Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (Mudman)

[DuckReconMajor]

Oh my god playing this made me so happy. I spent like a minute petting the doggy

[Not Jabba]

1 minute ago, DuckReconMajor said:

Oh my god playing this made me so happy. I spent like a minute petting the doggy

Me too!

[[McD] James]

We need more mods that are like Kill 'em With Kindness. 

[Not Jabba]

Impromptu Minidido by @rd. et al.

 

     

     

 

Many of the best community projects are simply anthologies, collecting a bunch of good maps that are connected by nothing but a shared texture pack but add together to create a weird, beautiful multiverse where every individual map becomes something more than it ever would have been on its own. Other CPs are more like collaborative concept albums, where a bunch of mappers with their own individual styles offer their take on a shared idea that ties everything together. This second kind of CP is only as good as its concept; a really good limitation or theme can inspire a ton of creativity. Impromptu Minidido isn't your typical concept album, though, and it really surprised me; what seemed like a fairly limited concept at first glance turned out to have an emergent awesomeness that far surpassed any of its parts. The whole idea was way more clever than I initially gave it credit for, because it was all about how to take the random pieces and build them into a world.

 

Impromptu Minidido is a single map composed of submissions from 23 mappers, each of which was designed independently without knowledge of what the rest of the map would be like. Mappers were instructed to make sure their segment didn't get too huge or lock the player into one area for too long, but otherwise they were given the freedom to go wild with their own mapping styles. The whole thing is stock textured, but the themes run the gamut from tech to hell. Some of them were very easy, others very challenging; some offer clear pathways in and out, while others are like isolated islands; none of them seem to have anything to do with each other.

 

So once all the submissions were in, rd was left with the task of figuring out how to put it all together into something that made sense. I think the way they handled this was quite smart; the map is built around a central toxic river area, and most of the submitted segments are divided into complexes on each side of the river, each with multiple entrances. The segments that were the most difficult to integrate into the main complexes were scattered around in isolated areas where they could stand on their own as something to explore or serve as a key part of the progression: in the middle of the river, at the ends of the river, as secrets that you could teleport to from other areas, as optional side-paths you could enter when you had certain keys. Rd also asked mappers not to add any keys, locked doors/switches, Icon of Sin things, or Commander Keens, since these were the tools they would use to sort out the progression and turn everything into a playable map.

 

The result is that the map is extremely variable and extremely explorable, and those are its greatest strengths. There's a ton of stuff to see and do, and even if no particular piece of it is super compelling on its own, the way it was put together makes it all feel like part of a single organic world, and that keeps it interesting. The map will play in completely different ways depending on where you choose to go in what order. For instance, I stumbled into one of the map's hardest segments early on and got a BFG out of it, but didn't find a plasma rifle until about 50 minutes into the map—only to realize that I could have potentially gotten one within just a few minutes of starting if I'd gone in the opposite direction; on the other hand, taking the latter path first would have given me a tougher start instead of a slow, classic ramp-up.

 

This is the beauty of how the map is designed; it'll give you a different experience every time, so it's highly replayable. All of the hardest fights except for the final battle are purely optional, but also give you rewarding loot, which helps the map support a huge variety of playstyles and skill levels. More skilled players can go straight for the toughest battles and then play the easier sections really aggressively with their better equipment, while less skilled players can slowly unravel the map from the easiest parts to the hardest parts as they slowly build up their arsenal and confidence, or they can skip the most frustrating battles entirely. Observant explorers are also rewarded with some cool secrets (including entire sections of the map that are only discovered by secret-hunting), my favorite of which is a warehouse with a crate full of tiny sex toys in honor of the obvious joke that everyone kept making about the map's title when it was still in development.

 

This map takes somewhere between 2 and 3 hours to complete if you're trying to do everything, and fatigue can be a major factor. At some point you're likely to start feeling burnt out—it took me two sittings to beat the map. Having a smaller scope and fewer areas might have helped it to feel more condensed and easily consumable, but on the other hand it might have taken a lot away from what a unique experience it is. Either way, the 12-minute epic prog rock midi definitely helps.

 

Impromptu Minidido is like nothing else I've seen: an impressive hybrid creature with the ideology of a concept CP but the assembly process and emergent gestalt of an anthology CP. The formula still has plenty of room to grow, of course—if you've already played Minidido, you might well imagine what could be done with a longer development time and a hand-picked team of the community's best mappers, or a resource pack with more variety, or even just a few additional guidelines that might fine-tune the process more. But as it stands, it may broaden your horizons about what can be done with a single Doom map, or what can be accomplished in a short development time.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Walter confetti]

Great review, too bad that this map never seen the light of an official release on idgames... thanks for digging out this great (in all senses) map!

[DANZA]

Great reviews! Discovered many cool maps I missed somehow, thanks!

[Not Jabba]

Eternal Damnation by @DMPhobos

 

   

   

 

High/Low 1, 2, 3, and 4 by @Chris Hansen

 

   

   

 

Today, we're going to be doing some comparative literature. Each of these sets of maps is designed in a series format, exploring and expanding on the four separate episode themes of Ultimate Doom, and each one consists of four maps occupying the E1M1, E2M1, E3M1, and E4M1 slots—but they both take very different approaches. Eternal Damnation is a set of vanilla maps released last year by relative newcomer DMPhobos, who is probably best known for the WIP GZDoom project Darkmoon. The first four High/Low maps, released between 2006 and 2010 by the already well-established mapper Chris Hansen, require ZDoom but have the look and feel of limit-removing maps (i.e., the port features are all under the hood).

 

Eternal Damnation, which was created for Doom's 25th anniversary, is distinctly a tribute to the original Romero/Petersen/Hall maps. Like all of the great retro UDoom tributes, it has a strong sense of pastiche, sporting many areas that echo the shapes and trappings of scenes from the episodes it's based on, but never directly copying anything and fully capable of offering ideas of its own without breaking the sense of nostalgia. The combat is basically free-flowing and maintains the feeling of the original episodes, but with a greater intensity and higher monster counts than you'd find in the IWAD maps. It's possible to get overwhelmed if you're not careful, but since most Doom monsters go down pretty quickly, the dense fighting really just gives you a slightly amped version of that classic episode feel that you know and love—you zoom around like a maniac and barely ever have to take your finger off the trigger, dropping a monster approximately once per second and never having to pause to think about anything.

 

While the E1 and E2 maps are almost purely pastiche, the later maps diverge a bit more in terms of design, but they still keep the essential flavor of their respective episodes. E3M1 is a larger adventure map with a snaking layout that weaves in between rocky canyon areas and fortress-like architecture, with lots of open areas that emphasize the clean vanilla detailing while allowing monsters to attack you from many angles. E4M1 plays like a bit of a combat puzzle, mostly sprawling out over a single interconnected area with a Spider Mastermind and a Cyberdemon anchoring the fighting at either end of it and low/mid-tier enemies trying to swamp you as you get your bearings. It takes some real effort to gain your initial foothold, but once you do, you can turn your mind to the task of gathering the resources you need for assassinating the two bosses. I like this sort of design—we've all killed zillions of Masterminds and Cybers, but focusing the level design on building anticipation for the kill is a way to make it still feel like an accomplishment.

