On the “visceral adrenaline” front, I’ve finished Final Doom’s campaign The Plutonia Experiment (plus one more romp through it for good measure so I could find the secret levels), and have now taken the plunge to start attempting its maps as standalone challenges without the benefit of a full inventory.

Well, time to slay another childhood boogeyman. Of the two expansion campaigns contained in Final Doom, The Plutonia Experiment was the more infamous one. But so far it’s totally playing fair. I was worried going into it, but the deathtrap dungeons of the first half-dozen maps have just been good clean fun.

The Goose Hype is real. I saw these posted on a Discord server I frequent, and they made me laugh out loud.

Doom 2 In Name Only is a 2014 community project where mappers challenged themselves to retain the level titles of Doom 2, but make entirely new levels around those titles.

I finished* Doom 2 In Name Only this week. There’s an asterisk on the word “finished” because I wasn’t able to be as thorough as I usually like to be. There certainly were levels I enjoyed enough to want to practice & nail a saveless run, but many of them were so very long that I had no interest in the prospect of…

I do wonder how this game would be remembered if the studio had decided to make a new setting for their spooky flashlight game rather than attaching an existing intellectual property to it. Even at the time, the “slower, smarter, more measured, more serious” style of the game was a hard sell for fans of the classics,…

In 2004, the narrative was: “What everyone remembers about Doom was the massive leap forward in graphical and audio fidelity. Variable light levels could prey on a primal fear of the dark. Stereo sound could enable the distant growl of a thing that is hunting you through this maze. More than anything, this game felt…

The two words can indeed be used to mean the exact same thing, but I believe the writer was using enervating to mean “I feel emotionally drained because the artist succeeded at what they were trying to do,” and using numbing to mean, “I feel nothing because the artist failed at what they were trying to do.”

Well, this is a little redundant, but I’ll reiterate my relief when it comes to the roadblock of Map29 in that WAD I was playing in my post. It was as daunting as a final stage should be (the puzzle boss of Map30 doesn’t count), and its marathon length made it stand out compared to the levels which had preceded it.

Doom 2 the Way id Did is a 2013 collaboration where many mappers came together to contribute to a 32-map replacement for all of Doom 2's levels.

Since I got back into Doom 2, I’ve been giving a couple fanmade WADs a try.

I can relate to this article. Last year, an old friend and I started a Terraria game as a way to stay in touch (with my brother joining us for dungeon raids or boss attempts whenever he had time). Bit by bit, session by session, we explored and mapped out the world. We went on mining expeditions. We built new outposts…

I too am a little baffled how, while fans talk about this mode all the time, there isn’t a single official mention of it in any of the in-game menus or readme files. I get the impression that the game’s makers knew about it and enjoyed it: as far as I know, that was the way every individual designer tested the maps…

I’ve been completing something I never did the first time around: tackling levels from Pistol Start and collecting observations on how that changes the game, along with general musings on level design. These are Postcards From Doom 2.

Thanks for the comprehensive review + musings on game design. The question of how to convey information to the player is a fascinating one, whether it’s the assumption that the community of players will collaborate and eventually dig up the deeply-buried secrets, like in Dark Souls or your Dragon Warrior II example,…

My motivation for posting (in addition to the usual “I finally finished it this week” updates you see around here) was how delighted I was at the novelty of discovering how many built-in sequence breaks there were. But, despite my attempt to give Map09 the benefit of the doubt, sometimes Doom 1&2 are just janky and…

When I was getting hyped for Sigil, I was inspired to shake off the rust by doing something in Doom 2 that I had never done the first time around: completing all 30 levels from Pistol Start. Having to find the weapons within the level instead of bringing them in from the previous map is something that can transform a…

I was already at peak absurdity when Microsoft’s latest console created the possibility for “Who’s On First” conversations:

Gnomes are talented at Illusion magic. Spell slots are precious, and it may not be worth the sacrifice, but if you can get experienced enough to cast Major Image, you can recreate the visions your character experienced, and use that performance to demonstrate to others the divine intervention you encountered.

Ah, the halcyon days of Flash Animation, where sites like rathergood, weebls-stuff, and newgrounds had endless surreal treasures (and trash. Lots of trash too).