salad to the casual reader. not that such an audience is going to read through the entirety of the lilith review. scratching an itch is probably the perfect phrase to describe what led to it running as long as it did. the more that I thought, the more that I wanted to write. it probably didn't help that it developed over the month or so after I finished playing.

@Myst.Haruko fffffffffffffffffffffffixed so that I am no longer spoiling my fake titlepic for @Gusta's Hell Medley

I remember it having really good music.

@Memfis it's an interesting track and most of the TXT is the story of how It ended up in SWOMEGA

it's been re-worded. thank you!

You're welcome. Good read, as usual!

Thanks for reviewing this. Nice review of that mediocre map Marcaek was forced to finish in my stead because I was too much out of mapping shape. Didn't think you'd even enjoy it, tbh.

Those are some really cool maps!

those look really impressive for 1996

@Memfis

You are most welcome!

Wow..it's so weird seeing someone delve into this old wad with this level of care. Right again, it was heavily inspired by Tim Willits, as my early work was all influenced by the main games. I was also obsessing with Hexen which shows in the other levels that were to be preceding and following Hell Pit. My megawad Doom Beyond started as a hell replacement episode, as I felt the original Hell maps were too forgiving (lol). I had map25 done (The Gateway) which is now lost, was a symmetrical, orthogonal borefest that didn't really do anything. Then Hell Pit at map 26, I forced my all of my poor friends to play it and for several years I considered it my best map. After Hell Pit came the Museum, a level I still have that I worked on last in 1999, just after Doom Beyond was completely rebooted into a full megawad. I also rebuilt map25 into a new level, Blood Cathedral, and that level I also still have, but ran into a snag when I finally encountered visplane overflow. I played these two maps not very long ago when moving computers and they are full of crazy, interesting ideas. When I'm done with my current distraction maybe I can clean them up and release them. 

Making 'Terror' much later in UDTWID was weird in a way, as I felt like I was building Hell Pit again which its obvious influences from Fear. Honestly both of the DTWID levels were incredibly difficult to make as I found I'm not good that 'staying in the lines' of other designers. I would makes improvements to both of them. Thanks for talking about this old dusty place. Now onto the Pit!

@Use so I have been laboring under the assumption that the megaWAD that you were building was or ended up becoming Nilla Doom. Was Beyond Doom a completely separate project?

Yes Doom Beyond predates Nilla by about 7 years. It's my oldest collection of work that I hope will see the light of day, who knows! Here's a really old thread about Doom Beyond:
 

Nilla came about in early 2004 when I was the lucky recipient of old decommissioned computers from the DoT. I picked out two perfect 486s complete with soundblasters. When loading them up with DOS games and PWADs I was amiss that my maps no longer conformed to vanilla standards. I made a new project that was to be released episodically (Doom2 format) and have strict adherence to vanilla limits. I only managed to finish the first 7 maps in a project i assumed would only take a few months tops. Yeah right. As it stand maps8-11 are structurally complete but with no monsters and other missing elements. I last worked on Nilla in 2013. It's not over yet! :)

You're speeding up, i'm used to you making like a review a week how am i supposed to keep up xD

p.s. attached my recollection of "who made what"

although we both dabbled in eachother's "areas" for texturing and gameplay design and other minor touchups

@SOSU there will be good periods and there will be terrible ones. I am posting all of my reviews the moment that they are finalized from here on out. the idea of keeping up a buffer is too much like work and I don't want to have an author waiting for a month or two - especially in plague times - to read a review. I used to send out "advance" copies but you never know who might be reading. I still get hits from people who made maps back in the mid-90s.

@Vorpal very cool! that's roughly what i had in my head when I was considering the partitioning for the review but I didn't know to the extent that you guys might be building off of each others' work.

Another fair and honest review..  I had a rather fun time mapping this one.  For a while this was my favorite of my maps and I played it hundreds of times.

I was just thinking about my play testers for most of my maps, today.  Magikal and Rich Sham.  Both have passed.  Blessings to them. R I P.

It seems funny now but many people complained about the monster counts on my maps at the time. and even coined a MSI (Monsters per square inch) phrase for the series, and then MSI was carried on to other people's maps..  These are fairly easy by today's standards.  These were built for average players or slightly above,  not doom-gods.

I wanted something with a little extra kick challenge wise for the maps in those days.  I wanted a fun challenge but not overwhelming. The maps are a target rich environment.

The only reason several of my maps ended up in the community chest 1 and 2 mega wads was because so many people dropped out at the last minute and we wanted to bring it rather than wait another few months for the release..  this fact is easy to check by re-reading the last several pages of the thread where so many people dropped out last minute.

there are two or three in the series that are rotting on my hard drive that won't likely ever see the light of day, but they were good practice.  These maps were all done after the other releases so should be decent to play but would still be crappy by today's 500 sectors per room maps standards.  Mine are all mostly simple classical play, Which is why we play in the first place.
Thanks for taking time to look the set over, given the nearly 20 year birthday of the set.

