DSC

From the founder of this website himself:

My dad bought that game in the 90's, played it to completion and he still speaks very fondly of it to this day! I'll have to play the game my first time with him someday, make him relive those good memories. I don't know where the CD is these days, but we still have the manual. I remember looking at it as a kid and getting very scared by some of the pictures!

Yeah, movie looks fucking awful. Still, some of the reactions it has gotten from Internet denizens are absolute gold. Look at this screenshot someone sent me:

Does Elon Musk risk his life fighting super-villains on the daily?

A small thing I forgot to mention... I saw many people share the "Doom 2 is boring because the levels are so lengthy" sentiment in that comments section, and I forgot to address that. The way I see it, no one is forcing you to play several levels in a row, or even just finishing a single level in one playthrough. If you start to get bored that's not necessarily the game's fault. Sometimes the players just need to take breaks and not think like they are obliged to complete everything in one sitting.

I'll be honest, I really shouldn't be taking this shit so seriously enough to make a whole post about it, but I have nothing better to do anyways, and trying to ignore it just takes too much willpower for me. I'm pretty much the "someone was stupid on the internet" guy from that xkcd comic. Still, I'm a giant Doom nerd, and if nerds are good at one thing that is to make giant needless rants about their favorite subject. I was browsing Doom videos on YT, and this one caught my attention: I clicked on it and originally I intended to watch it, but I saw it was 40+ minutes long and I wasn't in the mood to watch a long video, so I just did something I'm very frequently guilty of doing thanks to my short attention span, and went to check the comments first. Many of them made fun of the channel for the strange way he pronounced words, and one person even said they found their analysis pretty shallow and underwhelming, which further made me have less and less interest on the video itself. So, I just kept reading the comments, curious about what the average gamer outside the community had to say about Doom 2. And I found some interesting stuff: Those ones in particular hit close to me because one of my very first posts on DW was me asking if Requiem had aged well and was worth playing nowadays, and Linguica himself came in saying pretty much the same thing. https://www.doomworld.com/forum/post/2030426 It just goes to show, it's easy to point at something and say "Ah, you're so trash nowadays!" ignoring the entire context of when it was first released. When I see some people nowadays review old wads it frequently comes across as more of a glorified CinemaSins video rather than an attempt to actually make some kind of insightful analysis. Without input from those who experienced it first-hand it just leads to skewed conclusions. Unfortunately, I believe that's what kind of happens with some of the other comments. Like... What? Doom 2 has more maps than 1, most of them are much bigger and complex, several new enemies, a new weapon... All of this shit in only 10 months! But sure, lets call it a "cash grab" because it didn't have have more textures and they couldn't recreate a full scale alien invasion in the very limited Doom engine. It's unrelated to the subject at hand, but I personally despise this whole "I didn't like thing, therefore it's a cash-grab!" mentality. It's so lazy and devoid of any real meaning. Thankfully, at least some of the critics had actual substance behind their claims: Still, I can't really say I agree. They talk as if Doom 1 has Sunder level of detailing, when in reality many of the levels from Episode 3 and specially Episode 2 arguably have far more haphazard, incoherent and nonsensical texturing than anything in Doom 2 excluding perhaps Nirvana. And the whole "bloated" and "directionless" thing... It just screams to me "Doom 2 levels have careful exploration of the level and getting familiar with the layout as a central part of its progression, and that is bad because I'm too lazy to do any of it and don't want to use my brain." I really like the sandbox and non-linear nature of a lot of these levels, and to me it is what sets Doom apart as a whole from many other games. If I just wanted to go in a straight line while shooting at bad guys I would just play something like COD. And those complaints do feel like they came from someone familiar mostly with COD-like stuff, who saw the "rip and tear through everything!" attitude from nu-Doom and somehow assumed the old games would also just be a non-stop shooting gallery. Something like that might be more palatable and digestible to the masses, but personally I like levels to take risks and go as wild as they can with their creativity. That's the essence of Doom to me and what sets it apart from everything else. There's a parallel I would like to draw between this and the likes of, say, prog-rock. Prog-rock songs are not concise and straight-forward, and that puts many people off. Listening to those pieces for the first time they might sound unpleasant. But, if you were to think more critically about what you listen to and made an effort to engage with the material, you could soon find yourself loving this stuff and getting far more satisfaction from it than your regular more commercial and conventional songs. I find it players all too often just can't have a little more patience. I know I'm not the only one who loves this kind of stuff, hell, just look at that new Sandy inspired mapset by GermanPeter. There are others who also love Doom 2, but when I look at the internet as a whole I've found the majority vastly prefers Doom 1, and that has always made me feel an outlier. This disconnect manages to make me feel uncomfortable very frequently. I know I can't be harsh on people who are more unfamiliar to Doom, but again, this all ties with what I talked about taking context into consideration, knowing that for new players at the time the new expanded scope was absolutely mind-blowing. I'm interested in the input from a more Doom-focused place, see what more knowledgeable players than me have to say on the matter. Is there any truth to what I say, or I'm the one who's at fault from expecting so much from the players and that it's the game's job to keep them entertained at all times?

