Temple of the Lizard Men 2 (LMTMPL2.PK3)

Alando released the original Temple of the Lizard Men in 2009, following it up with the sequel in 2010, the aptly titled Temple of the Lizard Men 2. The TOTLM series is a conscious attempt to weld the gameplay of Doom to that of Unreal, more specifically the action of the former and the environments of the latter. Where the first installment was pretty much action for action's sake, though, the author attempted to work more story elements into his sophomore effort. TOTLM2 doesn't have any cut scenes, but there are a few NPCs you WILL chat with, and a number of digital journals to collect, one of the most prevalent quirks of Unreal, hammering in the depressing ends of a number of corpses.

TOTLM2 takes place on a mysterious island where vacationers have gone missing for weeks and counting. A squad of marines went in to investigate and promptly encountered some action before they themselves disappeared. You are the sole person sent to discover the squad's fate, and perhaps that of all the individuals. Of course, you soon encounter the titular lizard men, plus the recently-oppressed lizard women. One of the latter, named Azula, seeks your help to break her people of the oppressive hand that guides them. If you're lucky, you might manage to find a marine or two alive.

Part two is essentially a continuance of the style of the series, but more refined, with a few memorable boss battles and lots of reptile-slaying goodness. Alan has pared down some of the weaponry to give a more effective selection. There is no SSG, sadly, but the normal shotgun will prove to be your workhorse weapon alongside the chaingun and on some occasions grenade launcher. There's a sniper rifle, but it feels pretty weak. I wasn't sold on the serpent staff's initial appearance, but it's pretty useful, and the knife is a great backup with great reward for comparatively low risk against the slightly sluggish lizards.

The bestiary should seem familiar to veterans with the lizards appearing in a variety of colors alongside weredragons, their ranged combat counterparts. The sorcerers return, as do the minotaurs. There are eels to complement the creepy gill beasts but the major addition are the berserker lizards, recolors of Shadow Warrior's rippers that are basically a faster and tougher variety of the main antagonists. There are a few bosses to fight, with some nice attack patterns to keep you on your toes, but as always, mobility is the main advantage of Doomguy.

If you didn't play the original TOTLM, you're in for a bunch of linear crawls through temples, caverns, and death-filled wilderness, with a fair amount of monster closets. I think they look pretty cool, but Alando doesn't stress the exploration aspect of adventure, instead focusing on some hybrid of Indiana Jones meets sword and sorcery where the adventure is in the action. He delivers, for the most part, though gunning down hordes of lizards and their ilk can get wearisome with some of the hordes thrown at you in later areas. He still manages to rustle up a few novel encounters, though, and I think that the architecture has improved in comparison to his debut.

The story is inessential to the action though it's nice that you aren't locked into cutscenes. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense in that the lizard man chieftain is ordering the execution of all of the lizard women, who are thus grateful for your intervention. There may be a greater power that isn't really hinted at that's causing such asinine decision making, but really, it's an adolescent sword and sorcery wet dream, but with guns. You arrive in a mysterious world, find the subjugated and tortured women (lizard and human) and rescue them by killing their masculine oppressors, afterward basking in their gratitude and barely-clothed glory. It is one of the premiere male power fantasies, though I don't buy into it, and truth be told the partially nude and mutilated bodies of both species are more than a little off-putting.

Anyway, if you liked the idea behind TOTLM but wanted something a little more...advanced, Alan takes things to the next level with Temple of the Lizard Men 2. If you're not a fan of his intended atmosphere or the essential linearity, you might want to give this a pass, but it's a nice piece of action and plays a bit better than its progenitor. It's almost the Evil Dead II to the original Evil Dead, though I'll admit that most of the comedy I see in this release is unintentional, mostly due to the awkwardness of the author's narrative.

TEMPLE OF THE
LIZARD MEN 2
by Alan "alando1" D.

Dropped	MAP01
Almost entirely atmospheric level that consists of a walk up to the Temple proper. Some neat sights like that bridge by the waterfall, but that's what most of the level is - neat sights. As far as nailing Unreal, Alan isn't far off the mark, but he fails when he shows off the final outdoor area, which is disappointingly boxy, in spite of its little pond with lily pads.

