This post is about two wads that both came out about a year ago. The idea was to deliberately avoid going overboard with detail and just make some simple, fun maps. They are remakes of Doom episodes 1 and 2. Apparently the third episode is going to appear soon, along with reworked versions of the first two.
Needs More Detail Vaguely E1-style techbases. Very nice. Small, quick to play, fun, can't do much wrong really. The only bad thing was the lack of even a token effort to align textures. I mean, you know it's bad when even I notice texture misalignment. Several huge, highly noticable errors that are trivially fixable by changing unpegging flags, an effortless action even in otherwise intractable editors.
Needs More Detail II is slightly more complex than its predecessor. It's also a bit too derivative of the original episode 2, being more a wad of remakes than just style-inspired. However, perhaps that is a necessity if you want to make an E2-themed wad; episode 2 doesn't really have the same level of distinctiveness as episode 1.
Both of these wads are excellent and highly recommended and I fully approve of the "bugger detail" school of mapping, although I still don't particularly care for the wads' names (a blatant attempt to avoid a criticism the author knows he would otherwise hear endlessly) Nevertheless, more please!
An episode for Plutonia, although some of the levels only require Doom2 textures. The best map is probably 8, a city, with lots of height differences and running battles with large crowds of monsters. Also of note are 3 and 10 - although the former is confusing and complex and the latter has a couple of ZDoomisms (I'm sure that one secret is meant to be accessed via archvile jump, but it's way too high)
Some of the other maps are a bit mediocre or awkward to play, but it's worth a go.
A nice episode of small maps, split into two parts. Firstly, a set of maps with a common theme of structures floating in a red sky. These maps are generally wide open, with cage bars instead of walls. The latter half becomes more conventional, and has no overall theme.
Again worth a go, the map07 replacement is rather good.
Single map techbase. Quite impressive opening, standing before a tall structure rather similar to the start of Equinox. Interior is a fairly standard, but neatly detailed Doom2 base.
Only real trouble is the blue key has a habit of not teleporting. However it only means you can't get in the exit, you can still kill everything. That doesn't make it any less of a bug but it wasn't as irritating as it could have been.
The most noticable thing about this map are the textures that in four places emblazon the map with the author's name and three Doom news/community sites of varying degree of popularity. Other than that it's another smallish map of varied theme, mostly base but with some other stuff too. It's not very polished and there are some gameplay irritations (it's not obvious you're supposed to jump in the river, but if you do before you press the switch you're stuck; lots of plasma but no weapon)
Not to be confused with this newstuff 74, which according to its introduction is actually newstuff 71. Someone screwed up here, evidently. Anyway, I stumbled on the thread a few days ago, recognised both wad names but haven't played them since they came out.
This is an E1-style techbase running on E1M1. You'll probably need to play it a couple of times. The start hurts, due to lack of weapon and being surrounded by zombies. There's not much health, and a lot of slime, barrels and monsters around. Getting the blue key requires an unprotected run through slime and on my first attempt I didn't have enough health to do it, which meant I was basically stuck. I've also never much been a fan of the E1M2-style computer core maze and there's one here. However, I liked the way the yellow door gets progressively more locks on it as you pick up the keys.
It also gets a bit cheesy with its obsession with the numbers 666 and 1337. The latter is written on the automap in large letters. One of the secrets has a candle on the windowsill that I spent some time trying to activate - I thought it was a secret area opening trigger. It certainly looks like one. But it is in fact only there to mark linedef 666. This was pretty annoying (in fact the only part of the map I actually remembered from seven years ago was this wretched candle on the windowsill) The secrets in this map are in general irritating and you will probably need an editor to get them.
Summary: it's decent and worth playing, but this author has done better.
Four maps running on E1M1-E1M3 and E1M9. Apparently took seven years to make; couldn't have been working on it that entire time. It definitely looks like it's from the mid-nineties.
E1M1: the distinctive messily textured simplistic style of the early era of Doom mapping; it wouldn't look out of place in one of the wadpaks, for example.
E1M2: a bit better but quite cramped and extremely disjoint. Three sections can be accessed in any order to get keys (but it's a lot easier if you go east, north, west - the west red key section is quite nasty if you're not prepared for it, and is pretty much impossible if you go in there first) Some good battles here and it's not terrible. At least it uses a few windows and glimpses and stuff. It does manage to have one of those secret areas that's too thin to register, I don't know how people manage to make these, don't you test your levels?
E1M3: you start outside a fortress with three doorways in (this was the only scene I remembered from before, but then it's still a fairly standard opening and I might be remembering a different map... still, who cares) Pick the right-hand door and go up the stairs if you want a shotgun. It turns into a bit of a puzzle map and I needed a map editor to avoid frustration. Even having cheated I still needed to backtrack a lot, and there are certain actions like clambering around structures to press buttons to re-open doors that must be done repeatedly. It gets quite tedious and irritating.
E1M9: your prize for finding the secret exit is a four-mile-long and three-feet-wide corridor. You start at one end by a chaingun, invulnerability, and cyberdemon. The exit is naturally at the other end. The corridor is full of soulspheres, blue armour and more bullets. You can just run to the end before the invulnerability runs out or you can kill the monster by holding down the trigger button and trying to avoid its rockets and healing yourself as necessary. It is one of the most pointless maps I have ever seen (although its "pure gameplay" nature has some appeal to speedrunners...)
