#doom 1

Alright, folks. We have a very long way before we come to the 2012 roster, so hear me out:

In between reviewing yearly rosters of WADs, I started checking out other WADs that weren’t part of Cacowards and the Top 100 WADs of All Time before them; usually the ones reviewed by MtPain27. After a while, I have realized that there are a lot of WADs related to the ones from Cacowards and the Top 100, so I decided to review those as well. And with just the 1990s, I have a couple of dozen for now to check out. Today, we will be kicking off the (slightly) reimagined bonus rounds with-

B94.1: Dante’s Gate

Main author(s): John Anderson (Dr. Sleep)

Release date: May 17th, 1994 (original version)/February 21, 1996 (version 2.5)

Version(s) played: 2.5

Required port compatibility: vanilla

Levels: 1 (MAP02 replacement)

Yes, I kind of restarted the numbering of the reviews. I put the old ones in my computer in the archive folder to not get confused.

We kick off the first review with the WAD related to my very first WAD review – Crossing Acheron.

Dante’s Gate was the first map in the WAD series called Inferno – basically, the series is based on Divine Comedy. It was created by John Anderson (I’ll talk about his further work later).

The plot of this map takes place after the original game and references the original book up until Dante reaches the gates of Hell – your buddy disappears, and some beatnik shows you the way to the warp gate that the former was nearby.

With the plot out of the way, it’s time to see how this series has started.

The map is mostly brown; I feel like at least 50% of it is made of brown textures. It might sound shit, but I don’t think it is. But textures aside, I think the map looks kind of good for the 1994/96 standards. Remember that it was made before the proper foundations in the WAD making were formed.

Dante’s Gate didn’t feel complicated to me. It might be kind of mangled, but the future shown that it can get much worse.

I find it kind of annoying that the door that leads to the blue key is marked as secret.

On the other hand, it’s kind of cool how the yellow key changes its position if you play on Ultra-Violence or not.

The map was kind of challenging, I guess? A part of me wants to say that some of the fights were cheap, and yet I didn’t feel like that when replaying the map. The weapon placement felt weird to me, though.

The only bug I’ve found was the good, old secret sector too small to step on.

Dante’s Gate was kind of a good map. It feels like a big mess sometimes, but for the 1994 standards, it’s kind of cool to play.

After this map, the Inferno series went slightly nuts to say the least – the second map was the only one that was uploaded normally (I remember having rather fond times with it); maps 3-7 became a part of Master Levels for Doom; eighth one became And Hell Followed from Episode 4, and the ninth and final one was never released, which is kind of a shame.

Next WAD on the list will be a little jolly… even though I don’t feel like that at all.

I don’t know what WAD feels more tiresome. 1994 Tune-up… or this:

G4: Double Impact

Main author(s): Matt Cibulas (RottKing) and Ralph Vickers (Ralphis)

Release date: March 30th, 2011

Version(s) played: ???

Required port compatibility: Limit-removing

Levels: 9 (episode 1 replacement)

I’m gonna rip the band-aid off now: I don’t like Double Impact. The short answer to why I don’t like it is that I find it boring and monotonous. The long answer? I’ll explain it in a moment.

The WAD was made by RottKing and Ralphis; The former made MAP12 for Community Chest 3, while the latter made music for Urban Brawl. Double Impact is the anomaly for these two, since in the Doom community, they specialize in multiplayer maps. In the case of Ralphis, it might even be the only singleplayer-based WAD.

The plot described on the release thread on Doomwiki says that you play as a random mechanic on a random, natural satellite that tries to escape the demonic invasion.

If you played any techbase-themed WAD, you played Double Impact. Without counting the guts and the demonic eye cameos in the secret exit area in Research Complex, it’s all basically KDitD on steroids. People who like this theme will be overjoyed with it, but personally, I was done with it by the second third of the WAD. It does get better once the demonic corruption starts appearing, though.

I played this WAD with the dedicated MIDI pack released in 2023, and it is great. Well, at least 2/3rds of it is great. My favorite track is Main Code; I feel like it would fit in the Jazz Jackrabbit game and the bells that I heard in the Mucus Flow’s track make it even better; it’s like you explored some abandoned complex/ancient ruins and found what you are looking for, but then the demons start popping out, so you do some ripping and tearing on your way back.

I wish the levels themselves were as good as this track. Instead, I felt like I was playing the E1 version of Run Buddy, that really old Boom WAD that was more of a tech demo of the source port, but at least that map had an excuse of dragging itself. I have no idea why the maps in this WAD are annoyingly big. It gets really boring to play these maps, and if not for the MIDI pack, there would be a chance that I would fall asleep while playing this WAD. I didn’t even mention the annoying backtracking in some of the maps and some of the switches that belong in the what the fuck did that one do category.

