Woolie Wool

No. The eyepoint is lower because of the way the rendering engine works makes the player seem taller. If you look at screenshots of Laz Rojas' old WolfenDoom project, with the Doom player's eye height, the guards look like children. I think B.J. is meant to be about as tall as an officer, with the guard slightly shorter and the SS a bit taller. The same is true for Doom, as the Doom player has his eyes "in his chest" because otherwise it looks like he's peering over the human-sized monsters' heads. Remember that with a real human field of view, you see much more below you than above you--your vision is angled slightly downwards.

No. There's always another grift.

Does this mean I can finally afford a new video card?

No, I mean a modern D3D12/Vulkan game engine with ray-tracing and all the modern features, not a GZDoom mod. Something like the new System Shock remake, but it looks like Beast Wars.

(the only good example I could find on YouTube, thanks Doom Eternal for ruining searches related to Eternal Doom forever! Really appreciated!)

That would be a pretty amusing aesthetic, a retro game that use RTX to look like ReBoot or the D!Zone box art.

I really enjoyed this one, I think I might play it again and review it for my thread! Really nice "popcorn" maps, and the detailing style has that late-2000s baroque vibe, but in a good way. I don't like the placement of this armor (forget which map it was on, one of the earlier ones I think), could it be moved off to the side so the player can hit the switch without wasting whatever armor they already have? When I played this, I did so in MBF v2.04 and it worked pretty much flawlessly except for the UMAPINFO stuff. The sky would be easy enough to fix (just use MBF's alternate sky feature), but the boss action is a bigger problem. Well, it almost works in DOS! 😅

Confirmed those bugs are fixed, but I found two more: * The default 640x400 video mode is now letterboxed on my 4:3 CRT, while it previously displayed correctly (320x200 displays correctly) * Rush crashes on startup so quickly the debug file doesn't even have anything in it.

I don't have a setup.cfg, I have a tartar.cfg and I've attached it, along with logs for loading Earthless, which does not cause the BEX crash. It appears setting the video mode to 320x200 seems to break TARTAR22 even though it was fine with the earlier version. This crash happens regardless of what wad is loaded, even with the bare iwad. As far as my own environment, I'm playing on an AMD Athlon machine running IBM PC-DOS 7, which is a modified MS-DOS 5 with features from MS-DOS 6 backported and some IBM exclusive utilities. I might try it on my MS-DOS 6.22 boot card, but I don't expect it to be any different because PC-DOS and MS-DOS are almost identical. LOGS.ZIP

Yesterday I was trying out the new TARTAR22 build with various PWADs and getting segmentation faults on pretty much all Boom wads, either on initial startup or when accessing the main menu. I tried: doom2.wad (worked) mm2.wad (worked) uacultra.wad (segfault on startup, confirmed works in Boom v2.02 and MBF v2.04, and previous Tartar of Tartar) earthless_pr.wad (segfault on mainmenu, confirmed works in MBF v2.04 and previous release build of Tartar) Phobos: Anomaly Reborn (segfault on startup, confirmed worked in previous release build of Tartar) Several more modern wads that don't work in MBF (all segfaulted on startup) I plan to go through it with a bunch more pwads this evening. Does Tartar produce any sort of dump or error log when it segfaults? Also is it supposed to be using a custom CWSDPMI or anything like that?

For me, it's absinthe, when I can afford it. Otherwise Old Fashioneds made from mid-shelf whiskey and Angostura bitters.

