Ubik

Estrogen and progesterone are the best drugs I've ever taken. Also, I make beer for a living if alcohol counts.

Re-re-re-re-replaying System Shock 2, after the System Shock remake whetted my appetite for it. The remake was good, but it made it even more obvious that System Shock 1 walked so that System Shock 2 could run.

Still working in the beer mines.

In the last few years, I've gone from plonking around in DAWs to falling down the modular synthesis rabbit hole. I've streamed with Earth Modular Society a few times, and even got to perform live at my local synthesizer shop Patchwerks recently :D I'm of course still releasing music at https://rocketmermaid.bandcamp.com .

In no order: Cave Story Undertale DOOM 2016 Final Fantasy 6 Megaman 3 The Guardian Legend Katamari Damacy Super Metroid Terranigma Starsky & Hutch (and anything else produced by Tim Follin, really) Shovel Knight (and anything else produced by Jake Kaufman, naturally) Almost anything from the Konami NES era - Contra, Castlevania, etc.

Psst, off-topic, but I'm glad you still exist and are still active!

I fully agree with this. As much as I enjoyed MM1 and MM2, I don't remember any single map from either one of them standing out much. As megawads, they're especially significant, but no individual map seems to have had the effect or impact of the ones on the list here.

Also, switching from a testosterone-based metabolism to an estrogen-based metabolism means that it's harder to build or hang onto muscle in general, but thankfully my frame, my profession and my body's general behavior has mitigated 90% of that.

I hate that working in a brewery negates some of the results that all the physical labor entails, for obvious reasons. :v

Excellent list, and contains a whole bunch of the maps that stick out most in my memory. Personally, of Sunder I remember Hive Mother much more because of its persistent beehive hexagon structure and theme, but Pale Monument was also an excellent choice. In any case, I have a bunch more PWADs I need to catch up on now!

I'm working as usual (beer never sleeps), but maybe I'll do the mandatory E1 playthrough I do every once in a while. I'm about due.

I am 100% a lore nerd, but I have an immense respect for the way Doom2016 did things: Provide the lore without chaining your gameplay to it. Make it so that you can explore it between ripping and tearing, or do the ripping and tearing alone and ignore the lore completely. When the opportunity to let the player tailor the gameplay to their preference arises, I always say take it, and Doom2016 not only did that perfectly but lampshaded it wonderfully by refusing to take it too seriously and making Doomguy himself not give a damn. So in Doom:Eternal, give me all the lore I can take, but let me take it in on my own terms between ripping and tearing.

Some sort of stunning or blinding gadget like the alt-fire of D2016' Plasma Rifle would be a good use for it, I think. Also, on higher levels/endgame, a health sapping weapon would be nifty. Or a cutting laser that could aim with your line of sight that would do low-level continuous damage. There are lots of possibilities for it!

My roommate ran a high-level one-shot recently that ended with our whole party of druids wrecking the shit out of a dragon that happened to also be a forest that spanned the entire world. As it spat us out of its mouth while bleeding out of every tree in its forest, our spore druid kept chanting "SLIMY DOOM! SLIMY DOOM!" over and over, as that spell combined with dazzling/stunning moves turned out to be astonishingly deadly. Things ended in a good way, but now we love to chant "SLIMY DOOM! SLIMY DOOM" at each other once in a while for no reason. Before that, I played a half-orc monk in a Pathfinder game and rolled a Nat1 when trying to attack a boss mob, which ended up with me winding myself on a table. So our spellcaster created an illusion of me being threatening and intimidating... while still being winded by a table. It was just embarrassing and hilarious.

It turns out my ancient low-res Aeon Flux avatar looks like it was rendered by a potato on the current version of the forums, so I went with a cute fanart of Jasper from Steven Universe since I have a heavy affinity for her.

Way too much Minecraft, using a custom modpack I cobbled together myself. That, and some Nuclear Throne and Deathstate.

I love working out but need to get back into it. But I work a heavy labor job as a brewer and bicycle to work about 2 miles each way every day, so thankfully I'm able to keep my muscle mass pretty stable.

I tinker with music production now and then. rocketmermaid.bandcamp.com Fun fact: "downlord" from Scenes from a Gray Cosmos was originally produced for Job's WAD Point of No Return.

No, Doomslayer, you are the demons. And then the Doomslayer had a zombie skin.

Dunno if I ever posted any pictures of myself back in my most active days way back when, but there've been a few changes.

The first time I ever played Doom and the first time I ever owned Doom were the same: My mom bought me the full six-episode version of Wolfenstein 3D in 1994 or 1995, and it just happened to include a floppy with the original Doom shareware on it. I'd heard of Doom before, and seen a few disgruntled employees of a computer shop deathmatching each other in E2M1, but never played it before I had the shareware in my sweaty little teenage hands. I basically blew off Wolf3D episodes 2-6 to play Doom E1 over and over and over again. Then she bought me Doom 2 not too long after and it's been with me ever since. I'm sometimes moderately horrified by how many hours and how much mental real estate Doom's taken up in my life, but I still love the damn thing.

