Tangerine Nightmare (TN.WAD)

The French Doom Community celebrated in 2024 with a huge win, finally pushing out a release candidate of their Necromantic Thirst megaWAD after years of development. They didn't get there by just chipping away at their mega-project, though. franckFRAG and WH-Wilou84 fostered a creative community through their 3 Heures d'Agonie speedmapping project, which got sequels in 3HA2 and 3HA3. This seemed to activate authors like Datacore, who has since become one of the most productive authors of their subset of the Doom diaspora. Tangerine Nightmare started as a Datacore-led project with an emphasis on an orange color scheme. At some point, and I can't exactly tell by reading the development thread, franckFRAG sort of organically became the lead. What started as a vanilla adventure became a (mostly) limit-removing episode for Doom II, finalized in early 2018, replacing MAP01-MAP10.

3 Heures d' Agonie 3 (3HA3.WAD)

The Doom community has several, thriving international scenes. The French have developed over the last few years, spawning some prolific authors as well as auteurs. The front face of the FDC has been the 3 Heures d'Agonie series, which debuted in 2012 and was founded on the premise that all of the submitted maps be built over the course of three hours - give or take a few. These speedmapping megaWADs were conceived as an attempt to rejuvenate their community, which had become burnt out by the now-Quixotic construction of Necromantic Thirst. 3 Heures d'Agonie 3 is the third and purportedly final installment of the series as far as megaWADs go. It is a full, 32 map replacement for Doom II and ought to play well with any source port.

32in24-14: How the Hamburglar Stole Christmas (32IN2414.WAD)

32in24 is a Doomworld community institution, an event where participants make as many multiplayer levels as possible in a very short timeframe. Recent iterations of the proceedings have given the participants time to polish and punch-up their contributions. 32in24 doesn't really tread on the singleplayer / co-op side of things; Diet 32in24 has gone down as an interesting experiment but I've rarely seen it talked up, and it seemed that it would remain the only foray into demonslaying that we would get. Then, of course, there came 32in24-14: How the Hamburglar Stole Christmas. The rest, as they say, is robble robble. This is a 42 (!) level megaWAD of Boom-compatible levels, but if you want to mess around with the bonus levels, you'll need something that can play beyond the usual limit. MAPINFO is recommended as the other stuff is set up in its own special episode.

Swift Death (SWIDEATH.WAD)

When 3 Heures d'Agonie was released, there were a few authors who formed the backbone of the megaWAD. One of them was franckFRAG, who had six levels of a construction type I'd never seen before. They weren't ornate, but they were heavy in height variation and tricky monster positioning, making them short, sharp shocks full of riotous gameplay. Swift Death takes this aesthetic and drives it to its logical end. Released more or less in 2014, the lower difficulty levels play like the 3 Heures d'Agonie maps, but UV is a collection of death traps you will be hard-pressed to navigate, perhaps the closest confluence I've seen of a game like Super Meat Boy and Doom.

3 Heures d'Agonie 2 (3HA2.WAD)

The French Doom Community released 3 Heures d'Agonie back in 2013, a megaWAD's worth of speedmaps from a wide variety of authors, from inexperienced to guys that are established as heavy hitters in Doomworld thanks to their contributions to mapsets like Plutonia Revisited. 3 Heures d'Agonie 2 is what else but the second outpouring of hastily put-together levels from what is becoming an increasingly talented stable of individuals. This time, it's a full megaWAD for vanilla Doom II, though as could be expected there's no attached story, just raw Doom II.

Interception (INTERCEP.WAD)

Interception started around the height of vanilla megaWAD madness, back in 2011. Matt534Dog wanted to make a megaWAD, and there was enough enthusiasm knocking about that everyone not working on their top secret projects said "Hell yeah!" and started pouring in the maps. Then on release, the Doomworld MegaWAD Club played it, undergoing a sort of playtesting by fire, after which the PWAD underwent some significant changes. The super double ultimate final release happened sometime in 2013, but there are still a few game-breaking bugs to stamp out. Funny, unless you're playing it and run across them, trying to find out whether you just don't have the solution or whether the puzzle itself is inherently broken.

3 Heures d'agonie (3HAFINAL.WAD)

Necromantic Thirst may be on hiatus but French Doomers JC and Oxyde managed to wring some maps out of their burgeoning community. Speedmaps, that is. 3 Heures d'Agonie was constructed under one general guideline; authors were to map for no longer than three hours. Of course, it's just a guideline, with some taking slightly more time in their editor of choice. 3HA is a collection, offering no major themes and no given story. It does fill all thirty-two map slots, though, to be played with Doom II in limit-removing sourceports. While there's no defined theme there are a fair bit of custom textures added so that you have something new to look at and a pretty good soundtrack to enjoy them with. 

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.