Zulk RS

It honestly depends. If you want it so that enemies don't make noise when they are alerted so they can surprise attack the player, You can do that with Ambush Enemies behind sound blocking linedefs. However if you want some enemies to not make any noise at all, I think you can do that with ACS scripting.

I don't have a brother so I had to sabotage my own progress through Doom II by saving right before a cyberdemon rocket hits me.

And that is why I save scum manually!

I remember I did a challenge run once where I allowed myself to save only after picking up a key. It's way less frequent than how much I normally save but... well that was the point of the Challenge Run.

Then by all means, become the Save-scum god! You CAN get better while still playing with saves.

Okay. Do you enjoy playing with saves or do you actually want to start playing saveless? Because in all honesty, it IS possible to "Get good" doing either. If you don't enjoy playing saveless, then what's the point of getting good at beating maps saveless? You can just hone your skills while also saving. I like playing with many saves. While I still suck when it comes to playing saveless pistol-start, I don't really care because that's not how I enjoy playing. But with saves and continuous play, I have gotten better at the game to where I can beat maps now that I couldn't in the past. So it is possible to get good while playing with saves.

I somehow flip flop between "jibs" and "gibs". Though I use "Jibs" more often than "gibs"

You're not imagining things. The normal Shotgun really is more accurate at further ranges. The SSG has a much bigger horizontal and vertical spread. The normal Shotgun has no vertical spread and a smaller horizontal spread. Much easier to snipe things when you have 5 pellets in a horizontal line than a cluster of pellets.

One thing I like to do with the SSG is what I call "SSG Melee" Where I move into melee with Barons, fire the SSG to make sure all the pellets hit and then move back. It's like a more easier and high DPS version of Berserk boxing with barons.

Yeah I did mean to quote you. I probably should have done a better job highlighting exactly what part of your post I was responding to. This was the part of your post I was actually responding to. I guess what I really wish was less high difficulty and combat puzzley, arcadey wads and more wads like Solar Struggle and Ancient Aliens and DTS-T. I went back on what I said because I realized I was being an idiot and forgetting a bunch of wads that do fit this criteria.

I honestly kinda wish there were a bit more wads that felt cohesive. I may be completely wrong in this but a lot of PWADs feel to me like it's just a collection of really cool looking and challenging maps. Like they're good maps but it's just maps. No sense of being story or adventure. It's why I liked Icarus, Ancient Aliens, Solar Struggle and even DTS-T (kinda) so much. Empyrion is also really cool and while it doesn't exactly have a story all the maps in it feel connected to each other. Thinking about this for a few more minutes, I am an idiot. There are still a ton of maps that do feel like an adventure. Really hard but still an adventure. I'm spouting nonsense.

Quite a lot actually. While it's really kinda obsolete in the IWADs if you play Continuous, on PWADs, there are many situations where you'd need to bust out the Shotgun. Getting rid of a bunch of enemies on a ledge, fighting against a group of zombies, fighting against 1-2 imps or zombies. These are where I use it the most.

Excuse me... 22?

Now I wanna know how easier/harder Ultimate Doom will be if someone modded in the SSG and removed the rocket launcher (all rockets and Rocket boxes turned into shells)

Considering your 3 year old probably has no idea what the heck is happening, I would say no. However, if you start off at 6 or 7 then yes.

Not sure how relevant this is but while I was stressed over a lot of stuff the last month, one thing that did help me clear my head a bit that is on the travel front was to just go out. No traveling to a different town or anything or spending days outside. Just going outside, walking around familiar places, window shopping books and eating some cheap-ass street food. That might also be a thing you can do. Speaking of which I am actually planning to go out in an hour or so.

I don't know if this actually counts but I kinda sorta fit this? The thing is, TNT was technically the first Doom game I ever played. The problem though was that I was too young to even realize what it was and for it to be anything more than a distant memory. I think when I played it, I had just learned how to read or was still learning how to read because I called it "Doom 1" because I thought "This is Doom and obviously this is the first Doom game!" I remember panicking on the first level because it was "insanely difficult" The first Doom game I played after I actually was old enough to know what was happening and what I was playing was "Doom 2". Actual Doom 2. I remember saying "It's so weird they made Doom 1 so much harder than Doom 2". I was also really confused when I did get around to playing Ultimate Doom or the real Doom 1 and seeing "Why... is this so easy and why is it so different from what I remember?" Then of course I encountered TNT and I immediately recognized the first two levels and went "So THIS is what I had played." As for how I feel about them? I don't like Plutonia. I like TNT and it's probably my favorite of the 4 IWADs (though not the one I played the most. That would be Doom 2)

Because it is the hardest of the official Doom games (that use the Doom 2 Engine) by a wide margin. Also I have noticed that how hard something feels to you may vary based on your play style. For example, I found Plutonia to be harder than Ancient Aliens primarily because the type of fast-paced gameplay that Plutonia encouraged wasn't how I personally play Doom so it felt much harder to me. Perhaps the way you like to play Doom made Plutonia seem easy to you? Another possible reason for thinking Plutonia is not that bad is hype. Like it has this reputation of being super hard (which I get why) but no matter how hard something is if it gets hyped up as some insane challenge, more often than not, it would seem not that bad.

