NUTS
by "B.P.R.D."
by "B.P.R.D."
Nuts was selected as one of Doomworld's Top 10 Infamous WADs, and it's not hard to see why. B.P.R.D. went on to have a long, distinguished career as a Doom author; his followup to this bit of totty was Equinox, of all things. It's hard to imagine someone not knowing or understanding what Nuts is, but I'll humor you. Released late in 2001, this is a single map replacement for Doom II. You won't be able to run this in vanilla; I recommend the PrBoom-Plus family for sheer efficiency, but I didn't have much trouble working it in ZDoom. Nuts does have a story, with you sent to eliminate the final Hellspawn army on Litrivin IV, armed with nothing but a pistol because of a past social transgression. Good thing there is a fuck ton of cell ammo and guns at the drop off point, I guess.
Anyway, Nuts is little more than two really big and simple outdoor areas. One is filled with almost every land-bound Doom II monster and the other is filled with arch-viles, Cyberdemons, and Spider Masterminds. There is no way that you will be able to kill everything, mostly due to the fact that the inevitable survivors will be a big mass of Cyberdemons in the second room. There is simply not enough ammo, with or without infighting. Not that there's a without. If Doom's enemies didn't hate each other almost as much as they hate you, this would be a fruitless endeavor. Thankfully, their free-floating hostility means that most of the population will quickly dispatch each other.
Nuts is a practical demonstration of the importance of infighting. Fire some BFG shots to get the imps out of you way depending on the direction you break and then just do a little bit of crowdshaping before whipping the whole horde into a circle of death. Eventually, you'll be left with the revenants and the barons, and after that, just the barons. The exercise almost falls apart in the second half, since there's no way to dispatch all of those Cybers, but a little bit of crowdshaping can form a weak point in the wall that you can hope to punch through. The skills are rudimentary, and the execution pretty boring after the first few minutes, but the fundamentals are there.
Really, NUTS is utterly lacking in guile. By B.P.R.D.'s own account, it was tossed off as an exercise in silliness, and its ongoing infamy shows - if nothing else - that the constantly changing Doom community is not as jaded as one might believe. I wouldn't recommend it for a play as it is much more of a historical curiosity these days, though I must admit that there is something captivating about watching the monsters die in droves during the opening moments.
I'M CRAZY FOR TRYING
AND CRAZY FOR CRYING
AND CRAZY FOR CRYING
Sometimes those NUTS-style maps can be just ... awesome, to watch the kill counter go up faster than the eye can see. And the durn thing isn't actually very hard, if you get started right... with 100% kills possible in ...what's the best demo I've seen, around two minutes, I think?
ReplyDeleteI just played a NUTS descendant, IIRC by "Eternal" Alexander S., that was even more nuts and tricky good fun (don't get in a hurry to kill anything yourself, other than the viles on their mountains and the later free-roaming floaters). Tho it frequently brought my 3GHz Doomin' box to its knees!
sometimes the sheer spectacle is all you need
DeleteIt's not possible to 100% the level because of Cyberdemons in last room that will survive, maximum I got was 92% kills. I used ZDoom 2.8.1 to play and finish the level, only in the beginning the game lagged but after that I was fine. Even though there are tons of shotguns and chainguns dropped by zombies, cell ammo is quite limited and I had to kill hundreds of barons with shotgun and chaingun after they survived the initial onslaught. Not fun, it became boring quickly. I wonder how I managed to be patient enough considering I get bored even fighting 1-2 barons with shotgun in Ultimate Doom wads.
DeleteAfter I finished the level, I decided to do with SUPERWEP8.DEH and then I was able to get 100% kills. That seems to be only way to fully complete the level and in short time, which I'm assuming you were referring to when you said it can be finished in 2 minutes. Because without mods you will need at least 30 minutes (or an hour) to max the level (minus the cybers).
-FistMarine
I always liked BPRD's sense of humour. I still find nuts 2 to be the most hilarious thing I've played. And Doom 2: 2, as extremely dumb as it was, is fun to read the text file.
