#doom 2011

It’s time for some blast from the past… kinda...

G6: Reverie

Main author(s): Michael Jan Krizik (valkiriforce)

Release date: November 14th, 2011

Version(s) played: ???

Required port compatibility: vanilla

Levels: 32 (standard Doom II format)

Reverie is a megaWAD that pays homage to the old WADs of the 1990s; stuff like Requiem, Plutonia, Icarus, Memento Mori… Eternal Dud -_- and so on.

The text file goes into detail about the maps – how long these took to create individually, what they are referencing, etc.

The plot is where it gets weird when it comes to Doom – The events of the WAD never happened; Doomguy was just in a coma, fighting his way to wake up or something. The story even references how the WAD itself was inspired by the dream the author had.

Let’s hope that this WAD has many of the highs that the ones from the 90s had, along with as few lows as possible.

And by the way, from now on I’m playing on UZDoom, because le no chicken decided to try to take a Generative AI dump into the GZDoom’s code and a shit ton of GZDoom devs decided to make their own fork (after years of dealing with le no chicken’s arrogance and shenanigans). Let’s hope UZDoom holds up.

My memory of the WAD is kind of hazy at this point in time, but I remember that it looks very good for the vanilla restrictions. There are a lot of themes as well; one map might be happening in a library of sorts, only for the other map to happen in the Egyptian ruins.

Speaking of the library, Sleeping Spirits looks good overall, but I have a weak spot for the rain effect that happens in the outdoor areas of the map. It’s not the first time this effect was added, since I remember H2H-Xmas having a similar effect on some of the maps, and that was at the very end of 1995. I still like it, being here.

The music is great to listen to. It was made by the returning composers – PRIMEVAL, Jimmy Paddock, and stewboy, with the former making most of it.

My favorite tracks were City Streets and Fallen Sun. The former kind of sounds like it was made by Jimmy, when it’s actually PRIMEVAL’s work (the first part is especially great). The latter track, meanwhile, I heard the first time while playing the Lost Civilization WAD from 2019. Basically, when I’m listening to it, my first thought is not Civvie’s Delight.

Also, I feel like Arachnobus Mayhem and Knee Deep in DOOM are two halves of one track; I hear strong similarities between these two in my opinion.

Playing Reverie was kind of a mixed bag to me; some of the maps were easy to understand, some of them had at least one what did it just do kind of switch, and some are borderline moon-logic bullshit. At least one fifth of the WAD felt like the last type; these were dragging on and were too big for my taste (at least when it comes to vanilla); not to mention the a lot of times you have to backtrack in many maps.

Triplet II is a reference to the original map from 1995, where there are three portals for each individual key; thankfully, it is not as moon-logicy as the original map.

The Tech Towers requires to also collect the skulls to unlock the exit.

Hello, Cybie ends with you accidentally teleporting into the escape shuttle, and crashing it, forcing you to pistol-start Armageddon Valley.

I remember one moment in Tyranny, where at one point a Hoovy comes out of the toilet near the yellow key, and, I swear to God, it made me chuckle a bit. Seven years of Mockawards - didn’t giggle even once, and yet this moment made me do it.

Changing the subject, Final Doom (the map) ends with another icon of shit, but this time, John Romero’s head is placed in such a spacious room that the splash damage it receives is minimal; it needs dozens of rockets to be put down. At first, I thought that its health had increased until I checked further.

Metal Mansion might probably be more painful to play, though. Imagine moon logic on moon logic, where it forces you to find secrets to actually finish it. Oh, and you can also get stuck in it. Didn’t even finish it after trying once. MAP32 is not worth playing with this shitshow in the WAD before.

Reverie didn’t feel challenging. Sometimes there was bullshit, but nothing severe. It got harder in the last sixth, from what I can remember, but after many slaughter WADs, the last five maps were nothing.

Sleeping Spirits, that I mentioned earlier, has a couple of ghost imps; AKA can’t be hurt normally, and you have to use blast damage (among other, less reliable things).

I found only two bugs (on Tech Towers and Sleeping Spirits). Although I’ve also read that some of the levels are overblown, and you can’t save without the source port.

Reverie looks great when it comes to the vanilla restrictions, but I think it should’ve had less switch hunting. It’s a good WAD, but flawed.

This review would’ve been earlier, but unfortunately, the Doom fatigue struck again, and I wanted to read one to two books and try a bunch of games on Steam (the ones from the top 250 page, to be exact; year-by-year lists). I hope the fatigue will strike again later than sooner.

I still have the second half of Plutonia Revisited to finish. After that, I hope the rest of the WADs go down smoother.

G3: Lunatic

Main author(s): Paul DeBruyne (skillsaw)

Release date: August 11th, 2011

Version(s) played: ???

