Bloodworks (BLUDWRKS.WAD)

BLOODWORKS

by Bob "brad_tilf" Larkin

Bob Larkin is the webmaster of the Doom Wad Station, one of the oldest hubs of Doom diaspora still knocking around the internet. He also has his own bibliography of PWADs! Back before I wrote any reviews I think that I had randomly picked his Endgame project to try out. I was... deeply confused. If you ask him what his best WAD is, though, he'll almost certainly say Bloodworks, and probably give a shoutout to Mitnal. BLUDWRKS is a MAP03 replacement for Doom II. I think that the source port recommendation basically boils down to "limit-removing". The GL ports of the day didn't know what to do with the software renderer tricks, I guess, but times have changed and this looks pretty much as it was originally intended in GZDoom as well as ZDoom.

Tangerine Nightmare (TN.WAD)

The French Doom Community celebrated in 2024 with a huge win, finally pushing out a release candidate of their Necromantic Thirst megaWAD after years of development. They didn't get there by just chipping away at their mega-project, though. franckFRAG and WH-Wilou84 fostered a creative community through their 3 Heures d'Agonie speedmapping project, which got sequels in 3HA2 and 3HA3. This seemed to activate authors like Datacore, who has since become one of the most productive authors of their subset of the Doom diaspora. Tangerine Nightmare started as a Datacore-led project with an emphasis on an orange color scheme. At some point, and I can't exactly tell by reading the development thread, franckFRAG sort of organically became the lead. What started as a vanilla adventure became a (mostly) limit-removing episode for Doom II, finalized in early 2018, replacing MAP01-MAP10.

Death Cycle (#DCYCLE.WAD)

DEATH CYCLE

by "Sphagne"

One of my main goals has been to play through the collective works of the contributors to the first Community Chest as a sort of vertical slice of a subset of the Doom community at the time. I'd also like to do the same thing for Community Chest 2. The original CCHEST is somewhat maligned as the original goal was sort of something like, "hey, who wants to see their levels in a megaWAD?" with authors Gene Bird and Sphagne submitting levels that they had previously published on /idgames. Three of Sphagne's published fourteen maps ended up in the first Community Chest. Death Cycle, a MAP01 replacement for Doom II that was uploaded to /idgames in 2002, was not one of them. From what I can tell, it ought to be vanilla compatible, as the author had previously developed these maps between 1995 and 1999 before realizing that there was a broader Doom Community on the internet. This sort of precludes the existence of Boom as a target port.

Chaotic Grounds (CHAOSGRD.WAD)

CHAOTIC GROUNDS

by Mike "Use3D" Alfredson

Use is probably best known by word of mouth from his fantastic Nilla Doom episode, not to mention his fantastic contributions to community projects like the Community Chest series. To my total confusion, Alfredson has had two different megaWADs in the works. One of these is his rough and tough vanilla megaWAD, of which Nilla Doom was an excerpt, while the other is for limit-removing ports and a little easier ("classically-styled") and goes by Doom Beyond. The cut maps that he has released to the archives are all from Doom Beyond as they were all crafted before 2004, when Nilla Doom started production. This includes both Deep Core 1 but probably not Hell Pit as it predates Doom Beyond's genesis in 1997. 

007: License to Spell DooM (007LTSD.WAD)

Stephen Clark was something of a self-appointed vanilla advocate, a dude believed that OG Doom and Doom II were capable of great things that could close some of the gap between them and Quake and subsequent FPS games. He made Operation: Lightning, a Doom II episode that deliberately evoked Quake II with its dropships and had carefully arranged vanilla sector machinery to create effects like exploding reactors, flooding vessels, and collapsing bases. Then he took his lessons learned and authored Fragport, a 2001 "21st Century Doom 2 Episode" that was actually a megaWAD and which toned down some of OP-LITE2's worst excesses. Then he pushed Heretic into uncomfortably ingenious places with the Shadowcaster episode in 2002. This is also the year where he learned to stop worrying and love the ZDoom. Enter 007: License to Spell DooM, an E4 replacement for The Ultimate Doom.

Ultimate Doom Project Leftovers (UDPL.WAD)

Memfis established a reputation as a crafter of levels that would be fine openers for megaWADs because, well, he perennially started larger projects and stalled after the first level or so. Hence Ultimate Doom Project Leftovers, an archival release from 2012 that was published to /idgames in 2013. There is something morbidly amusing in UDPL as a demonstration of why he was pigeonholed into the "XXM1" / "MAP01" characterization, given that it replaces the first level of each of Ultimate Doom's four episodes. If you are looking for a more "substantial" experience, then UDPL will probably not make a convert of you. Its levels are short and not even classically difficult, insofar as how they differ from the standards set by id's own E1M1, E2M1, E3M1, and E4M1. They are assumed to be vanilla-compatible but may require a limit-removing source port.