Europa 3: The Dark Side of Vrack (EAEURO03.WAD)

EUROPA 3

THE DARK SIDE OF VRACK

by Erik Alm

Now here's an interesting piece of Doom history. This is an Erik Alm take on the Vrack series, as evidenced by the subtitle. If you're unfamiliar with Vrack - Fredrik Johansson's main claim to fame as an author - then the levels established a sort of orbital platform space station theme seen more recently in the Japanese Community Project. Europa 3 is also the third and final entry in Alm's EAEURO run, which began in 2001 and ends here in early 2002. As with the others, The Dark Side of Vrack is a MAP01 replacement for Doom II that is meant for play in a Boom-compatible port. Unlike Europa 2, it doesn't require the use of an independent texture pack.

Vrack 2b (VRACK2B.WAD)

VRACK 2B

by Fredrik Johansson

The original Vrack was released back in 2000, inspired by Dystopia 3's MAP04 and LucasArts's Dark Forces. The name of the game was a base in space and a big one at that. Fredrik's orbital platform was a pretty novel setting, but it didn't quite catch the eye of the public as strongly as its sequel did, leading to its enshrinement as one of Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2001. There are actually two versions of the sequel on the archives, original and extra crispy (2b). All of the changes are under the hood, adding Deathmatch starts, a REJECT table, and cleaning up the artificiality of the void; the original remains for demo compatibility purposes. That said, this review was written on Vrack 2b, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II and designed for Boom.

Vrack (VRACK.WAD)

VRACK

by Fredrik Johansson

Vrack 2 gets all the accolades as the face that launched a thousand space station levels, but Fredrik Johansson started out with just plain Vrack back in the year 2000. If you don't know who he is, well, you may have seen him up at the top of Doomworld's Post Hell. He's also done some other really cool things for the community, like create the Omgifol tool used to generate those lovely automap-type images and start up the Doom Wiki project. The original Vrack is his first publication, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in Boom-compatible ports. The story about as threadbare as can be ("somewhere on a base located somewhere in space") and references contemporary Doomworld forum member Mewse, so just take it for what it is: an excuse to go slaying demons on a big space platform.