MAP02	Temple of Water
	Something more action-oriented. It's a decent temple section with lots of brown and green lizards to dispatch, and a few weredragons for good measure. The shotgun makes short work of most of these beasts but with the hordes you'll be fighting you'll have to beat them back quite a bit. I like the look of the individual areas, with the southern dual-secret room my favorite.

The Swamp	MAP03
A linear trek down some marshlands that are rife with stalkers, which means that most of your experience consists of creeping down the river and then shooting the ugly bastards as they pop out of the water. It's not that thrilling, though the few appearances by green lizards come as welcome shake-ups to the otherwise excruciating crawl. It certainly has a decent atmosphere.

MAP04	The Mountains
	A few cool sights here including that massive gorge with the waterfall but after you enter the temple it's a bog-standard corridor shooter blowing tons of lizards away complete with monster closets. The only real surprise is the brown dragon at the end, which is mostly dangerous due to the confined space.

Night Fall

MAP05

The jungle is pretty nice-looking but the level isn't anything you haven't seen before. Its defining features are a few mobs of lizardmen that will have you pinned back to entrance points until you thin the herds out and, surprise surprise, the return of the chaos serpent, though you get the drop on him this time. This level also debuts the serpent staff, which is honestly a lackluster addition to your armory when you have stuff like the basic shotgun.

MAP06

The Dungeon

Another trek into a stronghold of the lizards. "The Dungeon" isn't very dungeony due to its small size; one small area with a few cells fits the bill, complete with the answer to the question that's been burning within you. If there is a lizard man, is there not a lizard woman? There's also a human woman in here, too, but all are bound to function as simple props in the Doom engine, unable to do anything but grunt. The fights are pretty standard though there's a lot of water action for anyone wary of swimming with gill beasts and the bridge section has some questionable design what with the big-ass weredragon at the top on the other side. Save your sniper rounds, I suppose?

Underground Temple

MAP07

This linear trek justifies itself with some great visuals and atmosphere with the jaunts into the rainy spaces. I love the huge altar room and as usual Alando does a decent job of making subterranean caverns, though his choice of texture leaves something to be desired as the first major chamber tends to blend together, robbing it of some of its spectacle. There are some tough fights, some of them sheer mob frenzy but the trickiest stuff revolves around the minotaurs, bad dudes that move fast and can crush you if you let them get a swing in. Cool stuff, and I love the treasure room.

MAP08

Arena of the Minotaur

Just a boss map. You've been fighting baby minotaurs but the big bad can swing his weight around with his two hammers. Your first main adversary is the slightly raised area in the center of the arena which has a tendency to bounce your grenades wildly; after that it's just getting your explosives to connect before finishing him off with the chaingun. Like any good boss, once you learn your counter-maneuvers, it's a cinch.

The Village

MAP09

Some cool vistas and a nice, long trek to the finale. Things get tense, here, as I ran so low on ammo I had to resort to the knife, which is incidentally a pretty powerful alternative. And that's after using infighting to sort out most of the big fight, found at the village proper. No real surprises except for the final boss, a big ol' berserker lizardman (gorilla) with a pretty obvious tell for its death charge and a ton of cover to block its LOS. The only real trick is nailing it with your shotgun blasts with how fast it moves. And, well, there's some hot springs to be found, but...

MAP10	Home Stretch
	Post-action roundup of loose ends with some nice scenery on your way to the exit.

Year 22 - A Rock and a Hard Place (YEAR_22.WAD)

YEAR 22
A ROCK AND A HARD PLACE
by Eric "The Green Herring" Baker

Eric Baker busted out his Year 21 speedmap in 2008 to celebrate his 21st anniversary on This Island Earth. Year 22 was made in 2009 for the same purpose, but due to a comedy of errors wasn't released until the tail end of the year, much like the third and as of this post final entry in the trilogy, Year 23. 22, aka A Rock and a Hard Place, is another single map replacement to be played in Boom-compatible engines. This time, though, it fills the MAP02 slot, with the intent that the levels can be loaded together and played back to back to form a cohesive narrative. Year 22 picks up where 21 left off. You've stepped through the still-active warp gate at a military installation thought abandoned only to find it quite inhabited and the gate fully functional, sending you to some Godforsaken canyon in who knows where. To add insult to injury, the trip seems to have been a one-way ticket.

