Endless

Funk! | Derek Waters | 1995 Funk! is a medium-sized level with a slightly above average monster count and difficulty that seems to employ interesting and creative ideas, but lacks the proper execution and polish to fully enjoy them. There's a variety of neat rooms that follow a very strange and confusing pathing, with little cohesion and terrible gameplay balance, the enjoyable weirdness of the scenery soon becomes a grueling test to your patience.

Had a lot of fun with this one after months of not playing. Thanks for the little meal! Here's a review I made: https://endlessquesting.wordpress.com/2023/12/05/wad-review-decades-of-doom/

Richard Garriott.

Myhouse.WAD was supposed to be "the" Doom creepypasta and it was honestly pretty eerie and cool for the first months, until the community devoured it, spit out, and lost its flavor by over-exposition.

Can't see the difference tbh

Not really disturbing per se, but, there's probably thousands of long lost and forgotten WADs gathering dust in some ancient floppy disk, HDDs or someone's CDs. If I've learnt something about forum threads on Doomworld, is that every once in a while someone comes out of nowhere to reveal they found and restored some ancient PC or drive, with a DOOM WAD stored, and share it with the rest of the world. I don't think it is spooky, but it is an ominous feeling to think about all the thousands of lost worlds out there, some awaiting, some doomed to oblivion already.

The Great Alexander, when he heard me argue that there are infinite WADs, he sat and wept, for he was only master of one.

Arizona is one of my ''dream states''. Would probably love to live somewhere in Flagstaff, or maybe a small town near Lake Powell. The landscape around those areas seems like the kind of place that you can explore for an entire lifetime.

The French will rule the Doomworld!

Oh that's scary, glad to hear you are back dooming! Despair.wad | Paul Thureen | 1995 Generic empty level from the 90s. Nothing to say here other than it is pretty damn barebones and actually broken. You can't finish the map due to a wrong-facing exit switch that goes into the wall itself. Sad day. Menzoberranzan v2.0 | Doug Erickson | 1995 A very odd and cryptic DM map from 1995. The title comes from the fictional underground continent of the Forgotten Realms (D&D lore) which caught my eye, but the actual map is far, far from actually being an accurate representation of the landscape of real Menzoberranzan. For DM, it sucks greatly, but it does have a few enemies in SP mode, and a lot of interesting-ugly areas to explore.

We look more or less like this.

Would love to see Alexander S. (Eternal) come back. I know he has made a few single contributions to different projects here and there, but he hasn't released a standalone WAD since 2016.

This is an interesting question that interest me as an outsider. I just know the basics of the historical and political context of the US, but when I try to look at it in the hypothetical scenario of where I would like to leave if I was a US citizen, it's honestly probably any of the West States and the Four Corners, mostly because of the geographical landscape. I'm a big "outdoors fan" and I'm enamored with mountains. The US West, to me, is absolute heaven on Earth. I also like Arizona a lot, and I think I would actually enjoy living in Phoenix. I understand it is absolute hell due to the extremely high temperatures, but I'm very used to heat already, plus, Phoenix at least gets cold seasons every once in a while, and you can travel a few miles to the upper areas and there's already snow. Where I live, cold season is, at best, 18 Celsius, while the rest of the year mostly stays around 38 Celsius. When it comes to the political, cultural, social, economical, etc situations, honestly, when you live in a third world country, even the trash of the US looks like a peaceful ranch in comparison. Except Florida, fuck that. Also honorable mention to my favorite place in the entire world, a place I've never even been to lol: Lake Powell. So, best state? For me, either Arizona, or Washington. Worst one? Florida for me. It's pretty much the same compared to where I live, minus that many crocodiles and snakes.

PEACE-D3.WAD (New Peace for Doom 2) | Wolfgang Grassl Christian Hellmann | 1995 A small DM map designed for some brutal violence across peaceful geometry, literally peaceful because of the symbol. This is quite the big piece of shit. It is terrible in almost all sense of the word and doesn't seem to understand even the basics of what makes DM a multiplayer mode. It also includes a large number of monsters without any care in the world in SP, and good luck trying to kill them all in UV. Pass. The Kult v1.1 | Ravenwing | 1995 The antithesis to what a 90s map should be. This one is slow-paced, extremely easy at less than 15 enemies, feels atmospheric due to its very interesting usage of textures, and occult-like details. I'm quite fascinated by the simplistic style of it and how it tries to take things slow and heavy, with a sense of impeding dread looming over. It's probably because it feels so out of place when compared to the usual 90s /idgames crap that lies everywhere. It's not a ''YOU WON'T SURVIVE THIS MAP'' kind of deal, is just a map, it just is, and it is is pretty decent. I do find it to be quite boring in the gameplay deparment, but it is not often you find a map that, for once, doesn't try to be the hardestTM in the world. It is quite inspiring as a matter of fact. Why? I don't know, it's a feeling that seems to evoke what quietness can do.

Go to /idgames archive, press ''Random File'' and play whatever you get. There's no limit, no end in sight, no rest for the living, only the living end.