But you know what? The maps are tolerable when it comes to the pacing, when you don’t play with enemies. But playing them normally? Oh boy...

Unless you know where the secrets are and stack up your rockets and plasma, prepare to have your awareness tested with boredom. I do realize that you can’t make fights in Doom I WADs as interesting and unique as Doom II ones, but did Double Impact have to fill itself to the brim with enemies? At least 75% of it was shotgunning cannon fodder from what I experienced. The WAD wasn’t even hard most of the time; it was boring.

And when it gets hard with the final map, Launch Bay, it’s for the wrong reasons. You know how icon of sin maps forces you to throw your brain out of your skull and run around like a headless chicken? Well, imagine that, but with looking for six switches while being chased by four siege cows instead of constantly spawning enemies.

I can understand the concept behind the map – the base reaches the critical mass of demonic corruption, and you are just a random engineer goober instead of the Doomguy, so you don’t stand a chance against the invasion, and you have to run. But after blowing up nothing but zombies, imps, and, occasionally, pinkies most of the time, now the WAD decides to go full out? You could at least give me BFG. Freedoom version has it. Why not this one?

…

Let’s change the subject, people.

When it comes to bugs, I think I’ve twice encountered a broken teleporter; my guess is that these were supposed to work as shortcuts after grabbing the key, but were busted, so I was forced to return the long way.

There are also a couple of other bugs mentioned in Doomwiki.

Double Impact is a WAD that I can only fully recommend to the E1 enjoyers. It might have its moments here and there, but the bloated levels and amounts of enemies, and mostly uninteresting-looking maps, soured my view on it. Even when I had more fun during my second playthrough.

If you are interested in this WAD, do me a favor and play it with the 2023 MIDI pack. It won’t make you fall asleep while playing it.

Next review will be on either Plutonia: Revisited or Vanguard. We will see if I’ll be in the mood to play another community project.

meta-wise doomguy (pre-doom 2016) and the doom slayer are different entites like mario 64 and normal mario (all of these headcanons are about doomguy btw)

he is in his edgelord phase during doom 64 and sounds like his unused quake 3 lines

hes in a freind group with gordon freeman the postal dude the ranger (quake guy) and duke nukem

he and the ranger are found family brothers

also that one post-chain about the silent protagonists gc

autistic about guns (and also just autistic in general)

very slightly insane

anyways doomguy variant time

dudeguy: coolest fucker on the block. hes blue and has sunglasses and he skateboards and has a cool ass sword (what the fuck is a dave strider/silly)

hideousguy: "main character" of hideous destructor. very tactical and all that jazz. prolly looks like the doom 64 doomguy and is dark green

testguy/gerald: playtests and sometimes makes custom doom maps. texan and transmasc and also fat. he wears a hardhat an orange construction vest a pair of construction gloves and cool ass steel-toed boots

house_guy: i could go on a whole ass yap about this guy

…

We are back.

REVENANT AWARDS 2010 EDITION

We are done with the Cacowards 2010 roster, folks, so that only means that this ripoff is back!

I’ll still be choosing the WADs that gave me the most fun, so there are no changes in that department.

And we have a lot of categories with more than one WAD… It’s actually only four, but for this wannabe award ceremony, that’s kind of a lot for me.

But anyway. Let’s not waste any more time and get into the first category.

SOLE SURVIVOR – BEST 1 MAP LONG WAD OF THE YEAR

Even though I like all of the maps, choosing the winner here was easier than I expected. Drip Feed was good, especially in its second half, but it should’ve toned down with enemies at the beginning, along with being less mangled; not to mention having to idclev or type command code to get to the map instead of just placing it in the MAP01 slot (it was archaic even before 2010). Valhalla was surprisingly good for a ZDoom WAD, even if it looks the same in every location, which can get confusing, along with other personal problems.

And then there is the winner – Arcadia Demade. It might be unpolished in some places, but here, the things that would be considered an annoyance in other WADs, like teleporting enemies and confusing layout, fit perfectly here when you realize that this map was made by one of the Bioshock 1’s designers.

So… yeah. I have nothing else to add here.

PUG-OF-PINK – BEST 2-7 MAPS LONG WAD OF THE YEAR

I have mixed feelings about choosing the winner in this category. Unloved is a better WAD, for sure, but Beyond Revival felt much less polarizing.

Honestly, if I had to pick the poison, I would choose Beyond Revival. It might not be as interesting as the other WAD, but I remember having more fun with it rather than with Unloved. And that’s why the former gets the award.