 

But suppose that sort of faithfulness to classic Doom isn't what you're looking for...

 

This past winter after the Cacowards, I spent a couple months trying to catch up on some of the past award-winners I hadn't played yet, and one result of this was that I happened upon Chris Hansen's entire catologue, none of which I had played before. Though most of Hansen's major solo or collaborative releases have gotten some form of award or other, I found that High/Low 1-4 (which all flew under the awards radar) were my favorites of the whole bunch.

 

The High/Low maps were very modern for their time—great flow, interesting progression, neatly designed combat with a distinction between incidental fighting and setpieces, and as the series progresses, increasingly beautiful detailing and lighting with a strong atmosphere. They're finely tuned, but without funneling the player or being overly brutal, and as a result they've aged really well and are a lot of fun to play. It's occasionally easy to miss a progression point and be confused about where to go—a bit of a hallmark for Hansen maps from that era—but that's the only snag, and it feels like it builds character instead of just devolving into a switch hunt. 

 

This is a series that isn't afraid to break all sorts of classic rules in the service of keeping its maps interesting, and that rule-breaking goes a lot deeper than just putting Cacodemons in E1M1. These maps are complex; they take risks but trust the player to be smart enough to handle it. They feel like a contemporary overhaul of Ultimate Doom, taking the distinct character of each episode but using updated mapping concepts to bring it out even more strongly. E1M1 is fast-flowing and emphasizes the arcadey "run and gun" feel of shareware Doom, with a layout that ties itself in knots as it keeps shooting you back through areas you've already visited. E2M1 plays up the tension and dread through murky lighting and tight quarters, with just enough uncertainty and surprises to keep you on your toes constantly. E3M1 has heavy fighting and heavy atmosphere, with high-contrast lighting and elaborate detailing that make the hell setting feel even more sinister, and (as with the original episode) puzzle elements that seem to add to the inherent hostility of the environment. And of course, E4M1 is the most cruel and threatening, always forcing you to think about how you move around the space without falling prey to the hazards as well as how you deal with the combat.

 

What's really interesting to me about these two mapsets is that they're coming from completely opposite perspectives. On the one hand, you have someone who's primarily a GZDoom mapper, used to working with advanced features, who's looking to return to the roots of Doom and learn new things from vanilla limitations; on the other hand, you have someone who originally gained notability working on retro maps, who wants to keep pushing Doom mapping into new territory thanks to reduced limits and modern design sensibilities. The Doom community is all about that push and pull: people who seek constant refinement vs. people who want to return to the original formula, people who believe that creativity is best inspired by strict limits vs. people who believe the only way forward is to be able to do something new. Not that these are black-and-white issues—look at DMPhobos and Hansen, who have each represented both sides of the argument in the course of their mapping careers. It has always been a rich dialogue, and honestly, I think we're all better off for it. Why choose between Eternal Damnation or High/Low when you can play both instead?

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Chris Hansen]

Thank you for the kind words and review of my maps, @Not Jabba. I'm always happy when people find some joy in my creations - especially the older stuff.

[DMPhobos]

Thank you for the review, finding out the vanilla limits and how to get around them, and also working with the classic themes was really such a joy to work with at the time. Im glad some of that fun is present when people play the set

[Not Jabba]

Hey all. Sorry it's been awhile—there's a lot going on in Doom and in real life, but here's something I've been putting together in bits and pieces over time—a bit of a sightseeing tour, if you will. This is the last 2018 review I have planned for now. "But NJ," you're saying, "you haven't written about everything yet!" And you're right. First of all, there are a few reviews that have been tentatively claimed by guest reviewers but aren't written yet. In addition, Paradise and Lost Civilization have gotten/will be getting major updates with a bunch more maps and are/will be up for award consideration again. So anyway, I hope you enjoy the mini-reviews below, and I'll be moving on to 2017 releases soon.

 

 

 

The "You Have to See This One Really Cool Thing" Edition 2018

 

Mothership by @Albatross

 

  

 

Eternity Engine is probably the third or fourth most popular source port for playing Doom, and although it's still fairly obscure by comparison to PRBoom and the Z-ports, it's a plucky port that's slowly gaining recognition for being something of a middle ground that offers advanced features against the backdrop of a more classic Doom gamefeel. Very few maps have been made that target EE specifically, and there's relatively little knowledge about what exactly it can do. It doesn't help that most of the projects intended to showcase it have either ended up as confirmed vaporware, been stuck in development hell for decades, or simply not been released yet.

 

The result is that Mothership is just about the only fish in the sea, but it's a pretty solid showcase for EE's features nonetheless. With its use of AA-tex and the ubiquitious stars.mid, it aims for an ultra-futuristic neon look that's only improved by the use of 3D floors and floating platforms with lots of sleek curves. The absolute awesomest thing about this map, however, is the orbiting UFOs that travel around the perimeter of the map—they actually fly! I don't know exactly what allows them to do this, but they're exactly the sort of thing that theoretically distinguishes EE as a source port; it's a feature that feels very advanced, but also looks perfectly at home in a map that keeps a relatively classic feel about it. Although Mothership is fairly symmetrical and not particularly noteworthy in many aspects of its design, including combat that relies heavily on turreted clusters of enemies, it's by no means a bad map, and it shines as a way of introducing players to some of the things Eternity is capable of.

 

 

 

Bifrost by Albatross

 

 

 

Albatross's second notable release last year was Bifrost, set in some sort of fabulous heavenly crossroads for the pride parades of the universe. The map is essentially a hub with six arena fights that you can complete in any order to get the keys to the exit. Like Mothership, it still has a lot of room to grow when it comes to the fundamentals of gameplay design and presentation. But what a setting! In terms of pure aesthetic concept, it was one of the most awesome things I encountered last year. Brilliantly white in answer to all the Ribbiks-inspired black voids of recent years, with rivers of vivid rainbow running through it, it's a beautiful map that honestly makes me happy just looking at it. It would be really neat to see a setting like this developed into a more complex map.

 

 

 

Terraces by @Bauul

 

  

 

Originally released in late 2017, Terraces seems like it was sort of a breather project in between the author's popular and highly ambitious debut, Foursite, and the even more popular and ambitious WIP megawad Elementalism. Terraces recently received a huge visual overhaul, keeping the bare bones of the map mostly the same but adding a ton of detail over the top of it. The visual overhaul draws heavily from Brigandine and Demonastery, relying on material-oriented use of stock textures and subtle variations to create a strong sense of realism, with loving attention given to each crack in the walls, each plank floating on the nukage, architecturally sensible use of trim, and so on. There's a lot to like here, though it does still feel like a reskin of a less strong layout—in particular, a lot of monster placement is simply clumped behind corners as a convenient way of avoiding the player's line of sight, whereas most modern mappers would shape the layout and architecture to convey monsters in a more organic way that allows for multiple attack angles and creates more of a challenge.