Here it is, two weeks plus in the making, my review of @skillsaw's incredible Heartland! Absolutely one of the greatest wads of all time and probably the overall best of 2021. Heartland (heartland.pke) Author: Paul "skillsaw" deBruyne Release date: March 25, 2021 IWAD: Doom II Format: Eternity (played with Eternity Engine 4.02.00) Completion time: 3 to 10 hours Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 5 | HMP: 4 | Overall: 5/5 Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/?file=levels/doom2/Ports/g-i/heartland I have been enthusiastic about the Eternity Engine's renderer for some years. GZDoom's 3D floors are a neat gimmick, but they're a fairly limited workaround for the Doom engine's limitations, and only work to their fullest potential (which still is a long way off from the true 3D of Quake and its successors) in hardware-accelerated mode. Eternity's linked portals, literally stacking areas of map on top of each other or even inside each other, are not only a more robust solution, but work fully in software rendering as well. Unfortunately, however, Eternity has been relatively unloved by the Doom mapping scene, esselfortium's "Vaporware Demo" (previously reviewed in this very thread) aside. So of course, a skillsaw release that goes hog wild with Eternity features, with Xaser doing weapon design, using Ola Björling's OTEX texture pack made famous by Eviternity, was something I just had to play. And, of course, being the depressed anxious wreck that I am, I didn't play it until very recently. I got through the first three levels, but it wasn't until I came back and replayed the whole thing for this review that I finally completed it. Skillsaw maps are not something you can just casually bumble your way through; every one of his major releases from Vanguard and Lunatic to this one put the player under constant pressure and require you to be "on" all the time to survive. The sort of frenzied, harrowing blastfests that might be a climactic highlight in a mapset like Legacy of Heroes or TNT Revilution are skillsaw's bread and butter, and much of your time in Heartland will be spent between one and three seconds from death. Hesitation usually means failure, and panic pretty much always means failure, as seemingly every step opens a new ambush. In fact, I would not be surprised if skillsaw was, along with Brutal Doom, one of the principal influences on Doom Eternal's similarly high-pressure-all-the-time gameplay experience. Be prepared for some seriously bananas encounters in the last three maps. That said, while it is demanding, Heartland is not as ruthless as true challenge wads. While there is little room for error, the tasks demanded of the player are never all that demanding in themselves compared to the necessity to simply keep one's head on straight amid all the chaos. Health, armor, and powerups are generally fairly abundant, and the larger fights usually have more lightly-populated zones and areas of (temporary and relative) refuge rather than being one big killzone. The tough-yet-accessible character of skillsaw's work, giving the player the rush of "Doom God" maps without the need for perfect footwork and esoteric techniques, has been a constant at least since Lunatic, and comes through in every encounter of every map here. But it is exhausting, especially in the last two maps, which each clock in at well over a thousand monsters. Skillsaw's maps have always been good-looking and employed striking texturing themes, but he definitely has a "thing" that he has normally done on nearly every map, and the slick-looking, speedway-like arenas of his earlier work in Vanguard and Back to Saturn X sometimes ran together (though his map02 for Community Chest 4, "Slugfest", is perhaps the most obvious example of the skillsaw signature style at its least subtle). However, starting with Ancient Aliens, he started incorporating more and more adventure map stylings, and that side of him really comes to the fore with Heartland, where every single map is a grand adventure with its own theme (similarities between "Reservoir Dog" and "Routine Flaring and Flailing" notwithstanding), setpieces, and Eternity-powered interactive sequences--the trains in "Subway Sandwich" and the gondola ride in "Get Shafted" are particularly memorable. The architecture is gorgeous beyond description—I don't think I've ever seen such meticulous and unsparing attention to detail in any other wad, ever. Nearly every frame is beautiful, every surface worked over, background details sprawling far beyond the playable area to make each map feel like a place in a large world rather than a container for arena combat. The doomcute sector furniture isn't even cute anymore; it's so perfectly designed that it loses the awkward charm it normally has and becomes another component of Heartland's architectural majesty. The little sector couches belong just as much as the ruined highway overpasses and towering smokestacks. It’s a long way down... If esselfortium's "Vaporware Demo" merely gestured at the possibilities inherent in Eternity's linked portals, Heartland goes absolutely nuts with them. These levels are not just 3D but massively, indulgently so; not just "room over room" but spaces where the vertical is just as important as the horizontal, with enough tiers, bridges, overhangs, inside-outside buildings, and blind drops to make your average Quake mapper eat their hat. The power and elegance of this for-real-3D architecture feels like more of a breaking of Doom's mold than anything that has come out of the GZDoom community in years. There has never been anything like Heartland’s architectural complexity in any PWAD ever before. That said, the portals are not perfect and sometimes the essential 2.5D nature of Doom shows through, like when a monster straddles two areas connected by a portal and the portal line cuts the monster's sprite off on one side, or when a monster gets stuck on top of a 3D floor for no apparent reason. Fortunately, these are rare. Less rare is the confusion you will experience looking at the automap; with all the "floors" of the map drawn at once (though only the one you are in is drawn in color), the map is completely covered in crisscrossing lines and it can become quite unhelpful when you're trying to backtrack to an out-of-the-way area to retrieve items you left behind. A fully 3D automap á la Descent would be a significant improvement. Aside from the compact "Bruce R. and Sons Construction Company", every map here is an epic, and while there are only seven maps (plus one that doesn't really count), the total commitment is more like twenty normal-sized maps, or a AAA action game before they all got infected with open-world elephantiasis. You'll have to set aside several hours on your first playthrough, though subsequent playthroughs with memory of the map layout are likely to go by a lot faster. I think it is just as long as it ought to be, ending on a high note just as a typical player is starting to feel drained rather than