Rest In Peace, John W. Anderson

If you haven't already heard the news then I regret to inform you that Dr. Sleep (John W. Anderson) died in April of 2018 of pneumonia. Anderson didn't make a great many levels compared to his fellow Master Levels for Doom II authors but his dedication to detailing as it pertains to texture alignment and lightcasting solidified him as one of the early cornerstones of PWAD design. While he had numerous other accomplishments during his lifetime of 61 years (including design credits for Blood, Unreal, Kingpin, and Daikatana), he had quite a few that are specific to Doom.

• John was responsible for the Inferno series of single map releases. While most of them ultimately became part of commercial products, the freely-available ones (Dante's Gate and Crossing Acheron) were acknowledged early on as outstanding examples of PWADs so much that the latter became immortalized as one of Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 1994. These works were an early influence on many authors including in my own personal experience Malcolm Sailor and Paul Corfiatis.
• Because of the quality of the first two levels, five of the rest - Virgil's Lead, Minos' Judgement, Nessus, Geryon, and Vesperas - became part of the Master Levels for Doom II project. Their appearance helped to cement the gothic brick and metal style but the more subtle influence is the proliferation of his simple, starry night sky in other user-created PWADs. These levels were also included in the Playstation's Final Doom, forming a significant portion of the initial impression and no doubt leaving an impact on people whose Playstation console experience remains definitive.
• The last of the Inferno levels, CHIRON, managed to make its way into The Ultimate Doom as a part of its additional fourth episode, Thy Flesh Consumed ("And Hell Followed"), and is thus likely the most widely-played of his output.
• John's least-known level - apart from the never-realized Lethe, which would have concluded the Inferno series - is almost certainly a Heretic level titled Recant.

More information is available on the DoomWiki if you're interested in reading more about this early pillar of the community. As for myself, it's sad to know that two of the six Master Levels authors are gone, both within a month of each other, but I'm glad that his family stopped by to let the community know of his passing.

Ty Halderman, Rest In Peace

My condolences to his friends and family for a man who more than anyone else helped the Doom community become what it is today

Rest in Peace, Ty

The Pink Bull

Martin Hunsager and Anders Johnsen - who you might recognize as being a lot of if not most of the driving force behind Alien Vendetta - are playing through WADs in coop and documenting their opinions. Together, as The Pink Bull, they've got a bucketload of interesting opinions, especially since they've actually spent a lot of time within the editor, among other things. Read up here.

Interview on Doom Nexus

Against better judgement, Doomworld forum superstar ReX Claussen did an email-style interview with me for his "Inside the Boss Brain" feature, which he uploaded this Thursday. Read it and weep!

In other news, Community Chest 4 has taken awhile to review because I'm in love with Borderlands 2 (<3) and have been in a bit of a funk over the past week, but I'm better now. If I don't have it done after I post Cygnus IV, There Will Be Blood. Spoiler: It's really fucking good! But you already knew I'd say that, didn't you?

More Newstuff from DoomX

Eriance's evil twin keeps plugging away. Mr. Ramirez released a beta creature pack showcasing the trite and succubus monsters of DoomX; if you want to play around with them, load the download on this page with Doom. They replace all imps and demons, though don't expect the gameplay to be balanced.

In case you didn't already know, DoomX is a WIP megaWAD featuring two new weapons (both freeze-based) and a ton of custom monsters with new sprites. Every update on this project warms this old chunk of coal's mottled heart. If he's been paying attention to community stuff at all, he might have noticed that some kind soul painstakingly created a vore sprite set, one of the creatures he was considering adding to his bestiary.

Going Down the Fast Way

Phobosdeimos1

According to Doomworld forum regular Marnetmar, Callum Guy Oliver aka "phobosdeimos1" passed away earlier this year. He was a newcomer to the Doom community in 2011, releasing a number of works and participating in several community projects, including Interception, Panophobia, and Doom the Way id Did. Though none of his entries made the cut for the first DTWiD release, project lead Xaser is compiling them for a posthumous solo WAD, along with perhaps any as of yet unreleased material. I know a third episode of his Raw Action series was in the works; perhaps it may still see the light of day.

While I've played works from authors who had previously passed on (most notably Esa Repo), I haven't had an author I've enjoyed die, until now. Oliver tended toward abstract layouts that emphasized map connectivity and lots of action, with the majority of his work featuring techbases. From what I can gather, he got most of his inspiration from Sandy Peterson.

