The DWmegawad Club plays: Memento Mori (play at your own pace!)

dobugabumaru said:

a special shoutout to mouldy for now being the only person (that we know of) to finish every megawad the club has played so far!

rock n roll!

I think Memento Mori is p cool, but it's basically Doom II PWADs circa '95. Most of the authors probably didn't care or cared very little about what other players considered fun, instead focusing on the things Doom II could do for them. Memento Mori II is far more polished and in line with modern standards as to what a PWAD should offer.

I was looking forward to your guy's playthrough of Interception, until I heard most everyone's final thoughts on Memento Mori. A lot of people have become desensitized by modern mapping standards to really appreciate the quality this was back when it was released. Compare this with the likes of Maximum Doom and you'll see this was clearly something to be hyped about back then. Memento Mori is a great megawad FAR better than most have been nowadays. If people enjoyed Ultimate Doom or Doom II I can't really see how they wouldn't like this, at least in some way. For me, it's not so much aging as it is something that I ultimately prefer over some of the most community-hardened efforts that are overzealous in their hype and quality. The problem I have with overly-detailed maps is that they feel like maps that could have been in a higher-quality game in general. It looks like a Quake III map with Doom sprites in them and it looks ugly and out of place. I wanted to play Doom maps, not Quake maps.

Overall, Memento Mori will always be one of my favorite megawads. It was my first surprise outside of playing the IWADs that showed me how dedicated the fans could be in both sound and design. The soundtrack was very well done and it was a nice surprise to find original tracks in a set of custom levels created by fans. Granted, I can understand the people who didn't like some maps (like MAP10 or 12) but ultimately I felt the good parts outweighed the lesser parts of the WAD. I've learned this generation has become a little spoiled with some of the more obvious solutions to map progression. Memento Mori had a lot more puzzle to it and it felt very accomplishing if you've ever been able to find every secret or even progress through certain parts of the megawad. It became a thinking man's action game that said something about the thought that went into the mathematical design. No, nothing to this day comes close to Memento Mori in my book.

On another note, I didn't feel it was the greatest thing when I first played it. I enjoyed it but didn't fully appreciate it. I hated Jens' levels and then some. I was convinced after a while of the quality given some time; Jens obviously at this point has become an influence to me. MAP28 is probably the single most awesome map in existence (and I'll be honest, I was convinced over time by the likes of such reviews as this and this). In other words, a lot of my appreciation came over time and familiarity; and now I find it to be the most enjoyable WAD experience I've had besides some other notable works.

^ different strokes. We went through a similar phase during Klie's BF_THUD! where people were tearing down the maps as pointless and annoying because of the odd conventions included therein. It's hard to sit them down and have them experience an older effort without much context, especially since we haven't played anything notably dreadful produced in the mid nineties era to make us appreciate what MM did at the time. Interception should be an interesting playthrough since it's a vanilla megawad created within the last two years, and I don't think people will be so abrasive or apprehensive towards it since it looks like it includes these newer mapping conventions.

I think people just have learned to distinguish between real puzzles and "hump everything that looks slightly different from textures surrounding it". Yeah, I'm talking about Reverie map31.

In the end, map28 drove me nuts, the map is great and I really enjoyed the map after accidentally grabbing the red key when I wasn't supposed to. It was fine. I just didn't know where to go and in the end I was hitting switches which at the time seemed to do nothing of use towards my immediate progression.

Memfis said:

I think people just have learned to distinguish between real puzzles and "hump everything that looks slightly different from textures surrounding it". Yeah, I'm talking about Reverie map31.

No, there's no sex in Reverie.

[EDIT] In all seriousness though, I should upload a playthrough of MAP31 of Reverie for those who found it too difficult. I purposely made the secret exit in MAP15 difficult because I figured if they could solve that puzzle then they should be able to handle MAP31. If not, the exit is readily available from the start. It was a Bob Evans inspired map, obviously; of which I know he has very few fans. I guess you could say that map is for the subtle-minded, because I was asked by someone else to make more maps like this because they enjoyed solving the puzzles.

valkiriforce said:

I was asked by someone else to make more maps like this because they enjoyed solving the puzzles.

It's me, I'm the monster

On the matter of judging games by their contemporary standards, I couldn't help thinking of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjikLCPeUdo

MM in 1996 was something of a revelation - an entire replacement of Doom 2 with new graphics and music and sporting levels that were mostly good to great by the standards of the time. In 2013, it doesn't look anywhere near as impressive, but it still deserves credit for its place in history.

a little late.. but if someone wants to see a TAS of this classic megawad, I uploaded a recording of Heretic's run on youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVOXtbB_Wp8

fda's if anyone is interested...

doh

Well, he did say play at your own pace. No judging.