Scypek2

That's the whole reason? I like the choice of zdoom 2.8.1 because the lack of updates makes it reliable and would allow for sharing demos that don't desync (that, and my computer is slow and weak too). But I see much less reason for the UDMF restriction. Can your computer not run a UDMF-compatible editor either? Do you even need to open other people's maps?

I've played almost all the way through. It has a nice, unique and cohesive aesthetic. With everything being changed ever so slightly, it feels like unearthing a whole another forgotten (and very unoriginal) early 90s FPS. The elegant but basic mapping compliments that perfectly, I don't think anything fancier would feel right with the uglified textures. This is one of those mapsets that gives me more authentic retro vibes than DTWID does... I'm not sure what it is exactly, but I feel like the DTWID devs were all just trying too hard and it shows, even as they're trying to imitate relatively inexperienced pioneers. Rowdy Rudy just feels natural. The melee weapons are both changed for the better. They're still far from overpowered, but they have the potential to be a lot more relevant. The only issue is the chainsaw's slowed down raising speed! From a gameplay standpoint it's completely unreasonable and annoying. It's neat that it animates, but if you don't have enough states to let it call Raise on every tic, it's not a good tradeoff. The burst rifle is definitely a step in the right direction! It's faster and more accurate! That means it has some degree of advantage over the chaingun, at least in theory. It sure is a lot better than Deus Vult II's twin pistols, which keep the mapper from having to place a shotgun right next to the player on every map, but are still so objectively inferior to the chaingun that you almost feel bad for them. So yeah, the burst rifle is better... but still ends up upstaged by the chaingun. Maybe the chaingun could be changed to be faster but have some wind-down after you release the trigger, like Skulltag's minigun, Hacx's Uzi and the plasma gun? Or if you don't want to meddle with the adequately functioning weapons, maybe you could have the rifle fire just one bullet at once, but with the same DPS? It would give the player more choice over how to dish out the damage. Quite like the machine gun in Wolf3d, which most players continue to use long after they find a gatling gun. The bouncy health and armor orbs are my favorite minor tweak. They're kind of silly, but very fun to collect. And they glow in the dark, as anything that counts towards Items should! The biggest flaw of the mod is the proportion of enemies populating the levels... Most of the cool new Dehacked creatures are totally dominated and overshadowed by shotgunners, cultists, shotgunners, weak and strong chaingunners (that feel pretty much identical), and some more shotgunners on top of that. The Stealth Imps are great (I love how they're faster in addition to just looking different), the RPG and plasma zombies seem like they could be fun too... but I can barely even form an opinion about them, because compared to all those hitscanners they barely appear at all. The way the hitscanners are used (that is, in every single encounter and often in high numbers) just messes up what could've been fun projectile-dodging action bits. Instead, I just hang out in the doorway until a group of concerned barons and cacodemons comes over to ask if I'm okay. And then I can only deal with them all one by one in a tedious non-fight as I explain that I would have loved to come out and play, really, but that would mean getting shredded by a crowd of Chaingunners Lite and Chaingunners Deluxe from every direction. I'm not the kind of person who believes that all hitscanners suck forever. I made countless Wolf3d levels, so I know there's potential in that. But it can be difficult to use them right, especially in such a projectile-oriented game like Doom. In this mod, they ruin a lot of things. I'd like to chainsaw more things, stab more things with they bayonet, use more rockets and plasma. But I gotta stick to my chaingun or SSG so that I can react instantly to another shotgunner that's gonna inevitably show up behind the next corner. Cause if I don't react instantly enough, I'm getting shot. The yellow card ambush on MAP09 was one especially glaring example of how hitscanners can make things worse. If it was a crowd of imps (maybe even stealth imps on higher skills), the resulting challenge would've been challenging but fair. As it is now, the only option I had was to dash back to the entrance and carefully take them down from behind a corner. With a chaingun, of course. A rocket launcher would've been more fun, but they're shotgunners and there's a metric shitton of them, so I'm gonna get hit three times by the time I peek out, fire a rocket and hide again. Why does it always have to be shotgunners?! The Cultists seem like the least common hitscanners, maybe on par with the chaingunners. Sure, a single Cultist can't do much, but they're hitscanners! They're always a threat because you can't dodge them, and the low health and damage is just good balance. If I had to improve gameplay without thinking too much about it, I'd replace many shotgunners with cultists and stealth imps, and replace most of the chaingunners with RPG and plasma zombies. Maybe the RPG and Plasma zombies could benefit from less HP, so you'd have an excuse to use them as often as you use the chaingunners. That would've been a lot more interesting.

