Barons o' Fun (BRNSOFUN.WAD)

BARONS O' FUN

by Esa Repo aka "Espi"

Espi is one of the most celebrated authors of the Doom community. I've only touched on his Suspended in Dusk, but his Back to Basics and level in Eternal Doom IV, "The Shrine" (MAP27), are similarly lauded. When we instituted a lifetime achievement award for the Cacowards, it was named in his honor. And it all began with this. Barons o' Fun is an E1M8 replacement for the original Doom. Released in 2000, the name clearly refers to Barons of Hell while also implying the presence of explosive barrels due to it being a take on Doom II's "Barrels o' Fun" (MAP23). You will have both, but the execution may be simpler than you were expecting.

BRNSOFUN is effectively a gimmick map, more akin to those early concept maps where people demonstrated the game's notably weird behavior when it was still wild and exciting. What Esa wanted to show you is that monsters that destroy a barrel and in doing so, harm another monster of the same species, end up provoking infighting to be executed via tooth and claw. In this it is similar to Paul Corfiatis's MAD STUFF FOR DOOM II. At least, mechanically speaking. Espi's work here is however much cleaner and gives the final product a more arcade-like feeling, as though I could have sat through a whole megaWAD of variations on this premise.

It had to be E1M8 for several reasons, of course. "Phobos Anomaly" is an official level where the behavior was likely to be discovered given that two Barons are present in the same location with a number of close-by barrels. More importantly, it's also the only level in the original Doom where slaying all of the Barons will cause a specific action. In a level like this, the primary challenge is in effecting the death of the goat men and doing so involves the player being able to lead them about. Thus, they can't guard anything like a key or an exit. By leveraging special sector tag 666, the author has created a situation where you must accomplish the destruction of all four Barons in order to win.

It's challenging, of course. The playing field does not allow for infinite barrels so you have a finite number of opportunities to provoke sudden death duels between the goat men. Some of the explosives will no doubt blow apart as collateral damage. The drums toward the edge of the map are less desirable as a means for mischief since you have to be relatively close to them in order to herd a Baron anywhere nearby. By the time you are using one of them, though, you will hopefully have manipulated the monsters into significantly reducing their numbers. At which point, uh, just pop those barrels with your pistol unless you're trying to do a Pacifist run.

I also know that there are some oddities regarding how barrels actually trigger monster infighting. In the original .EXE, a barrel that is destroyed in one hit dies before it has any memory of what hit it and thus does not propagate its impotent, barrel hatred among afflicted bystanders. You would need to get a Baron to hit a drum, have it not explode, and then have the goat man finish the job in order for the barrel to properly trigger infighting. I am glazing over some technicalities that you can read up on in the DoomWiki article for Barrel. I am fairly sure, however, that ZDoom altered this behavior to more intuitive behavior, e.g. whatever destroys the drum gets the hate. As to whether it was altered back when Espi tested this in ZDoom back in 2000, well, I leave that to people who love pouring over source code.

Barons o' Fun may not appear to be an auspicious beginning for Espi's career but it reveals how mechanically imaginative he was as an author. I love seeing people play around on the fringes of Doom's typical gameplay and hope to see more such experiments from Esa over his subsequent works.

SOCKA BARON BLOW THEN