Temple of the Lizardmen (LMTEMPLE.WAD)

Temple of the Lizard Men, dating from 2009, is a cool pastiche of several things. I get an Unreal vibe (no doubt due to the soundtrack selection) and the setting feels like a mix of sword and sorcery (battling alien-minded lizard people) and Indiana Jones (exploring ancient ruins from a modern mindset). Storywise, it's not much different from a Doom PWAD, except instead of battling demons, you're against the savage lizard men. Apparently a bunch of other marines have tried to investigate a mysterious temple but never reported back, so you're sent into South America to put these malcontents down. All of the resulting action occurs in this seven-map episode for Doom II, to be played in GZDoom.

Year 21 - The Vanishing Point (YEAR_21.WAD)

YEAR 21
THE VANISHING POINT
by Eric "The Green Herring" Baker

Back in 2008, Eric Baker started what he hoped would be a yearly tradition, celebrating his birthday by making a speedmap and then sharing it with the Doom community. Years 22 and 23 did not enjoy the same speedy timetable, with 22 suffering from a series of unfortunate events and 23 turning into an epic, and there have been no followups since. Maybe Baker will see fit to give us a little minisode to update things to a more current timetable. Anyway, this is Year 21, the first level in the series, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in Boom-compatible ports. The story is simple. As a marine, you locate an abandoned warp gate facility in your free time only to find out that it isn't exactly devoid of inhabitants, and must thus get to killin'.

Rage Doom (RAGE20.WAD)

Dan Krempel published Rage Doom in a final but unfinished state back in '94, an OG Doom megaWAD that replaces 19 out of the 27 original levels. Krempel did not replace the levels in any fixed order. Slots E1M5-7, E2M3, 4, E3M3, 4, and 6 are not filled because the author eventually found himself too occupied in other affairs to finish it out. I'm guessing that since he was 14 at the time, the transition from grade school to high school was a major factor, but I'm pretty presumptuous. Rage Doom has no given story, but given that Krempel's levels appear to take their cues from the names of the maps originally in the slots, I'm assuming it's pretty much the same thing as Doom, except instead of starting at a "Hangar" you begin at an "Air Base".

The Castle of Blood (BLOOD.WAD)

THE CASTLE OF BLOOD
by Jim McColm

The Castle of Blood is a single map released for OG Doom back in '95 by one Jim McColm, one of the authors whose output went down with Compuserve and has since been archived on /idgames. It's a pretty cool green marble and blood structure, reminding me of Thy Flesh Consumed in its overall aesthetics, though not in its execution. The brief story is typical of PWADs; the eponymous castle is a hotspot of demonic activity and has served as a death trap for marines battling Hell. This time, you drew the lot (literally the short straw) and have to excise the Hellspawn.

ASDOOM][: The Final Countdown (ASD2.WAD)

Andy Sheppard released his ASDOOM back in '94, an episode 1 replacement for the original Doom. The following year, he published ASDOOM][: The Final Countdown, an eight-map episode for Doom II. The basic idea is the same, a series of levels with little consideration for 100% completion for pistol start. It's not a true sequel, though. When Sheppard put out ASDOOM, he must not have known Doom II's story, because the plot involved the marine returning from Hell only to be immediately thrust into a mission to a UAC base on Jupiter's moon, Io. ASD2 drops that concept entirely, as though it never happened. It's actually a followup to Doom II, starting immediately after your battle with the Icon of Sin. You return to Earth to find that the evacuation fleet is locked in some kind of stasis and needs your help in slaying the demonic remnants holding them back. One Colonel Diaz is your liaison, and she has several tidbits of wisdom to offer between MAP03 / 04 and MAP06 / 07, which you can read in Sheppard's voluminous .TXT.

Mayan Temple (MAYAN667.WAD)

MAYAN TEMPLE
by Paul Turnbull

Paul Turnbull's major claim to fame is the authorship of TNT Evilution's MAP23, "Lunar Mining Project", a level noted for feeling out of place in the scheme of the megaWAD being as it's a pretty concrete man-made level in the ostensibly Hellish third episode. It's also noted for having a few of those odd custom textures that some people find questionable. His other contribution to the Doom community is Mayan Temple, an E1M1 replacement released back in '94, which being a standalone work doesn't fall prey to the first complaint. The second, though, is fair game as Turnbull has included a host of brand new textures to help establish his theme. It's some kind of Mayan temple, of course, or more accurately a block of Mayan architecture with conflicting inclusions of Egyptian iconography.