FUNHOUSE.WAD | Robert Payne | 1996 Contrary to the title of the WAD, this is not a very fun house. An extremely basic and dull level with pretty much nothing worthy to mention about. The only two positive things about this is that it is super easy and at least not broken. Pretty much a Wolf3D level in Doom engine. Ambush2 | MrBlonde | 1996 A nicely looking DM level from 1996 with some extra touches that add up to a rather enjoyable experience, at least when it comes to visuals. The map layout itself is circuit-like and flows well, for the most part. It has some interesting touches and paths to take, and while the BFG9000 area is a bit tricky to get into, the map seems pretty damn good, but could have had better item placement. DOY2.WAD | Doyoon Kim | 1996 Another DM map. This one has a few SS soldiers and HKs going around in singleplayer mode. The layout of the map is far too small for group fights, but could work in duel mode, although, the actual placement and the general geometry of the level is rather, eh, obtuse. Nothing particularly bad, but at least understands the most basic layout design philosophy. LOOE's First Level | Looe | 1994 A very generic level from 1994 that at least follows a basic concept and doesn't try to do anything particularly crazy that breaks the experience. Very simple in almost all aspects, but unlike the first WAD I played, this one has better texture work, design, geometry, and is not a flat Wolf3D recreation. Not bad, but then again, not much competition to begin with.

People are so fucking empty that they really are desperate to get fake internet points as fast as they can, that are not even points to begin with.

Haha my greatest bane. Thanks a lot for playing my map mate. Never crossed my mind I would see Technical Issues here reviewed again. I still consider it my beast, and def the one that I've enjoyed working on the most. Maybe I'll make a sequel someday :D Thanks for the review and kind words!

Thought it was worth mentioning since I think no one has yet. @Bob Evans came out of the blue almost a decade ago to release his lost Odessa series of maps to /idgames, and there in his thread he also mentioned having a CD-ROM with the entire WAD archive of the long-extinct CompuServe forums. He seemed eager to help with preserving the contents of the CD, but seems like due to both internet and personal reasons, he never got to do it. Hist last post was in 2014, and his last connection in 2015. Does anyone know if something happened to Bob, or is the CD lost for other reasons? Anyway, thought I mention it since this is probably a golden grail for old school WADs, including content from a variety of top mappers from the 90s era that have never been released. It's been years since the last update so I thought going back to it, even if just to remind people of the existence of the CD, would be worth posting about.

The problem with this is the way you have worded it it. Garbage is a strong word to describe what is considered an important age for Doom history. While it is true that the 90s had a lot of bad WADs, a similar thing can be said about modern times. There's still WADs coming out today that look like they were made 30 years ago. If you want to compare the quality of a good 1994 WAD with that of a good 2023 release, you are just being unfair and negligent of the historical context. As for why people have reverence for 90s stuff, here's some stuff I can think about: Nostalgia, the most simple factor to go for Simplicity, most maps were done with the essentials and still work and play good Innovation, people were new to mapping and even tools were quite rudimentary, you had to make due with what you had, and some people could be very creative Historical interest, I find myself in this one. There's something to be said that a game manages to survive for 30 years and you can go back to its premiering date and still play its earliest works as if you were digging some ancient dinosaur. I think it is awesome Vanilla, most WADs back then were created for the original .exe, and while source ports didn't took long to appear, people stuck with vanilla for years. Today, there's a lot of vanilla-lovers that find themselves attracted to old school WADs at some point because of the huge amount of vanilla maps that are from that era And heck, I even covered this with other 90s enthusiasts out there in my blog: Why Play 90s WADs?

One of my main duties in the Doom Wiki, is finding and playing WADs from the 90s to upload screenshots to their pages. While scouring the archives, I found out about TMP, a WAD with an unknown author. It is usually rare for such thing to be in the wiki, so that caught my attention. I went down a rabbit hole and read the .txt, finding that TMP was supposedly the winner of a magazine competition from PC Zone, and the author name is Gary McAndrew. I did more digging and managed to found the issues where the event happened! PC Zone 15 (where the event was announced) PC Zone 19 (where the winners were announced) It was an awesome find and I decided to preserve it our history and made an article for it on the Doom Wiki. This happened some months ago already. Today, I was able to find the compilation of the 25 finalist WADs, which to my surprise, were archived on /idgames. Sadly, the remaining submissions seem to have been lost, but according to the article, they existed as part of the compiling CD-ROM back when the event ended. Probably lost to time, but I think it is worth a shot asking if someone knows any of the remaining missing WADs, and maybe they can be somehow rescued. A total of 120 submissions were sent, but only the 25 finalist (plus the winner) were archived on /idgames. Anyway, hope you guys enjoy this little piece of forgotten Doom history. If you know of other similar events, would be awesome to read about them :)

Incredible! It does exist still. The .ISO files seems to have all the submissions sent to the PC Zone competition, plus a few hundred random zip files, and hundreds of other items for other games I assume. Here's Temple by David Harvey. E1L1 by David Moore Abraxis by Nick Lee Canals by M. Booth Searching his name in /idgames doesn't yield results, and the same goes for a lot of the WADs and authors for this competition. Either they are not on /idgames at all, or maybe under a different name or title. Is there any way to possibly upload these levels to /idgames? @Grazza I've always wondered exactly how the process goes for uploading lost-and-found levels. I think you've uploaded many throughout the years so you were the first person that came to mind.

Those are some considerable prize pools. First time I see this. I imagine that if this was just packed inside the D!Zone big boxes, then its reach would have probably been minimal compared to magazine like PC Gamer, for example.