It's interesting to see that FIREBLU's original color scheme is actually one of the least hideous possible variants. So far I've only used low amounts of FIREBLU to depict seemingly non-solid things, but using it more boldly like on Mount Erebus seems like a fun idea.

MAP07 - Pirates And now, it's a shorter map again! The beginning would've been a lot more fun if it wasn't for the utterly ridiculous pinky horde. I tricked a faraway arachnotron into safely mass-slaughtering a whole bunch of them, and I still had to do plenty of tedious grinding on my own. It was an aesthetically pleasing area, though - I don't know what the arachno-tubes were built for, but it certainly felt like they were built for something. I liked the usage of midtextures to create a feeling of a 3d structure without really trying to make a solid-looking ceiling. It already showed up at the end of MAP05, and it was used again here both on the arachno-tubes, and on the archvile/hellknight room on the ship. The ship itself is a very visually pleasing area and the gameplay there is good as well. The sudden possibility of going out into the sea was a nice surprise. MAP08 - Psychodelia It's already an ALT map, and now it's actually called Psychodelia? What's that gonna be? A brown techbase, apparently! Perhaps the most classic-feeling level piece so far. The initial subversion of expectations was really quite amusing. Then, of course, things change and you get caught off guard as you're suddenly dunked into the revenant realm. The fight there is chaotic and tricky, but not excessively hard - the omnipresent teleports can be a good defense. And then, the adventure continues! After some obligatory switch hunting, we walk onto a lift and descend into madness. The pillar area is a visually great design, but the challenge there might be the lowest gameplay point of the level. The path behind you is closed now, and you have to fight... chaingunners and revanants! With no cover! Genius. Fighting them from inside the little corridors works well enough, especially with mouselook, but it sure doesn't feel very satisfying. And then, there's another dark tech nightmare... with not only more monsters, but a puzzle too. It wasn't too bad once I figured it out, but it sure would've been more helpful if I knew what I was doing! The hardest part was noticing there's another switch to press, noticing that I'm raising a platform, and so on. Yeah, solving puzzles in deep darkness was not very fun. Then we're on to the final part, as we rapidly shift between the hellish and the human realms. It's pretty cool, but my mood was soured by the previous section and I didn't appreciate it as much as I could've. I loved the megasphere secret, though - it was a pretty epic feeling moment... but also one not designed for 100% kills, apparently, as you can either backpedal to safety real quick or engage in some uncomfortable combat that's gonna sap your newly acquired health and armor real quick. Personally, I think I'd replace all those cacodemons with pain elementals - it would make it a lot less challenging and maybe still not very elegant gameplay-wise, but it would've been a lot less painful and it would've amplified the inside vs outside contrast even further. By the way, the megasphere was one of the two secrets I found just by trying to find the way forward... so that's not a good sign I guess. Finally, we cap it off with what might be the ugliest and most boring exit so far. It looks like a placeholder.

50 Shades of GRAYTALL is a great example. It pretty much necessitated clever texture usage. Two other really good ones I played are Going Down and The Given, the latter has a screenshot in the linked thread but wasn't specifically mentioned so far.

