Jump to content
Search In
  • More options...
Find results that contain...
Find results in...

baja blast rd.

Super Moderators
  • Content count

    7358
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by baja blast rd.

  1. baja blast rd.

    Good small city(-ish) maps?

  2. I'll try to get kills but won't track down stragglers and I'm usually happy with 60-80%. I have a slight push to want to find secrets but don't mind missing them. I ignore that item % is even a thing. I think of 100/100/100 as the entry level way to be a completionist. If I really want to be a completionist, I write 1000+ words about a map and try to notice everything, all the little nuances and interpretations you might overlook on a first play, which counts for more than killing one imp or grabbing that last armor bonus. I rarely do that either because it's impractical to do it more than once or twice a week.
  3. baja blast rd.

    Do you enjoy it less when you try to go for UV-Max single segments?

    I never begin grinding attempts for a truly hard map without practice. I'll throw down saves at every important setup and spend 10-30 minutes (or even longer) working out a good approach for all the hard setups. I'll often spend far less time on the run than on practice. It is really important to know when a map is not easy enough that you can string together a max just from familiarity, when it is instead more of a practice map. I usually want to know all the fights well enough to survive most 80%+, maybe some as little as 50% but not many. 20-30% is bad outside of speedrunning for records, and means I should learn it better. I nearly always think of "RNG" as meaning my strategy/skill is not good enough. 99.999% of the time, hyperspecific strategies are possible that make RNG irrelevant. A good example, SWTW map02 has this bridge fight where the cyberdemon can refuse to shoot and the HK/baron mob will overwhelm you. But you can melee-bait the HKs/barons forever, which is arcane but it works. I can't remember a hard map where spectres vs. RL gave me trouble. Can work out how to herd enemies or soften up the spectre mass so that they aren't problems at the time you might face-rocket or budget resources to tank the damage or intuit where they might be based on how other enemies are moving or Prepping with saves means you can learn fights well enough to notice ideas like that.
  4. baja blast rd.

    Unpopular Doom Opinions

    Most mappers have a good amount of variety in what they do and are capable of, and if you're pigeonholing someone into one tidy set of fixations, you're almost certainly oversimplifying.
  5. baja blast rd.

    Which custom monster have you seen most often in various WADs?

    The 1000 HP cyberdemon. I mean specifically as a recolored enemy that exists alongside the regular cyberdemon, so not counting HP nerfs to the regular cyber. That one has become very common. Understandably because it's a very good enemy. Also because "challenge wads" tend to share ideas; if you get really familiar with a concept from one wad, you don't want to start from scratch in the next. That almost feels too easy so I'm thinking about second place. This is an interesting question because what it is really measuring is "out of the enemy classes that are popular, which tend to have similar implementations from wad to wad?" For example, buffed imps are very common as an enemy class. But there are a lot of different sprites for buffed imps that get used, and there's quite a lot of range in buffed imp behavior. Many don't even fire imp projectiles. So most of those register as different enemies. Buffed cacos and buffed HKs (that fire regular projectiles) are very varied enemy classes too. But for a rocket-firing hell noble, just about everyone uses the familiar cybruiser sprite and makes it fire a rocket attack of some kind. If you want an explosive zombie, there's the familiar yodeling kamikaze bomber, which blows up at point blank. And arachnorbs are pretty common. All of those usually have different implementations too (Tarnsman's Projectile Hell's kamikaze is fancy and emanates a ring of projectiles around it when it blows up), but they register as the same monster. I'm not sure, but it might be the cybruiser out of wads I've played, because of the popularity of that sprite for that enemy niche. I've also played plenty of more obscure wads with cybruisers, like Lunar Laceration.
  6. I have written 3000+ words about some individual maps before. I believe it would be very doable for people to write a whole book about most mapsets (and some standalone maps) without straining for substance. But that can be exhausting and I want an outlet for writing about levels that doesn't end up scope-creeping into a burden. So every review I post in this thread will be 300 words long tops. If I backtrack on that you can call me out on that. No ratings, not my style. :P
  7. baja blast rd.

