some i’d recommend:
A.L.T.
Bauhaus/Monster Hunter
Sacrament
Japanese Community Project
No End In Sight
The Alfonzone Voyager (only partially complete Russian doom wad - may be abandoned unfortunately)
Equinox
Lost Civilization
Bloody Steel
The Given
Alpha Accident
Syringe
Epic 2
NOVA: The Birth is pretty good
Hocus Pocus Doom is a fun TC if you like old DOS games
some of those Joy of Mapping sets (4-6 esp) can be a fun grabbag - i have a map in #6
Nicolas Monti has a weird, very particular style of map that’s worth experiencing at least once
also older classic mapsets Memento Mori 2 and Requiem are still quite good to me. if you like smaller/medium-sized levels like the Hell Revealed sets you might enjoy those.
i appreciate these suggestions both being solicited and given, my current fixation is messing with player created doom and quake levels. There’s so much there that it’s a little intimidating, but it’s also really fun to dig into!
I downloaded all of the 2020 cacowards because i havent kept up with the scene and was curious what fancy-ass modern wads look like. Of the ones ive tried so far, ive had the most fun with Rowdy Rudy 2 and stuck with it the longest. It’s meant to be throwbacky and is just a very breezy, straightforward megawad, which im into.
Also tried: Abandon, which looks really cool and metal but is a slaughter map wad, and i don’t really care for those either. I can grasp the appeal but it’s not for me, and this one is really fuckin hard. Im good at Doom but not THAT good. The doomworld review suggests playing on god mode or with no monsters to appreciate the visuals; i did the latter for a bit before deciding to be finished
and Ar Luminae, which also looks very cool and has the novelty of being on a single map so huge that it basically is a search action game. Neat in theory, but my not amazing for gaming laptop chugs while trying to play it! Again, worth trying for the aesthetics but i doubt ill be able to tolerate playing the whole thing
Oh yeah and ive played a ton of the Treasure Tech mod because Doom x Wario Land 4 is such an improbable but good idea, and it’s incredibly fun. really wins me over with specific loving details like the shop/item art and Treasure Guy yelling weird echoey voice clips and laughing when he picks up treasure just like Wario does
I had a great time playing the first few maps of Lost Civilization, but I had even more fun noclipping through the rest of the levels in spectator mode. That wad is gorgeous, and it has enormous variety in its settings. I love the map where you exit a gothic castle and end up on a country path winding through a pitch black night, starkly illuminated by a narrow band of street lights.
i did a video playing through/talking about the very neat, slightly out of left field horror map from Lost Civilization a few months ago on my youtube channel btw:
Explanation of how the player movement code in Quake gives rise to these three different player movement “bugs”, with a quick look at TAS movement mechanics at the end.
Big thanks to the Quake Speedrunning Discord for helping me out with getting TASQuake running on my machine, and for clarifying terminology.
will never forget that you drove backwards and off the track in that F1 SNES game to find a hidden miniature track in the middle of nowhere, which this reminded me of
Briefly coming out of my eternal lurk to plug my friend’s mapping project, which just released today: https://heckscaper.com/tt
TIME TRIPPER is a freewheeling first-person action-adventure-STG that runs on the GZDoom engine. what started as a “let’s learn BOOM mapping” lark quickly spun out of control and became a reason to learn ACS scripting, DECORATE, and how to compile it all into a single project.
with no real goal or guiding principle beyond evoking what DOOM means to me, TIME TRIPPER is an exercise in embracing creative chaos as a vision, pulling from works that inspire in an effort to learn and find my voice in DOOM mapping.
thank you for joining me on this journey, if even for a fleeting moment.