Zfactory (single Doom II map for ZDoom)
Corebinder (four-map Doom II minisode for ZDoom)
Digon Base (five-map Doom II minisode for ZDoom)
Spire Complex (nine-map Doom II episode for Boom-c)
Pallace Skorn (single Doom II map for Boom-c)

THE SKY MAY BE

DoomX Not Dead!

Pierre Ramirez's DoomX project site went down for a good few days, sending a smidgen of incoming traffic to my blog. Apparently it was hacked, but it's back up with a minor update, concerning his badass-looking "freeze thrower" (and "freeze gun"). I wanna play this so bad.

Happy 18th Birthday, Doom

Another year has come and gone and a dozen or so nominees lie smoking by the roadside. Congratulations to award winners and thanks to anyone who earnestly made anything during this period of Doom's life; indeed, in all periods. The biggest changes this year include a) the removal of the worst WAD award and Mock awards, and in their place installing the Best Gameplay Mod category, given to the ever-evolving Brütal Doom. Here's to another year of excellent releases! And, uh, Mordeth and Millenium. Keep on truckin'.

Also taking a moment to mention community members that were unfortunately lost this year, The Engineer and the patron saint of Legacy WADs, Jive. My condolences to their loved ones.

New Update at DoomX.net

Oh, hey! Eriance's evil twin updated a few days ago, mostly to say that he's slowly chipping away at his magnum opus (and talking about Rage, which I love). DoomX and Demon Eclipse are my two watched Mordeth-esque projects, and coincidentally, Eriance recently pushed out a new beta of his pet project as well. It's a great time to be playing Doom, especially with all the user projects going on, like Doom Core, Reverie, Back to Saturn X, Community Chest 4, Doom the Way id Did, 1994 Community Tune-Up Project, Plutonia Revisited, TNT2: Devilution, Doom Unleashed, Progressive Fiction, Interception, and that's just the megaWADs I can name off the top of my head, not to forget the wonderful work of Paul DeBruyne, or Kaiser pushing out Doom64Ex (already garnering some user-made maps). Actually, there's just new stuff being made every day for Doom. It's one of the greatest gaming communities to buy into.

Master Levels on Steam

Over the past few months you'll have noticed my focus on id's Master Levels for Doom II, consisting of 20 individual PWADs by six different authors. The maps enjoy a wide variety of difficulty and size as well as aesthetics as befits such a collection. I was preparing to write a full retrospective highlighting the package itself to flesh out its current page under the Features section of the blog, which intended to answer the question of whether these maps are worth your cold hard cash. And, uh, that's a tough question to answer. The package isn't available as an individual purchase on Steam, and in the two packs it's included in (the Doom Pack Complete and the id Super Pack) it's separately listed at $69.99 and $34.99, respectively, before package discounts.

I have no idea what's going on here. Is that a pricing gaffe? Is it supposed to be $6.99 and $3.49? I could have sworn that was the price range I saw it at back when I bought the id Super Pack a few years ago. Possible explanations:

• It is indeed a pricing gaffe, and it's supposed to be listed at a tenth of the estimated price. (plausible)
• It is not a pricing gaffe, but has legitimate reasons for being priced at $70 (ha!)
• It is not a pricing gaffe, and its unavailability outside of the packs suggests that its inflated listing price allows them to claim a greater discount (plausible, but shady)

I don't know the reality of the situation, only the appearance. That said, under current conditions I wouldn't recommend buying the Master Levels for Doom II. Even if you ignore the suspicious pricing, it's only available as part of a package deal. If you don't have any (or most) of the included games already, then yeah, go for it. The difference assuming reasonable pricing is a 50% deal as opposed to a 75% one, at least for the Doom Pack. 

Two Big Ones

I was gonna leave Icarus up until this next Friday but as long as actual news is happening, I should say something before it gets stale.

On the port side of things, Scoredoom got what I can only assume was an eagerly anticipated 3.0 release. If you haven't heard of Scoredoom before (who are you???) it's a mod that replaces certain enemies in Doom IWADs and PWADs as well as replacing powerups. It's semi-randomized, in that the port generates a random assortment of powerups and monsters for every map, but that map will always have that given setup. Then you play Scoredoom, get scored on various factors, and compete against other players. I'm still pretty young Doomwise so I'm staying away from stuff like this for now, but if I were to mod my gameplay regularly, Scoredoom would be one of my top plays. It's got a host of other features, of course, but I think I've touched on the important bits.

