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?

Candy Choppers (PC_HERT1.WAD)

CANDY CHOPPERS

by Paul Corfiatis

1999 was a really big year for pcorf. After releasing a veritable glut of levels including The Twilight Zone II as well as Death Tormention and its sequel, he released three individual levels (the first-created entries of his Selfish series) in 2000 and cranked out a handful of submissions for the 10 Sectors contest. Four of them made it into the runoff compilation, 10SECTO2, uploaded in 2001. Candy Choppers, published later in the year, takes things in a completely different direction. It's Paul's token Heretic level! It presumably works with its vanilla executable and occupies its E2M1 slot.

Quake: Descent into Heresy (QUAKE-DIH_1.PK3)

QUAKE
DESCENT INTO HERESY
by "osjclatchford"

Do you love Quake? Do you like Heretic? Then do I have a mod for you! Descent Into Heresy is an unusual combo for the ZDoom engine that will no doubt have some players rattling their chains due to the mixture of fantasy and... Quake. The flipside is that people inured to the mixture of Gothic horror / fantasy and gunpowder are probably more ready to accept a mod that throws shotguns in Heretic than the Hexen crowd was at the genesis of The Ranger. This rev of the mod was stamped mid 2015, and in some aspects, it brings the gunplay of Quake to the world of Parthoris.