dragging on and on like many modern megawads do. The individual adventure maps form one coherent and thoughtfully placed meta-adventure, with aesthetics, gameplay, and map size all contributing to the sense of escalation towards the big climax. Also worthy of mention is the excellent soundtrack by veteran MIDI wizard Stewart "stewboy" Rynn, one of the most talented composers in the Doom community, and certainly the most distinctive. His jazz fusion stylings, light on heavy rock guitars and heavy on quirky instrument choices and piquant harmonies, have long been a big part of the atmosphere of skillsaw's mapsets. The ones here have an excellent progression between maps/midis too, with the upbeat, arcade-game-like tone of the first few giving way to something darker and more sinister as you enter the back half of the map set and the monster count soars. As usual with his big releases since Valiant, skillsaw makes some additions to the standard Doom II bestiary, but more refined due to the use of Eternity's more powerful EDF definition system rather than crusty old Dehacked. Some old favorites from Valiant return, though the infamous cybruiser has been mercifully nerfed by the use of a half-strength rocket that is shared with a version of the rocket zombie also seen in Obituary and Knee-Deep in ZDoom. The cell weapons are gone, replaced by a flamethrower whose flames stick to enemies with a radius damage over time effect that is pretty unique among Doom mod weapons, and a mine launcher that shoots a large rocket that explodes into many small submunitions. These weapons add to the demand on the player to never panic, because what were the player's panic buttons are now weapons that deny space to the player just as much as the monsters and will punish careless movement with suicide. I was less fond of the smooth weapon animations and special effects like rocket smoke trails and Nashgore blood; they felt a bit gratuitous, and the flying blood trails draw attention to the mismatch between the red blood effect sprites and the green or blue blood of the hell nobles and cacodemon. MAP01: Subway Sandwich (5/5) Heartland kicks off with "Subway Sandwich", and it wastes no time in kicking your ass. Right from the moment you ascend out of the starting subway station into the city you're costantly on the move, scrambling around hordes of zombies, imps, and pinkies, blasting away left, right, and behind to get desperately needed room to maneuver. You're denied the SSG throughout this map, which forces some careful improvisation (and judicious use of scattered clumps of explosive barrels) when heavier enemies such as hell knights and revenants begin appearing. It all looks dazzlingly beautiful, of course, and makes good use of Eternity's linked portals for 3D overpasses and office blocks, trucks on lifts and spiral staircases. With some more bespoke city textures and a couple of sophomoric joke scenes, it would look almost like an Ion Fury map. A few enemies from the Realm667 Beastiary appear here; the catharsi's annoying movement patterns have been eliminated, making them much easier to deal with. A much bigger threat are the suicide zombies that appear in the second subway station that concludes the level, and locating the source of their screaming and taking them out first is essential to survival in the deadly ambushes in the station. Overall an excellent and intense first map that looks and plays beautifully. (huhuhuh, the par time is 13:37, that's cool, huhuhuhuh) MAP02: Bruce R. and Son Construction Co. (5/5) "Construction Co." cools off a bit after the high-compression frenzy of "Subway Sandwich". Though it superficially resembles "Shipyard" from Mutiny in its basic setup, the portals add tremendous verticality and the player ascends through several floors, leaping between metal beams and trading fire with enemies two or three floors above. The Rocket Zombie makes his appearance here, and he is a far more balanced and useful enemy than the Realm667 original. The mini-rockets cut down on the frustration he often produced in KDiZD, and he seems a bit slower on the draw too. One hit will usually not kill you, but they are definitely priority targets in any fight. The combat is mostly methodical clearing with a couple of teleport waves along the way, until you get a brutal rooftop fight first with cacos (don’t trust in cover, the portal hax mean they can just fly over it), than an archvile and revenants, and finally by two cybruisers. It's a compact, gleaming showcase for the Eternity Engine's capabilities and a standout even among such excellent levels as these. Don't miss this one. MAP03: Reservoir Dog (5/5) "Reservoir Dog" brings together the epic scale of "Subway Sandwich" with the extreme verticality of "Construction Co." for an absolute masterpiece of a map. "Reservoir Dog" puts you in a gloomy subterranean grotto filled with filthy, algae-choked water, dominated by a towering, grimy water pumping station. You'll be once again dashing and scrambling to establish a position at the beginning of the map as the muck is crawling with all sorts of beasties and hardly any angle will be safe for the first few minutes. Every surface is perfectly aligned and textured, oozing with disgusting beauty—thank God Doom doesn't come in Smell-O-Vision! You'll get a second submachine gun in this map, which turns what was a pretty standard chaingun replacement into a deadly pair of bullet hoses that absolutely shred whatever they're pointed at. The twin SMGs saved my life once, when I miscalculated and let three bruiser demons trap me in a corner and unloaded almost all my bullets into them. Of course that meant I couldn't count on them when faced with several pain elementals immediately afterwards, but hey, you win some, you lose some. You also encounter Vader's monster the grell, essentially a cacodemon snowclone that's faster, more damaging, but frailer, and has a creepy horse mouth. The speed makes him a superior harasser to the caco, though grells lack the hitpoints to box the player in like a good old-fashioned cacoswarm. When you finally work your way up to the top level, surprise! You're sent back down to the bottom, and now the water level descends, opening up an entirely new half of the level below you! This half features some absolutely vicious fights where the hordes will try to try to completely crowd you, though spotting and eliminating the suicide zombies while they're still bunched up with the other monsters will do a lot to lessen the odds against you. Now you get to fight your way back up to the top again, and the rocky parts of the previous map now stand as ledges and arches suspended over the pit as you do some acrobatics to retrace your steps while several ambushes provide additional entertainment. Topping it all off is an excellent Stewboy midi that calls to mind the best of Ancient Aliens. Did I already say "don't miss this one"? MAP04: Routine Flaring and Flailing (5/5) The watery industrial theme from "Reservoir Dog" continues, this time