On the WAD side of things, Doom Core made its way to the archives. Doom Core is a 32-map MegaWAD (for Doom II, obviously) totalling much of Valkiriforce's output over the 2010 year. It's been rigorously tested to work in vanilla, so grizzled classic players take notice. I can't speak as to the quality of Doom Core yet but I did spend some time testing the first third of his 1996 style MegaWAD, Reverie, which was pretty damn challenging and fun to play (and also really fucking inventive), so I'll vouch for DCV.WAD, on top of the people already playing it and enjoying it in its development thread.

On the site side of things, the following WADs have been reviewed, I'm just stalling putting them up:

Polygon Base, by Rick Lipsey
A Hidden Mountain Factory, by Grzegorz Werner
99 Ways to Die, by Warren Marshall

The following WADs are on the chopping block:

Army of Darkness Doom (II), by some AoD fans
Dystopia 3: Re-Birth of Anarchy, by Anthony "Adelusion" Czerwonka and Iikka "Fingers" Keranen
The Troopers' Playground, by Matthias Worch

After I finish 1996 out I'll indulge myself in some non-"Best of" fare. Probably play through Doom Core, Raven, some other stuff. All I know is that quadruple threat of Eternal Doom, Requiem, S.T.R.A.I.N., and Hell Revealed, along with The Talosian Incident and Dawn of the Dead feels incredibly daunting. 1997 was one hell of a year, and yet Doom continues to march on...

Perdition's Gate research

Because I don't really have enough info to incorporate this into either the Perdition's Gate or Hell to Pay pages yet, I'm throwing something together right now because it's somewhat interesting info regarding the topic and I'm going to be touching on it in the near future. I dunno, it could be feature of its own, maybe something like Connections, but I'm not sure I'm sufficiently interested in other authors yet to really pull something together.

This is a little bit of puzzle-piecing I've cobbled together through independent research. Glancing through .TXTs, searching for author info on the archives, etc.. Tom Mustaine mentions on his website/blog that the Hell to Pay project was headed by an individual named Jim Elson, and that Elson along with Jimmy "Evilgenius" Sieben and Mackey "Avatar" McCandlish helped push Perdition's Gate out the door. Now, glancing through the .TXT file for Perdition's Gate, I come across the following credit list.


Lich: Artwork, Design, Production Manager, Sound
Tom Mustaine: Artwork, Design, Music, Production Assistant
ArchDaemon: Design, Programming
Mackey McCandlish: Artwork, Design
Pavel Hodek: Artwork
Bob Mustaine: Design
Mark Gundy: Marketing
Anavrin: Music
Kristin Weeks: Computer Voice
Jaroslaw Wolski: Artwork


Now, for some connecting. I've actually reviewed one of Pavel Hodek's works, Galaxia. He's also a fairly prolific author in the archives, particularly with deathmatch mapping, though he's worked single player into all the levels (as far as I have seen). Hodek was also one of the primary authors behind H2H-Xmas (which I will be reviewing in the near future), supplying 8 of the 32 maps of the series. It started as a branch off from a small mapset derived from the Head-to-Head International Doomers Competition (read more about it here on Doomworld, the sixth paragraph of ).

The original H2HMud team: Dave Swift aka "Mud", Jimmy Sieben aka "Evil Genius", Greg Lewis aka "Tree", Mark Gundy aka "Mag", and Jim Elson aka H2HMud. From what I gathered in a .TXT of a map by Jimmy Sieben, Elson ran the original H2H competition, and incidentally headed the H2H-Xmas project given his status as "Quality Control & final assembley". So, this establishes Elson as having project leadership skills, and working together with both Jimmy Sieben and Pavel Hodek, as well as Mark Gundy. I'd say H2H-Xmas planted the seeds of the Hell to Pay project, at least.

Here's something that confused me. Perdition's Gate lists neither Jim Elson nor Jimmy Sieben as having worked on it, yet we can clearly see from Tom Mustaine's own recollections that they did. Two people credited for "Design" in Perdition's Gate are using handles, "Lich" and "Archdaemon". From this, we can deduce that Jim Elson, indicated by Tom Mustaine as the project manager and already established as a project leader , used the handle of Lich for Perdition's Gate for reasons unknown. We can also deduce that Jimmy Sieben used the handle of ArchDaemon for Perditon's Gate, again for reasons unknown. Actually, hold it.

