2002: A Doom Odyssey (2002AD10.WAD)

Paul Corfiatis released a ton of maps during 1998 and 1999 and then slipped into the background for a bit. You saw a few glimpses of his work making the lineup for the 10 Sectors 2 megaWAD and he also released a few solo levels as part of his Selfish series, but he was working on much bigger things. The first was as a contributor to the ill-fated Doom: Millennium project which he started taking to task in the .TXTs that accompanied his contemporary releases. The other was 2002: A Doom Odyssey, a megaWAD for the Ultimate release replacing all four episodes and featuring the collected works of eight authors... even if pcorf is responsible for half of them.

10 Sectors (10SECTOR.WAD)

Way back when in the year 2000, while the rest of us were fighting off Y2K, Doomworld hosted a contest. The goal was to create a Boom map using no more than ten sectors. The idea has more merit than one might think at first, as - to quote DoomWiki - "[a] sector does not have to be a single polygon. For instance, two squares can be separate and non-contiguous, but still be part of the same sector." What this meant for 10 Sectors was a ton of maps that had a bunch of "sectors" that only had ten different combinations of ceiling and floor flat, height, light, tag, and type. A whopping 146 entries were submitted, and the cream of the crop were selected and deposited into this, the 10 Sectors megaWAD.

The Classic Episode (CLASS_EP.WAD)

Jan Van der Veken showed his love for the original Doom back in 1997, when he authored Dawn of the Dead. The Classic Episode began life as a series of solo releases that Veken worked on whenever he got bored with mapping for The Darkening E1 and it sort of caught on with his teammates. Jan eventually collected the individual releases and, after adding two more, released the package as this in 2000, though not in the order you'd expect. He updated the release two years later - version 2.0 - with various balance tweaks and level changes, and that's the version that I'm reviewing. Since the scope of the project was somewhat incidental, there's no attempt to tie these levels together with any kind of story, just a note that the authors were attempting to mimic the atmosphere of Doom as accurately as possible.

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.

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!