under an open sky. Pistol starters will have to run like hell in the beginning, but continuous players would be better served by drawing most of the initial monsters into the starting area. Monsters will continually harass you from high above, and I had to use Eternity's rather ropey mouselook several times—I recommend binding it to a mouse button rather than having it on full time. There are no real horde battles here, but many smaller ambushes, many of which combine suicide bombers and cybruisers into perilous tests of dexterity and efficiency. Here, the techbase feels less like a single structure like in "Reservoir Dog", but rather some sort of almost organic growth emerging from nature, spreading rigid, brutalist tentacles and infiltrating the cliffsides like iron fungus. You'll be going up and down several times, seeing nearly every part of the map from multiple vantage points, and as you progress, the keys unlock shortcuts to quickly get from any part of the map to any other. Observant players will be able to get their hands on the plasma gun replacement, the flamethrower, towards the end of the map. It will come in very handy for the vicious pincer battle on the bridge leading to the exit, though it obscures incoming projectiles. Overall it's a great map, if not quite as striking as the previous three. MAP05: Titan of Industry (5/5) A menacing midi announces that this dark, vast, ominous Unreal Tournament-style brick factory is ready to kick everything a notch beyond what has come before. If the previous maps were huge, this one is humongous, and the vast silent halls that once built machines of nearly unimaginable proportions now are host to huge pitched battles involving nearly the entire expanded bestiary at once. You'll find a number of green and orange armors lying around in the early parts of the level and you'll need to conserve all of them to have enough ammo to see you through the legions of heavyweight monsters you'll be facing. The initial count on HMP was 544, but the numerous archviles that deploy throughout the map's impression brought my kill total over 560. Ambushes from high-threat enemies like suicide bombers, cybruisers, and archviles happen suddenly, and you can die almost instantly if caught off guard. Fortunately, the map hands out the flamethrower and plenty of cells, even for those who do not get any of the secrets. There are a few impressive Eternity Engine setpieces, like an elevated bridge that moves left and right above a huge assembly area, at the behest of switches, to give you access to different side areas. Overall it's a brooding and atmospheric piece and a fine adventure, but the intro text that kicks off the level promises some sort of dreadful secret at the end, and all you get is just another industrial map—a great map, but no kind of revelation or surprise. Maybe the next few maps will change that… MAP06: Get Shafted (5/5) Hold on to your butts, it’s a full-on slaughter map! The HUD counts 1446 monsters at the start of the map, and that's before the any of the many archviles you will encounter have had their fun. "Get Shafted" is an archaeological dig site of truly epic proportions, catwalks and towers and supporting scaffolding suspended over a fathomless abyss housing...something. Something evil. But to get there, you will have to survive countless brutal shock encounters, much larger than any in previous maps, often unfolding in multiple stages Sunlust-style. Keeping your nerve is more critical than ever as the actual floor area of the map is fairly small—there are just so many floors—and space is almost always at a premium (another thing that makes me think of Sunlust). The heavier monsters are used with abandon here, fleets of cacos, legions of hell knights, archviles traveling with entourages, and you're never more than a couple of seconds or a single bad miscalculation from being pinned and destroyed. Panic means instant death, and the map is seemingly always trying to make you panic. While the music in the previous maps was fairly mellow, here the midi is a high-octane power metal-ish piece that fortunately has enough length and variation not to get repetitive, though I would have preferred a broodier, more atmospheric soundtrack. There are so many cool vistas and setpieces here, the moments were you pass under grated catwalks and see the corpses of demons you killed earlier in the map above you, the glorious and terrifying ride on a three-set of gondolas where you're Unlucky Pierre as the cars to your left and right fill up with monsters multiple times, the way a series of lifts bring you back up several levels near the end to give you a chance to scavenge for resources or gaze in awe at the sheer scale of the megastructure that you have just conquered. The cluster bomb launcher first appears here, though its debut fight is an inauspicious one as it is perhaps the most cramped and frantic battle in the entire map. It is so, so easy to blow yourself up in this fight with your own cluster bomb, as I did many times. Finally, though, you reach the very bottom and the architecture takes a turn for the demonic as you at last reach the demons' home turf, and what a welcome they have prepared for you! You're given a few moments to explore the area and dread what might be in store for you before skillsaw uncorks a white-hot megaslaughter, over six hundred demons pouring in from the sides, flyers descending from above, entrenched mancubi blasting away from every angle. After the sadistic Ribbiksian beatdowns that came before, however, it's actually not all that hard if you keep your head on straight and don't plow bodily into a Grell and die like an idiot. If you use the mine launcher to clear out enough of the initial onslaught fast enough, you can do laps around the arena--by far the largest area in the map--and have plenty of room to move around and avoid being Good at Doomed by your own submunitions as you pound the walls of demonflesh with an entire Gulf War's worth of explosives. Rockets are handed out in vast numbers and you're highly unlikely to run out before the floor is carpeted with bodies and all that's left is cleaning up the snipers. Indeed, it feels less like a final challenge but a final, spectacular reward for beating the previous challenges, especially that aforementioned close-quarters fight with the mine launcher. I felt like a Champion of Khorne after completing it, soaked head to toe in demonic viscera. What a rush! MAP07: The Beating Heart (5+/5) "The Beating Heart" is an absolute design and layout masterpiece, starting off with one of the most foreboding and intimidating introductions of any Doom level I've ever played, where you descend into a titanic, towering hell citadel that is almost like if Arcane Dimensions had a map set in Peter Jackson's rendition of Mordor. The vast towers reaching up into the darkness, with tier upon tier of burning galleries, is an awe-inspiring sight, especially considering that you will visit nearly every place you can see from the