Final Doom was released May 31, 1996, though I understand that TNT Evilution had been commercially developed for some time, as TNT's following WAD, Icarus: Alien Vanguard, was released more than two months prior. TNT's own website page for Evilution declares that the original WAD was finished in November, 1995 (!!). Perdition's Gate (and, I assume, Hell to Pay) was released in 1996, I'm betting in the wake of Final Doom. As suggested by Doomworld forumgoer T-Rex, Siebens probably used an alias to distance himself from Evilution, which the community had had a less than glowing reaction to. Additionally, looking through TNT's member names associated with project lists, you can clearly see Jim Elson, aka H2H, credited as a contributor to Evilution. In the list Ty Halderman dropped in this thread on Doomworld, you'll notice that Elson isn't credited as doing any mapping work for Evilution. However, in that same post, Ty states that

"Of course this is just the levels--there was a lot of other stuff done that virtually equaled the effort in doing levels. In fact we only divvied up 1/2 of the purchase price as being for level work."

I'm gonna guess that Jim Elson, given his previous history with H2HMud and H2H-Xmas and what I know of Perdition's Gate and Hell to Pay, worked on TNT Evilution somewhere in the realm of project management, maybe even "Quality Control & final assembley". As such, I'll posit that he used the moniker of Lich for this project for the same reason Jimmy Sieben did. Mackey McCandlish had no such need, not having participated in Final Doom. Of course, that doesn't account for why Tom Mustaine brazenly slapped his name on the project, given that he was just as much a part of Evilution as everyone else. I can only conclude that Tom Mustaine gives no fucks, and that makes him one of the greatest mappers of all.

What I take away from this is that the two Wraith Corp. Doom II commercial MegaWADs have far more in common with the similarly commercial (but overseen by id) TNT Evilution than I originally thought, and that's even knowing that Tom Mustaine started Perdition's Gate with the intent of selling it to id as part of Final Doom. If there are alternate universes, perhaps one has some commercial Final Doom trilogy. There's some interesting parallels, too. Tom and his dad as relatives crafting a megawad with Milo and Dario as relatives working on Plutonia, and here, instead of Milo and Dario getting split off from Evilution to craft their "solo" project, Tom and his dad started out with a solo project and got the rest of the Wraith Corporation team grafted on to it. Now I'll never be able to divorce the idea of the Wraith Corp WADs as a sister series to id's Final Doom.

Doomed Makes a New Friend

I started this Blog back in April with the intent of posting the various notes I'd made of WADs as I played them. You could call them reviews, and I've labelled them as such, but I don't intend to judge Doom's user-made content on an empirical basis. I just want to say what it is, what I liked, and what I didn't like, attempting to mention one memorable encounter (especially when reviewing the hulkier MegaWADs). Hopefully what I like outweighs what I don't like, but even if I find myself disliking something, I try to find at least one novel thing, one reason why playing something is worth your time.

It's evolved a bit, as I'm also adding general news I pick up from the Doom community, some of it easily found at Doomworld and some of it not. I've also sneakily reformatted pages, cooked up second drafts, and added screenshots to every review page, something I hadn't intended, and made review indexes by filename and title (author and possibly initial release date to come). And now, Doomed makes a friend.

I don't know how many Doomers have Doom blogs. I know some of them have websites. But Herculine has the first Doom blog I've come across. She's a mapper and a modder and a WAD reviewer, probably more known for her modding at this point. She's crafted a gameplay mod for GZDoom in the vein of Aeons of Death and Scaliano's 667 Shuffle. It's an item and monster randomizer with new content, some things coming from Realm667, and some things I understand are illicit cocktails of the author's own design.

She's also released two maps of her own design to the archives which have unfairly fallen to an anonymous Oblige accusation frenzy, which is interesting as both maps underwent some open criticism in Doomworld's forums with none of the critiquing authors crying foul. Just gonna chalk it up to archives being archives, I guess, as both maps got encouraging feedback on the forums and had positive reviews on the archives before Oblige trolling.

She's pretty heavy into mods at this point but I hope she dusts off her mapping tools in the future since the veterans at DW saw some promise rather than uniformly trashing her work like they usually do with undesirables. Practice makes perfect and from what I see every mapper has some unreleased skeletons in their closet. No one has to toss out a MegaWAD on their first shot; Hell, Skillsaw's Vanguard got cut down to a 13 map affair and is a lean, mean Dooming machine.