    my 300-word reviews (most recent: JPCP by Japan)

    Sunlust by dannebubinga and Ribbiks 32 Boom-format maps for Doom 2 The big thing to understand about Sunlust is that it's half dannebubinga. He's the soul of the megawad's defining combat style: his preoccupations (bloody mixed-horde moshpit fights; open-plan sandbox slaughter; PE gangs; timed setups where the incoming second wave forces you to do the first one quickly; and endurance fights built around a fun repeated tactic) establish much of why it's so consistently enjoyable, and he proves Ribbiks's peer at building an atmosphere. What makes Sunlust special among hardcore wads is not raw difficulty (many releases, some involving these very authors, outdo it there comfortably). It's the pacing, and even more, the range. The seemingly patchwork structure would give the wrong impression of the authors' control of the experience. Few wads escalate from near-traditional intensity to borderline insanity like Sunlust does, while also treating the easier parts as so important: the breather maps, and the early game's wonderfully flowing "Plutonia meets microslaughter" phase. Sunlust has a strong handle on the 'semiotics of danger'. If you want wow factor, it's easy to drop an enormous horde, but this duo does that sparingly, despite the late game dipping into macroslaughter. They rely on striking encounter presentation and on clever concepts. When excess happens, it registers as a "holy shit" moment, like map20's cacoswarm or map24's imp exit-party or map28's [redacted], rather than being the desensitizing norm. There's plenty of levity -- breather maps and easter eggs and silly intermission messages -- but at the end, Sunlust marches into a crushing abyss. The lategame void has few pwad rivals in oppressive feel and in charismatic viciousness, which peaks in the iconic "Go Fuck Yourself," such iconic moments being Ribbiks's biggest contributions. Thanks to the build-up, when you finally reach "God Machine," it feels like something you've been waiting for, or fearing, your whole life.
  8. baja blast rd.

    Is using SAVES in Doom bad?

