Batman Doom (BATMAN.WAD)

You never forget your first superhero. Some twenty years ago, my big two faves were the X-Men cartoon and Batman: The Animated Series. I only have one of those on DVD today; you can probably guess which one. It's TAS, by the way, because B:TAS is awesome, and even though I am a much bigger Spider-Man fan, when I go DC, it's Batman all the way. Batman Doom, released in 1999, is a fun throwback to that 90s Batman fever. It pulls a lot more from the comics than either TAS or the movies, but you can see where they intrude. It's also designed for DOS (not vanilla!) Doom II, doing an unprecedented amount of mod work with DeHackEd. Batman Doom comes from the ACE Team - Andres, Carlos, and Edmundo Bordeau. I think this is where they started their work; nowadays, they're releasing actual games for money, most recently Steam favorite Rock of Ages.

Planisphere 2 (PLANISF2.WAD)

PLANISPHERE 2
by "Perro Seco"

Perro Seco released the first Planisphere in 2011. He published the sequel, Planisphere 2, more than a year later. Like the original, PLANISF2 is a single city level for Doom II, occupying the MAP01 slot. Unlike its progenitor, however, Planisphere 2 is big. That's because it's a scale model of New York City. Yeah, that's right. The whole city. Well, actually, you start in New Jersey and fight your way through Manhattan, gracing Brooklyn and Queens with your presence, eventually ending up in Rikers Island. The point is, the map is so huge it's prone to causing errors in the engines it plays in, but more on that later.

The Darkening Episode 2 (DARKEN2.WAD)

In 1999, The Darkening team released the first episode of what was to presumably be more. In 2000, a clearly exhausted Ola Björling pushed the second episode out the door. We got twelve more levels for Doom II, an impressive set of brand-new textures to play around in (though not WITH for many years), and a complementary deathmatch-oriented episode. Gone was the voluminous prose in the .TXT, eliminating any story connections between Darkening's E1 and E2, eerily echoing the relationship between id's Quake and Quake II, a comparison even more relevant when one realizes that the aesthetics of the new textures (and bits of level design) clearly evoke Quake II where DARKEN's borrowed from Quake. The other downer was the announcement that there would be no third episode as the authors had either given up on mapping for Doom or moved on to other games. Amusingly, Jan and Adam are still around and mapping, along with Travers from the original episode. Keep it strong, guys!

Planisphere (PLANISF.WAD)

PLANISPHERE
by "Perro Seco"

Latin Doomer Perro Seco made a bit of a splash when he released Planisphere 2 mid 2012, which begged the question: Where is original Planisphere? Well, Deathz0r archived it on Gamebanana, though the distribution clause means it could show up on the /idgames server if some kind soul wants to upload it. It dates to roughly a year before its sequel. Planisphere, like its younger brother, is something of a city map, but with a few jaunts to other domains that better encapsulates it as a single-map PWAD for Doom II. It's meant to be played in a limit-removing port, with no other real restrictions, at least that I could see, and plays in the MAP01 slot.

The Darkening Episode 1: The Nameless Project (DARKEN.WAD)

1998 seemed to mark the death of super cool community projects for Doom. Everyone seemed to be too busy playing Quake, realizing Warren Marshall's very public fear. So imagine when The Darkening debuted its first episode in 1999, "The Nameless Project", looking very much like Doom but with a keen eye for lighting characteristic of many of these authors' earlier works. Lighting isn't the only element borrowed from Quake. It's nothing like Iikka Kernanen's ode to the big Q in Requiem, but there's a certain aesthetic clearly echoed with the use of Shub-Niggurath slipgates and the new textures that clearly shows that Doom II wasn't the only thing on the minds of this team. Still, they managed to stop boxing Shub-Niggurath long enough to put out eleven more levels for Doom II.

skePLand (SKEPLAND.WAD)

Monakhov Vladimir, aka "Skepticist", published the first iteration of skePLand back in late 2011, adding another level to it in 2012. Currently, it's three maps for the Plutonia IWAD, though not really borrowing the style. skePLand has a nasty brand of gameplay, highlighted in the .TXT. Doomers looking for a less demanding experience are directed to play the maps on HMP, which is sound advice. Your Doom gods can try to tango on UV, but HMP is still more than the average player will be comfortable with. For an idea of just how much harsher Skepticist has set things up, compare the opening of MAP03 on both difficulties.

New PWAD layout

Long-time readers may have noticed a shift in the format of multiple-level PWAD reviews toward something resembling Andy Olivera's review page. This design migrated from the series articles in Serial Killing, where it was prototyped. I'm still working out some kinks but I'm backporting all of the archived articles to the current standard. Any and all opinions are welcome on possible improvements. You might notice some incongruities with backported articles as I am using a few reformats as the template for others; report these for a swift fix!

Winter's Fury (WINTER'S FURY.WAD)

Every so often a super-ambitious GZDoom project manages to climb over the sea of bodies left by its fallen brethren and grab the brass ring. 2012 had Ed Cripps's Putrefier, but it also had Pyroscourge's Winter's Fury, a twelve-map episode for Doom II packed with tons of goodies. Winter's Fury, like many PWADs, begins some time after the events of Hell on Earth. The demons lost the war on Terra, but rebuilding has been a long and costly process. The UAC kept the corpse of the uber-demon - Baphomet - interred deep in the mountains of Siberia while tactical units traveled across the globe, wiping out the remaining bastions of infestation. Of course, when scanning Earth for demonic activity, recent results revealed a presence in the top-secret facility where Baphomet's body resides. When the exploratory team failed to report back, well...