Doomed salutes you, Herculine. Keep fighting the good fight.

DoomX Update 06/01/2011

DoomX put out another status update recently, mostly just to say that the developer was introducing more extensive custom weapons to the project than he'd originally intended and showing off his freeze gun, a video of which plays at the top of the site. There's also a bonus gift, I believe a file housing his custom monster, The Loper, in its current state. He also hints at some other new monsters he's thinking of spriting up, explicitly mentioning the Cherub! Again, I'm pretty stoked observing this project and Pierre can take all the time he needs to do this right, 'cause it'll be a blast.

Risen3D v2.2.10 released!

Risen3D put out a new edition of the Risen3D engine. From the website:

Changes over v220-9 ...

1. Code changes introduced in v220-9 meant that some analysis requirements were not being met. E.g infill flats on bridge near start of Requiem map13 but this is just one example amongst many that have now been fixed. 
2. The analysis code has been further extended to deal with previously ignored map tricks such as scrchhet.wad. Issues with recently released pwads have also been addressed. 
3. Rendering of doom alpha textures (walls and sprites) modified to get rid of fuzzy edges. In the case of sprites this can be changed in the in-game control panel under Textures (as some may prefer the previous way these were drawn). 
4. Rendering problems with recently released pwads have been addressed. 
5. Distortion in the automap fixed. This mainly occurred in fullscreen mode when the monitor's max resolution was not being selected. 
6. The in game console switch 'game-fastmonsters' has been removed as no-one seemed to know it was available. Instead this has now been optioned in the launcher under Options/Games. 
7. Lighting specials now applied with infill flats. 
8. The player weapon is now lit using the floor light level. 
9. Dating errors with pwads can now be fixed in R3D. Beluga, for example, is dated, inside its zip, as January 2012. This meant that saved games could not be used as they would pre-date the pwad. The user is now given the option of changing an incorrect pwad's date, where in advance of the current date, back to the current date. 
10. Various bugs fixed including some that could cause, in rare circumstances, the Risen3D error handler to force an exit. 
11. Resolved problem, when not using fullscreen, with screen save images or the image shown in control panel video with an ATI card.

Eternity Engine Update plus Vaporware Demo

Eternity's "Blue Box"

I haven't really used the Eternity Engine yet, but they just made a major update, extending compatibility and reaching toward Heretic support (and of course Hexen and Strife in the distant future). Cool stuff! In addition, there's apparently an Eternity project titled Vaporware that's been knocking around for some time. The Eternity Engine released a one map demo of the project along with the Engine update. I may take a look after finishing Memento Mori 2. After all, I've dabbled in PrBoom+ to play with Obituary. The least I can do is take a look at another fine Doom engine.

(Old) New Update at DoomX.net

DoomX is a project for ZDoom I've been following with some interest for awhile. It's one of those labours of love conducted during the author's spare time, but he's been pretty productive, with 23 maps created out of a 32 level megawad and a host of new monsters. Most recently the author's posted an updated bestiary, with one brand new monster (that I can remember) and new, different sprites for three others. Excluding the casually racist charicatures (his new Grosse brothers) I see a host of worthy additions to Doom's bestiary, especially in the videos I've seen. He's got

• the Death Dealer, a brand new addition in the style of the Angel of Death, a previous monster, and judging from the apparent weaponry an Angel of Death lite as long as the glowing eyes don't betray some alternate, magical attack
• the Trite Mother, a grotesque original that explodes into, what else, Trites
• the Sinstress, Dark Vixen and Succubus, which were more overtly based off the same female sprites but from videos he's posted have definitively different behavior (still not anatomically correct, despite his poll)
• the Angel of Death, clearly harkening back to Wolf3D in a more serious vein as opposed to the Grosse throwbacks, with a chest-mounted cannon and espousing Chainguns akimbo
• the Loper, about as wide as the Mancubus but much faster, with gameplay videos revealing it blinking around dangerously and disorientingly
• the Elite Imp, even spikier
• the Exploding Imp, which does what it says on the tin
• a Trite sprite, though not nearly as disturbing as its "The Thing" inspired Doom 3 counterpart
• and the Flesh Wizard, which along with the Grosses is currently available for download and testing, and appears to be Arch-Vile inspired (graphically, at least) and warps around, shooting fireballs.

Not even counting the host of graphical effects and new weapons. I wish Mr. Ramirez the best of luck and look forward to future updates; any quality project for ZDoom is a project well worth waiting for.