GOLDEN SPIDER – BEST EPISODE REPLACEMENT (8-9 MAPS LONG WAD) OF THE YEAR

I won’t be counting “Curse of D’Sparil” here, since I only managed to pass 3-4 maps, and I don’t think I’ll finish it due to how tiresome it is.

We will start with choosing the winner that requires a source port. And you know what, let’s just cut to the chase – No Rest for the Living gets the first award in this category, because what kind of WAD does it have as a competition? TurboCharged ARCADE! – The Sequel Episode? Yet another Mockaward winner?

But seriously. TurboCharged 2 has interesting concepts, and it’s better than its predecessor, but it’s still nothing compared to NRftL, which blows it out of the water. It even blows TNT and Plutonia out of the water.

The second award goes to the second episode of Base Ganymede, which wins by default. While polarizing, I remember having fun playing it.

OFF THE WALL – BEST PARTIAL/TOTAL CONVERSION OF THE YEAR

Choosing the winner for this category was really easy, since it's Threshold of Pain. Stronghold WAD might have its fans, but for me, it’s just another one of Tormentor’s overblown projects, not to mention how it feels like it was made more for co-op rather than singleplayer. ToP might have at least one annoying new enemy, and some of its maps feel like dragging on, but I still liked it, and it’s great for people who like the PS1 port.

OTHER AWARDS

As always, or as almost always, there will be WADs that won the award by default. For 2010, we have three of these.

UAC Ultra gets the Platinum Revenant award for the best 10-19 maps long WAD/megaWAD of the year. It might lack in colors, but it was really fun to play from what I can remember.

Epic 2 earns the Full Deck of Diamonds award for the best 30-32 maps long megaWAD of the year. Not as good as Hell Grounds and has a severe case of too many corner goblins, but when it gets good, it gets really good.

And Speed of Doom gets the Big Fucking WAD award for the best 33+ maps long megaWAD. This WAD has some of the best slaughter maps created, and that’s coming from someone who is not really a fan of these. I especially recommend the Darkwave’s maps; Joshy’s are more mixed bag for me.

CONCLUSION

And that’s the Revenant Awards 2010, folks! Apologies for sounding off in some places. I think I have a couple of loose screws in my head while writing these words. I would say more in some parts of this post, but my brain wasn’t rotten by school essays we all had to write.

Before I take a break from Doom WADs, there are still two maps on my bonus list to play.

By Neil Merrett Doom (1993), released on Nintendo Switch in 2019, published by Bethesda With its now primitive 3D worlds,  Doom 1’s simple premise of running and shooting has a pleasant sense of immersion in the 2020s – even without the ability to look up or down Earlier generations of virtual reality brought to market in the 1990s promised an immersion that would blur the very boundaries of…

Just a little disclaimer before we start – I made a mistake in the previous post about the bugged music. I thought that the music tracks were played like it was shown in the Doomwiki page like half the time, but it turns out I misread something and didn’t think that the music is already properly integrated with the WAD itself. All this time, I needlessly used the optional WAD file with music from DtWiD. I might be an idiot, but hey, it could’ve ended up worse.

S.Ru2: Base Ganymede Episode 2

Main author(s): Adam Woodmansey (Khorus)

Release date: November 18th, 2010 (standalone)

Version(s) played: BG: Complete

Required port compatibility: Vanilla

Levels: 9 (episodic standard)

Honestly, at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if UAC (providing it’s them in this WAD) unleashed literal hell on every planet and moon on our solar system.

...

Anyway, we have talked about the first episode of Base Ganymede during a bonus round in the previous post. Now, we will be tackling the second episode, which, as you already know, was named one of the two runners-up of 2010.

As a reminder, before the WAD was finished in 2012, the first two episodes were separately released in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

Now, let’s see if this episode delivers, and the final map is better than the one in E1.

The second episode looks at least as good as the first one. There is still at least one big area per map, but the episode overall feels less like another Shores of Hell homage; for me, it’s more like three techbase maps and the rest takes place in hell.

Musically, it’s still great to listen to. Although, I don’t think I have a favorite track this time, not to mention having nothing else to talk about.

Gameplay-wise, E2 is similar to E1. It’s not complicated, some of the maps feel mangled, and the episode tries to organically move between each map.

Ganymede’s Core, like Twitch in the previous episode, kills you with barrels, forcing you to Tyson the following map – Ultramarine. Still better than what happened in E1 and its final map.

Also, for some reason, one section of Haunted Research has a bunch of platforms that try to resemble stairs, except they go in zigzag… Just wanted to point that out.

