Psychic (XA-PSYCH.PK3)

PSYCHIC

by Xaser Acheron

My reintroduction to Doom is tangentially related to Psychic. A friend gifted me a Something Awful account back in '09 and one of the forums that I gravitated toward was the Let's Play forums. They had a Doom mods thread going on at the time and I think that they were playing a combination of Psychic with B.P.R.D.'s Equinox. I saw so much cool stuff going on with Doom (my previous dips in user-created content being limited to whatever I found on my Dad's Doom 1 & 2 Collection shovelware CD as well as Kaiser's Doom 64: Absolution TC) that I wanted to dive right in. Of course, if you're a long-time reader you know that I don't spend a lot of time playing gameplay mods, but fourteen years to finally load up Xaser's Psychic seems, in retrospect, a bit excessive. At least I had planned it out back in 2019 to play it after The Abyss! That's got to count for something, right?

Titan 2 (TITAN2.WAD)

The advent of source ports with "advanced" features drove authorship in two additional, different directions. One of these strove to make Doom closer to the popular first person shooters of the time, making mapsets featuring hub systems and missions (Quake II) or using scripting to augment the story with cutscenes and the like (Half-Life). The other path was more comfortable using graphical enhancements, e.g. slopes and room-over-room geometry, as well as scripts to render an experience that was relatively close to Doom's gameplay, just slightly more dynamic. Ixnatifual was definitely a disciple of the latter trend. TITAN2 was released in 2009, some five years after the publication of his debut, Titan. It is a ten-level episode for Doom II and was designed for play in GZDoom.

Year 22 - A Rock and a Hard Place (YEAR_22.WAD)

YEAR 22
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
by Eric "The Green Herring" Baker

Eric Baker busted out his Year 21 speedmap in 2008 to celebrate his 21st anniversary on This Island Earth. Year 22 was made in 2009 for the same purpose, but due to a comedy of errors wasn't released until the tail end of the year, much like the third and as of this post final entry in the trilogy, Year 23. 22, aka A Rock and a Hard Place, is another single map replacement to be played in Boom-compatible engines. This time, though, it fills the MAP02 slot, with the intent that the levels can be loaded together and played back to back to form a cohesive narrative. Year 22 picks up where 21 left off. You've stepped through the still-active warp gate at a military installation thought abandoned only to find it quite inhabited and the gate fully functional, sending you to some Godforsaken canyon in who knows where. To add insult to injury, the trip seems to have been a one-way ticket.

Heroes' Tales (HT.WAD)

If I know anything about the Russian Doom community, it's that they love their speedmap competitions. A year ago, this gave birth to the Christmas time megaWAD Whitemare, but back in 2009 an assortment of entries were combined with brand spankin' new material to create Heroes' Tales. It's a full-fledged megaWAD for limit-removing ports that requires the Evilution IWAD for resources in several areas. HT doesn't work as a sequel to TNT, though. Its story is more or less draped over the framework of the rearranged levels. The text is vague and could really apply to any scenario, to the point that I'm not really sure it's even worth expounding upon. Suffice it to say that you're going to fight your way through a bunch of demon infested areas until you put the hurt on the big bad that's responsible.

Da Will (DAWILL.WAD)

Da Will is a 2009 release of Russian mapping team Clan [B0S], a ten-map episode for The Plutonia Experiment (Doom II) meant to be played in limit-removing source ports. Clan [B0S] has gone on to make more ambitious releases; Da Will should be a comparably comfortable mapset, especially for players more at home with traditional Doom II action (namely Plutonia). The plot takes the player through Central American jungles in search of the mysterious Object "33", continuing on from Lainos's Object "32". I think I've finally come to understand what the Objects are (though I'm probably wrong) – they're foreboding ruins which the UAC has foolishly constructed bases nearby. The installation by Object "33" has ceased communications, and you've been tasked with locating the ruins and finding out what went wrong.

Four Maps (4MAPS.WAD)

Four Maps is, unsurprisingly, a collection of four short maps for Doom II from one Brian "Snakes" Knox, released late in 2009. It's made to work in ZDoom, due to the first level, which uses the Hexen map format. His freshman output, the offerings showcase decreasingly bland level design, going from flat to more height variation and from simple to more complex lighting. It's plain to see where he drew his inspiration from as far as level themes goes. MAP04 is perhaps the most interesting offering here, but you'll want to play through the first three so you're not down a combat shotgun or rocket launcher. Certainly, Knox has produced much better material since this, but 4MAPS is hardly unpalatable.

The Lost Episode: Evil Unleashed (LOSTEPIS.WAD)

Doom: The Lost Episode is an unofficial fifth episode (complete with intermission screen!) released for Ultimate Doom in 2009, requiring either ZDoom or Eternity to run. Headed by Xaser with additional credit to Skunk, Wills, Nuxius and SnowKate709, it aimed to collect unused Doom Alpha maps with maps exclusive to the various console versions of Doom and retool them to create a strange but excellent adventure (link to development thread here). For those interested the in narrative justifications Doom authors provide for their unholy concoctions, the story is quite simple. Crammed right in between Doomguy avenging the death of his pet rabbit and his arduous campaign to rid Earth itself of Hellspawn, the action finds our protagonist teleported into a fragmented dimension as a last-ditch attempt to distance Doomguy from the campaign of Evil. You'll have to fight your way through to the architects of the false reality to return to your own.