Splatter

I feel slightly better about there being no (unmodded) animation to cycle the weapon now

The UAC facilities were on Phobos & Deimos, the marine base was on Mars. All anybody on the moons had time to do was scream "something evil's comin out!" into the radio. The marine base on Mars picked up the transmission and sent up their infantry. Don't know why you'd think anyone on Earth had a remote control shutdown. McDonald's HQ in Chicago can't flip a switch when a restaurant in Beijing has a grease fire

UAC wasn't expecting any hostiles to come through the gates, yet alone literal demons from hell. The enemy hit too fast and too hard and in short order, everyone was too dead to shut them down

The Ottoman. I think Turkish warriors would look great done up in Hexen's dark style.

It's-a me, Doomguy!

Each of series has a very different style and approach. The clash from pasting them all together results in a weaker setting than they are individually.

Metaphysical questions aside, in Doom games, you need to go through an interdimensional gate to get to Hell. In Plutonia, there's explicitly one last gate on Earth. Your paramount mission is to reach it and neutralize it before enough demonic badness comes through to cause a second global catastrophe. You do in Map 30, and the game ends. So the weirdness to me is not that one user states the game is set on Earth, but that any player thinks he got to Hell before even reaching The Gateway of Hell. Classic Doom may not be particularly story-based, but the other games always provide some special transition to Hell and text acknowledgement that you've crossed over. The original Doom has the corrupt UAC gate in E1M8 and text about you being stuck on the shores of Hell. Doom II's map 20 has a hole in the world and text about you closing it on the other side. Evilution has the Quake-like gate near the end of map 21 (though since intermissions couldn't be shown mid-level the text about that familiar vista had to play at the end of map 20). Doom 64 has the gateway in map 8 and text about how the demons are practically inviting your into their domain. But Plutonia's map 6 & 11 - some posters have said the former and some the latter - just use the WAD's standard platform exit, and their text is just about about destroying one of the accelerator trio and moving on. Sure, that works well enough. Doom never goes into detail about how the demons make their fortifications... I don't imagine imps going to it with hard hats and toolboxes. So them forming the devil-hive on Earth from parts of Hell they brought through the gate shouldn't be a problem. Someone in the other Plutonia thread mentioned a blurb on Dario Casali's old website about skipping between alternative time periods. The platform entrances and exits could be a remnant from that concept.

"The Quantum Accelerator and its prototypes are deep inside the ravaged complex. A demon Gatekeeper guards them and mans the last Gate of Hell." is as definite, unambiguous as anything in classic Doom stories. Even if you go by the old blurb you quoted from Dario's site it's not Hell, it's alternative time periods.

If the gateway to Hell was before map 12, the gatekeeper would be before map 12, and the game would end before map 12. That's definitely not what happens. In the complex. The enemy in these games makes demonic structures on Earth every chance it gets. Doom II's "outpost of Hell" wasn't in Hell either. Remember that there are multiple accelerators in the complex, as I quoted previously, the original and its prototypes. You find one at Baron's Lair, another at Hunted, and the last at The Gateway of Hell.

I like this idea.

No part of The Plutonia Experiment is set in Hell. The background story says that "The quantum accelerator and its prototypes are deep inside the ravaged complex. A demon gatekeeper guards them and mans the last gate of Hell." Over the course of the game, you go deeper into the complex and through the devil-hive the lower levels have been corrupted into. By the finale you've reached the gateway of Hell, per the map name, and quantum accelerator, per the end text. Their destruction causes everything from Hell to be sucked back into it. Since your ultimate goal is the gateway that leads to Hell, there's no point it would make sense for you to already be in Hell. You haven't reached the point where you could transition there until the game's practically over.

Romero did a good job with the WADs he released in the past couple years, and working with the original Doom was fine to get back into the swing of mapping, but a whole episode of it seems overly geared toward nostalgia. We all know how much the Doom II monsters spice up combat.

He was very creative to come up with his unique puzzle & exploration-themed maps. RIP.

Episode 3's end text certainly doesn't say "episode 4 takes place on Earth." Episode 4 wasn't thought up until after Doom and Doom II were released. The original game's ending says that the protagonist will return to Earth, and shows Earth suffering an apparent demonic invasion. The story section in Doom II's manual picks up that thread with Doomguy arriving back on Earth (though it takes the perspective he got back via drop pod) and learning about the demonic invasion, eventually seguing into map 01. There's no unaccounted time in between games. Furthermore, Doom II's text screens tell us that the entryway for the invasion was map 20. Like Woolie Wool said, they're just a set of levels. There's no intended story, aside from E4M7, which comes from Dr. Sleep's Inferno series and is actually supposed to be about Dante looking for Beatrice in Hell. Which is not to say that a player couldn't create a story in his head if it makes them more enjoyable.

I kill all the monsters instead of trying to understand them and find common ground.