beginning over the course of this truly colossal map. There's so much verticality and clever use of space here it rivals the best of what the Quake scene has to offer. The MIDI, too, serves as a musical and emotional climax, recalling the epic intensity of classic Final Fantasy boss music (especially "Dancing Mad" from Final Fantasy VI) with its symphonic arrangements and brooding organ theme, while sometimes coyly hinting at "Sign of Evil" from the original Doom. It also has enough variety and use of dynamics to keep it from getting stale, which is greatly appreciated in a map that will take most players over an hour. Skillsaw breaks up the action here with carefully judged quiet sections, devoid of enemies, and the intro is the first of these, gradually building the anticipation as you circumnavigate the base of the city, looking up at its battlements. But surely, with the huge supply of ammo you built up at the end of "Get Shafted", you can kick down the doors and take the fight to the enemy, right? Wrong. Soon you come upon the gate to the city, which demands a sacrifice of...your weapons. All of your weapons. One by one you place them onto the altars, and watch helplessly as your hard-earned guns are sacrificed as a burnt offering to open the way. Hope you have some Tyson skills, as you're going to need them. Immediately beyond the gate is a berserk and the fire axe and you are raised into a gladiatorial arena for your first test. There are no small, intimate fights here; every encounter is a huge, multi-stage frenzy of carnage, and this one sets the tone as you're set upon by dozens of imps and hell knights, with more waves of hellspawn on the way. The axe is much more fiddly and requires more precision than the similarly long-ranged melee weapons from Hexen, but still this fight is one hell of a power trip that pulls its punches a bit to let the player feel the rush of ripping and tearing without the need for perfect footwork. That's the last mercy you're likely to get, however, as then you're thrown into a desperate struggle to recover some of your weapons as you're hounded hither and yon by the legions of hell—revenant kill teams, mancubi sniping from on high, and even a spider mastermind dominating one end of the arena. This bit might be the hardest part not only of the map, but of the entire wad, as you'll have to lean heavily on the rocket launcher in exactly the sort of desperate circumstances when using explosives is most difficult. Other than that though, all of the major encounters exemplify a viciously intense but deceptively simple and accessible sort of slaughter gameplay I like to call "NASCAR slaughter", similar to what you see in the last episode of Eviternity or the later maps of Mechadon's Counterattack. Each arena is set up like a racetrack, with big wide paths that loop around each other, allowing you to survive indefinitely, stoke infighting among the monsters, and take potshots as long as you can simply keep running laps at full speed like you're playing an ultraviolent game of Mario Kart. Don't stop, don't ever stop, and if the monsters block your way for even a second, you're likely to die then and there. However, the effectiveness of this tactic kind of takes away some of the fear factor this map tries so hard to build up. When you escape the second setpiece and reach the Dark Souls-like weapon shrine that forms the heart (heh) of the map and its primary safe area, you'll have most of your arsenal back, but the three most critical weapons—the super shotgun, the twin machine guns, and the cluster bomb launcher—are locked away with skull keys that you have to obtain in yet more arena slugfests, each again with multiple stages. However, the fights are distinct enough (aside from having the basic NASCAR strategy in common) that they don't run together, and you can tackle them in any order you wish. My favorite bit (and the second hardest behind when you first get the rocket launcher) is a series of frightfully narrow catwalks in the latter half of the yellow key arena, which force you to temporarily abandon your loops and think carefully about your positioning so you don't get trapped by the waves of meat that will try to pin you into a corner—and then as a last hurrah you're sandwiched between two columns of suicide bombers, imps, and finally hell nobles approaching from opposite sides, forcing you to act quickly and decisively to force your way through the pincer before you're annihilated. Each key will return you to the shrine, and you can return to previously cleared arenas to scavenge before tackling the next, though skillsaw is generous enough with supplies that this isn't really necessary. Return with the final key, and the level resounds with the sound of the titular beating heart, calling for you, beckoning to you... In the map's final atmospheric interlude, you proceed to the central keep and encounter the heart itself—well it kind of also looks like a scrotum, which deflates the tension a bit. Attacking the heart opens the way to the final arena, where skillsaw has prepared his ultimate challenge. That challenge, considering the frenzied mayhem that has come in the previous two maps, is actually a big step down in enemies. Yes, there are four waves with tons of heavyweight enemies, including many cybruisers in the final two, but the arena is the most NASCAR thing that ever NASCARed, a loop containing another loop with yet another loop in the upper tier. There is ample maneuvering room unless your crowdshaping and herding skills are completely nonexistent, an absurd amount of ammo, and numerous soul spheres, megaspheres, and blue armors. The biggest danger will come from your own explosives, especially as you'll want to use the cluster bombs on some of the bigger thickets of demonflesh. With each wave you get another crack at the heart, and with the fourth wave down, you can deal the killing blow and the source of the demonic onslaught explodes in a welter of gore. You stand victorious! ...Or do you? MAP08: Arrhythmia (N/A) "Arrhythmia" is a cute little horror setpiece, sort of like The Legend of Zelda's Forgotten Woods meets "Ghoul's Forest", but there's nothing to do but wander around futilely as the Doomguy's heart sputters and dies, and your own quiets down to normal from the pounding it was likely doing in the arena encounters of the previous map. Overall, I can’t recommend Heartland enough. Corporate propaganda might have turned “game-changer” into one of the most pernicious clichés in the English language, but Heartland quite literally changes the game of Doom, exploring for the very first time the full implications of making Doom a truly 3D game, and not skimping on quality level design in the process. I can only hope that Heartland inspires more level authors to map for Eternity and try out some portal magic for themselves; seeing what skillsaw can do with the engine absolutely blows my mind. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I think I have to play Heartland again...