ReplyDeleteI am definitely looking forward to Nuts 2, i mean i know the jokes already but still
DeleteHonestly I always found the author's humor garbage. There was absolutely nothing funny to be found whatsoever in the NUTS series, instead there was a lame story in text files (not that I care about the story too much but in this case it was just idiotic) and in terms of gameplay, nothing good to be found in all three NUTS series (though I will admit nuts 3 is the best of the nuts series). I wonder how did this shit become popular in first place? These nuts wads were made bad on purpose and unfairly got praised all over the years. Personally, I always found BPRD to be an extremely overrated mapper, pretty much everything he made has been unfairly and ungodly praised just because of the popularity of the crappy nuts.wad. Yes it's my opinion but I still think he got unfairly popular over the years (especially with all the cacowards he has received and the multiple spots his maps got in Top 100 Memorable Maps at Doomworld, precisely places #3, #4, #30 and #97) compared to many other better mappers around that haven't got so much recognition.
DeleteOverall, there was nothing good to be found in the nuts series other than purposely crashing computers back then because computers couldn't handle this crap. I remember once in 2008-2009 loading nuts 3 with AEOD and typing KILL MONSTERS in console, needless to say it froze my computer, lol good times. Even nowadays some people still have trouble running this wad. I really have to wonder wtf was BRPD thinking when he designed this garbage.
-FistMarine
per B.P.R.D. it was something like
Delete"well I want to upload Equinox but I want to make sure that I can work the file upload process, better make something quick to test the FTP out"
Fisty there seems awfully salty that there's something people enjoy that he doesn't.
DeleteFinally you did it! As a certain Russian reviewer wrote, "you don't always need years of hard work to become famous, sometimes just a few minutes is enough". :)
ReplyDelete- memfis
indeed.
DeleteSo by your logic it is better to design a piece of shit map in just a couple of minutes and hope to become popular over time rather than working hard for days, weeks, months or even years to create a decently fun and well designed levels? I mean don't get me wrong, there are cases where you can create short and fun well designed maps in just a couple of hours (I'm not a mapper personally but I can try start mapping one day) but not in this case where the author threw a shitty map (baby's first map) in a couple of minutes and release it and got popular over time for the wrong reasons. Poorly balanced and designed map right here. Pretty much the definition of "quantity over quality" rather than the OPPOSITE that people should aim for.
Delete-FistMarine
I don't think that there's any sort of preferential logic in this statement. I think it's mentioning the same phenomenon that led to the infamous WOW.WAD to having some 827 votes on the old /idgames frontend. I'm also not going to kick up a fuss on this blog to make an example of Nuts just because of its relative popularity. NUTS got great word of mouth because it is patently ridiculous and requires almost zero time investment in order to experience. Once you've loaded it up, you've witnessed just about everything that there is to see.
DeleteI apologize for my behavior earlier, I'm generally a calm person. I was just a bit annoyed because of seeing Nuts.wad often mentioned (and BPRD often praised too) on various Doomworld topics (as well as the awards mentioned earlier) and after reading the comments posted here, I wanted to reply to them, even if I'm 4 years late. My intention is to comment on wads I have played so far and since last year, I started playing through various wads and hope to catch up on many wads that I haven't had the chance to play yet. I also want to start becoming a bit more active user on this blog compared to last few years where I became busy with my life that I haven't commented much (except occasionally pointing a mistake in the review) and nowadays I still check the blog sometimes to see an important wad getting reviewed.
DeleteAs for what you stated, yeah the wow.wad is a good comparison because it is also an infamous wad that got massive popularity over time, despite being a pointless crappy short map and the difference between these two infamous wads is that wow.wad has only 2 stars from the 827 votes, while nuts.wad has 3.5 stars from 606 votes. It is quite a difference between these two! I would have been much happier if nuts also had a lower rating, because clearly the effort wasn't put into it to warrant a rating of 3.5 stars. I've played much better wads that were rated only 3 stars, for example. Sure, they didn't have as many votes as nuts but my point still stands. I don't like seeing low effort stuff getting rewarded.
But yeah pretty much what you said. People are going to download the wad, load it up, laugh at the ridiculousness that the game has become unplayable due to the thousands of monsters active on screen, delete the wad and then move on.
I hope this clears the post I created earlier. I will try from now on to review good wads and to avoid creating a fuss about it.
-FistMarine
Could you review BPRD's Grove wad? I think that is a classic wad worthy of being included in this awesome blog.
ReplyDeleteGrove is something that I will be getting to Soon (TM)
Delete