50 Shades of Graytall (50SHADES.WAD)

50 Shades of Graytall is partially a joke. It's also mostly serious. Doomworld Forum superstar Marcake took Gez on his jest, creating a project with an unusual restriction, limiting the available textures to what are widely considered to be the three least attractive options - DOORTRAK, GRAYTALL, and FIREBLU. The end result is an eighteen-level megaWAD to be played in a Boom-compatible source port that attempts to deliver, again, on the promise of the Monochromatic Mapping Project. That is, to create a mapset whose limited capacity for visuals forced the authors to focus on the aspects of level design related to gameplay.

Doom 2 In Name Only (D2INO.WAD)

Doom 2 in Name Only arose out of discussions of Chris Klie's BF_THUD. After playing Klie's megaWAD, it's pretty clear that he took most of his design cues from the names of the map slots his levels appeared in. A thread by Hellbent prompted another thread by ella guro where the project took off and then stagnated until its untimely release in 2014 amid some controversy. The final product is a full-fledged megaWAD for Doom II that makes a claim for vanilla compatibility, but the sheer size of many of the submitted levels made for less than rigorous playtesting as far as technical details go. A limit-removing port should be used, at the very least.

NOVA: The Birth (NOVA.WAD)

Way back at the tail end of 2011, Doomworld Forum superstar kildeth had an idea for a community project. Where the Community Chest series aimed to combine the works of authors who would never be capable of making a megaWAD on their own, NOVA's goal was to make a limit-removing PWAD out of maps made by newbie authors. Now in 2014, more than two years later, we can reap the rewards of their learning experience. NOVA: The Birth doesn't have a story outside of the new intermission texts. Hell is warping reality again, and no one else can see it, almost as though it's drawing Doomguy into its infernal embrace. You're nothing if not an unstoppable evil-destroying siege engine, though, so the outcome of this encounter is all but predetermined.

The Eye (EYE.WAD)

THE EYE
by Cyriak "mouldy" Harris

The Eye is an unassuming single map for Doom II, meant to be played in Boom (or Boom-compatible) engines. It isn't the first thing Doomworld forum superstar mouldy's made, but it's the first solo release that found its way onto the archives. There's no pomp and circumstance in the .TXT, just a terse description that gives you a vague idea of what you're in for. The Eye isn't exactly an enormous level. It's certainly smaller than other maps I've played featuring more than 500 monsters. But, yeah, there are a bunch of enemies to fight, found in what are essentially two different areas of the level.