Nuclear Halls (NUKEHALL.WAD)

NUCLEAR HALLS
by Adam "Capellan" Windsor

Adam Windsor has had a long, industrious career of having a hand in a bunch of classic WADs, including Demonfear. He was gone for awhile, but as of 2012's Community Chest 4 he's up to his old tricks. Nuclear Halls is actually a solo release, a single map for limit-removing ports that occupies the ol' MAP01 slot. I'm no stranger to the story, which has you as a lowly security guard at a nuclear waste facility who just wants to get away from the whole "Savior of Earth" thing and forget about Hell. Of course, if it were that easy, we wouldn't have thousands of user maps to play through. Pretty soon, your "guaranteed" gig is a colossal nightmare.

Doom 2 In Name Only (D2INO.WAD)

Doom 2 in Name Only arose out of discussions of Chris Klie's BF_THUD. After playing Klie's megaWAD, it's pretty clear that he took most of his design cues from the names of the map slots his levels appeared in. A thread by Hellbent prompted another thread by ella guro where the project took off and then stagnated until its untimely release in 2014 amid some controversy. The final product is a full-fledged megaWAD for Doom II that makes a claim for vanilla compatibility, but the sheer size of many of the submitted levels made for less than rigorous playtesting as far as technical details go. A limit-removing port should be used, at the very least.

Demonfear (DMONFEAR.WAD)

Adam Windsor created Demonfear over the span of several years, releasing it in six episodes over 1995 and 1998. When finished, he collected the levels into a megaWAD and published it in 1999. The final product consists of a full thirty-two maps for Doom II, playable in vanilla. The intention was a complete replacement functional in solo, co-op, and DM play. It even has a story .TXT to go along with it which helps to set the tone of some of the levels with the occasional hint. As usual, Hell has caught Earth by surprise, and it's up to you to defend the planet, starting with the military base you were stationed at. After running around (and beyond) Terra for the first half, you enter a portal and continue the fight in a sort of twisted facsimile of our dimension.

Alien Vendetta (AV.WAD)

Alien Vendetta started out as a solo project from Norwegian Doomer and speedrunner Anders Johnsen. The original plan was for something closer in scope to Hell Revealed but it slowly drew away as Anders began to invite other authors to the project, among them his close friends, eventually landing in between something more like what are now considered the "classic" Doom II megaWADs of '96-'97 and more obvious slaughter combat a la Hell Revealed. Like any Doom PWAD, it doesn't need a story, but there's one included in the intermission texts. I'm not entirely sure, but it looks like the UAC has been working with Hell. The demons pull a double-cross, of course, eliminating their benefactors, taking over UAC installations, and then mounting an offensive which you naturally must repel and then push back to where it came from.

Lord of the Flies (FLYMAPS1.WAD)

Sam Ketner may be fondly remembered as the author of Assault on Tei Tenga, but did you know that his first release was 1996's Lord of the Flies, authored alongside James "[thantos]" Jennings and luminary Adam Windsor? This nine-map episode for Doom II's main selling point was a mess of new monsters culled from the shovelware discs of the time, which the new maps were allegedly balanced for. The story is bizarre, of course. There is a colony on Gamma Hydra IV (the setting of a Star Trek TOS episode no less). Apparently the ice caps started melting and after the colonists' bid to deal with the rising ocean levels failed, they aligned themselves with "Belzebub" and have since disappeared off the grid. You're strong-armed into dealing with the threat after the UAC's recon droids reveal a demonic presence.

The Darkening Episode 2 (DARKEN2.WAD)

In 1999, The Darkening team released the first episode of what was to presumably be more. In 2000, a clearly exhausted Ola Björling pushed the second episode out the door. We got twelve more levels for Doom II, an impressive set of brand-new textures to play around in (though not WITH for many years), and a complementary deathmatch-oriented episode. Gone was the voluminous prose in the .TXT, eliminating any story connections between Darkening's E1 and E2, eerily echoing the relationship between id's Quake and Quake II, a comparison even more relevant when one realizes that the aesthetics of the new textures (and bits of level design) clearly evoke Quake II where DARKEN's borrowed from Quake. The other downer was the announcement that there would be no third episode as the authors had either given up on mapping for Doom or moved on to other games. Amusingly, Jan and Adam are still around and mapping, along with Travers from the original episode. Keep it strong, guys!

The Darkening Episode 1: The Nameless Project (DARKEN.WAD)

1998 seemed to mark the death of super cool community projects for Doom. Everyone seemed to be too busy playing Quake, realizing Warren Marshall's very public fear. So imagine when The Darkening debuted its first episode in 1999, "The Nameless Project", looking very much like Doom but with a keen eye for lighting characteristic of many of these authors' earlier works. Lighting isn't the only element borrowed from Quake. It's nothing like Iikka Kernanen's ode to the big Q in Requiem, but there's a certain aesthetic clearly echoed with the use of Shub-Niggurath slipgates and the new textures that clearly shows that Doom II wasn't the only thing on the minds of this team. Still, they managed to stop boxing Shub-Niggurath long enough to put out eleven more levels for Doom II.

Community Chest 4 (CCHEST4.WAD)

The Community Chest series is one of Doomworld's oldest institutions, with the first outing published in 2003. Now it's 2012 and between Duke Nukem Forever, Black Mesa, and the release of Community Chest 4, all signs point to the apocalypse being nigh. Doomworld forum superstar Eric "The Green Herring" Baker took full control of the project after some drama I was fortunate enough to avoid. The short story is, hey, here's Community Chest 4! It comes with a sweet-ass texture pack that's seen a lot of use prior to this release, most notably skillsaw's Vanguard from 2011 (but I know there are many more, and not just because I've seen whining about overuse of the resources).

Requiem (REQUIEM.WAD)

Most of these authors should look familiar to you. Requiem gathered some of the greatest "star" power when it came to megaWAD authors of the time. Some of the names you may recognize from Memento Mori / MM2, and others from STRAIN and Dystopia 3. And, of course, there are a few new faces, as always seems to be the case with these community projects. The show-stealers for this particular project appear to be Iikka Keranen and Anthony "Adelusion" Czerwonka who together might as well have released Dystopia 4 in disguise. Adam Windsor contributes a fair number of maps as well, but all but one of them are short but sweet affairs, singled out by some as filler speedmaps made to push Requiem to release (given an apparently troubled development, not unlike STRAIN and The Talosian Incident).

Memento Mori II (MM2.WAD)

Memento Mori II, released in 1996, is of course the second outpouring of mapping effort from the Memento Mori Crew, though I should note that this Memento Mori Crew is not exactly the same group that made Memento Mori. Indeed, a number of mappers did not return for a second outing, while a number of authors stepped up to bang another quality megaWAD out. It's 31 levels of Doom II, 1 level of Doom, all specifically tweaked for coop. Both members of TiC - Thomas and Denis Moeller - return, alongside Jens Nielsen, David Davidson, Mark Klem, Orin Flaharty, Alden Bates, Florian Helmberger, Michael Rapp, and Andy Badorek. Some of these guys would even go on to work on Requiem, kind of a Memento Mori III, if you will.