MAP05 - All Hightmare Long The action-packed episode is over, and we're back to exploration! It's another level that goes on for quite a while, but it wasn't that hard to find my way around... aside from the two little switches near the beginning, that is. Damn, that was a pain. But otherwise, it's a fairly linear progression and while it's often not obvious what you accomplished or if you accomplished anything at all, the confusion tends to clear once you backtrack a bit and see a newly open pathway. It's also very nice that you can see the train right away and then a few more times, so your goal is always clear, even if the path to reach it is pretty meandering. My favorite part has to be the megasphere secret, it's like an entire adventure. I liked all the secrets though (got all of them!), and how natural the method to reach them often felt. Especially the blue armor was beautiful in its simplicity. And then, after all those adventures, you open the door to the elevator and find the path inside blocked by some columns, so you end up having to take another path. Reminds me of Wolf3d's E4M5. Also it's pretty interesting that once you reach the room with the blue key, you can ignore it and exit through a one-way door instead. This would force you to travel through the entirety of the level again just to get your key back... unless you don't want the key, because it's already unnecessary at that point? MAP06 - Sanctuary I guess that's my least favorite level so far... even though it starts out nicely. Like others mentioned, it starts where MAP04 ended... but it ALSO starts where MAP05 ended! So which one was the hallucination, again? It begins with a seemingly ordinary brown techbase that soon reveals itself to be a festival of expectation-defying cheekiness. To begin with, you reach it by trying to open a door which then collapses deep underground and turns out to be a lift. And then it continues. You try to open a door? It stays closed, but a passage elsewhere opens instead. You reach what's obviously a lift and press a nearby switch to lower it? Lower what? When you do find a lift switch, it only ends up lowering one quarter of the lift-like structure. Also, you get to meet one innocent imp in a cage who's just chilling out by the fire with his barrel and has no intent to hurt you unless you shoot him first, no matter how clearly you announce your presence otherwise. Then you enter what could be called the main section of the level... starting with a street and some sort of switch storage area, with just a single functional one. After some running around, you go through an outstandingly boring long corridor to reach some grassy hills. It's kind of annoying that the level tricks you into entering the corridor prematurely, so that you have to backtrack to lower the barrier and then go through it again... but it's a pretty neat moment when the bright outdoors tease you from behind the standing barrier, letting your imagination run wild until you get to see more. A hill or two later, you plunge into hell... and then it gets annoying. It would've been perfect if there was no confusingly-located teleporter right next to where you start, one of the branches was available right away and taking you to the cool gimmicky little arena with the spiral, and if completing the spiral arena would take you back to the hellish hub to take on the spider and leave. Instead, you need to fight your way through some annoyingly dark techbases and caves. It would probably work better if it was put somewhere in the town area, before teleporting to hell. Maybe it would be a good replacement for that long and stupid corridor? Oh well. Also, the blood in the hellish hub is harmless for some reason at least it allowed me to deal with the spider mastermind easily. I got zero secrets in the end, though. My one last complaint is the music. As usual, it's great... but not for this map. It feels good at first, but then it turns out to be too upbeat, too action-y and too repetitive for this map that just keeps going without much sense of progression. At last, we get a text screen... which mostly tells us what we already know. Aside from the fact that the crashing plane apparently caused a lot more damage than it seemed... no wonder everyone in the town is pissed at us.

Finally, a solution for those who want to use custom textures but don't want to use any custom textures.

Leave both, continue meticulously avoiding health bonuses through the entire level, backtrack after reaching the exit and get yourself to 200%, exit, then end up reduced to 100% ten seconds into the next level.

MAP03 - Dies Irae So here it is, first in the line of maps that just keep going... But this one's not that bad all in all. By the second playthrough, I wasn't even confused. Or at least, not that much. I guess the lack of clear direction makes it feel more of a real location... But first of all, the beginning got to be the weirdest case of seamless level progression I've ever encountered. We finally reach the exit door... only to loop back to where we already were and discover that the few zombies along the way are back from the dead, and the previously dead end in the dark alleyway (one that's already been accessible much earlier) has inexplicably turned into a path to the town. It feels like a story with an indecisive unreliable narrator... "I saw that the room was now damaged by an explosion, which allowed me to, uh... actually, there was no dead end in that alleyway, I got those eight shells from somewhere else." I dig the midtexture trees, by the way. They're elegant and spice up the place well without using up any sprites. Other points of interest include: What seems like a piece of writing in Standard Galactic Alphabet, but doesn't actually use letters from it. A demon classroom with Baron teaching ripping and tearing 101 (I mostly consider it a classroom/meeting room because of the big blackboard/screen thing in the front). Deja vu teleporters with fancy doors. A cacodemon hole that doesn't just open, but also closes, making it really harmless. Maybe it just wants you to stay away from its hole. My favorite little place has to be the bloody room that flashes bright and fades out when you enter it. I really loved this trick as soon as I understood it, and I already used it in two maps. I also made one more very interesting discovery... MAP04 - Death From Above Now that's some sudden intensity! It's really nicely choreographed, like something out of an action movie. Escaping between crates while they sink in the floor behind you, and then having to run back... floor in front of you suddenly contracting into a zigzag walkway... The cyberdemon following you everywhere, even into the indoors staircase. Finally, a face to face meeting in the great big room, and then it concludes by mass slaughter of zombies by blinking Icon of Sin twins, which is equal parts ridiculous and beautiful, and a fitting conclusion to the level.

