An Infernal Place v1.1 (INFERNAL.WAD)

AN INFERNAL PLACE v1.1

by Pablo Dictter

An Infernal Place v1.1 is a Doom II conversion of an E1M1 replacement that Dictter had made a few months prior in 2001. The original iteration was published on I assume his hosted website as well as Doom WAD Station, where you can find a few of his maps that never found their way to the archives. It was apparently meant for a larger-scale project called Good V/S Evil that never really took off in his esteem. In any event, v1.1 changed the format to Doom II and made some changes to sectors and thing placement that make for a somewhat different play. Worthy enough of being considered for a separate review? By my reckoning, yes. After all, I did decide to cover RRW_D201. This revision of INFERNAL is a MAP01 replacement that purportedly plays back in any port. The original might, too, for all it matters.

An Infernal Place (INFERNAL.WAD)

AN INFERNAL PLACE

by Pablo Dictter

Pablo was a boundless fountain of youthful energy around 2000. He made a ton of very small levels, the earliest of which are ferreted away in his personal archive. Some were never uploaded to /idgames, instead appearing on Doom WAD Station. An Infernal Place is a slightly weirder situation; it was originally released as an E1M1 replacement on DWS, where it is still available as such. The version on /idgames is v1.1, a Doom II conversion with a few alterations. Nowadays we typically think of maps as either stolidly for one game type or the other but it's not all that unusual when you consider how many 1994 authors converted some of their PWADs to Doom II. This review is for the original publication of An Infernal Place, timestamped 03/04/01. It is purportedly meant for play in a Boom-compatible port.

Blind Alley R., "Monster Mansion" (BNDALYR.WAD)

BLIND ALLEY R.

MONSTER MANSION

by Gene Bird

It's been something of a comfort playing the levels of the Blind Alley series. To phrase something 40oz once said (concerning ...And the Bloodshed Began), sometimes you forget what sort of a demon murder machine Doomguy is. The current trend of encounter design involves escalating difficulty by exerting pressure on the player in new and exciting ways. Gene Bird is from an older school of thought, though. Monster Mansion has the alpha-numeric designator "R" which, if "E" is to be believed, pegs it as MAP27 of an episode that continued to grow in spite of the author's humble intentions. Many of its levels were individually polished and released over 2002-2003 as well as featuring as significant minorities of Community Chest I & II (and a few yet remain...). This one straddled both years, being finished / uploaded in 2002 and officially interred in 2003. Like the previous instances, it's a MAP01 replacement.

Beta 64 (BETA64.WAD)

For many years, authors were mostly content with attempting to bring the magic of Doom 64 to the PC. Sure, some folks made episode-like mods for The Absolution TC (like The Outcast Levels, Redemption Denied, and The Reckoning), but there just wasn't the same level of love as with Doom I & II. Maybe it's a "mod of a mod" thing. The disparity persists after the release of Doom64 EX, but someone - Doomworld Forum superstar Antnee - stuck it out for the long haul and fabricated the first ever user-created megaWAD for Doom 64. Beta 64 is a thirty-one level mapset for Doom64 EX, soft-released in late 2018. It isn't officially "done" or uploaded but if the author comes back to fashion MAP29 then I'll update this review.

Doom 64: The Lost Levels (DOOM64.WAD)

Samuel Villarreal has had one of Doom's longest and storied love affairs. The object of his affection? Doom 64. Kaiser started out converting its levels or otherwise using them as inspiration for part of his 2000 megaWAD debut, DSV. (Not to forget about the more polished reconstructions in his Console Doom.) He spearheaded the Herculean effort to recreate the entire experience in Doomsday for 2003's Absolution TC. 2011 saw the official release of the next phase of his passion project, the reverse-engineered Doom64 EX source port. It's been clear that some of the developers of Doom 2016 have a lot of love for the largely forgotten '97 release so it's cool to see all this hard work pay off in an official re-release for both consoles and PC using Kaiser's KEX engine, used for some other Night Dive re-publications, as the base. There's slightly more to this story, though - The Lost Levels.

Europa 2 (EAEURO02.WAD)

EUROPA 2

by Erik Alm

2001 appeared to have been a pretty formative year for Erik. Alm made five submissions for Sam Woodman's One Week Mapping Contest, demonstrating an esoteric taste that spanned "short and sweet" to large-scale challenges informed by Hell Revealed. It also marked the debut of his Europa series. The first entry was a massive labyrinth that mixed his stiff encounter design with a tangled layout and key sidequest that evoked shades of 1995. This entry - the second - closes out 2001 on a high note that sees a drastic change of style away from some of his less user-friendly design decisions. EAEURO02 is a MAP01 replacement for Doom II to be played in a Boom-compatible port. As is the case with EAGOTH1 and EAGOTH2, you need to play this with the Gothic DeathMatch II texture pack.

The Future of ONEMANDOOM

It's been more than another month since my last post so I ought to make a salient update that I've been putting off. Everything is going fine but at this point in my life, writing about the works of the Doom community isn't satisfying to me as a creative outlet. I'm not making WADs because chance and circumstance brought me back to my love of crafting stories and the sorts of thing that I would like to do cannot be accomplished within the admittedly flexible confines of the Doom engine.

I will still be maintaining this blog as a repository of reviews - pruning spam comments and the like - and may update it when I feel like I've grown the way that I want to. Until then, though, I'm done playing. Thanks to everyone who was and still is interested in reading these longform reviews; it's been a dazzling journey so far and I feel bad leaving so many cool sights still unseen. I'm just ready for a long, healthy detour.

still not ded

Just checking in to say that I've thus far weathered a jam-packed work schedule in addition to the epidemic.