The One Level With All Those Teleporters. (TOLWATT.WAD)

THE ONE LEVEL WITH

ALL THOSE TELEPORTERS.

by Esa Repo aka "Espi"

I think that there is a tendency in this community to think of classically lauded authors as being beneath a bit of fun like Erik Alm and his goofball Find It. Not everything has to be Scythe II to be worth making OR preserving. In Esa Repo's case, his pre-Suspended in Dusk work is peppered with levels that people perusing his back catalogue might find...questionable. The first of these that we got was Barons o' Fun, so named because it's an arcade-type scenario where you attempt to get Barons of Hell to blow each other up with barrels and even scratch each other. The One Level With All Those Teleporters is not an auspicious name to start things off with, and if you keep reading, you'll see what all the fuss is about. TOLWATT is a MAP01 replacement for Doom II, released toward the end of 2001. As to why it requires ZDoom, I think that the only reason is because it has a MAPINFO lump. It seemed to play just fine back in DSDA-Doom apart from not being able to play the included music.

The initial question you may have on reading the level title may be WHY does it have so many teleporters? The reason is because this map is entirely composed of small, isolated areas that the teleporters link together. Take a look at the automap after you reach the first teleporter and you'll see that the starting area is a big E and, just below and to the right of it, there's a URL for a hosted site on the now defunct NewDoom. Yes; this is a map made entirely out of letters made to promote Espi's webpage. In this case, the letters spell out ESPI'S SITE, including the apostrophe. You can still see the site as it once existed thanks to archive.org.

When you load up into the first area you may be wowed by the new texture scheme. Coming from Suspended in Dusk I knew that Espi was an accomplished texture artist, but Linna was the first one of his levels where he demonstrated this talent, primarily in the outdoor jaunt in Hell. The dark gray bottom / light gray top and big, circular tech guts panels hit me as something new, but what really caught my eye were the distinctive recessed lighting sconces and the bespoke bordering textures that simulate a glow from the light. That's an awesome look! I really hope to see these things again in a future level or mapset.

The gameplay is incredibly straightforward. It's you against generally single types of monsters with two exceptions, the beginning and end. It's zombimen and sergeants; spectres; an arch-vile with plenty of cover from the hole in the "P"; a bunch of revenants, who in a fun twist (since it's a straight hallway for the "I") force you back through the teleporter you came from; mancubi; Hell knights; chaingunners; cacodemons; and arachnotrons, with two monster closets revealing the bruiser brothers and two final arch-viles. You pick up the combat shotgun, plasma gun, and rocket launcher as you play through. I think that the final fight could get ugly based on whether or not you blew all your rockets prior to opening the closet.

I liked the atmospheric metal track, apparently a mod tracker from a Finnish rock band that I had never heard of. Apparently CMX is wildly popular within Finland but virtually unknown outside of it, which checks out since opening up the song file in SLADE was my first time I personally had knowledge of them. I kept trying to place it as one of as an extract of one of Metallica's more moody or atmospheric songs, like "One", but it's "Eufrat" (Euphrates) from their 1998 album, Vainajala, which if I'm interpreting Wikipedia correctly means something like the land of the dead ("a name of a place inhabited by the dead").  CMX may have been an inspiration for Espi apart from this as one of their hit singles, "Ruoste", was also the name for an aborted Espi project for 3DGE that got folded in to Back to Basics.

This map is more of a curiosity in Espi's career but the wall sconces are a great graphical effect and it's interesting to see him try to play within the designs of the letters, namely the "I"s, in order to steer this away from a "shoot through to the end of the letter and then repeat". I had fun and I saw several things that I never had before; I can't ask too much more from a Doom level!

I ALREADY TOL YOU WATT I'M GONNA DO