Arachnotron. Doom 2's greatest strength over Doom 1 is that it has a fully fleshed-out mid-tier, rather than jumping directly from Cacodemon to Baron of Hell. And it executes the mid-tier in a number of different ways: Glass cannons (high damage/low HP) in the form of Chaingunners and Revenants; slow tanks in the form of the Mancubus; "mook-plus" enemies in the form of the Hell Knight; and the hellish pest of the Pain Elemental. (The Arch-Vile obviously counts as an upper-tier monster) So where does the Arachnotron fit in to all of this? It doesn't have a special gimmick, and it doesn't have a "job" that any of the other Doom 2 additions don't do. The only thing it does differently as act as kind of a "mobile turret", but most Doom maps are either too close-quarters for that to be effective, or large enough that other monsters can do that better (like the Mancubus or Chaingunner). Their hitbox is comparatively enormous, they're slow, they have a high rate of pain frames, and their firing delay makes them largely ineffective. The Arachnotron has cool visuals and sound effects, but it doesn't fill any slot in the gameplay that another monster doesn't do better. Plus, it more or less just looks like a shrunk-down Mastermind. And I ultimately think that's why it's not unique or memorable enough to have made it into another Doom game. Maybe if they had redesigned both the Mastermind and the Arachnotron so that they had some sort of a queen/drone gameplay element, it'd be more worthwhile to have them, but in the meantime I think it's more or less redundant. I think most map designers think so too, since you see it so infrequently in PWADs.

Tough call, but... 1. Doom 2 (if we include user-made content, it easily lands above, but the original levels are solid and what I grew up with) 2. Ultimate Doom (although if individual episodes came into play I'd put Doom E1 above all else) 3. Doom 2016 4. Doom 3 + RoE 5. Doom 64 (never played the N64 version and never got very far in the fan-made port)

Hey, so it's been a while, eh? I think I'm about 80-90% of the way through the game, so I'll only judge it by what I've seen so far. But what I've seen is every damn thing I was hoping for from Doom 3 that I never got, and then some. Background: I've been playing Doom since shareware days, and have spent more time playing PWADs than I care to admit. I even did some music stuff for some Doom things back in the day. I don't keep up with modern games very much, but still put in lots of time on older games and the occasional new release... like this one. The first thing I'll admit: Yeah, its combat is a bit different from that of Doom/Doom II. But after 23 years since the shareware first came into being, how could it not be? So many new game styles, programming tricks and gameplay elements have come into being since those days that it'd be impossible to make something feel *exactly* like the old, and why would you want that from an entirely new game? What I feel is that the game took some of the best elements of the original games and added a lot of modern touches on to it. At the same time, however, it does rely on an arena structure more than expected, which means it feels quite a bit like Serious Sam or Painkiller. I don't consider that a bad thing, though, and it definitely plays more like Doom than either one of those. I'm just glad we're past the point of monster closets and flashlighting that one random Imp to death. In any case: The combat is wonderfully varied, complex and meaty. While arena setups are common, there's also a pretty wide variety of setups that often entail some different tactics. The weapons are excellently balanced between a variety of different tactical roles, even if certain later weapons tend to become mainstays after a while. And the monsters! It'd be impossible for this game to play like the original games, because their monsters worked more on slow inexorability than combat tactics. But in Doom 4, while you're almost as mobile as the original Marine, the monsters are more mobile than they've ever been, with far better tactical prowess. It's hard to just circle-strafe everything to death anymore, and it makes for some really amazing fights here and there. There are enough interstitial skirmishes to keep it from feeling entirely arena-based, but that tends to be the mainstay of the game's combat. I also enjoy the hell out of the mechanics of the Chainsaw and Glory Kills, which add super-visceral satisfaction while playing up an innovative mechanic that's the exact opposite of the "hide somewhere and regenerate health" thing that's been in games for a while now. The risk/reward balance of the Chainsaw is particularly awesome, if you ask me. I love the enemy and weapon design. The weapons, again, are nice and varied, and the upgrade trees just make them even more fun. And they FEEL very visceral and meaty, in a way that Doom 3 just couldn't accomplish. The monsters keep nicely to the original roster while introducing some new elements, and give the existing monsters lots of new touches. And again, the speed and mobility of the monsters makes the game entirely new and different. There are just enough callbacks to the original games () to invoke a giggle every once in a while. Level design relies on that arena setup quite a bit, which ends up making the game more linear than the originals. But the environments are awesomely designed and executed, and flow very well. The detail and atmosphere are great, although the game borrows heavily from Doom 3 on that front. I love the sound design, from the changes in music cues to the beefy-sounding weapons to the little musical tics of the Glory Kills. The graphics and the detail are just gorgeous, and although they sometimes tax my 650Ti I can still play the game very smoothly most of the time. I particularly enjoy the fact that the game has an okay plot, and that the game lampshades it fully as something you can more or less ignore. I love how the Doom Marine , as he's really only concerned with ripping and tearing. I mean, that's what we're here for too, right? But it has more flesh and nuance to it that any of the previous Doom plots without enslaving you to it quite as fully as Doom 3 did. Part of what I love about this game is how ardently it resists modern FPS tropes, including many that were used by Doom 3. Fall damage? Not really. Regenerating health? Nope. Duck-and-cover combat mechanics? Get outta here. This game is all about no-holds-barred aggression, but even in that it introduces and demands more sophisticated tactics than the original Doom did. I'd say the game's weakest point is its linearity and reliance on arena fights, but that really hasn't hurt it in my mind. It doesn't feel exactly like the original Doom games, but it feels like a progression of them, and that's just what I was hoping for. 9/10 for me so far. And by the way:

Pretty much always HMP these days. If it's something I've played a bunch of times before and I feel like a challenge, I'll up it to UV sometimes. And if a WAD is very difficult and I need to adjust, I'll drop it down to HNTR or even ITYTD as I see fit. Sunder forced me all the way down to ITYTD and even then it was super-difficult for me. But HMP is definitely my default, even for the IWADs. However, coop Nightmare! can be absolutely hilarious if you're playing with the right people.