dististik

Unwelcome by Plusw may be very up your alley. It's custom playpal with the vanilla colormaps alone make for some very surreal visuals and it does some really cool out of the box things with its level design.

I'd hardly call these flipping out, but I'll give you the benefit of maybe I'm reading the tone of these differently from you. What I have to say though is it feels awfully ironic that someone being so persistant on the point that everyone is allowed to have their opinions seems so aggressive towards people they personally disagree with. Must be that tone thing again.

That honestly does seem to be a big part of I guess the problem(?) with discussion around slaughter. Quoting MtPain27 a bit here, but often times it does just feel like the overarching definition of "slaughter map" to a not insignificant number of people can be boiled down to at some point someone said "Wow this is really fucking hard" and leaves out the parts of the genre like microslaughter or easy (by design) slaughter. I also used to hold the opinion of slaughter is no fun and unfair because what the hell am I supposed to do, but also I'd play stuff like 1 Monster and get a kick out of rocketing loads of imps to death. Sounds like a load of revenants or hell knights all dying at once from a rocket launcher or BFG are really, really satisfying but a lot of the time I see people think slaughter as a whole is just Sunder. And sure, there's something to be said about the huge influence that wad has had over the genre, it'd be silly to say slaughter mappers aren't usually inspired by Gazebo's work, but like people who write off genres of music because they only heard what was played on the radio I think it's awfully silly to say all slaughter is x y and/or z and deciding to dislike the whole lot.

Proto-slaughter at the very least. It has very similar trappings as things very firmly in the genre, I'd say.

Doom's momentum and movement is definitely on the slippery end in general so you're not imagining it or anything. What may help is you can briefly hold/tap your backwards movement key and that'll act sort of like breaks which will slow/stop your movement a lot more directly than just letting go of the key.

I'm not sure if creating another thread for the same project instead of just editing the OP for the original is a very good idea. I'd also say you should have waited a bit to share more than just graphics; I get that development is exciting and you want to share what you're doing but it can easily be disregarded if you don't have any examples of what the gameplay experience will be like.

It's hard putting a number to it, but I suppose 6 or 7? I prefer no freelook with autoaim (although I won't pretend like autoaim isn't very good frequently), jumping and crouching being required can be a big jarring for me but they're by no means deal breakers, maps can have any style they like and it generally doesn't bother me, scaled sprites look dreadful to me, custom monsters and weapons can be really fun, and while I prefer midi I'm also one to use Hulshult's IDKFA whenever I replay Ultimate Doom and not infrequently use sigil_shreds for playing Sigil; my real preference is probably in instrumentals. That all said, I do explicitly keep the blockmap bug/errors enabled despite my port of choice having an option to fix it, not having "infinitely tall" things feels off to me, truecolor is off-putting to me, I adore software rendering over hardware, and while I'm not sure if this adds purism points or if it's just a weird me thing but having a stat tracker for kills, items, and secrets outside of the auto-map bugs me for a reason I can't quite find words for.

When playing generally I'll play anything so long as jumping/crouching and freelook are optional. Them being required aren't deal breakers, but make the game feel nebulously "less like Doom" to me in a way that's hard to put to words. Mapping, Boom has been my go-to but I haven't seriously played with MBF21 yet; I imagine I'd really like it.

It could probably go either way, to be honest. Mancs and arachnotrons are especially bad with partial invisibility compared to other projectile attacking enemies and it feels like they were put in places especially easy to pick them up on accident. That said, I could see Sandy and American thinking it was a nice assist in a boss arena lol.

Oh, oh! I know this one I know the answer! No! Hope that helps :) Dead Simple, while very straightforward, has layers of strategy to it. You need to take cover, get out in the open to heal or grab weapons, avoid the level's hazards in the form of the blur spheres, and so on.

In a lot of ways that does happen to be the gameplay loop. Entice the player into putting themselves into a position that makes an initiating fight a challenge for them to survive; in my humblest of opinions it'd get more boring much quicker if all of the combat was incidental and all of the ambushes were a handful or less of enemies. UV is supposed to be the "Hard" difficulty, contrary to the UV or bust mentality, so at least to me it makes sense the levels would be meaner to you on that skill. That all said, to properly answer your question, I first played Doom II in 2019 and at the time I enjoyed it. It was more engaging than the first game which I had just finished prior and the new enemies made me have to consider my movement and weapon choices a heck of a lot more than the first game which I liked. These days I play most things from pistol start trying to get 100% kills and secrets as I go and I can safely say I still enjoy most of Doom II, I can just more easily pick out what I like and dislike about the levels.

I'd definitely argue that without their gimmicks, Doom II's levels would not be nearly as memorable. Also to parrot Shepardus a bit, I don't recall suddenly being bashed over the head with a large influx of enemies with no way to reasonably fend for myself, and I've just recently started replaying the IWAD myself.

Bonus points if there was a vile or two with them so you get a bunch extra.