The darkness and dark colors look like they'd be unpleasant to the eyes, especially the third screenshot looks bad with the dark red or black. You could use some actual black/colorful textures instead of dark/colored sectors to achieve a similar visual that's easy on the eyes. Actual dark areas in the level could be a fun gameplay challenge, but it would probably get annoying if the whole level's like that.

So, I'm playing it on HMP continuously with saves. And before I start, that's a pretty sweet title screen! I guess it was mostly a matter of finding the right photos and putting them together, but it's arranged really elegantly. It's better than Final "graphic design is my passion" Doom, at least! Also, whoever recorded the demos was reeeeeal subtle about getting killed quickly on purpose. MAP01 - Seele Now that's how you grab my attention! An unsettling death vision that cuts your health in half, and a plane under Nazi attack. I quite dig the custom sounds, they create an unique vibe right away. The ambient wind sound contributes to the atmosphere particularly well, and the chosen music fits really well too. Gameplay-wise, hitscanners are an unique challenge to do right... and they aren't very fun to fight here, with just the pistol against fairly beefy Nazis who shoot faster than you, and the wingmen are situated at just the right level to shoot the player while it's barely possible to see them. Fortunately, the whole thing goes by fast enough to not get too annoying. Theme-wise, it only gets more peculiar the more you think about it. The tiny stars passing by outside make sense as long as you don't look or think about them too much. Are we flying through the sky, or are we slowly rotating in outer space? I suppose either could be the case... Using nothing but a bunch of opaque walls that slowly scroll their texture left feels like a terrible design choice, but the first time I played it, I noticed no issues and was 100% immersed. In fact, it still doesn't hurt my immersion all that much after all! This is some refuge in audacity. I wonder about the story, too. Why are the zombiemen packed in a box, are they a shipment of victims to be sacrificed in the Absolute Life Transformation? Maybe they're shooting at me because the marines (who were in charge of the plane, going by the corpses in the cockpit) are the real bad guys here? Setting up a portal in a plane and kidnapping people until some kind of special forces unit in blue shows up to save the day? Who knows. At most, the story in the text file only mildly contradicts my theory. Last but also least, I like how that one crate contains all keys, including the currently useless ones. It enhances the feeling of the world not revolving around the player, and it's a nice break from the convention in general. * * * MAP02 - Dead by the Down More hitscanners and ammo scarcity, but this time things are much more pleasant. The zombiemen are a perfect fit for the pistol, and there's plenty of space to move around. The amount of intended platforming really surprised me here - in most mapsets, I tend to climb decorative geometry only to find myself disappointed, if not breaking maps. Here, it's outright mandatory a couple of times, which stumped me for a while. But ultimately, it wasn't that hard to find my way around. I couldn't find all secrets though, three of them were fairly obvious but I still have no clue about the other two. The music fits really well again, and I get to hear some more custom sounds... most of them being similar to original ones but more moist, I guess. Meanwhile, there are some more peculiarities. Why is the waterfall flowing out of a cave stuffed to the brim with corpses? Why is there a door high above the floor, blocked with crates from the other side? Someone changed the building layout, but didn't bother bricking up the door? An architectural Thomasson in a Doom map, that's new. There's also a number of classic crate staircases that frustratingly don't lead anywhere... of course they don't lead anywhere, they're just stacks of crates! Way to toy with savvy players, though.

Cool, maybe I'll play along! I already tried it recently, but stopped a few maps in after something else took my attention. I really enjoyed the mapset's unique vibes, though. Maybe playing it with alongside other people will be the solution to getting stuck! So far I've only gotten stuck twice, and both times I found a way to progress without cheating of any kind... but I can see the potential for further confusion here. Should be fun regardless!

For DMP 2017, I made a map where you need to keep monsters from reaching a teleporter for a specific amount of time to succeed. It's available separately in this post.

Apparently it was a trap made specifically for John Romero. The crusher room contains a rocket launcher, which is John Romero's favorite weapon.

Basically, the Doom Wikia is a crappier and more ad-filled version of doomwiki, but it still shows up ahead of Doomwiki on google search cause it's a Wikia. Consistently using Doomwiki instead might alleviate that.