 

There was one thing added in the update that I absolutely love, though—a gigantic snake monster created out of sector detailing and hellish spine textures, curling in and out of the lava and then rising up to rest its head on a larger platform that turns out to house the map's final arena fight. This is a prime example of how to make a piece of map detailing look cool, stand out as memorable, tell a story, and inform the experience of playing the entire map, all at once. You see the beast multiple times from different angles throughout the map, which builds anticipation and gives the map a sort of grounding element, a centerpiece that feels like part of the backstory, and then finally you reach the platform where its open mouth creates a backdrop for the final setpiece battle and houses the exit to the map. This one addition accomplishes a whole lot, and I have to applaud Bauul for making it work.

 

 

 

Spiderfight by @Nootrac4571

 

 

 

Spiderfight is just a single map with a single arena, but the concept is pretty clever: all of the cover that you can use to hide from the Spider Mastermind is destructible, so in theory you have to kill it before you run out of cover completely. This fight is pretty easy to cheese, but it's really just a proof of concept anyway, illustrating the basic idea of a gimmick that could be executed in a more complex way, with more pressure from more enemies in a more advanced arena design. The idea has been used before—both in No End in Sight, where it was part of an even simpler setup, and in Ashes 2063, where it was presumably created using more advanced features—but Spiderfight is a template for using this idea in a complex way within the bounds of Boom compatibility. Hopefully we'll see this concept taken further.

 

 

 

The Eclipse of Betelgeuse by @antares031 (SlaughterMAX map 28)

 

   

 

I never played this map, exactly. With all due respect to the genre, 22,000 monsters (or even 9,000 on the lower difficulty setting) is a bit much for me, and the things I like about this map have nothing to do with fighting monsters. This is a map that's worth opening up occasionally with -nomonsters just for inspiration. The sheer vastness and beauty of it is like almost nothing else I've seen in the Doom engine—though if you've played Struggle, map 28 of the megawad is something like a condensed version of the same concept (the two maps even use the same Maxime Tondreau midi). Eclipse of Betelgeuse starts you off with a view of the titular eclipse (which is conveyed via one of the coolest Doom skies I've seen) haloing distant towers, and from there you can turn around and take in a view of almost the entire map right from the start—though there's so much to see that it's kind of hard to wrap your head around. The map is constructed something like a modern city, but with a distinctly hellish skin to it, sprawling out at the center of a giant sea of lava with more skyscrapers ringing the horizon. Though the whole grand cityscape is essentially one giant symmetrical arena, the detailing is so complex and the scale of it makes you feel like such an insignificant speck that it's easy to just wander around in awe for awhile. 

 

 

 

Order of the Odonata by @Dragonfly

 

    

 

Of all the maps presented in this review, Order of the Odonata is probably the most conceptually complete and the most polished, though I think it does suffer a bit from a quick build time to meet the Vinesauce Doom Mapping Contest deadline and the fact that the author had other, bigger things on his mind throughout its development cycle. Nonetheless, it's a neat map, and it was given a special award in the Vinesauce Contest for being the most beautiful entry submitted.

 

The combat for most of the map is probably what you'd call basic "run and gun," for lack of a better term—a bit haphazard on the enemy placement, perhaps, and with a fair share of SSG meat grinding, with the expectation that the theme and the basic gameplay hook will carry it well enough to get the player to the main points of interest. The map is set in a pretty nice looking gothic castle that makes good use of GZDoom's visual features given the short development time, including lots of spires and 3D architecture. The layout is probably the strongest point here—it's tight and very interconnected, designed to funnel you around very quickly and let you play pretty aggressively or cautiously, depending on your preference—and the connectivity combined with the multi-level structure works very well for the concise three-key hunt that serves as your main goal. One area that seems to have gotten a bit more attention was the yellow key/rocket launcher room, which is constructed as a combat setpiece with two waves of fighting and some transforming architecture; I think more of this sort of thing would have been a good choice for the map, and similarly well-presented setpiece fights for the other two keys would have helped tie the level together more.

 

The part of the map that clearly had the most attention lavished on it was the final boss arena, which is definitely worth seeing. unlocking the three key switches causes a huge, awesome-looking portal to open before you, throwing you into what appears to be an empty wasteland for a brief moment before the entire boss arena suddenly builds itself around you, walls and lava floors and all. It's extremely impressive to watch—just be careful not to let the high-powered arcade boss fight catch you by surprise while you're staring at it. If this is a taste of the sort of mixed gameplay/feature-oriented design we're going to see in a more polished form in Elementalism, count me in.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[antares031]

Much appreciated for an another review, Not Jabba! One thing I have to point out is that the link gives you the idgames page of Slaughterfest 3, instead of SlaughterMAX. Since the wad is not on idgames yet, I suggest you to link this thread on Doomworld. And for those who want to see the UV-Max playthrough of it, I actually recorded the viddump of my demo for the updated version a couple of days ago. Keep in mind that the amount of monsters is increased to 32k, and sorry about the lack of the background music; somehow, my -viddump parameter on PrBoom+ doesn't record the music for some reason:

 

Spoiler

 

 

[Not Jabba]

Oops, guess I was grabbing those links too fast and got the megawads mixed up. Fixed.

[baja blast rd.]

(review expanded on 12/18/21)

 

Black Room by @Paul977

 

 

Ever since Paul977 debuted in 2017 with Disciples of Darkness, a set of four tightly balanced gauntlet maps backed by soothing midis, he has been taking large sheaves out of Death-Destiny's tome of aesthetic and combat flair, inspired by works like Grime, Disturbia, and Abyssion, which are characterized by a pervasive eerie stillness that is offset by joyful eruptions into brutal combat puzzles. Other influences -- Malcom Sailor, Erik Alm -- are weaved into these choruses of violence, but D-D stands above all as the conductor in spirit. 

 

Imitation this brazen is bold: fail, and the work will be looked on by future generations with a matronly air of "ahh cute; rough but everyone has to start somewhere!" But Paul977 doesn't fail. While D-D was a visionary, he left room for improvement: on the visual front, there was rough alignment and texturing; on the gameplay front, there were occasional "harsh gotchas the first time, simple escape-and-wins thereafter" and other crude setups. And with ten additional years of models to draw from, the bar has been raised for everyone. So here we are with "Black Room," the latest of Paul977's single maps that build on D-D's patterns with an updated coat of polish.

