I spent a week's worth of Dooming replaying Armadosia. I think most of what I said 5 years ago still applies. It's an incredibly impressive piece of work, especially if you like enormous "long trek" style maps. And its architecture has the right balance: plain but functional, decent but not an overdetailed mess of linedefs. But it's full of bugs both minor and major, and too much of its gameplay just ends up just the wrong side of irritating.
Revenant Battlefield: Slaying Daredevils Afterwards I found this in /newstuff. It's a large grassy plain with a plutonia-style hedge maze in one corner. And every inch of it is smothered in revenants. Yeah it's a bit silly but I had fun with it. If I recall correctly I managed to beat it without cheating on I'm Too Young To Die (1300 revenants, half damage) and then on Ultra Violence (1900 revenants) with hoover mode turned on. One thing to note is that a little way inside the maze there are a couple of hidden linedefs that start off a crushing ceiling that, 8 minutes later, crushes all the revenants that are on the outer wall, so you don't have to shoot them.
Four speedmaps, joined together in the middle, one mapper's work making a central hub leading to three others' as separate sections.
Central A semicircular staircase around a courtyard that contains three pillars. You have to press one button from each of the other sections to raise the pillars to reach the exit. Starting from the bottom of the staircase:
South A rocky canyon appears in front of you, crawling with imps. Behind that is a dark cave crawling with all kinds of stuff, in particular the back wall is a row of guys with shotguns. It's quite annoying since it's just a bit too dark to see anything and the stuff on the floor of the cave stops you jumping down into it. You can charge in aggressively but then you're getting pelted from all direction with bullet weapons you can't really avoid...
East Possibly a small part of a green stone castle/fortress, this one is pretty small and gives the impression that it is the easiest section, but after repeated failures I guess it isn't. I suppose you need to go somewhere else to get some ammo first. (I haven't actually manage to do this map on UV skill yet.)
North A booby-trapped dark corridor leads to ledges surrounding a large courtyard. This part is probably the hardest, and certainly the one with the nastiest monsters, with five archviles and a cyberdemon to get past. (The south section might have a higher monster count, I'm not sure, but this one is the most like a slaughter map.) It gives you lots and lots of shells, but frankly I needed a faster weapon to deal with having to fight two archviles and several revenants and imps in a small dark room, for instance.
A good map, a bit too hard for me on UV (and skill settings didn't seem to do much) and with a couple of annoying parts. Very disjoint of course, but what with the way it's been made, you can't really help that.
This is a small level I vaguely remember playing in 2002 when it came out. It is divided into a half dozen or so sub-areas which all vary wildly in theme, making it a little odd. There's a library, a dark underground cave, an outdoor area with a big helipad, an old storage warehouse that you need to blow up a wall to get inside, a pair of bathrooms with big mirrors in them, and a couple of others that are harder to describe.
Most of the areas are interconnected in some way so you get a lot of choice about how to do the map, but that also means you can get lost if you're not paying attention. The architecture is pretty detailed and the texturing of each area was done properly as far as I checked. As for resistance, there are only about 20 monsters. So, the map is quite empty, but ammunition is very tight, you can't really waste any at all.
Possibly of further interest:
- Grind - the original deathmatch level that was developed into grind2.
- Grind2X - further development, with more monsters.
A guy makes a map of his school. Something of a cliche of mid-nineties Doom mapping, recently introduced to /idgames. Nevertheless, this is a decent map, and I enjoyed playing it, all the way through, several times. Points of interest:
the main hall, with a nicely high ceiling, and a couple of classrooms round the outside; there is a megasphere up on one wall with a teleporter next to it that I spent ages trying to strafejump into, when in fact you're meant to shoot it (there's a few places in the map that really need foreknowledge)
an inner garden, one might call it a quadrangle, full of trees, with a well-hidden "VML SUCKS" spraypainted on a wall - I guess the author was glad to leave! To reach here (and the yellow key) you have to walk into a cupboard in the back of a classroom - another thing that needs foreknowledge. There's a hidden BFG in there too which activates a nasty trap a long way away. It's that kind of map.
a bit of fake room-over-room to simulate the basement, it worked really well except the teleport is quite blatant - I wonder if Boom silent line teleports would improve it. The basement contains a cafeteria with a couple of nastily-placed archviles. You can use one to jump onto a wall that has a hidden room full of soulspheres behind it. I think this was meant to be a deathmatch-only thing.
a monster spawner finishes the map off. I could do without this part, frankly. I usually kill all the monsters in the room, then quit when I activate the spawner. It's too annoying to bother with, not just because of having to fire off a moving platform, but because it spawns a load of monsters right below the target, which messes with autoaim (rockets always fly down towards the monsters rather than in the hole in the spawner's head)
So, your typical 1995 map, with quite a few of what I'll call "rough edges". But like I said, I played this several times and didn't get bored of it so that must count for something. And the description of the map in its text file is is dryly amusing. Give it a try.
A typically ancient 1994 wad, all single rooms, halls and doors, like a wolfenstein level without all the right angles... However, made memorable by its text file which gives gradiose names to the otherwise largely featureless areas.
In any other wad, a low corridor with a load of corpses hanging in your face would be unmemorable, if not mildly annoying. Here, it's The Corridor of Raw Meat!
In any other wad, a strobe-lit maze that disables the automap would have you reaching for the quit button.* But here, it's The Disco of the Damned!
And in any other wad, finding a room with a rocket launcher and a plasma gun, which tries to do it so picking up one makes the other inaccessible, but is constructed around the belief that you can't press a button that's receeded into the floor, would make you smile at the naivety and innocence of the old-school player**. But here, it's the The Pit of Choices!
And I didn't even mention The Zombie Shootout, The Rodeo of Infinity, and The Apocalypse! I won't spoil them, to entice you to play the wad (and I'm not too sure which part of the map the last two are meant to be)
Anyway, so much for sarcasm. It's not a particularly stand-out wad, so whether or not you'll like it is dependent on whether or not you like this era of mapping. I liked it, I played it several times, it's not too hard and more importantly it's not too aggravating, although it does abuse those really slow-moving perpetual lifts a bit too much at the end.
* There is a well-hidden pair of light goggles which makes this bearable; the text file mentions them, but doesn't tell you where they are...
** Speaking of a time of innocence, the completion time in the text file is quoted as 20 minutes. This is... rather high. It was a simpler time, when everybody used the keyboard, and no-one had cottoned on to the benefits of the mouse.