    Even when you are trying to become skilled at the game, practice sessions with saves are where most of the improvement comes from, and the saveless run is more like the "test" that shows whether you've put it all together and what you need to work on if not. Some improvement comes from the run itself, but not always! And that's not even casual play. Runners (which are the best players) make ample use of saves, rewind, and cheats to prepare routes, and naturally would not look down on saving. The idea of "looking down on saving" mostly comes from pretend YouTube comment trolls and people with similarly low credibility, and should be ignored.
  9. Felt like starting a thread to talk about whatever maps I feel like talking about. So that's what this is. Adding a ToC for my convenience: ("I Should Quit Mapping" by Brendondle, D5DA3 map28, 2023) The D5DA series -- Dubzzz's 5-Minute Design Assembly -- is both a pun on DSDA (Doom Speed Demos Archive) and a forced acronym, and the core idea behind it is that every map was made in 5 or so minutes (plus some grace period for testing). D5DA3 is the biggest one yet with 99 maps, which mathematically speaking makes it about three times better than most megawads. I'll be covering at least another map from this wad, because it is 'good'. I might cover some maps from other goodwads too. "I Should Quit Mapping" by Brendondle is a map in the newly re-enlivened category of Disorientation Doom (also see Her Love Just Washed Away by Maribo, which among other things uses untextured walls and the resulting HOMs to obscure your awareness of where enemies are). "I Should Quit Mapping" relies on rendering rules associated with a fake-underwater effect that seem to be port-specific (GZDoom and Eternity break the effect, DSDA-Doom doesn't and neither does prBoom+, although the latter is not compatible thanks to UMAPINFO use. You can only see enemies in the sector you are currently in, provided line of sight does not pass through some other sector. It just so happens the center of the map has a giant hurtfloor sector, so for 90%+ of the map you can't see what you are fighting, which includes a huge horde of revenants and hell knights and also eight cyberdemons you probably want to rush directly at, some time or another. If that sounds super fucked, it is -- although it's not particularly extreme for how fucked D5DA3 gets, which you come to expect when you see Dubzzz on the mapper list of a project multiple times. Here all of these factors take what might be an entry-level slaughter setup and turns it into a very thrilling crowd control and awareness exercise. While playing it I noticed quite a few unique mechanics, such as: - using the plasma rifle or rocket splash as 'sonar' -- where plasma balls disappear tell you where the horde or a cyb is - using your brief glimpses at where everything is to try your best to simulate where the enemies are 2-5 seconds in the future from that point - using the superfluous green armors in the corner as guide rules for the edge of the map - noticing cybies that you can't see by paying attention to what the mid-tiers you can see are doing (if they're walking at some odd angle from you a cyb must be alive) All of that is rewarding to do, so although it is a crude-looking horde setup in a standard Amongus layout, it has a good amount of Gameplay to it. The key to beating the map is trying to save one mega to divebomb each cybie closet with. It's not pretty but that buys you essential cushion against getting wiped out if you a rocket hits you. You're likely to take at least one. That constraint shapes the rest of what you have to do, like finding a good movement scheme for getting past the initial crowd without using every mega. It's easy to exhaust the megas and try to hold out at the top, but since the number of cybs is well calibrated thanks to Mapping RNG (every decision in a five-minute speedmap is luck), that leaves you with cybs scattered around the map and not enough enemies to kill them, making that a questionable approach. I went with a zigzag (light blue) -> horseshoe (blue) -> loop-around (purple) pattern for that first stretch. This drawing is probably not at all precise since the automap is completely hidden during play and it's hard to even tell what the shape of the layout is. There are some points of visual interest too; it's actually a pretty map in a weird way. A looping conveyor belt combined with a deep water effect changes the texture of the liquid you're submerged in every second. The evil eye switches go together well with the uniform water, and this "pure color with decorative props" style is an impressionistic look that has surfaced from time to time around the community, in one-texture restriction projects and in maps like Alien Vendetta's "Killer Colors" and JPCP's "My Fav." Here's a whatever first exit. Not pretty but I don't want to spend too long on this. The beauty of five-minute speedmaps is when they end up fun, which happens, you can spend 30+ minutes playing them, which is an amazing ratio of time spent to enjoyment produced. More people should try their hands at it. It doesn't seem reasonable that you can make anything in five minutes, but the learning curve is quick because each iteration is very quick. I a lot of appreciation for low-effort maps (on the scale of minutes to a few hours) and unreasonably high effort maps (years+). Both allow you to go places that the middle ground does not -- and the mindset that a map generally "should" take a certain amount of time, like a week to a couple months, is very limiting.
  10. baja blast rd.

    My Map Talk Corner (most recent: Eviternity 2 map11 by Guardsoul)