A rather silly name for a rather generic but solid Doom2 base/hell map. Perhaps the author doesn't actually know what "libido" means, I don't know.
Anyway it's your classic Doom2 sprawling relatively themeless map. 300+ monsters of all sizes, various themes used, some interconnection and future glimpses, but not a great deal.
I say relatively themeless; large Doom2 maps tend to stray from a single theme because the stock IWAD textures are all fairly generic and so you end up with base maps with stone and brick and stuff in them. It's quite distinctive but abstract - you can't really say just what this map is meant to be. Some people think this abstractness is a good thing. I don't really care as long as it plays well.
Difficulty varies, it's mostly manageable except occasionally you might find yourself trapped in some hell cave full of lava with 10% health and surrounded by imps and a pain elemental just teleported in and...oh. I'm dead.
Six maps of an upcoming megawad. The maps are essentially remixes of various maps from Hell Revealed, Hell Revealed 2, Alien Vendetta etc. This in itself is not a bad thing, but they're fairly mediocre and it's not worth it.
The author is obviously a fan of speedrunner's slaughter maps but doesn't understand stuff like you need your monster teleporters to go off in a timely fashion to avoid frustration, etc. Also you probably need to put enough ammunition on your levels that they can be done from pistol starts. Map03 I am sure does not have enough ammunition on it. Map04 on the other hand has more ammo than you'll ever need, and once past the first room is trivially bypassable (don't fire your weapon - he should have surrounded the switch with enough barrels so you can't reach it rather than one single lost soul that can be dodged until the exit has lowered) There's a lot more silly bugs (TEXTURE1 referring to unknown patches, missing texture HOM, etc.)
Incidentally I only downloaded this to find out why it demanded ZDoom, Legacy or Eternity. I found out why; rboom could play it right up until map05 where you need mouselook to shoot a button on a wall. Pretty dumb.
2x2 series
More from Eternal who set himself the limit of only using two textures and two flats from the Doom2 IWAD in each map. Amazingly, this actually works. You end up with a lot more done with linedefs, sectors and texture alignment to provide visual detail.
However, note that two textures doesn't leave enough room for switches, so you might find, as I did, that you get stuck easily because you don't know you're actually meant to press on that knobbly thing in the corner.
Two maps. On the first you're on a spaceship which you must rid of monsters and then activate the self-destruct. Some impressive DeHackEd work gives this illusion. However as you might expect from a spacecraft map it's all thin corridors and tubes and stuff, so is very cramped. The second is a more traditional large dark techbase with some good use of height.
Several monsters are replaced with relatively pointless recolours and sprite edits, which has become somewhat the norm for Eternal's maps. Having said that the imps are replaced with these nasty-looking things that are sped up quite a lot and are some threat.
Textures The spacecraft is made of COMPTALL - not surprising - and ZZZFACE6, which is part of the machinery behind the Icon of Sin, but works quite well on its own; the flats used are CEIL4_2, a dark blue shade that usually goes with the COMP* textures, and FLOOR5_1, a variant of Doom's common hexagonal floor panelling theme. The base is darker, but has the more surprising choices of MODWALL2 (some mostly black panelling) and LITE3, a 32-wide strip of lighting which is usually repetitive when overused but works here; flats are FLOOR7_1, a fairly generic brown floor and CEIL4_1, a slightly darker blue than the one used on the spacecraft map.
Survival horror map set inside a pyramid-like tomb. Usual high detail, high linedef and sector density, lots of fancy lighting, and plenty of advanced DeHackEd stuff to make a creepy atmosphere (evil laughter coming out of nowhere, etc.)
It likes its traps. One room has three switches; the one you want, one that drops the ceiling slowly and silently on your head, and one that just kills you instantly, to the sound of more laughter. I suppose you'd expect this from a tomb.
Also at one point I found myself completely stuck and had to go and look at the thing in a map editor. Spoiler: at the top of the curved ceiling "maze" you have to open both of the windows, and shoot through them with a bullet weapon. I had stood back and used the rocket launcher.
Overall, the kind of map that's worth playing due to being technically impressive but not really my sort of thing in terms of gameplay.
Textures On the walls, BRICK7, generic enough for most places, and BIGDOOR7 for doors and switches. FLOOR7_1 appeared again as a flat, and the other was CRATOP2, which usually looks awful if you use it anywhere but on the top of a crate, but has been made to work here with lots of fancy shapes drawn on the ground using different light levels.
A rather abstract metallic tech map whose form is less important than the fact that it is utterly stuffed with monsters. You start on a central tower, cramped exploration of which will net you enough guns and ammo to start you off. Then, the most memorable part of the map - jumping off the side surrounds you with an enormous horde of revenants.
After that you have to go into the four corners of the room and clear them out and press on something to reveal a teleporter that takes you to the red key, then you can teleport back up to the central tower (and a chaingunner horde that takes too long to teleport in, bad design) and open the red door that leads to the exit, which incidentally is a monster spawner.
I quickly gave up trying to play this one properly and loaded my dehacked patch for slaughter maps. Once I did that it was really fun.
Textures TEKWALL6, mostly, which doesn't tile vertically too well; and an inspired use of SPCDOOR3, which not only has some nice bright green lights on it, useful for switches, but also contains most of DOORTRAK so he got that for free. Most flats are SLIME14 - one of the worst-named flats in Doom, as it is actually 4 metal panels - and TLITE6_5, red lights on a dark background, used sparingly for lighting and teleporters (it looks bad if you use it on too large an area)