Required port compatibility: Boom

Levels: 5

Looks like we are talking about an actual banger today, folks.

Lunatic is one of the two 2011 Cacoward winners created by a man nicknamed skillsaw. You probably heard about him; one of the more well-known WAD mappers, a man who made Valiant, Ancient Aliens (at this point probably my favorite WAD, but I would have to replay it), and Heartland, all of which won a Cacoward in each year these were released.

Skillsaw himself uploaded his first WAD in 1998, disappeared for almost a decade, only to come back, and he would later contribute some maps for Zpack (of which Thunderpeak comes from) and… Stronghold… I’ll ignore that-

Surprisingly, compared to the history of its creator, Lunatic doesn’t really have that much of its backstory. All I found out was that it took 10 weeks to make it, and it uses textures from Community Chest 4 (that wasn’t released at that point). And its plot is about how our moon was hit by the gigantic ball of demons, and you have to hop on the rocket before the moon crashes into Earth.

With that said, let’s take a look at the WAD.

Lunatic looks great, especially with the outdoor areas. And the skybox makes it all even better… I wish I could say more, but what else is there to add? I like the design of this WAD.

Same with the music. It starts and ends with bangers. And even the ones in between are good to listen to.

The WAD is simple to understand. The only thing that might count as a problem is that you have to wait for a while in some of the areas (it’s especially prominent in Rocket Zone), but you are thankfully occupied by waves of enemies coming through, so you won’t even notice when the passage is unlocked again.

Space Weapon Research has, as the title points out, areas where the rocket launcher and the plasma gun are tested, but instead of finding them, you find out that these have been stolen and taken to the aforementioned Rocket Zone, and in exchange, you get ambushed by new enemies (about them later).

The final map, Final Countdown (guess what MIDI it uses >:]), is a gauntlet of ten waves, and as the time passes, more locations unlock in the arena. It is also the only map where you can find BFG, from what I know. -_-

Anyway...

Lunatic is rather medium when it comes to difficulty. The first map is rather easy when RNG is on your side, and it ends with slaughter in the final map. I would say that the first area in Super Lunarcomputer is kind of assholish, because I think that it’s kind of too small, and the arch-vile here doesn’t help, but honestly, I think I have experienced worse, not to mention how enemies are turned around when you teleport onto the map.

Going back to Space Weapon Research for a moment, you start it out like MAP04 that I mentioned just now, but here, you sneak without waking enemies up to arm yourself before tackling the starting area.

There are two new enemies. Both zombies, but at least they are not hitscanners. Both can be easily killed, too.

First enemy is a pale baldy that has a plasma gun, and for some reason drops chaingun ammo (probably because you would be stacked with plasma by the time you find the plasma gun).

The second enemy is a cyborg hoovy, who fires revenant’s rockets. He thankfully doesn’t fire as often as the spoop meister.

Lunatic is a great WAD to play. It might be kind of assholish in some areas, but overall, I had a blast playing it. Worth checking out.

Next WAD on the list requires Doom I, so let’s hope I won’t fall asleep while playing.

What a way to start the Cacowards 2011 roster, huh?

Br1: Brutal Doom

Main author(s): Marcos Abenante (Sergeant Mark IV)

Release date: August 19th, 2010 (original version)

Version(s) played: v21 Gold Release

Required port compatibility: GZDoom/Zandronum

If you know about the Doom franchise even a bit, you have heard about Brutal Doom. How could you not hear about Brutal Doom? You probably heard about it so much that you were sick of it, along with its fanatics, non-stop asking if other WADs are compatible with this mod, to the point that it felt like they were whining about it.

But some of you may be asking – What is this mod even about?

To put it simply, Brutal Doom is like a classic Doom, but on steroids. It adds a shit ton of new mechanics, enemy behavior, new enemies, new weapons, etc. I would say it might have too much new stuff, but let’s not get ahead.

My point is that this mod has too much stuff to talk about in one post. So I’ll split the review/analysis/retrospective (even though I have no nostalgia towards this mod when it comes to the latter) into at least five parts, talking about my first impressions about this mod and its story and its author, going through the mod’s mechanics, enemies, weapons (don’t expect that I will talk about all of them), culminating with talking about my final, proper playthrough of Doom I and Doom II with this mod (although, at this point, I’m still not sure which way I’ll play it).

Now, with all that said, let’s dive into Boot All Dume and see what’s the deal with this mod.

PART 1 – FIRST IMPRESSIONS AND THE HISTORY

For my first playthrough with Doomed Brutality, I decided to play the first episode of Doom I and the first eleven maps of Doom II to see what it has to offer. Both games were played, of course, on Hurt Me Plenty, in a Standard Mode (pistol start), and without touching any other options.