    ("Titan" by Guardsoul, Eviternity 2 map11, 2023) I'm outing myself as a Guardsoul fan, this being the second map of his featured in this thread after Breakpoint map03. "Titan" has a couple of very cool contradictions. One is that it is the most grandiose mainline map to this point in the megawad, but the underlying layout structure is relatively simple, which is not obvious until you look at the automap (or read about it here lol). This is done not through building a simple arena of enormous proportions -- which is a much more common way to do that -- but through blowing up a layout that is about as complex as a small Scythe 2 map, meaning it's still a full layout, into immensity. Along with this, there's heaps of contrast in vibrancy of "Titan's" two types of settings: the buildings are cold, gray concrete bunkers -- very Winter's Fury in their particular layered-radial architectural makeup, but almost incomprehensibly tall, like something out of Sunder. The "concrete bunker" theme usually doesn't do anything special for me, but scale of it all, and more importantly the breathtakingly colorful wilderness around it, changes that entirely. (Also have to compliment the rock texture here. I tend not to mind tiling that much, but avoiding it entirely with a 512x1024 texture is even better.) Eviternity 2's natural foliage really pops, reminds me of something prehistoric, even though the pink trees are cherry blossoms lol. What I also like about "Titan" is how the monster deployment matches the local setting around it -- which seems more coincidental than some deep scheme, but that counts too. The bunkers all have a mind of their own; they dispense memorable events like the big lost soul swarm and scripted, multi-phase fights that seem wired into the underlying pneumatics of the place. By contrast, the incidental combat in the wilderness regions is very, very simple: a lot of cliff imps (not being an obligate 100%-er, I don't mind skipping these) and roaming spectres and pinkies. The indoor sections that mix foliage and concrete bunker lie at more of a mid-point between those extremes, with simple traps and also one-shot designed setpieces that are part encounter, part freeform combat. A thought I've had about this approach to design is that even though it seems like an extra constraint, it's easier to pull off. If you're knowingly designing around that sort of theme-gameplay consistency, you can build different regions of the map knowing exactly what sort of gameplay they might have ahead of time, which in turn allows you to take certain liberties with how you shape areas. The wilderness portions of "Titan" don't really need to be designed for sophisticated combat, for example. As grand as the map actually is, the implied scale is far, far larger. The design suggests that we might be on the top of a large mountain, or at least an especially tall hill. The layout is split into a low part and a high part, connected with silent teleporters to simulate fake 3D, and what gives me this idea is how the low part gives us a view of rocky cliffs obscured by mist, implying that you can keep going down quite some vertical distance before finally hitting the ground. Another of my favorite parts about the structure is the penultimate area, when you've ascended to the top of the massive building you see from the early stages of the map. The mountains and trees I was noticing around me felt like scenery, like one of the vistas that we get to glimpse many times before. This would make sense because a designed encounter wouldn't let you simply hop off and escape, right? Then I realized -- you can just hop off. We've come full circle and that's the whole start region again. This is another pretty coincidental thing, but sometimes really enjoying a map comes down to those unexpected accidents that can't realistically have been designed for. (They can be noticed by the author and cultivated -- but this one feels really personal to my own perception.) Overall, the half of Eviternity 2 I've played so far goes beyond the "Great Synthesis" model of the prequel, and feels creatively innovative in many ways. But "Titan," with its medley of settings and all the different hints of influence that are present in it, is one of those maps that shows it isn't abandoning its "synthesis" roots either.
  11. baja blast rd.

    my 300-word reviews (most recent: JPCP by Japan)

    Mutabor by tourniquet one vanilla-compatible map for Doom 2 Levels where "everything looks the same" aren't everyone's cup of tea, but Mutabor uses this design style for a rare, peculiar effect. Deep into one playthrough, I started getting genuine deja vu in the particular oblong, green-and-beige pipe-fitted area I was in -- I've been exactly here before, right? It looked so familiar. But I knew I was more than halfway across the map from UV's spawn point (which differs from HMP's and from the "Onslaught" mode's spawn points). I had to check the automap to be sure. The disorientation was unsettling and it felt like this slime city at the edge of reality was unending, in a way that Miasma alludes to but Mutabor now seemed to more deeply embody. It's made all the more strange by how the numerous "backtracking fights" -- duplicitous encounters that get you in your return through an area -- feel impossible to keep track of. Those setups, which play into the idea that the layout is some intelligent structure that can disassemble and remake itself on a whim, are the defining gameplay trope of Mutabor (the root word being "mutation"). There's nothing unprecedentedly dark and grimy about the look of this wad -- the most common color wavelength is a bright green, and some of the city textures are outright cheery. zzzv's background music is quirky but not dark either. The combat -- which is a mix of light incidental scuffling, modern-Plutonia minimalist "smart monster placement" fights, some occasional higher-bodycount arena battles, and some gimmick fights that are scattered about -- is not even especially difficult; if you can handle the middle of Speed of Doom, you'll be fine here. Despite all that, it manages to be very unnerving in a unique way. You can sure feel stranded in the infinite labyrinth. Everything fits within vanilla's blockmap limit, somehow.
  12. baja blast rd.

    2023 Cacowards

    plz delete
  13. baja blast rd.