You know, I've had this idea for a while of remaking Hell Revealed 1 with updated visuals and gameplay, but this wad also got me thinking that maybe a "HR1 The Way Yonatan & Haggay Did" could be pretty kickass too. I've always felt they were quite similar in style to Sandy in a lot of ways. Thing is, I'm still a novice mapper occupied with getting good in the first place, and trying to closely imitate others might be out of reach for me as of right now. But if anyone here finds the idea interesting and wants to try doing something like that, feel free to do so! I'm always in the mood for some more classic vanilla Doom stuff, and I believe GermanPeter shares this same sentiment.

I don't explicitly say the entire level itself is THE combat puzzle, apologies if it appeared otherwise (I did write "encounters" in plural, but whatever, simple misunderstanding). But yeah, I do agree completely: most combat-puzzle maps consist in a series of individual challenges, almost like a gauntlet. There are however a few maps who are more "sandbox" in style, like Sunlust MAP18. In that level you're constantly running around on an open area shooting at the demons and just trying to survive, and it's possible to trigger all the ambushes while the main fight is still going on, kind of blending it all together.

Nowadays the term "combat-puzzle" is thrown around a lot to describe a myriad of different wads, and that made me think... We have tried to define more clearly the usage of "slaughter" beforehand, but I don't think we've done so yet with "combat puzzle". It kinda is very vague of a descriptor, the opinions of what constitutes a combat-puzzle differ very much from player to player. In order to make it less meaningless and vacuous of an expression I thought it would be fun if everyone gave their own personal definition of what they think it means, and maybe give an example of a wad or two. Going by my description, I would say "combat-puzzle" is a difficult sub-genre of Doom wads characterized by very particular usage of terrain and monster/items placements in order to create unconventional encounters with the enemies, that in their "solution" usually involves adapting quickly to the situation at hand and figure out a specific strategy to get the player out of said mess and survive the encounter. Common tropes include the likes of locking a player in an arena, pop-up monsters, surprise monster closets, and occasionally large densities of enemies, overlapping a bit in those cases with slaughter. If I had to choose one example of what a combat-puzzle is, I definitely would pick Sunlust. To me it's the quintessential example of the genre. Now... What do you fellow doomers have to say about this?

Played through the first two episodes, and I'm loving it so far! There is only one thing that bothered me a bit... MAP15 was very funny and well-executed, but it did leave me wanting a Sandyfied version of Industrial Zone. Would it be asking too much to maybe make it and release it as a bonus level in the future?

We over here don't use the Fandom wiki. Here's the link to the other, good wiki: https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEDM Also, as bonus, in case anyone is curious about the image of the poor cat:

Oh sweet summer child, you have no idea...

It's OK to dislike the mapset, but saying shit likes this is just extremely disrespectful both to the mappers and the Cacoawards staff.

Recently I bought a pretty cool F-Zero spiritual successor called Aero GPX, and also joined the game's Discord channel. And guess what I found there right now: Someone is playing it on QuakeCon! If anyone passes by them please say hi for me, a fellow fan of both Doom/GPX!

One small bug that needs to be fixed: the imp that is supposed to appear on this section of MAP05 doesn't show up on GZDoom. Maybe it's a pop-up trap and they're stuck in the ground?