This episode is a little hard. Once again, the amount of enemies is ridiculous in around half of the maps, although the difficulty feels cheaper than in the previous episode, mostly due to constant ambushes behind you and pop-up monsters. The former might be tolerable when it happens like once in a while (and once per map), but when it happens in over 50% of encounters, this is getting tiring and uninteresting. The latter, for me, sucks no matter what.

Another bullshit is with Strut. Remember those shitty cyberdemon fights where he constantly teleports around the area? This is THAT kind of boss fight. At least it’s not as bad as E1M8.

I’ve noticed an interesting glitch, where in Demonic Concrete, in the area where you have to shoot four switches to get access to the fifth one, after shooting one of the four switches, the texture surrounding it slightly changes. It probably is just that there wasn’t the exact texture for both turned on and off switches, but what do I know?

Base Ganymede’s episode 2 feels more annoying to play than the first episode, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t have any enjoyment while playing it. It’s still a good episode; just more obnoxious. For all the things it does, at least it didn’t feel boring (for a Doom I WAD that is).

And since we are done with runners-up, I am automatically promoting both this episode and Beyond Revival to the Revenant Awards 2010 (Golden Spider and Pug-of-Pink categories, respectively) due to these WADs having no competition (I forgot to write this section down).

After taking a short break from WADs, I’ll start taking a look at the honorable mentions of 2010.

As I said in my previous post, there is one episode to check out before tackling the second 2010 runner-up... which is actually an episode of the same WAD as that one.

B21: Base Ganymede Episode 1

Main author(s): Adam Woodmansey (Khorus)

Release date: November 15th, 2009 (E1)

Version(s) played: BG: Complete

Required port compatibility: Vanilla

Levels: 9 (E1 standard)

Now, the way this WAD was released is quite interesting. Base Ganymede’s first 2 episodes were released separately on November 15th, 2009, and November 18th, 2010 respectively. It was only on January 20th, 2012 that all three episodes were released as a single WAD titled Base Ganymede: Complete. What’s funny is that while the second episode, as I mentioned at the beginning, was named runner-up in Cacowards 2010, the complete trilogy earned an actual Cacoward in the 2012 edition.

But we are not here to talk about the awards that this WAD got; We are going to talk about its first episode. I played the entire WAD before when it became an official addon for Bethesda’s (then) Unity port of Doom. I remember it was a rather pleasant experience, although the final maps of E1 and E2 were terrible and filled with cheap bullshit.

Will I have the same opinion for episode 1 as I had before or it will end up different? There is only one way to find out.

For the vanilla standards, this episode looks pretty dope. The corruption appearing much earlier than in the typical techbase episode for Doom I is always a plus for me; not to mention how sometimes the scale of areas is ginormous (for the vanilla standards that is). I feel like there is at least one, big area on a map, indoors or outdoors.

The music is also great. The tracks were made by Mr. Freeze, and were used in the 2011 WAD Doom the Way id Did; in case of this WAD, the soundtrack is in a separate WAD that can be downloaded. If I had to choose my favorite track, I think I would go with The Halls Have Eyes that plays in Hunting Giants.

This episode isn’t that complicated to play through. Sure, some of the maps feel mangled like Warped Outpost and The First Base (the latter to a lesser degree), but I don’t reckon any of them having obnoxious switch-hunting.

I like how this episode quasi-organically goes from one level to another for lack of better words. It doesn’t feel as smooth as some of the other WADs I’ve played that do that, but, hey, I’m glad it's still here.

Also, I would like to mention that Twitch ends up with you getting blown up by barrels, forcing you to pistol-start The Incredible Machine (we will get to that map later).

The first episode is not that hard. Sure, it can be challenging, mostly due to the ridiculous amount of enemies on maps (one goes up to almost 300 on HMP), but most of them are imps, so at least their attacks can be dodged. Should’ve toned down with hitscanners in some places, though.

Especially when it comes to the final map. The Incredible Machine is anything but incredible. Hey! Wanna run around like a headless chicken because there is a spiderbitch in a cage to telefrag and you have next-to-no cover, making the entire map completely luck-based? No? Well, fuck you! :D

Changing the subject, I’ve noticed the bug with the soundtrack, where, sometimes, it doesn’t play the tracks in a proper order, basically going like it was in The Way id Did instead of what Doomwiki article about BG says. I have no idea what causes it, and I tried turning GZDoom on and off like twice on my latest playthrough to fix it and it did nothing.

But anyway, despite the soundtrack working properly like half a time, and the E1M8 sucking a shit ton of crap, the first episode of Base Ganymede is fun. It’s rare for Doom I WADs to have exciting fights (at least from what I experienced) and this episode delivers these most of the time; less so if you conserve rockets and plasma for tougher enemies.