 

Rare exceptions aside, the Difficult Maps industry has generally disavowed bright, cheery UAC techbases. More common are "darkbases" as in Black Room -- the familiar assets in familiar techbase shapes, but recolored in grittier combinations, hints of a grimy underbelly or a dark heart. This industry has also fallen in love with color coding, and Black Room's signature note is blue, which courses through sheets of shadowy black and brown. Inside, monster placement is guided as much by function as by staging: setups have an artful look and rhythm to the way they unfurl, the way groups are frozen at the start like statues and blink away to their initial positions once awoken. Like a lot in Ribbiks's Stardate series, encounters can play out as mechanics puzzles: while you're given the slack to manage the most intense crossfires with pure reflex and improvisation, you're encouraged to find precise plans to defang a lot of the most severe elements, which is further reinforced by the relative absence of true "traps," and the way Paul977 is willing to lay his cards on the table by showing you what is coming. His work also leans consistently easier than most of Death-Destiny's.  

 

So, unlike the most extreme gauntlets out there, a defining quality of Black Room -- and Paul977's maps in general -- is a general pliability. Take each fragment as you're given, and at times under the whistles of the MIDI, trekking through silence or fighting a lone monster, the mood is downright soothing. And though the rhythms of modern setpiece-based challenge play are all there, a diligent player willing to work out strategies will find they don't really need to be a Doomgod to feel like one at times. 

 

Though not a truly great map -- that called for a memorable showpiece fight or two, a more fully realized (perhaps Elysion-like) setting with greater visual variety, and some other X-factor -- it is surprisingly close for something so modest. Difficulty settings are included, so play on UV at your own risk, and see your doctor immediately if the MIDI loops for more than four hours. 

[Not Jabba]

Moonblood by @Deadwing

 

    

    

    

    

 

Moonblood is a humble offering that's easy to write off as a middle-of-the-road retro megawad—and if you love that sort of megawad, you've come to the right place—but there's a bit more to it than that, as well. It began its life even more humbly as Deadwing's debut mapset, Eclipse, but was gradually revamped over time. I never played Eclipse (or the proto-Moonblood version, Reclipse, or for that matter any of Deadwing's earlier stuff), but from what I've seen and heard, it seems like Moonblood is where the author started to find their own individual voice. 

 

The result is a fairly low-key Plutonia flavored megawad, a set of maps that plays with the boundary between being laid-back and smacking the player around a bit, without getting too trivial or frustratingly hard for its intended retro-loving audience. In true Plutonia fashion, the combat is more brawl than moshpit, with the combination of shotgunners/chaingunners and Revenants being the main grounding force for a lot of the fighting, but plenty of other mid- and upper-tier monsters lurking around and clamoring for your attention. This sort of combat is why I always found Plutonia itself to be a bit of a grind, and that's somewhat true for Moonblood as well, though I'm well aware that a substantial portion of Doomers take great pleasure in it.

 

The beginning of the megawad features a lot of jaunty little techbases, but it gradually starts to hit its stride and take on more of that Plutonia feel around the late single digits and early teens; from there, it wavers back and forth quite a bit between techbase maps and more abstract wood/stone/outdoor/hell regions, with a lot of gritty, jungly Plutonia-esque texturing. This repeated, amorphous theme shifting is one thing that I find pretty interesting about it, as it adds to the abstraction, the sense of shifting and merging reality that characterizes Doom 2 and a lot of the community's PWAD output. Moonblood also lays the atmosphere on nice and thick—dim, desolate ambient lighting, high-contrast techlights, and many dark interiors and environmental hazards that give you a sense of delving too deep into places where humanity has been forcefully expunged. That said, there's a bit of a sameyness to both the combat and the locales over the course of the 32 maps; it may require some endurance to get through the whole thing, but on the other hand, a mapset like this can give you a certain sense of pushing onward, of going on a long journey, and that feeling itself becomes a part of the game's atmosphere.

 

One of the best things about Moonblood is the soundtrack, which was all composed by Deadwing (aside from the map 32 track, I think). It's not typical Doom fare, even for a megawad born in the Late Jimmian Era when the idea that Doom is required to have metal tracks has long since been lost to the sands of time. Deadwing's soundtrack is jazzy, alternately upbeat and forlorn, and weirdly alien—and it completely transforms the megawad, giving a strange sort of emotional weight to the old-school trappings and meandering layouts. Combined with the story (which revolves around mysticism, cataclysmic failure, and a great mind staring way too deeply into the abyss) and the other atmospheric elements I mentioned earlier, it creates a pretty interesting backdrop for the megawad and gives you the sense that there is something unique to discover, some worthwhile goal that you're working toward—which makes it all the more satisfying when you finally beat the custom boss at the end.

 

Moonblood's sequel, Exomoon—which was a hair's breadth shy of winning a 2018 Cacoward—takes everything that's good about Moonblood and does it even better. The soundtrack is even moodier, the storytelling carries even more weight, the maps are more captivating and varied, and the array of custom monsters gives the Plutonia-brawls more depth and better pacing. Exomoon is a must-play, in my opinion—but chances are that if you like it, you'll like Moonblood as well.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Deadwing]

Thanks a lot for the awesome review and pics, Not Jabba! :)

I'm glad that you've enjoyed both Moonblood and Exomoon!

Both wads ended being targeted to specfic playerbase (especially Moonblood), which I hope I can expand in my next works.

[Not Jabba]

Castlevania: Simon's Destiny by @Batandy

 

     

     

 

Recreating Game X in Game Y is one of the most common forms of project in a lot of modding communities, and if the idea is often synonymous with low-quality vaporware, that's probably because it's usually the first project of an inexperienced game designer. Batandy, however, has stuck with it and made it the focus of his mapping career. Ideally, a mod like this combines the best of both games into a hybrid form, keeping what works and rejecting what doesn't, and Doom: The Golden Souls 2 is a masterpiece of exactly that—drawing from all sorts of games, but focusing on the Super Mario series to transform Doom into a cross-genre universe that's both lighthearted and violent, a blend of familiar and unfamiliar (but always intuitive) gameplay mechanics. The original Golden Souls, which I still have yet to play, is by most accounts great fun as well, albeit with a different set of strengths and weaknesses, and I'm highly anticipating the recently announced third installment.

 

Castlevania: Simon's Destiny is a bit of a different animal, and although I don't think it translates the Castlevania mechanics into Doom as well as the Golden Souls series does for SMB, it's an interesting hybrid that leaves a strong impression if you can stick it out—and a lot of people seemed to love it when it was released. Somewhat in contrast with GS2, it recreates all the tropes of the early Castlevania games with absolute faithfulness, and therefore plays something like "Castlevania in Doom" rather than "Castlevania Doom." All of its best points—and all of its worst ones—are ultimately born out of this decision. 