@Searcher I for one would be happy to see any more Blind Alley enterprises!

Only time will tell if we will meet in another Blind Alley or Not.

The ones I have left are not all that far from being done. It is food for thought.

Thanks for the confidence.

noice.

Amazing review!

Nice review—definitely agree with the Doom Eternal resources being too close to the Gothic ones. Thankfully MAYhem has bounced around in style a lot after this point.

Fun fact: my map has no revenants because around this time @Suitepee was bemoaning how difficult it would be to make a map without them, and sure enough it wasn't hard to do. The 1500 lines, on the other hand, was a huge roadblock due to how I make maps. I remember having a weird dummy sector setup where they were all linked together, and my voodoo closet was a stretched-out diamond. Good times.

Interested in playtesting an Ultimate Doom map?

@joepallai I don't consider myself to be a useful playtester because I feel that I am more oriented toward the needs of the author over that of the player but I am down to play something and give you my opinions.

okay that works;  I'll send it over the weekend once i finish it (I'm roughly 90% complete)

thank you! I played this wad a looooong time ago and I couldn't remember the name! I've been looking for it forever!

The best thing about this wad is that it has Tubular Bells in it.

Good stuff in this one

Oh wow, that TITLEPIC is true art of a caliber rarely seen or heard of

Lest anyone be misled, this fake titlepic's original source is "La Rixe" ("The Brawl") by French Classicist artist Ernest Meissonier

Hopefully you hear this often enough, but I really enjoy and appreciate your reviews. You've covered so many WADs that I've never even heard of and might not have had the chance to play otherwise.

@Megalyth

Thanks! I hear it a lot less than I used to. Then again, I am posting less reviews than I used to :D

One of my all time favorites.

Good map, but some of the jumping areas (i.e. near the place where you put the keys, in the first screenshot) is downright annoying.

The shrinking part was probably my favorite area.

Wonder where he went. I remember him from the /newstuff chronicles.

I'm also curious as to where he went. It seems pretty sudden he disappeared, hope he's okay.

<3 your reviews :)

I never read this one when you wrote it, but it was a good read now and the faux titlepic turned out great. Speaking of titlepic madness, I'm loving it; you've done good with the ones I've seen thus far.

Thanks dude! Had a few great laughs reading your review. Lovely <3 :D This wad was never meant to be released publicly x) ...just a 13-year old learning how to map on a shareware editor that had a linedef limit set to 800 per map!

They sure are :)

Indeed! Community consensus!

Btw, what Sam Woodman map you think is his best? Seems to be a energetic fellow, with multiple solo releases and was involved in plenty of projects in the early to mid 2000s. MAP27: Red Hot (Plutonia 2) is one of the finest i've played from him. but generally his style is not something to fall in love with yet, for me at least.

@Catpho I have no strong opinion on the matter, plus I haven't finished his catalog. Mortiser 4 is probably his most nuanced level that I've played.

If you can't adequately convey it then why write a review for it :O?

badum tss

OHHHH SIK BRN

Hello

@NuMetalManiak please check after me but you are such a helpful, prolific contributor on DoomWiki that I noticed this around the time that it happened there (the primary change reflected in the author registry https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/p/wads-by-author.html since the review articles only used your alias at each time). I just went back and updated all of the reviews with your name and current alias, though.

https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/2014/06/nova-birth-novawad.html

https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/2014/12/mayhem-2048-mayhem14wad.html

https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/2015/07/32in24-14-how-hamburglar-stole.html

https://onemandoom.blogspot.com/2019/07/mayhem-1500-mayhem15wad.html

Been halfway through at this point. Awesome read, as always. Thank you for putting that together.

I can't help but wonder what a full "modern-romero-megawad" would be like. If he made one, it'd be one of the best things since sliced bread, I'd assume.

I played Romero's E1M8b some time ago and enjoyed it. And he releases a new map??? 

Sweet!!! I think he is trying to <<make us his bitches again>> and I don't know about you guys, but he succeeded with me.

Hah thanks for the memories. I still remember when I made this map. At this point I had played little to no user-made content. I was still trying to understand textures, layouts and combat. Your insights are spot-on as always. 

I have always enjoyed his maps.

Bit of a correction - that map by 'Slayer' there isn't actually by me :P

@sirjuddington corrections have been made. Thank you for the information!

sidenote: I accidentally lost this entire post this morning and had to re-write it from scratch. somewhere along the way I slipped into a short dissertation on interconnections that isn't really fair to dump in any single Blind Alley review. I might work it into a series overview article supposing i get there, though. I also think that the re-write mysteriously gained another paragraph which is weird since I thought that I had plotted out all the review beats!!

That's weird but cool :D

Have always read it as you being the specific "one man" -- even without knowing the origin of the name you just referred to. 

'Grats on 10 years! 

Congratulations on keeping the good reviewing fight going so long!