Hell Revealed II (HR2FINAL.WAD)

Hell Revealed remains an inexplicable enigma; for awhile, when someone would pop in and ask what they should play after having finished and loved Doom II, a sizable number of people would throw it out there. If I didn't know any better, I'd think they were trolling, attempting to turn people off Doom forever with HR's sheer difficulty curve. The truth, though, is that a lot of people love it, and when the iron was hot, some of its fans got together to make a sequel. Hell Revealed II took a lot longer to make than its forbear, though; about five times as long, in fact. Released at the very end of 2003, its influence is undeniable. I've seen numerous explicit citations when parsing the more elaborate commentary provided by PWAD authors. There are moments of sheer BFG frenzy sure to satiate fans of demon-reaping gameplay. Then, of course, there's the other stuff.

Esselfortium's Birthday Cave (ESSEL11.WAD)

ESSELFORTIUM'S BIRTHDAY CAVE
by Brendt "Megalyth" Pantley

Sometimes, Doomworld members make birthday levels for each other. Sometimes, they get uploaded to the /idgames archives. DTWID alumnus Brent Pantley, aka Megalyth, crafted this level for Esselfortium back in 2011, officially publishing it almost two years later. Titled Esselfortium's Birthday Cave, it is indeed a cavern of sorts, and a MAP01 replacement that should play back in any engine. Birthday levels aren't known for pushing the envelope, and this one isn't any different. It's definitely competent, though, and shows Megalyth as a talented author who must be sitting on like a ton of supercool maps by now.

Titan (TITAN.WAD)

You don't see a whole lot of "normal maps but with ZDoom features" nowadays. It looks like most of the people are making mods instead of maps. If you're looking for Doom+ gameplay, though, this one's for you. Titan is a nine-map episode for Doom II, released in 2004 by one Jesper Krag Rasmussen, aka Ixnatifual. This one WAS made for ZDoom, but a now ancient release, and ZDoom's continued development created a game-breaking bug at the end of MAP02 stemming from a malfunction in the execution of a handful of Rasmusen's major teleport traps. This led to an update back in 2014, which I nonetheless missed out on due to my insistence on using a copy I had downloaded back in 2010. Sorry about that!

Nuts (NUTS.WAD)

NUTS
by "B.P.R.D."

Nuts was selected as one of Doomworld's Top 10 Infamous WADs, and it's not hard to see why. B.P.R.D. went on to have a long, distinguished career as a Doom author; his followup to this bit of totty was Equinox, of all things. It's hard to imagine someone not knowing or understanding what Nuts is, but I'll humor you. Released late in 2001, this is a single map replacement for Doom II. You won't be able to run this in vanilla; I recommend the PrBoom-Plus family for sheer efficiency, but I didn't have much trouble working it in ZDoom. Nuts does have a story, with you sent to eliminate the final Hellspawn army on Litrivin IV, armed with nothing but a pistol because of a past social transgression. Good thing there is a fuck ton of cell ammo and guns at the drop off point, I guess.

Master Levels and Speculation

John Romero released a boatload of dev shit for Doom and Doom II, furthering the already intimate understandings of Doom's development history into previously uncharted depths. A lot of this stuff is tangentially interesting to me, but I'm not someone to go gaga over the pornographic details of how Doom was made unless it turns up something Not Yet Seen, like those art assets. One of the things uncovered during this asset dump is a file that contains at the very least this list of .WAD and .TXT names, which shows an inarguable connection to the Master Levels For Doom II.

Quake: Descent into Heresy (QUAKE-DIH_1.PK3)

QUAKE
DESCENT INTO HERESY
by "osjclatchford"

Do you love Quake? Do you like Heretic? Then do I have a mod for you! Descent Into Heresy is an unusual combo for the ZDoom engine that will no doubt have some players rattling their chains due to the mixture of fantasy and... Quake. The flipside is that people inured to the mixture of Gothic horror / fantasy and gunpowder are probably more ready to accept a mod that throws shotguns in Heretic than the Hexen crowd was at the genesis of The Ranger. This rev of the mod was stamped mid 2015, and in some aspects, it brings the gunplay of Quake to the world of Parthoris.

not so stealth update

Nebula 95 now has its own series page, which is something I've been meaning to do since, like, March, but it got bogged down in a really long essay on the pathetic "elitism" vs. "rugged individualism" slapfight that I see going on in the community, which i have since cut out. It was a "stealth update" because, uh, that's how I've handled all the Serial Killing features so far. Heck, i don't even know how many people know that the feature even exists!

Serial Killing is one of the features on the blog, which really means that I should be featuring them whenever they're written instead of sneakily inserting them at the day after the last review for the series was posted, but there are many things about this site that I am uncoordinated with. I guess this is my attempt to do these articles justice since they constitute some of the least-trafficked areas of the blog. Serial Killing is a very not politically correct title, and it still feels a little gross having it there, because I find nothing glamorous about its namesake. I am strongly considering changing the name of the feature to "Super Serials" as I am writing this.

anyway, regardless of the name of the feature, it had its genesis in the Master Levels For Doom II article. one of the things I did was do exhaustive playthroughs of all the surrounding material, which included several different series - Titan, Inferno, and Cabal. at some point I foolishly thought that it would be pretty cool to build posts similar to my multi-map reviews for the "collected" series. in fact, I didn't have the infobox style in place at the time. after "borrowing" it from andy olivera's Visions of Doom page, i tweaked the format and tested it out in the series pages and then, on recommendation, reformatted the rest of the site reviews using it.

another thing I started doing like a few years ago but never really knuckled down to finish was something similar to the series feature but geared more toward authors, like a career retrospective. i still have the Christen David Klie article bouncing around in my drafts. I've also had a bunch of other feature ideas kicking around, but the only one that's made it was the hastily slapped-together Maximum Doom article.

in any case, if you didn't know about the series features before, I hope you'll give them a read! they were fun to write, and i hope they're at least fun to read, if not informative.

KZDOOM6: Hidden Valley of the Aliens (KZDOOM6.WAD)

KZDOOM6
HIDDEN VALLEY OF
THE ALIENS
by Kurt Kesler

Boom appealed to Doom PWAD authors with several advanced features, like BEX, custom color maps, silent teleporters, and "limit removal". Kesler was one of many mappers that experimented with TNT's engine when it became available, producing his KBOOM series of maps in 1998. It was only natural that when the ZDoom engine came along with several more advancements, chief among them ACS scripting a la Hexen, Kesler would try it out, too. KZDOOM6 is the penultimate entry in the self-explanatory KZDOOM series, a MAP01 replacement released in 2000. While the valley setting is pretty much a commonality of his later works, the brick and mortar structures built into the landscape are not.