MAP14 - Pain Despite the title (well, I did have the passing thought that it referred to the hurt floors but), I actually thought this one was pretty nice. Relatively short, at least compared the previous map, and filled with a few elements that dare I say I thought were pretty clever. I genuinely like the use of hurt floors and how the explosive barrels along the first major section of them make you take special care not to get caught on the non-damaging sides for too long while fighting. The archvile ambush on your way back after grabbing the yellow key was something I could see coming from a trillion miles away but still was rather nice. I just ran back to the initial entrance of the room and waited for the vile to come join me so I could safely get him stuck resurrecting enemies from my first pass and take him out no problem. That strategy also doubled as a nice way to limit the number of lost souls that joined the party since I more or less remained out of sight of the pain elemental until he was close enough that I could easily take him out. The blue key fight can be simplified a little by peaking through your hint window and killing the enemies on that side of the following ambush early. After that, the area where you were intended to grab the red key was a little interesting to me. After pushing the necessary switches and grabbing the non-secret secret energy pack, I made my way back to assumed progress to find that I couldn't shoot the switch to presumably open the next bridge. Slowly inching forward like the bridge before it didn't work either so I just noclipped up to the button and shot it so I could move on. After that I believe I accidentally sequence broke by noticing an unmarked door and strafe jumping to the building with the red key without going what I later assumed was the intended path. Not 100% sure why that door was there then though, maybe my approach was anticipated somehow? Ah well, grab the red key, have some nice mindless fun with the BFG, and on to MAP15. MAP15 - Lair of the Baron Boy was this one... Something. Objectively speaking. Start off with a clear view of the yellow key right in front of you and as I'm known to make poor or unneccessary decisions I think "Wouldn't it be funny if I could grab that?", SR50'd into the wall and did just that. Oh. Huh. After that though, I had an insanely hard time getting a foothold on the level. Eventually I scrounge up what could generously be called a start but don't quite have the arms or health to deal with the hitscanners or the revenants I was supposedly supposed to fight to get the yellow key properly. So I move on, get some mega armor, and walk up some steps that I somehow can't walk back down? Wonder if this was intentional before moving on and triggering the archvile + hitscanner extravaganza. I have close to no ammo at this point and that same trigger also added a few cacos and pain elementals to the crew so I raised an eyebrow and thought y'know what? I was probably supposed to grab a rocket launcher earlier. Boy am I silly for SR50 grabbing that key. So, I idclip through the barely too tall ceiling to backtrack and... huh? Wait how am I actually supposed to get up to the key? At this point I'm a little bewildered so I open UDB and there's apparently some random lines on the floor meant to drop the lift down for me to move on. Despite opening the editor I didn't see that I was probably supposed to hit the mancubus guarded switch a few more times so I just use that miscellaneous part of the air to move on and... no rocket launcher? Well, I have UDB open and I'm already pretty blatantly cheating, so I look for where the rocket launcher is and it's back with all the hitscanners. I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that this level was pretty strongly made for continous playthroughs. Well, either that or I'm bad which is honestly probably more likely. With all the ammo I'm given for a weapon I couldn't possibly reach if I tried, I cannot see this as any other case except that Angelo expected me to have the rocket launcher from previous maps, at least on UV. So, I go on back, notice that I hear two sets of archvile noises, lovely, and do the extremely fun task of baiting the hitscanners into hurting the vile. This takes a bit, as you can imagine, but eventually, the alien dies and there's just few enough hitscanners left that I can pick them off just two shells. After that I carefully bait the pain elementals up the lift one at a time and punch them to death, saving my remaining 8 shells for the cacos. I expectedly could only kill one caco, but I just needed to slip by the other to get an instant full refill on both shells and bullets from the ahem 51 hitscanners the archvile resurrected and killed over and over while I waited for it to die. After that I grabbed the non-secret megasphere, before moving on to the red door backtracked and did the non-secret soulsphere fight with the non-secret archvile there, pushed forward and... Why is that wall purple? Originally I took a short video of it and sent it to my partner like look at this zany graphical bug in this silly 90's wad haha but then remembered I still had UDB open and uh sorry this is supposed to look like this? Huh? I had not even considered that Angelo may have used custom graphics since they all fit the vanilla aesthetic (and after checking the wad in Slade noticed he was pretty conservative with his choices sans his WOLF6 and WOLF9 replacements). The next fight looks brutal at a glance, especially at my 29% health at the time, but I just backed up into the teleporter immediately, took out the cacos and shotgunners who wanted to follow me, and after a short wait teleported back through and hit behind a bend in the stairs while I rocketed the freshly formed clump of enemies, making short work of them despite the vile. The fakeout exit was interesting and luckily I noticed the secret exit opening up while I was fighting the final vile of the day and exited with a whopping 58 archvile revives. I can't say I especially enjoyed the level while I was playing it but the series of events played out almost like a sitcom to me so in retrospect I guess it's a bit of a goofy level that I can't help but enjoy the thought of in hindsight. Not sure I'd ever want to play it again though... Results screens

You're misunderstanding what DeHackEd is on a fundamental level here. When you apply a patch, whether that be by editing the DOS executable or load it embedded in a WAD file, you only get one. The bigger reason you couldn't load Valiant or Eviternity with Minicharge or Vesper is because either the entire set's DeHackEd would be superceded or your gameplay mod wouldn't load. Yes.