 

On a lot of levels, Simon's Destiny is brilliant homage with a great sense of authenticity to it. The settings for each map feel so much like locations you'd encounter in the series that you'll probably find yourself trying to remember whether they're referencing specific Castlevania levels or not. Every map is backed up by the sorts of high-energy monster-masher tracks that helped make the series so famous (though I don't recognize any of them entirely—I'm not sure if they're remixes or tracks from later games that I never played). All the most memorable monsters are there: the Goddamned Bats, the bone-chucking skeletons, the fish men that pop up out of the water, the infinitely respawning wavy medusa heads, the many and varied flavors of living suits of armor, the turrets made of dragon skulls, the boss fights against the likes of the twin mummies, Frankenstein('s monster), and Death. Combat is melee with the whip plus special items like throwing daggers, axes, and holy water, which are fueled by hearts that you get from smashing things (Note: these use alt-fire rather than being inventory items, which took me a little while to figure out). All of this can be really fun to discover; a lot of the experience of playing the mapset is getting that nostalgic spark with each new element that's introduced, and seeing how faithfully it was done and how it all plays out in the Doom engine.

 

On the other hand, there's a lot of frustration in seeing how a lot of these tropes don't adapt as well to the Doom engine as they do in a 2D platformer. The focus on melee combat can make the game more of a grind, especially in later levels where ammo for the special items becomes more scarce. Many enemies, particularly harassers, become more of a pain due to being harder to hit with three axes of space rather than two. The boss battles compound on these problems, and I found them mostly infuriating, even (especially?) the very first one, which is against a giant form of Goddamned Bat. Gathering heart ammo and other items becomes a huge grind simply because it takes time to smash every decoration lining the walls of a 3D room, as opposed to having them simply be in your path in 2D. The rooms and halls that make up most of the maps are very boxy and plain, in comparison to GS2's environments, which were hugely varied and more freely shaped, even though both games use linear map design. The common thread is that a lot of stuff simply doesn't execute flawlessly in 3D space, which is a problem that GS2 avoids by taking inspiration for many aspects of its design (most notably the weapons) from Doom. In keeping with the source material, Castlevania also puts a lot more effort into being Nintendo Hard, which makes anything you might not like about it all the more frustrating. And again, this contrasts with GS2, where I tended to feel like I had a firm grasp on the challenges thrown at me and felt like I could own my mistakes more—though I could say the same thing about any classic Castlevania game vs. the Super Mario games from the same era, so maybe that's just a matter of taste.

 

Simon's Destiny ramps up in intensity just as much as you would expect, and it's at its best when it's going full-blown homage to the more interesting elements of the Castlevania games—when you're hopping across pieces of crumbled bridges, when the fish-men spawn wave after wave as you rush forward, when the ground crumbles out from under you as you try to make it to safety while being dive-bombed by a dozen boss bats. The final map is the one that perhaps does it best, a fully mechanized castle with lots of vertical movement and conveyor belt platforming that requires some pretty precise timing, not to mention the requisite multi-stage final boss battle. The thing that makes this mapset difficult to love unequivocally is also its greatest draw: Simon's Destiny is so utterly, unapologetically an homage to another series of games that it's hard not to be charmed by it.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Walter confetti]

Awesome review or an awesome wad!

[Not Jabba]

The Red Line by @didy

 

    

    

   

 

Didy was one of the great mappers of the 2000s, but I don't know if they ever became much of a household name, despite multiple awards. Didy is simply a little too quiet and a little too weird—releasing maps with zero hype, hard to categorize into any particular genre of mapping, appealing to those of us with a love for the labyrinthine, for things that are complex and hard to describe. Their initial wave of releases in the late 2000s was mostly single maps or 2-map sets, including Sine Die (Cacoward winner) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (runner-up), as well as the lesser-known Blowup, Beluga, Sigma, and Axiom, which I'm sure I'll be covering later on in this thread. Seemingly taking hiatuses and then mapping in bursts, they had a big comeback year in 2014 with Monster Hunter Ltd. 1 and 2 (Cacoward winners) and Bauhaus (runner-up), and then, completely true to form, released The Red Line out of nowhere in 2017.

 

The Red Line is pure didy—maybe even more so than the 2014 releases, which both reached fairly dramatically into new territory for the mapper. This 9-map set is much more reminiscent of the various 2000s maps, which were all in a very similar mold (but what a great mold!). Take the very best of 2000s faux-realistic detailing, add in oppressive darkness and fine lighting, populate it with just enough enemies to keep drawing the player in but sparsely enough to keep the sense of eerie desolation, and you have at least the basic shell of what didy represents. A great didy map is permeated with a sense of mystery—practically choking on it, even—and even if The Red Line doesn't capture that quite as well as Bell Tolls or Sigma, it still gives you a huge amount to take in and think about.

 

The detailing is top-notch; I can let the screenshots do some of the talking, but it's pretty hard to capture everything that's going on in a didy map with screenshots alone. Powered-down techbases were always didy's main setting, perhaps because the dead, inscrutable machinery leaves a lot to the imagination and fuels a lot of emotion in the back of your mind as you play. In any case, The Red Line focuses on that same setting for most of its run, but dips into what could perhaps be called cities (though they're not constructed like anything you'd normally see) and then deep into hell toward the end of the set, turning all that careful detailing towards each sinew of flesh and rock formation instead. Because the focus is on micro details rather than macro architectural detailing, each area is distinct and often memorable, which is something that I really love to see even though it's fallen somewhat out of fashion since the 2000s. The spaces are often enclosed and even claustrophobic, which can take its toll on gunplay but is amazing for atmosphere. The maps move back and forth between linearity and nonlinearity or blur the line between the two; they have the feeling of being nonlinear and explorable even when there's really only one way to go. If you're someone who feels that none of this matters much and combat alone is king, then I can't really tell you whether you'll like this mapset, because I don't understand how your brain works.

 

But on top of all this standard, beautiful didyness, there's a twist—an overarching gameplay gimmick that's bound to either spoil the experience somewhat or make you love it even more. Every map in the set revolves around introducing a single weapon in the arsenal, and is designed primarily around using that weapon. In the first map, you have nothing but the unberserked fist, which you are not intended to use; instead, your goal is to evade your enemies long enough to find the guillotine triggers that will kill them with crushers. The second and third maps use the Berserk and chainsaw, respectively, and the rest of the maps introduce the chaingun, shotgun, SSG, rocket launcher, plasma rifle, and BFG one by one—though thankfully, the weaponry is cumulative, and you always get all previous weapons at the start of a map along with whichever weapon is being introduced. Even so, the maps are focused on the namesake weapon, with "Chaingun," "Shotgun," and "SSG" (maps 04, 05, and 06) being fairly standard Doom combat, "Rocket Launcher" and "Plasma Rifle" (maps 07 and 08) being more intense, fast-paced shooting sprees with combat on a more grand scale, and "BFG" (map 09) shifting to tough monsters and very, very light slaughter, including a fun bridge covered in a hundred or so zombiemen. As you might expect, the middle maps are a little more grindy and are the least conceptually interesting (though also some of the most beautiful), simply because there's not much of a gimmick to be had with the lower-tier guns—though I have to admit that even the more gimmicky maps don't embrace the concept quite as well as they could, at least for players who are comfortable with the weapons already.