    12 Maps I Loved This Year

    <3 Also shout-out to @Korp for my MIDI too!
  14. From time to time I have questions that I don't feel deserve their own threads, and others probably do as well, hence the existence of this thread. -- Here's a "circle" with a radius of around 16400 mu. I want to use it as a "sea". The actual playable area of the map would be much smaller, of course. Will this result in blockmap (or other) issues in Boom, and what's the largest this circle can be before these bad things happen?
  15. baja blast rd.

    2023 Missed Cacowards - Any WADs you'd like to share?

    This one added about a third of its maps after Nov 15. Escape from Slime City is probably an extra one I would have chosen as an HM if I did everything myself. Imo more people should do informal write-ups, so I'll write one for that. Escape from Slime City by kwc Doom 2, DSDA-Doom, 1 map Escape from Slime City (much like Jimmy's Mercury Rain) shows the good you can get out of advanced-port bells and whistles by making them part of the core experience. This 15-minute lighthearted trek through a post-apocalyptic city has edible donuts, a fully stocked arcade room, a bowling alley cluttered with pins that go kathunk with every wayward SSG pellet, and much more -- playing out as a barrage of amusing ideas spaced out by punchy and sometimes unexpectedly vicious traps. There's also surprising depth if you go looking for it. Packaged alongside the brief "infiltrating a computer" set HOTFIX '93, kwc shows good taste for fx curation; nothing is ever garish, overdone, or out of place.
  16. baja blast rd.

    2023 Missed Cacowards - Any WADs you'd like to share?

    myhouse -- it only got a tiny blurb omg
  17. baja blast rd.

    2023 Cacowards

    Feel really lucky to be involved in projects that were very received this year. Fun fact is that when I thing-placed the current version of "Infernal Carrier" (TNT2 20) years ago, in the back of my mind during the very first beta release I was worried it was a disaster -- and I'm still kind of stunned the overall result turned out well enough for people to really like the map, and for it to get a prominent place in the write-up. Hardfest 2 was a big surprise too (being spoiled a few weeks early doesn't make it any less of a surprise!), as was seeing how many different people ended up liking Junk Food 2. Some extra commentary on a few of my favorite overall trends: - The still-growing niche-gameplay scene. I wrote about this already, but one of my favorite other examples is how raddicted takes a lot of influence from lunchlunch, who himself is very new. The iteration is ridiculous. - The level of quality that community projects and team projects that draw their teams from one subcommunity (which I think of as the same spirit) can attain with a seemingly more informal approach to management. (By "informal" I just mean they aren't run on BTSX/TNT2 dev cycles lol.) There's been a lot of meme-ing on badly managed community projects in W&M lately, but projects like 1x1, Solar Struggle, Skulltiverse, Hardfest 2, What Lies Beneath, Pina Colada, and many more would be unthinkable in 2015-2016 at their current-day level of overall goodness. These days it's really easy for projects to recruit a number of creative, skilled authors who bring a lot to the table. Authors like Muumi, Dashlet, Yumheart, and many many more aren't mouldy- or skillsaw-level recognizable but there are a bunch of authors like that who are responsible for this. (Me in 2021 playing Skulltiverse: "Who is 7Soul?" Look up their DoomWiki and they have four maps but just casually dropped a top-notch map okay, perfectly normal these days.) Back in 2015, it seemed like "extra-nitpicky quality control" would be the way forward for these projects -- 50 Shades of Graytall being a good example of a project that rejected many maps -- but instead people simply show up and are creative and passionate and very conscientious about their work and that's it. A lot of this is because of increasing activity, but it's not just that; the skill floor has also risen because people learn from good examples and there are more of those around, so it is self-perpetuating. - Oversaturation has proven not to be a thing. Yeah, there are so many good wads, and you'll never play them all. But if you are very selective about what you want to play during one particular week, there still isn't an abundance of any one particular thing. Rather, there are so many wads because there a lot more approaches being explored, and a much broader range of voices and styles. The RAMP 3 rundown and the extra wads on the myhouse page are a very good example of this -- a lot there feels nothing like traditional Doom. Check out the Duck Nukem map lmao. People (who don't know what they're talking about!) sometimes rag on post-Sunder for being too much about bright highlights on dark backgrounds, but a wad like suzerduzer's Black Diamond is heavily inspired by Swim With the Whales but in a mode of artistic expression that is very different from 2013 Ribbiks -- suzerduzer's style is more like a painter (and would fit at home in something like JPCP), whereas Ribbiks had that cold abstraction minimalism, and these wads feel a lot different in tone and aesthetics. Authors like RJD, Aurelius, Tango, LordEntropy, and Bridgeburner (who seem to draw from later gens of FPSes) do grand, baroque architectural in a way that's miles away from Mechadon, lupinx-Kassman, Tarnsman, or Xaser (who have a more traditionally Doomy take on it) -- and all of those authors split up in different ways too. There's platforming maps, glide maps, "wobble maps," all that. There's wads like this. Okay, I need to stop with the examples. Rather than the scene getting more and more crowded, like one bucket filling with more and more ""Content"" to the point of overload -- what's happened is space itself has greatly expanded, so even though there's more work, it's even more differentiated (and it's not called "Content").
  18. baja blast rd.