So normally I don't make threads like this and I probably won't either. I just finished playing Icarus and it was awesome. Before I say anything else I want to give a disclaimer that I am kind of sleep deprived right now and so the post might get rambly and a bit nonsensical. So most of Icarus' maps, I loved. I hated a few of the puzzle maps and maps with very confusing progression but I loved all the other maps. I think my impression though might have been skewed a bit. Against what I normally do when playing wads, I decided to play this with Complex Doom. I normally don't play mods on map packs I've never played before but this time I just felt like playing it with Complex for some odd reason. The thing about this megawad that I absolutely hated was the music. I don't know what it was but 80% of the tracks either pissed me off immedietly or started off good and then became unbearably irritating and grating as I played the level. The music pissed me off so much that I stopped playing around MAP06 or something and just paired it with music from Empyreon so I can use Changemus console command to change the music whenever a track started to piss me off. TNT is my favorite of the IWADs. I think that's a big reason as to why I liked Icarus. Though the maps look pretty bland compared to TNT, I think what I loved more was the creativity on display. The wad tried to do cool locations and interesting ideas. The ideas didn't always work out as well as one would hope but the ideas itself were pretty cool. Really it feels like TNT but more experimental. There was an upside-down level, scrolling textures to simulate being on a moving spaceship, a feeling of adventure as you go from place to place in your spaceship and run combat simulations to pass the time and visit different demon planets. And now here's the part which made me make this post. Plutonia and TNT were the two halves of Final Doom. Out of the two, Plutonia is the clear community favorite (with good reason). I don't think I'm wrong in saying that Plutonia heavily influenced many great mappers and wad authors. Many of the earlier classic megawads have traces of DNA from Plutonia's aggressive and mobile combat encounters that pressure the player (in a good way mostly) and from Plutonia's arcadey map design. A lot of megawads that took Plutonia's formula and evolved it to the next level. These megawads, in turn, influenced more megawads and we are where we are now. While playing Icarus, I couldn't help but think about an alternate reality where TNT was the more well regarded of the two Final Dooms. I wondered what would the cacoward winners, classic megawads and the mapping philosophy would have looked like in that universe. Where wads had very experimental designs to them which would later be perfected by other wads that would come afterward. We'd have a lot more "Adventure" wads. We'd also have maps that feel like they are part of a larger world or a larger story-line than just Great Doom Levels that are loosely connected by theming. It made me a bit sad thinking about all the cool and experimental shit that could have been in the megawads. However, it also made me grateful for the megawads we do have because of how we've refined encounter design and how almost all cacoward winners have solid challenging gameplay. I can see that being an aspect which would be lacking had TNT been what was loved more than Plutonia. So yeah. That's my ramble after getting like a combined 7 hours of sleep in two days. Sorry I went off the deep end there.

Okay I know this post is like 2 months old but I have to talk about it. So I've actually been playing this wad (at a very slow pace because the last month and a half has been really hectic for me) and it was an emotional experience. Maybe I'm being dumb for getting so emotional over what's essentially Doom 2 with the sectors stretched and the monsters multiplied. Maybe I'm reading too deep into it. To me playing this made me feel like I was playing Doom 2 again for the, maybe not first but 2nd time. t somehow captured the experience of being a complete Doom noob again. When I was still completely new to Doom, the Doom 2 maps seemed so huge. A monster closet with like 8-12 monsters in it seemed like a hoard or a small army. I didn't know how to properly fight Pain Elementals so I BFG. I didn't know just how many monsters a well-placed BFG shot can take down so I would panic fire when ever it felt like "WTF!? This room is filled to the brim with a massive army of demons" when in reality it was probably just like 15-20 demons in a room. I was bad with ammo conservation so even though I would play Continuous my very first time playing UV, I would quickly run low on ammo. When you I would have to do some basic-ass platforming which seems easy now but at that time it felt like jumping through big gaps. Hell I didn't even have the "Always run" turned on because I was a Doom noob kid. I would take a lot of damage because I didn't quite figure out how to dodge everything properly and thus be scrambling for health. Now I'm older, more experienced. I know how many shots from the SSG a demon can take, how many imps I can kill in one shot. Thus I'm now more efficient with my shots and I almost always have a surplus of ammo. I have always run on and now and can even do some basic Strafe-Running jumps so Vanilla Doom 2's platforming is nothing. Monster groups now feel much smaller because where kid me panicked and went' What the- HOW MANY DEMONS ARE THERE!?" when he saw a small group of demons, I now see small splattering of monsters. "Oh It's just 5 zombiemen and a shotgun guy.". I now know how to dodge monster attacks so I take a lot less damage and thus I don't need desperately search the map to find health. This wad made me re-experience the feelings of Kid me going through Doom 2. Everything 2x bigger so now the levels seem as big as they did when I was a kid. The gaps which were ones child's play require some effort to jump. Where there would normally be 1 monster, there is 4. Suddenly the small 12 monster group that kid me thought was a hoard... is now an actual hoard with 48 monsters. Where kid me would bust out the BFG whenever he saw a Pain Elemental, this wad made me do the same because there's now 4 PEs. And because of such huge monster numbers, you take more damage. You use up more ammo. While the ammo and health and powerups have also been multiplied, you maximums have not. Thus you won't truly bone yourself with there being no more ammo but against larger groups, you will blow through your ammo and health reserves and have to desperately scramble to find where you left the health and ammo. High-tier monsters feel scary again; groups feel like armies again; ambushes feel endless again. This wad made me feel how Kid Zulk felt playing Doom 2 for the very 2nd time. It might be a shitpost map but I recommend everyone play it. I should note that this requires a sourceport that: Removes monster limits: Thing count for every level has literally quadrupled so I think a limit removing sourceport is needed. Removes the Lost Soul Limit: Will make PEs very harmless. Allows Jumping: Because of how the map has been made bigger, I some required platforming seemed to me to be straight up impossible unless you can Jump. Just don't use jump to sequence break and only use it for those otherwise impossible platforming sections.

I'm 5ft tall.

I ban the person above me because big words make my brain hurt.

The person above me has the right idea. Therefore, I ban them to get rid of the competition too.

I ban the person above me for having an Astolfo Profile pic.