Episodes 4-6 of Wolf3D were not originally retail products. You could buy them separately from the first three or all six as a complete package through mail order.

The entire world economy is a giant hustle to cover up the fact that the earth is pretty much tapped out of natural resources, and the real economy of material commodity production peaked in the west in the 1970s and is peaking in the rest of the world now, and the consequences of admitting there is nothing left but long-term, permanent decline for a system that depends on perpetual growth are so dire that capitalists will do anything, anything at all, to prevent Wile E. Coyote from looking down long enough to complete their doomsday bunkers. There is no plan, there is no solution, they're just winging it quarter by quarter desperately trying to delay the inevitable. In short,

I have never understood the love for Quake II's soundtrack. To me it's a perfect encapsulation of how non-extreme metal lost its way after the late '80s. Mid-paced, low-energy riff salad with no interesting leads and a featureless blast of distortion that calls itself a guitar tone. Even at its own grungy industrial metal schtick, it gets solidly thrashed by Tribes 2's soundtrack, which has so, so much more atmosphere: As for Doom and the original Quake, I don't consider their soundtracks to be comparable. They have totally different atmospheres and goals, that are perfectly in line with their respective games. Neither game would work with the soundtrack of the other.

Working on a really big review for a major recent project and it's taking longer than I'd like, so in the meantime here's a review I put on Tumblr exactly four years ago today: A Big Job (abigjob.wad) Author: Michael Krause Release date: September 23, 1997 IWAD: Doom II Format: Vanilla (played in doom2.exe v1.9) Completion time: 8 to 60 minutes Layout: 5 | Visuals: 4 | Combat: 4 | UV: 2 | Overall: 5/5 Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/a-c/abigjob Happy May Day comrades! A map titled like this seemed like a fine choice for the occasion. Of all the vanilla wads I’ve played, this one seems to anticipate the dawn of limit-removing source ports above all others. “A Big Job” is a huge, huge semi-brutalist concrete cityscape with a remarkably complex layout for ‘97, with many different tiers, colonnades, plazas, and interlinked complexes of buildings. It looks like a rough blockout of a modern city-themed slaughtermap by Skillsaw or a similar author, with the monster population from one of his smaller maps. Everything is built to a monumental scale; it looks “realistic” in as much as the architecture makes logical sense and you could imagine such a thing possibly being built, and it has (simplified and exaggerated) features common in real cities, but this is a city planned without any consideration for humans. Even larger monsters like revenants and hell knights seem utterly insignificant next to these stark gray edifices. It has an uncanny feeling to it, a city immortal, indestructible, ever unchanging, indifferent to your struggles with the demons. It just is. The layout is very open and completely nonlinear. The entire map except for the exit room is accessible the moment you start the map; it is only a matter of finding your destination and surviving the journey. The start is by far the trickiest part of the map as you have to figure out for yourself where to find ammo and start progressing, and you’re harried by imps and hell knights on the ground while revenants and cacos take potshots from above with only your pistol to defend you. If you aren’t observant enough to deduce how to get the SSG that is visible from from the start but initially blocked off quickly enough, you may die a couple of times before you work out a viable strategy. After you get the SSG, it’s smooth sailing all the way to the end, an inevitable consequence of too much space and too few monsters. You’re given these grand open spaces to run around in and a mere 251 monsters don’t bring the firepower to significantly restrict your options. Except for the roaming chaingunners that like to pop up at the most inconvenient possible times, very few of the monsters have a significant chance of injuring you. You can just run past most enemies you face without even fighting them, and provoke infighting with impunity. Normally, I’m not a fan of lock-ins, but I think quite a few encounters in this map could have benefited from preventing the player from kiting the monsters towards other monsters to make them infight or escaping them altogether. Two of the keys are guarded by cyberdemons, but you have an absolute surfeit of both ammo and maneuvering room and you can take them out with little effort. You can even head towards the end of the map to grab the BFG first and two-shot them into a lonely grave. The architectural grandeur of this map could support many times more monsters than it has. The texturing is pretty spartan, mostly plain gray concrete and rough iron, which further contributes to the “geometry blockout” look of the map, but it’s still pretty interesting to look at thanks to some well-thought-out lighting and the extreme (for 1997) structural complexity of this map. I talked about “structural detail” in my layout essay from a couple of years ago as being better than merely ornamental detail; this map has structural detail and only structural detail. The surfaces are all left blank; all the effort is spent carefully laying out the skeletons of these concrete megastructures to awe the player. This is definitely a map to be played in low resolution, to break up all the straight lines and flat planes. This level does not use the map01 slot but is instead located at map27, presumably to use the music from it instead of supplying its own midi. I’ve never liked this habit of '90s level authors, and I especially don’t like it here because the music doesn’t really fit with the mood of the level and the hell sky’s searing red clashes terribly with this fairly dark, gray level. Also clashing are some sound replacements from Quake, which only replace a relatively small number of sounds (mostly monster noises) so monsters sound normal in some circumstances and completely different in others. Fortunately the map seems free of any HOMs or technical faults as far as I can tell. The map is fairly long, but not nearly as long as it could be due to the monsters’ complete inability to stop you or seriously slow you down, so your completion time largely depends on how well you can navigate the layout–I had played this map several times many years ago, so I more or less knew my way around and managed a pretty thorough exploration in 20 minutes. First-timers may take a lot longer. Despite its raw visual presentation and flaccid challenge, I find this a highly enjoyable map that I would recommend to nearly any Doom player. However, I also think it would be an excellent candidate for a modernized overhaul that polishes the looks to a diamond finish and adds all-new, much harder gameplay. Perhaps there should be a 1997 Tuneup megawad?