 

Looking back through The Red Line now, I'm not entirely sure why we felt that it wasn't super amazing at the time, though I know I agreed with the decision. As usual for the stuff that I'm covering in this thread, I can only point to the Cacowards and say, "just look at the stuff that DID get awards." 2017 was a tough year, as was 2018. You could say that it's the perpetual curse of didy, being just a bit too strange to be popular, but I doubt that was it, because a lot of us love weird artistry. Maybe the middle third of the mapset dragged too much. Maybe the gimmick felt a bit shallowly executed overall, merely limiting possibilities rather than really going deep into interesting territory, or maybe the mechanical concreteness of it took a little something away from didy's enigmatic mapping cocktail. I think all of that is true to some degree, but I wouldn't dream of dissuading anyone from playing The Red Line; it's a lovely mapset, particularly for didy fans or anyone who likes traditional Doom mapping with a conceptual limitation.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

Altitude by @tourniquet

 

     

 

Altitude is a Tourniquet map, which may be all you need to know. If you're not familiar with the mapper, just ask @Nine Inch Heels, and she'll regale you with tales of why the Cacoward-winning Miasma is the one map you should choose to have with you when you're stranded on a desert island. For my part, when I think of Tourniquet I always think of his contributions to Nova 2—a gorgeous, flowy solo map and two hard-hitting collabs that together account for three of the best maps in the megawad. But Miasma is, for now, his magnum opus, and the reason people love it is that it's the perfect all-you-can-eat buffet: a little of this, a little of that, a plate piled high with every possible combat type, catering to every playstyle, indoor and outdoor, big arenas and tight confines, exploration and close-quarters brawls and slaughter and secret-hunting, and much of it completely optional.

 

Altitude follows the same general design philosophy, except that it's vanilla compatible and only uses stock textures. As with Miasma, the layout feels larger than it actually is due to the complexity of the routes you can take and the fact that you'll probably have to make multiple passes to discover some of the optional content. It's very free-flowing but with lots of branching paths, the sort of map that encourages you to zoom through and pick a path on a whim, but requires you to keep a running catalogue of the paths you skipped so that you can return later or have an "Aha!" moment when you come back through the other end of a fork you already passed through. There are six keys on the map, but you can exit with any two as long as they're different colors. As a result, you can play about as much or as little of the map as you want on any given playthrough, which allows it to accommodate many different skill levels, play styles, and speeds. I guess the most likely approach for most players will be to try to find/kill everything on the first playthrough, but there's still a lot of flexibility in how you can do this.

 

The map is laid out as an abstract city with a central courtyard area that everything else branches off from, and there's a huge amount of height variation coming off of that central area, which is presumably where the map gets its name. Although this quintessential Doom 2 setting is a lot plainer than the Ribbiks-style mystery fortress of Miasma, the way the map is shaped to create the city setting gives it a lot of character—buildings tower up over the courtyard, high walkways run along the sides of them, and there's a nice sense of verticality to it all. Many of the shortcuts in the map make you do some spatial reasoning and figure out how to use height differentials to your advantage. The groovy @yakfak midi is a bit of a surprise but fits well, since Altitude is really a bit of a weird map at heart. Most of the major mappers in the schools that seem to have influenced Tourniquet the most—people like Insane Gazebo and Ribbiks on the one hand, and Erik Alm and skillsaw on the other—don't let you roam around nearly as much as you can in Miasma and Altitude; these are maps where you're just cut loose to find your own way to the end, doing things in whatever order you want, and that brings out a feeling of carefree disorder rather than uncertainty. That's even more true of Altitude than Miasma because of the more abstract, retro-skinned setting (not that anyone would have made anything remotely like this in the '90s).

 

The monster count of around 600 makes it less dense and at least a little bit tamer than Miasma, though I'm not sure whether that's due to vanilla limitations or simply what Tourniquet was aiming for. There are plenty of tricky fights around, but generally the challenge comes from the way monsters fill a limited space rather than numbers; these fights have a combat puzzle feel, requiring you to figure out the best way to move around and the best order for clearing enemies in order to survive. I didn't keep great track, but I think all of the most dangerous fights are optional, and many are even secret; even the final battle of the map is optional in that you can evade it and run to the exit if you want.

 

Since the fairly hardcore fights are there, even if skippable, this map is most likely to appeal to people looking for a challenge. But like Impromptu Minidido or Miasma itself, it's a good skill-building map; you can take on the easier parts first, build resources, and then tackle each challenging part as you feel ready for it. The hardcore players will most likely want to try to one-shot this and just take every tough fight as they happen upon it, but I suspect there's also lots of potential here for speedrunning, since there are so many possible routes; in particular, which two keys can you get the fastest? It's got fairly broad appeal—vanilla lovers, challenge lovers, explorers—though it's not a master of any particular trade. Really, the only bad thing about Altitude is that Tourniquet hasn't released another map since.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Nine Inch Heels]

7 minutes ago, Not Jabba said:

just ask @Nine Inch Heels, and she'll regale you with tales of why the Cacoward-winning Miasma is the one map you should choose to have with you when you're stranded on a desert island.

My inbox is gonna love this. ;-)

[FrancisT218]

@Not JabbaAny future plans to cover these from 2018?

 

Team Rocket

Deathless

Pumpkin Hell

Tangerine Nightmare

Demonic Deviation

Sons of Ares

[Big Ol Billy]

7 minutes ago, FrancisT18 said:

Pumpkin Hell

Tangerine Nightmare

 

Do I smell a special halloween edition? ;)

[Not Jabba]

1 hour ago, FrancisT18 said:

@Not JabbaAny future plans to cover these from 2018?

 

Team Rocket

Deathless

Pumpkin Hell

Tangerine Nightmare

Demonic Deviation

Sons of Ares

 

Just Tangerine Nightmare and Deathless, and I'll try to write one for Breathless as well if I can't find a guest reviewer for it. TN is currently claimed by a guest reviewer.

 

Sorry about the rest -- there's only so much I can do, and I'm definitely curating the selection somewhat even though it extends well beyond what's gotten awards. I probably won't cover very many speedmap sessions/compilations, or many non-selective community projects, but there can always be some exceptions.

[Scotty]

Worth noting that Tourniquet had a map after Altitude in Slaughtermax, that i guess got ignored like the rest of the wad for map28 ;P

[SitarA]

You are not Jabba. I'm not Jabba either. I don't know who Jabba must be but I do know that I'm enjoying reading those reviews. Glad to have stumbled upon this.

Its nice to have some sort of a continuation to the newstuff in this way, to wich I used to look forward almost every week back in the day. 

 

Nice to see someone shining light to wads that would otherwise be mostly overlooked and left in the dark. Didn't knew about most of those in this thread until now. And they're all stunners!

 

 

 

[FrancisT218]

Demonic Deviation and Sons of Ares aren't community wads or speedmaps, but it doesn't matter, I really enjoy these even if it isn't completely thorough. :) While not true of the last couple (since Moonblood), many wads covered on this thread also are ones I may have easily forgotten about given they're not just 'more work by a Cacoward or runner up recipient'.