Not gonna lie, I didn’t have relatively positive expectations towards this mod; not after what I heard about its author (even though most of the stuff he did either he apologized for, was exaggerated by people who don’t like him or the mod, or made sense in the context of the game development) and its vocal minority of fans.

Anyway, playing Knee-Deep again, the mod starts out relatively small; I can see some differences, but nothing much that would relatively flip the concept of the Classic Doom upside down. Then, as I progress through the maps, the mod shows more and more of its teeth; weapons, enemy behavior, and mechanics I wasn’t even aware of, like how your regular shotgun shoots much faster when using iron sight, or the demonic sphere that turns you into a baron. Not to mention the Bruise Brothers having four times more health to make them actual bosses, and the army of pinkies and imps that reveal after killing one of the barons in E1M8.

Moving to Doom II, it was a rather similar experience to Doom I – the mod starts off relatively small, and shows more and more with each map. Even here, there were things I didn’t realize were possible, like stealing revenants’ and mancubi’s weapons and using them.

So first impressions – better than I expected, although I sometimes felt overwhelmed with new mechanics.

Now, about how the mod came into fruition, I don’t really have much information on it. All I managed to find on Doomwiki and Wikipedia is that the mod started as a testing ground for new effects for another Sergeant Mark IV’s mod called ArmageDoom that was released the same year as Brutal. From what I’ve gathered, people liked these new effects, and so they were made for a separate mod we know today.

But we can’t talk about Bootoot Doot without its creator – Sergeant Mark IV himself.

Marcos Abenante is a man of many talents (at least from what I’ve read). He’s a bodybuilder, he teaches English, and is also a web designer. But most of all, he is a game designer. Incredible, but still controversial, I might add. Arrogant is the nicest thing you might hear about his personality (especially on ZDoom and Zandronum forums). Here are some of the dumber things he did (mostly from the early 2010s):

Taking other Doom modders’ work and not crediting them.

Showing some guy with depression symptoms on a forum a guide on how to jump off the bridge good (this is what perma-banned him from the aforementioned forums).

Putting racist text in one of the BD v17 lumps.

This is what was confirmed he did up to 2013, and yeah, it’s horrible, but you have to remember that it happened over a decade ago, and Marcos apologized for this crap. IN 2013. BEFORE HE WAS BANNED. I’m not saying that where he lived completely excuses his actions (you need to remember that he’s from Brazil; the humor there is different than in North America), but you must realize that people were slightly more edgy in 2013 than today, not to mention how people who aren’t from the USA are not completely PC and sensitive towards these things.

Today, in the decade where it feels like we have another celebrity exposed for being too interested in children every month, this feels like looking at the braindead edgelord saying one thing too many and letting the fame go over his head… Which, in the case of Marcos, couldn’t be further from the truth.

I didn’t even mention how he threw a hissy fit over Doom 2016’s glory kills because he thought id Software ripped him off… even though these were already planned since Doom 4. You know, the Call of Doom one.

While the things Sarge did described above will definitely make you cringe and facepalm, there are other controversial things that were overblown to say the least:

Calling him sociopath because he was experimenting with the digitized real-life gore… even though he didn’t ultimately implement it in his mod, not to mention how many, more gory games like Half-Life 2 (even though this game isn’t that gory) and Dead Space used real life gore as a reference (he didn’t even force anyone to look at these pictures).

One of the main devs behind Project Brutality (a mod that started as a fork of BD) saying that Sarge put a hack in the newest (at the time) public version of the Extermination day (another Marcos’ WAD) that will crash GZDoom and even the entire computer if used with the aforementioned Project… when Sarge did it for a public BETA version of his mod, it lasted only a few days before the hack was removed in the following version, only bricked GZDoom and not the entire computer, and was done only to troll the Project Brutality community, rather than out of purely malicious intends.

Accusing Sarge of being a neo-yahtzee… basing it on his stupid 4chan profile tag that says United Communist [[Yahtzee]] Republic Dictatorship of Banana Land (Brazil)… Did these people ever consider that he was making fun of himself? Not to mention that 4chan is a walking shitpost of the site and shouldn’t be treated 100% seriously?

Comparing Sarge to one of the Columbiners… because both made a Doom mod that’s more gory than the original game… This is just being desperate and refusing to stop living in the past.

So, yeah, that’s what I have to say about Marcos Abenante. He is a talented game designer, he said, and did dumb and terrible things in the past, but I think his accusers should stop acting like 2013 was yesterday and move on with their lives. I didn’t even mention how Graf Zahl made BD v20b incompatible with GZDoom 2.3.0 onward ON PURPOSE. I won’t be surprised if Graf still holds the grudge.

But anyway, that’s all I have to say for now. I recommend you watch this video made by Midnight. It helped me a lot with looking at the author’s controversies.

In the next part, I will be talking about the mod’s new mechanics.