Technical Issues (techissues.wad) Author: Endless Release date: March 2, 2022 IWAD: Doom II Format: Limit-removing (played in Doom2-plus v1.9 Completion time: 20 to 40 minutes Visuals: 3 | Layout: 2 | Combat: 2 | UV: 2 | Overall: 2 Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/s-u/techissues "Technical Issues" is a fairly long limit-removing single map for limit-removing exes. Though it was not tested with an actual DOS port, unlike some recent -complevel 2 or "vanilla" wads, it does indeed run under the original DOS engine. However, aside from its admirable commitment to compatibility, it has little going for it; aside from not having been tested to the original Doom engine limits, it feels like it would have easily fit in--and sunk into the depths of /idgames largely unnoticed--in 1995 or 1996, and not in a good "lost gem" way. "Technical Issues" bills itself as a "complete map that felt like a progressive adventure", but an adventure map is made or broken by its sense of place and immersion, and the aimless sprawl of cramped, boxy rooms and corridors that makes up "Technical Issues" completely fails to deliver either. The vast majority of the map is decorated in bland gray and silver textures that recall nothing so much as the early Doom alphas. Id Software, mercifully, recognized the direction they were going in summer 1993 was headed nowhere good and retooled Doom into the game we know and love today; "Technical Issues" feels like a collection of the slough they left behind in the transition, dressed up with some Doom II objects and hackneyed sector lighting effects that were trendy in 1998 but trite today. The MIDI is one of Jimmy's lesser works; a rather bland Dream Theater homage that never builds much atmosphere or tension. Most fights are a simple matter of camping corners or doorways. The amorphous, labyrinthine layout and cramped, rectilinear architecture make for stilted gameplay; by far the biggest threat to yourself is your own rockets as they slam into some of the superfluous detail bits sticking out of walls. There are several archviles scattered throughout the map, most of whom are placed to resurrect plenty of monsters, but the layout means that all of the vile encounters are played out in a strictly one-directional manner with the archviles and supporting posse all crashing upon you in a single wave to be rocketed into oblivion. Ammo is initially scarce, but later in the map, rockets and cells are handed out like AOL trial CDs and it's virtually impossible to mismanage your resources after the red key area. The map ends with a couple of outdoor areas that at least break up all the right angles, but they are just as cramped and maze-like as the rest of the level, and the twin-cyberdemon encounter at the end is trivialized both by the layout and the map handing you a free BFG only a few moments before. And on top of that, the Doom Builder auto-align feature seems to be more or less the extent of the texture alignment. Don't waste your time.

Disregard this I didn't see the thread was old.

It's really cool to see a new DOS source port! Any chance compatibility might be updated to support more modern "Boom-compatible" wads like Eviternity, Sunlust, Ancient Aliens, etc.? Also it should be noted that the time display on the automap resets to 0:00 when you load a saved game.