I’ve been testing it over the last few months. It’s an incredible first effort that deserves every bit of attention it gets.
i tried to play Time Tripper but i don’t think my old laptop can handle it! new mods/wads are too powerful. It looks fresh to death though
im still working my way through the 2020 cacowards. Rowdy Rudy 2 and Antaresian Reliquary are both very good and very hard. actually, they even take similar choices with how they mod the weapons (pistol is a machine gun, chaingun/shotguns are faster). RR2 is silly fun (there are midis sampled from led zeppelin songs and other video games) and edits enemies in a way that makes it feel like an ersatz Duke Nukem kind of thing. AR is a bunch of maps the author originally made for other projects and theyre all very pretty and tough pistol starts. both of em get a little slaughter mappy without going all the way, theres still attention paid to the good DOOM key/switch hunting and navigating (except the last map of AR which is hit the switch and fight a million dudes rinse repeat no thanks)
i shouldve taken more than 1 screen of AR, every map is really nice looking. (from map 03)
i also used the quake injector to download a bunch of tiny crappy rando maps from 1997 and poke around people’s cute attempts at quake castles/manors! The quake injector is a miracle, i wish there was one like it for every moddable game.
BTSX: Episode 2: Finally finished this one. As I mentioned earlier, this is FAR better than the terrible first episode in basically every way.
For one thing, the aesthetic is much more my thing, with lots of gothic castles and hellish environments. Levels actually look and feel different, are interesting to explore with clever secrets, feature very solid combat encounters with some devious tricks and traps. There are some levels built around fun gimmicks, such as one where you keep changing the water level to access different areas, and another that’s full of dead bodies with the only enemies being archviles.
THAT SAID, it still has some of the problems from the first episode. Namely that there are levels which are FAR too large (will take you well over an hour to complete on your first go) and are too easy to get lost and confused in, and they lack flow so when you hit a switch you have to try to remember where there were places you couldn’t get to before, so lots of backtracking. It’s not as bad as it was in the first episode, but still bad enough to make some levels become very tedious. The most memorable levels are definitely the more focused, shorter ones.
Oh, a lot of levels also look fantastic, and I enjoyed the intermission levels which have no enemies, and just let you wander around a pretty environment before hopping into the next hellscape. I wish I took screenshots, but I didn’t think of doing it until towards the end.
It ends on a cliffhanger of sorts, and I look forward to the next episode should it ever be completed. Hopefully they do away with the over-sized levels all together.
It looks incredible, I tried it last night and it was too hard for me (playing on normal). I’m too dumb to internalise which fence textures block shots, I got lost a lot, I’m bad at managing space in restricted slaughter rooms with monster closets, and (the big one) I didn’t realise it remapped Use to ‘E’ & didn’t find switches/doors.
It’s definitely balanced a bit tougher than most mods! Definitely don’t be ashamed to kick it down to Light or Beginner - a big part of the appeal is having the time to appreciate the detailed mapping, imo.
@meauxdal I’ve been listening to it for months and I’ve yet to tire of any single track. :3
I tried playing Rekker but just couldn’t get into it. I WANT to like it, and it looks and sounds like a commercial game from the 90s, but it feels more like a Build game than a Doom engine game, and I’m not too big on the former.
The weapons are just too slow, the enemies are spongy, and it feels like it doesn’t give you enough ammo. Also not a fan of a lot of mechanics it has. It just doesn’t feel satisfying to play and became too tedious after the first five or so levels. Maybe I’ll try it another time, but as for now I’m hopping back into traditional WAD territory.
i thought Rekkr was not too bad… but i also like the weird off-kilter feeling of some of those Build games. i’d still prefer to play a particularly high quality Doom mapset over that, but i thought it did a good job going for what it was going for… esp compared to many other Doom TCs i’ve seen before.
rekkr gets better as it goes, but I never thought it felt like a build engine game, either
Agree that the enemies are spongy in the beginning
Enemy souls as primary source of ammo is a really good mechanic, though, especially since those souls disappear in a few seconds, necessitating that you push forward even when its dangerous if you want to avoid being low on ammo.
The thing I found with Rekkr is it’s your arsenal that’s lacking at first, it takes a little more time in giving you better guns and unlike traditional Doom and its mods the chaingun replacement is your bread and butter, not the shotgun replacement but you get the latter before the former. If anything I think maybe the other weapons were a little too situational, I rarely had much cause to use anything else but the #4.