    [RC5] EVITERNITY II - RC5 Released!

    Thought I'd give this a spin!
  19. baja blast rd.

    PRAGMATICON [COMMUNITY MEGAWAD]

    On top of what Xaser said, the idea/thread is one of the very easy parts of being a project lead, and "stitching it together" is one of the hard parts and something the project lead should be doing themselves. So while it might feel like you're asking for help with a supporting role, you're really asking for someone to do the main gig. People would have a lot more trust in a project by a first-day member if they committed to figuring that out and doing it themselves -- which involves asking for help, but not asking for someone to do it. The bottom half of this post has a very simple roadmap.
  20. Surprise, I felt like playing some wads. This runs from now until 12/31. If you join in, play these in basically any order you feel like it. There's no 'one map a day' rule; there's 33 maps though so you can do that. Garden of Plagues by Sneezy McGlassFace One Mucus-Flow inspired Boom map. Sigma by Didy One adventure-centered Boom map. Night on Doom Mountain by Cannonball One long, difficult Boom map. The Settlements by dashlet Three Boom maps that explore surreal environments. Glaive 3 by EANB Ten short, action-focused limit-removing maps. Fucking Hostile Psychoholic Slosh by Peter Schiecke Six fucking hostile psychocolic slosh vanilla maps. Jaded by lunchlunch Three challenging MBF21 maps (one long map and two short bookending maps). Gravity by Eternal Two scenic maps for strong limit-removing ports. Hundreds and Thousands by finnks13 Six short Boom reality maps (take any damage, you die). And finally... Bonus by unknown ??? Revealed at a later date Bonus by unknown ??? Revealed at a later date Thank you to the lovely person who gave me suggestions for some of these. They insisted that I pick one of my maps so one of them will be a later bonus. Both bonuses will be short ones.
  21. Heaven Stroll by @Roofi Heaven Stroll, along with RJD's Nensha, cannonball's Night on Doom Mountain, and Albatross's Beware of Falling Angels, are what I considered the best standalone maps from the 2022 cycle that didn't make the award tier (Silver and higher), based on what I had played at the time. Although honestly HMs were becoming awards even in 2022, and Nensha was featured in the 22 for '22. Roofi, whether it's works like "Ventose" (Deadly Standards 3 e3m4) or his 180mpv and Mayhem 2020 contributions, has stood out to me as one of the most imaginative working authors. It's not quite the Dobu Gabu Maru or Mouldy sort of creativity the word 'imaginative' might most evoke these days, which is characterized by this hyperdensity and hyperactivity of ideas -- a relentlessly rich layering of events and microdetails and backstories. It's more in the category of authors like Muumi or Xaser, which is a broader-strokes style characterized more by having unusually cool themes, settings, architectural constructs, and visual setpieces -- which are then supported by good smaller-scale designs and subtleties. Like Muumi and Xaser, I get the sense that Roofi draws on a lot of "real world" references for his ideas -- and even maps like "Ventose" that are far from realistic in their worldbuilding appear to be so creatively rich as to draw heavily from a mix of art or fiction or even daydreams. Heaven Stroll, in depicting a small out of the way mountain resort (I think? lol) with a central lodge, is a meeting point of that design style and a thematic area he explored in a few of his very first Doom maps, which is a naturalistic woods theme with Doom's stock textures that reminds me a lot of a certain niche of early '00s slaughtermaps that includes Hell Revealed 2 and Kama Sutra. Heaven Stroll is presented as a very humbly scaled, cozily themed map, belonging to a style that would not be out of place in even the '90s -- it even vaguely resembles a myhouse.wad ;) -- but it has very deftly crafted architecture and polished texturing and a general seasonedness to the design that not very many authors had in their creative toolkits back in the earliest days of pwads. Roofi