That's pretty standard for such graphical "upgrades", because the fact that you're doing this to Doom in the first place means you don't really have artistry or taste, so everything looks like it's been oiled up like a porn star to show off the "badass" reflections.

Arcadia Demade (arcadia.wad) Author: Jean-Paul LeBreton Release date: August 19, 2010 IWAD: Doom II Format: Limit-removing (played in MBF 2.04) Completion time: 20 to 60 minutes Layout: 5 | Visuals: 5 | Combat: 4 | UV: 3 | Overall: 5/5 Download: https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom2/Ports/a-c/arcadia While a few notable mappers from the early days of Doom modding, like Dario Casali and Matthias Worch, used their mod projects to jumpstart careers in the commercial games industry, it is exceedingly rare for a crossover to come from the other direction. "Arcadia Demade" is the product of Jean-Paul LeBreton, the lead level designer from the first and second BioShock games, and, as the title suggests, remakes (or rather "demakes") the "Arcadia" and "Farmer's Market" levels from BioShock in the Doom engine. "Arcadia Demade" runs on limit-removing engines, so even doom2-plus will run it just fine. "Arcadia Demade"'s only custom assets amount to a tinted palette and a sky texture, yet its aesthetic is like no other Doom map ever made. Rather than attempt a facsimile of the original BioShock maps with a raft of custom textures or GZDoom sorcery, LeBreton artfully reinterprets and abstracts the level using strictly Doom's visual and gameplay tools. A layout that was somewhat tedious in BioShock flows much better in Doom, with its radically improved mobility. 3D features in the original levels are recreated here with lift platforms, which provide the added benefit of a quick shortcut between higher and lower areas. It’s not quite clear with the low-res, muddy sky if the map is supposed to be underwater or lit by twilight/moonlight, but it definitely feels cold, desolate, and lonely. Texture usage and alignment are impeccable, conveying a sense of physicality and scale without baroque detailing or Ribbiksian chiaroscuro. I hope you know how to use it. Like its antecedent, and really, all the System Shock 2 and BioShock maps, the objectives (keys, in this case, incorporated into setpieces vaguely reminiscent of the original map) are strictly linear, but some can be reached using a choice of different routes. Late in the map, a secret teleporter room opens behind the start area, allowing instant teleporter access to all the major areas. The other way "Arcadia Demade" imparts some Shock-like flavor to the proceedings is through its poverty of ammo. From the very beginning, on UV, ammo is so scarce that the inclusion of a backpack feels like a joke, and competence at kiting, Tyson, and infight instigating are crucial for survival as you dash past monsters and scrounge for ammo. In addition, many of the more valuable pickups are "poisoned" with teleport traps, to the point where some would be better off avoided altogether, at least on UV. The combat in this map would be quite desperate if there weren’t a surfeit of health and armor to offset the ammo famine. However, monsters are thinly spread around the map, so it isn't nearly as punishing as it could be. Still, it manages quite aptly to instill a sense of creeping, slow-burning, ever-present dread as you nervously eye your ammo counter. Near the end of the map I simply ran from a couple of encounters in the central hub, including a cyberdemon that I did not have anywhere near enough ammunition to kill. Despite being a level for a game that is usually about the complete opposite, "Arcadia Demade" genuinely captures some of the tension of survival horror games. Monster teleport lines are used in several encounters to disorient and confuse the player, and with the ammo desert, one never really feels fully in control at any time. One skulks, creeps, and hides, rather than carving through enemies like a murderous figure skater. "Arcadia Demade" draws from the knowledge of the Doom community without fully being part of the "PWAD tradition", and for that reason is almost unique among Doom maps (though there is also No Rest for the Living), an "outsider art" wad that nonetheless lives up to professional standards of quality. It looks fantastic, plays well enough, and its MIDI is tasteful and understated enough to not become grating over the course of the map's considerable length. Everybody should have played this one.

For me, not panicking is the hardest thing about slaughter maps, really. The sheer daunting scale of them tickles my lizard brain instincts, and when they get in control everything else goes to shit and I run around like a headless chicken and then die.

The books that sucked, you mean.

Many things are left unresolved on purpose, to give a mystery for the audience to be tantalized by. Who and what is Tom Bombadil? Is Deckard really a replicant? What exactly happened when David Bowman encountered the monolith? What is the blue glow in the demon-spitter? Not knowing the answer gives what would otherwise be a simple "you're winner" message a power it would not otherwise have. Embrace the ambiguity. Though perhaps the fact that my introduction to attempts to explain everything about Doom came from the tie-in novels has somewhat prejudiced me towards the idea. Even when I was 12 years old and loved nothing more than reading the most horrible trash, the alien shit from Infernal Sky was the worst fiction I have ever read and still is, and I also used to read horny fan fiction.

Why not bundle the tools as a set of batch files or something to make the IWAD with DeuSF or whatever and pack it?