Japanese Community Project (JPCP_V1*.WAD)

The Doom community has a distinctly international flair. It isn't immediately obvious since many of them are pretty good English typists but a considerable number have their own personal forums like the massive Russian website and the smaller but no less treasured French message board. Enter the Japanese Doom community, a group of individuals who I assume must be tightly knit. I'm no games historian but I understand that PC gaming is a relatively niche activity in Japan. While Doom has been ported to what seems like anything and everything the tools used for content creation - specifically, levels - are an entirely different matter. The JDC is no less passionate for it, though, and from them comes one of 2016's biggest surprises: the Japanese Community Project, a full-fledged megaWAD for limit-removing ports.

1994 Tune-up Community Project (1994TU.WAD)

The 1994 Tune-up Community Project started with a simple concept. The general opinion of WADs from Doom's earliest era is not glowing; most 1994 maps are considered crude by today's standards. The disparity in appearance and playability is attributable to any number of sources, but Doomworld forum superstar Snarboo presented an interesting idea for a project, assisted along by GreyGhost and Travers Dunne. Rather than bitch about how awful '94 WADs are, why not take the ones authors released free to modify and renovate them? The target was limit-removing and Boom-compatible, freeing mappers from the dreaded visplane specter and allowing for a limited number of "advanced" features. The only caveat was to avoid rendering the layouts of the original maps unrecognizable, though contributors were free to make their own additions, provided they not increase the map's size by more than 100%. As a general rule.

Plutonia Revisited Community Project (PRCP.WAD)

The Plutonia Experiment was a megaWAD created by the Casali brothers for id Software as part of the Final Doom package. In the years since, it's enjoyed a more favorable legacy than its sibling, TNT Evilution, so much so that it's had two unofficial sequels, Plutonia 2 and the WAD which this review covers, Plutonia Revisited. Plutonia Revisited's scope is a bit narrower than Plutonia 2, however, as the PRCP focused on vanilla compatibility (the trend of 2011). The only flaws you'll encounter when playing the original .EXE are a few maps that invoke the savegame buffer overflow (hooray for source ports!). In fact, this project has a few instances of mapping tricks that require vanilla emulation in source ports (notably some linedef hoodoo in MAP31). Redacted 05/01/12.