in particular is fond of using arch-like runs of foliage or other overhanging features, which loop over paths and interrupt lines of sight, in the process slicing up planes into richer scenes that change depending on where you're standing. There is a reason arches are so common in the visual arts. One of my favorite aesthetic things that Heaven Stroll does is grounding the early-'00s trope of STEPTOP-textured false-3D bridges -- which charming as it could be, could also look out of place or like an "advanced feature for its own sake" affectation -- in a basis of pseudorealistic design that suddenly has it making perfect sense visually. It looks totally natural to be able to stand on the awning of a cabin en route to a key. They are also used to let you navigate the second floor of the lodge, which crisscrosses over the first floor at one point. Heaven Stroll is a very brief map but is loaded with cool little design moves like that. Another of my favorite is how the central house has many doors with blue key strips but there's not a blue key to be found in the whole map. Instead, the blue key strips simply explain why you can't open certain purely decorative doors, but here's the thing: at least until you realize they are inert, they draw more attention to those doors existing (when you might otherwise tune them out as set dressing), and get you thinking about the supposed rooms on the other side, which can't actually exist because of Doom engine limitations but are now strongly implied, which helps make the house feel even more 3D than it is. That might not have been the consciously thought-out plan, but I've always felt "intentionality" unnecessary for subtleties like that to matter in criticism, because happy accidents are very much a thing and everyone's interpretation of every work is different. There's a lot of good Doomcute, and what I find interesting about it is that much of the Doomcute is very lo-fi, like indoor shrubs being rendered as blocky columns rather than anything more fine-tuned. That, combined with the frequent recurrences of it, causes much of the Doomcute to play more of a role in core theme-building than serving as those one-off concentrated bursts of detail, but there's also powerlines and a pool table and a sawmill, so it goes both ways. The inner house also has this secret wardrobe, which I'll let speak for itself. Heaven Stroll isn't the pure leisure map that the idyllic visuals and Nirvana cover MIDI might have you expecting, but it is also not very difficult or combat-oriented. One little amusing touch about it is how the initial turret enemies tend to occupy positions that look like fortifications, which has the campy and charming effect of making the lodge look like a zealously guarded military base. This meshes with setpieces that definitely make me think of Hell Revealed 2, with the way the tight interior spaces end up filling up with several hell nobles or revenants (with vile guardians). That isn't a lot, but it ends up reading as very "slaughtery" thanks to how snug these spaces are -- and as a result the combat evokes that early '00s era of slaughter, while going even further than Kama Sutra to ground it in pseudorealism. Almost every encounter ties into the aesthetic somehow, or draws attention to some architectural feature, often through slightly comical enemy placements. All in all, Heaven Stroll is a very good map, and it's supposedly a one-off from an aborted mapset. If there are maps in that project that are even half as interesting as this one, I would personally love to see that continued, but I'm not making any demands. :)
  22. baja blast rd.

    why people mostly play on ultra violence instead on nightmare?

    ngl this map is kind of fun. there are a lot of little things to learn about doing it well. For the original question: Why are you thinking people would play on Nightmare instead of UV? The question would be easier to answer if you share what your assumptions are.
  23. baja blast rd.

    DUM

    Link is currently not working and post has basically no information. Read this before trying again.
×