[Not Jabba]

Doomguy Gets a Puppy by @Big Ol Billy

 

  

 

Doomguy Gets a Puppy is the debut map of Big Ol' Billy, who has become best known as the standout mapper at the heart of the DBP series. There are a few other solid mappers in the DBP cadre, but I don't mind saying that as a rule of thumb, the quality of any given mapset in the monthly community project series is largely dependent on the extent to which Billy is involved in it. His style is distinctive and might best be described as extremely creative '90s camp—standard classic Doom gameplay at heart, but wrapped up in such oddball thematic ideas, and with such attention to telling its own bizarre story, that it takes on a life of its own. A tour through croquet-themed symbolism, a lethal gladiatorial game based on the '90s Nickelodeon series Legend of the Hidden Temple, a fearsome scramble around a hellish spiral with shifting geometry, a mining colony in space ruined by capitalism—well, I can tell you more about his 2019 maps another time, perhaps.

 

The premise of Doomguy Gets a Puppy is that you were about to adopt the cutest Yorkshire terrier in France, Imelda Barkos, who was to fill the empty space in your heart left by Daisy's death, but then she was kidnapped by demonic pet shop owners. M. and Mme. Poulet were apparently a Spider Mastermind and a Cyberdemon all along, and they've secreted your beloved dog away in their well-guarded mansion. You know what to do, though.

 

Although the map is generally pretty moderate, the start can be a bit tricky, as you'll have no safe footing until you can find your way past either the Mastermind who runs the mansion or a room full of zombies, at which point you can start to carve out your foothold and gather more resources. The start doesn't pull punches, deploying Revenants and Mancubi right away in order to push you to get the lay of the land and discover the camping Mastermind who serves as one of your main goals. You can fight it at any time, at least once you've got the armaments and munitions to take it on, though you'll probably want to get it to wreak some havoc among its own minions first. Once you've dealt with initial threats, it's fairly comfortable to push through the rest of the mansion and caves to clear out the remaining opposition, though there are a couple of evil surprises along the way. Make sure to pry the blue key out of the Mastermind's cold, dead foot bumpers and find the secret blue doors, which house mysterious potions that will "cause Doomguy to confront his deepest hopes and fears about pet ownership."

 

The other crux of the map is the gardens, where you'll find your furry companion and then hold your ground against waves of opposition before you can get through to the exit. Note that when you pick up Imelda Barkos, she serves as a chainsaw replacement—I daresay you won't want to use her against the main fight in the garden's center, but the map conveniently provides a wave of Pinkies and a wave of Spectres on the way out, so she can still take out her pent-up aggression and express her devotion to you by biting off your enemies' faces. All in all, this is a really fun little map in which you'll probably come for the bizarre story but stay for the pleasantly active fights and interesting design quirks. So far, I think it's Big Ol' Billy's only solo release, but hopefully we'll see more.

Edited April 21, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Big Ol Billy]

Thanks @Not Jabba this was a great flashback for me. In case anyone wonders, the “Lil’ E” credited in various places (including in a secret in the map itself) is my girlfriend, who mostly wrote the story and sat beside me during the many nights I spent making this map. I think it all started when she joked that I should build her a castle, and I said I would—in Doom. Great memories! Hopefully I’ve progressed in some ways since as a mapper, but there’s a lot of love and joy in this little map :)

[Not Jabba]

Editorial note:

The following reviews are all reposted from The /newstuff Chronicles. It's kind of funny looking back on my old reviews and seeing how I could have written things better or added more depth, or places where my biases were showing against certain kinds of maps that I've since learned to appreciate more as I've played a ton of stuff, tried to understand it from the proper perspective, and broadened my horizons more. I feel like this batch of reviews in particular is very short, and that's probably because I was getting a bit burned out on /newstuff at that time. I don't think I really did justice to these, especially Templum Dormiens Dei. Templum is a great Heretic map, and I would recommend it enthusiastically to anyone who likes the game, or thinks they don't. It's good with vanilla gameplay, but it's also one of the very best maps I've played with The Wayfarer's Tome.

 

It's also worth noting in hindsight that Travelling to the Moon is the prequel to Man on the Moon, an even more awesome map that was a 2018 Cacoward runner-up.

 

 

 

Templum Dormiens Dei by Stormwalker aka Vordakk

 

    

 

You've probably figured out by now that I'm one of the Six Fans of Heretic, and a new release for one of the Raven IWADs is always a treat, especially if it's really well done. Stormwalker has made some pretty cool Heretic wads in the past (Dark Deity's Bastion and Call of the Apostate), but Templum Dormiens Deity is probably their best work so far.

 

First off, the level looks really nice, and it gets a ton of mileage out of what I'm pretty sure is nothing but stock textures. There's a great contrast between large outdoor areas and atmospheric, slightly claustrophobic indoor sections. The lighting is excellent and sets the mood of a dungeon crawl whenever you leave the brighter outdoor areas behind. The music is also well chosen and adds a lot to the atmosphere (and it's by Kevin Schilder, so it fits Heretic like a glove—must be from one of Raven's later 3D games).

 

The map feels very exploratory, and slow-paced in a good way. I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about Heretic in terms of how to speed up or vary the pacing, but TDD proves that the feeling of slowly carving your way through an imposing enemy bastion, hunting for loot and watching for enemies in every shadow, is very much what Heretic is set up to excel at. To make things even more interesting, there are three new monsters (the Medusa from Hexen 2, a stationary turret gem, and the flying wizards that were used in Strange Aeons), all of which have low health like typical Heretic monsters but have attacks that are more difficult to dodge. There's also a final boss that throws a variety of attacks at you, including some that reduce player stats such as speed. Stormwalker has even found interesting ways to use the regenerating explosive pods, both as a legitimate part of combat and to set up deadly gantlets (in combination with crushers) between you and some useful gear or an important switch.

 

Templum Dormiens Dei is a large level that takes a solid half hour to play, and it's worth every second. I've played it, and Stormwalker has obviously played it, so that's at least four fans still unaccounted for. You know who you are—don't miss it!

 

 

 

Travelling to the Moon by @Yugiboy85

 

    

 

Traveling to the Moon is a very large (around 50 minutes to beat) lunar base level in the vein of Valiant E5, but decked out in the CC4 texture set. The map is stunning to look at, with plenty of panoramic views, gorgeous spot lighting, and lots of those cool scrolling forcefield effects that always seem to be at the heart of CC4-tex maps. The whole thing is set to a great laid-back electronica OGG track (at least if you're playing in ZDoom; the textfile makes it sound like Boom players are treated to Jimmy's "Voyage 1," my all-time favorite Doom MIDI), and although the music and the pulsing lights make you want to trance out, the action rarely gives you a break.

