Wagi

Counterpoint: Heretic's ultra colorful palette is the reason its appearance stands out among all of the other bog-standard fantasy games that all use the same drab gray/brown colors everywhere. Look at E2M4, E3M2 or E5M7... You just don't see places that look like that in other fantasy games.

I'm going to chime in here and say one aspect where Heretic really outshines Doom is the bosses. The bosses in Doom wander around and fire projectiles at you that you just circle strafe to dodge (with the exception of the JOKE BOSS at the end of Episode 3). In Heretic, the bosses have different attacks. The iron liches can shoot tornadoes that actually follow around and displace you. The maulotaurs can charge at you, giving them mobility, and they can lock you into certain areas with their instakill flame snake, and they have a wide "sweeping" flame attack as well. D'Sparil obviously teleports and spawns disciples.

E4M2 is one of those rare cases where a pistol start actually puts you at an advantage.

Capture the Flag as a game mode in Doom is criminally underappreciated and there really isn't any other game on the planet that provides CTF experience anything like it. The sheer acrobatics involved, the risky rocket jumps, ridiculous maneuverability and speed of the player just makes every game chaotic and frantic from start to finish. It was crazy back in the mid 2000s back when Skulltag was at it's peak, and it would probably be even better now that internet connections are a lot more stable and lower ping.

Do bear in mind that there are more Cyberdemons and Archviles in certain levels of Plutonia than there are in all Doom2 maps *combined*. It cannot be overstated how massive of a jump in difficulty there is between the other IWADS and Plutonia.

Megaman X series since the maneuverability like dashing, wall jumps, etc. make the game a lot more fun to play. X4 and X5 are easily the best in the series.

Fix collision detection, and up the pain chance so you can safely attack enemies without them hitting you back. Alternatively, make it so it drains enemy health.

I was told there was a branch of Crispy Doom that had truecolor, so I decided not to release it, and thus doesn't have a name. The F5 key toggles between "Low Detail" (Vanilla high detail mode) and "High Detail" (turns the enhancements on) to see how big of a difference it makes, even at 320x200. Entryway comparison Limbo comparison UDMX MAP16 comparison

My recommendations are Judas23, Greenwar MAP14/MAP20, and Boo.wad

I can't post this, because I can't find it anymore, but there was an absolutely hilarious series of videos made by CodeIMP (the guy who made the original Doombuilder) about idiots playing ZDaemon CTF.

If you play this level on Nightmare, you will learn never to hit this switch *very* quickly.

I never found Doom scary even at 6 years old. I did get freaked out the first time I stumbled across an Ophidian in Heretic though...

A mod where Revenant missiles will stop moving unless you're looking at them, like Boo from Super Mario

There was a level pack called rjumpin2.wad that, as the name suggests, was a series of platforming levels where you had to rocket jump from platform to platform, or "rocket climb" up walls.

It indeed comes down to personal preference. But here's why I personally won't ever use that feature: Doom was designed to look good in a low resolution and with pixelated textures. Because of the low level of geometry detail, it relies on that "crispiness" to avoid looking flat and boring. This is exacerbated by the fact that the extremely low resolution of the textures means that applying (bi/tri)linear filtering on them makes them look extremely blurry. It also makes hard barriers between textures look much more jarring in contrast. When a game is made with this sort of filtering in mind, they will take steps to mitigate issues like this. IMO the bigger problems with a lot of early OpenGL ports was the lack of fake contrast, lack of depth lighting, and sprites being clipped into the floor by default, but it looks like a lot of progress has been made since then.