 

This map is very challenging. As you explore around the non-linear central base area, you'll face a lot of what I'm going to call incidental combat on steroids: moderate monster density, plenty of roaming hitscanners, and smallish ambushes at just about every turn. The toughest action takes place in the three peripheral keycard arenas, two of which feature rather elegant slaughter-level battles and one of which has a pair of slightly smaller fights instead. After you collect all three keys (in any order), you open up a final arena for a really impressive multi-stage horde battle that includes several Cyberdemons. There are two things I like about the slaughter-type battles in this map that help bring them down more toward the average player's skill level. First, most of them let you feel out the arena and gather all your ammo before you trigger the enemies via the obvious and ominous switches. Second, the hordes all contain a ton of fodder enemies, making them really fun to blast apart with the rocket launcher (which is easily the favored weapon for this map, as there's a ton of rocket ammo all over). Unless you're an invincible Doom god who demands the utmost difficulty, this map on UV should be a pretty nice balance for just about any experienced player who's looking for a challenge. The one thing that can be irritating at times is the abundance of hitscanners, though they can also be very helpful for infighting purposes.

 

Traveling to the Moon isn't just fun, it's inspiring—everything from the architecture to the combat hits the spot. Highly recommended.

 

 

 

Uplink by @Katamori

 

    

 

Uplink is a set of three maps that take place almost entirely in a CC4-skinned cyberspace. This type of setting has been done before (most recently, to my knowledge, in the last few levels of Mutiny), but Katamori's execution is pretty unique. Blue and silver are the primary colors, and the author has focused on complex architectural structures and simple (non-annoying) maze-like environments that call to mind the shapes of circuitry. The maps all do a great job of conveying the setting, and there are some pretty neat digital concepts integrated into the architecture—my favorite is the huge scrolling bands of floating crates in map 02 that represent the flow of data. Laid-back electronic tracks set the tone for each level (map 03's track is especially good), and I felt like they really helped me get immersed.

 

In keeping with the unreality of the setting, things change rapidly in these levels, whether it's a key suddenly teleporting away or a bunch of walls lowering, and you have to think on your feet. Combat is trap-oriented, but it's generally pretty moderate; it never feels trollish or difficult to get out of, it just forces you to react quickly. The mapset ends with a very cool final battle against a bunch of Pain Elementals—because you don't have plasma weapons and they teleport into the arena rapidly, your only choice is to take them on with the rocket launcher, making for some seriously nerve-wracking combat with an emphasis on maneuvering quickly for a good shot. All in all, these smallish maps are well worth the time to play, and I really enjoyed them.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Not Jabba

[Not Jabba]

Return to Daro by @Ryath

 

   

   

 

I'd certainly view myself as a classicist, or retroist, when it comes to video gaming in general—it's why I'm here, after all—but most of the great '90s megawads aren't my cup of tea. STRAIN is no exception—as with Eternal Doom, Perdition's Gate, Icarus, and many others from the era, I have a hard time getting past the dated aesthetic and the plainness of the maps themselves, and 32 maps is a pretty long haul when you're not feeling enthusiastic about something. I've played it, of course, but only once, and it had to have been 13 or 14 years ago now. So something like Return to Daro is perfect for me; this tribute mapset distills the essence of STRAIN down into just four short to medium-sized maps, showing off the most interesting aspects of the megawad's innovative Dehacked work and unusual texture themes without any of the grind.

 

If you're not familiar with STRAIN, it is, of course, the cream of the '90s crop, arguably surpassed only by Requiem and perhaps (assuming you don't hate it completely) Eternal Doom. The heart of it is the built-in Dehacked gameplay mod, which is quite extensive and dramatically changes the feel of the game. Pinkies are tankier and faster, Lost Souls shoot fireballs immediately before charging, Cyberdemons are shrunken and have roughly the health of a Hell Knight, and Revenants are reskinned as a floating robot that fires much slower-moving seeker missiles. Mancubi, Arachnotrons, Masterminds, and Pain Elementals are gone entirely, replaced by an Imp variant that zooms around and then stops to turret at you; a lightweight flying cube that moves around erratically and fires a hitscan attack; and a white Baron that behaves somewhat unpredictably and tosses a spread of projectiles at you. The Spectre is also gone, and instead there's a spectral Revenant-bot. Most of the guns are a bit more powerful, and with most of the beefiest enemies removed, and the highest-tier enemy having similar health to a Baron, the combat moves quickly. As a counterbalance, many of the new enemies have pretty dangerous attacks. It's a slightly more glass cannon mode of play, and you could say that it plays up the tactics of dealing with individual enemies more, whereas Doom itself is generally seen as being more about the macro-strategy of dealing with larger groups of enemies that are easily avoidable on their own.

 

Like STRAIN, Return to Daro takes great care to introduce each new or customized enemy, and each weapon, in a way that feels meaningful—and although it's a short set, it makes sure to fit in a couple of big fights that hinge on each enemy, either alone or in combination with other enemy types. Arch-Viles, now the closest thing the game has to a boss enemy, are used only a handful of times, and to great effect, in fights that really bring out their strengths and the strategies involved in fighting them. Other than that, though, the stars of the show are the enemies that are the most unique to STRAIN: the mini-Cybers, the white Demon Lords, the Revenant-bots, the flying cubes, and the enhanced Imps.

 

Map 01 is the most classically minded, the one that feels like it could have come directly out of the '90s, with a condensed back-and-forth layout and enemy placement that leans mostly toward the more familiar, popcorny enemies. Map 02, on the other hand, provides an immediate contrast and embraces the more puzzly aspects of STRAIN, giving you a light floor puzzle right out of the gate (simple enough to navigate, unless you want to squeeze the secrets out of it) and then some sneaky fighting that can vary a lot depending on how you approach the map but is likely to make you think on your feet.

 

Map 03 is the largest and most complex of the bunch, and easily my favorite. It's one of those Light World/Dark World maps where you periodically enter a different version of reality, and the things you do in one realm affect the other. The interplay between worlds is handled nicely, and the map has a handful of very cool fights against the diverse custom bestiary. Map 04 is more of an all-out brawl, a fast-paced final exam where you face every interesting enemy type in the game, ending with a big dodge-fest where you take on a wave of Demon Lords with the super-BFG.

 

Return to Daro probably has a ton of homages to the original megawad, but I barely remember anything from STRAIN. I did, however, recognize map 03's tribute to Charlie Patterson's "Entryway" (STRAIN map 10), which Xaser and others convinced me was one of the most memorable maps of all time. STRAIN fans will no doubt recognize more, but the mapset definitely feels like it has ideas of its own, and it offers a smoother, more modern take on what people love about STRAIN. These four maps make a pretty convincing case for what the megawad has to offer, and who knows—maybe I'll revisit it someday after all. But regardless of what you think of its aged parent, Return to Daro is a quick, pleasant little romp that doesn't even come close to wearing out its welcome.

Edited April 22, 2022 by Not Jabba