H2H-XMAS.WAD for Doom: Santa the Doom Slayer.

Every time December rolls around, I always feel a compulsion to write about a Christmas-themed video game. There’s some pretty okay ones, but there’s one that’s always been on my mind and have thought about writing about it, but just felt there wasn’t enough material there to justify it.

This fight is annoying, primarily because he keeps saying “HO HO HO It’s not nice to shoot Santa!” repeatedly.

That game was Duke: Nuclear Winter, an official expansion for Duke Nukem 3D by Simply Silly Software, and while it has a decent Christmas theme to it, really feels slapdash and hastily put together. Hell, the first two levels are literally just Red Light District and Hollywood Holocaust from Duke 3D but with snow all over them. Compared to the other official expansions – Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach and Duke it Out in D.C., respectively – it feels like the black sheep of all the Duke expansions. Hell, Alien Armageddon, a mod I covered on this site previously, has pretty much ignored its existence yet given the other Duke expansions a complete overhaul.

The best computer art 1994 had to offer.

But Simply Silly Software didn’t spawn out of nowhere. Its founder and head honcho, Joe Wilcox, was making middleware for games like Doom, where stuff like DOOM/Master were his big claim to fame. Of course, he dabbled in Doom mapping as well, making one map for a small Christmas-themed mapset called “Xmas Doom,” which eventually got a bigger, badder sequel in December 1995. H2H-XMAS.WAD is that followup.

This was made by several members of the Head 2 Head Gaming Network, a community of Doom fans where one could dial up to a network and play Doom multiplayer with others online, similar to services like DWANGO. And like DWANGO, H2H-Xmas was made as something to promote their gaming service. To commemorate Doom‘s tenth anniversary, H2H-Xmas was put on the “Top 100 WADs of All Time” on Doomworld, basically a precursor to the modern-day Cacowards.

Wilcox was one of several folks who spearheaded this project, as well as contributing one map, which is… quite mediocre. H2H-Xmas definitely has the vibe of what would show up in Duke Nuclear Winter a few years later. Though Duke is a vastly different beast from Doom in terms of design and gameplay.

I like how the HUD is both Christmas and Halloween themed at the same time.

The plot is simply silly: After returning from vacation, Santa Claus finds Doomguy bruised, battered and bloody, with Martha Claus being kidnapped by the demons. Unable to finish his mission, Doomguy gives Santa Claus his trusty pistol and tells him to rip and tear those demons like unopened presents.

If you’ve played Doom, you know what to expect. A pistol, 50 bullets, kill demons, find keys, exit, repeat. Except now there’s a lot of snow and Christmas music to get you into the holiday spirit. Weirdly, the monsters look the same as they do in Doom II, which is odd to me, considering Xmas Doom changed the sprites of the monsters to have santa hats, Cacodemons look like christmas tree bulbs, and Imps throwing snowballs instead of fireballs.

I thought I might’ve botched something in the install – this was made in the days when you had to run batch EXE files to create the WAD to play it in Doom II, a more complex process compared to the drag-and-drop usability of today – but other videos and images I’ve seen of this WAD seem to match my experience with it, so maybe that was just how it was back then.

Monster infighting is your friend, and this is no exception.

Since it’s a community project, the challenge can be a bit off kilter. Several levels have no secrets and are fairly straightforward, some not even requiring keys to progress, whereas some levels require a lot of backtracking to a plain exit where you open 3 key doors and fight an Archvile or Chaingunner guarding the exit switch. Some levels for some reason have the Wolfenstein SS Trooper spread around randomly, which looks kinda awkward among the rest of Doom II‘s bestiary.

MAP05: More Sewers – yes, there are two sewer levels – has a lot of Revenants that are tough to dodge without cheesing it. In several cases I’d just spam rockets in one place and clear the area so I didn’t have to deal with them later. This isn’t bad per se, but playing Doom with that stop and pop kind of gameplay isn’t really fun, I prefer when I’m moving around while fighting foes and dodging projectiles. I chalk this up to being another one of those things people were still figuring out back then.

The Casali brothers would be proud.

Speaking of people trying to figure things out, Hell Knights and Chaingunners are used rather sparingly in this megawad compared to later WADs. However, the sheer amount of Revenants I saw on several maps could rival most modern slaughter maps. Plasma was oddly scarce, so I couldn’t BFG my way through everything, but shells, bullets and rockets were plentiful, and on several levels I had topped off my rocket launcher with the rocket boxes strewn about that it took until the very end of the level set to actually run out of rockets.

This almost feels like a deathmatch arena repurposed with monsters.

A good chunk of the levels, especially in the middle third of the whole megawad, are surprisingly very symmetrical, which kept reminding me of stuff like Dead Simple from Doom II. It’s not bad at all, just an interesting choice. Since the team who made this were part of a multiplayer gaming network, I figure this was deliberate, just so folks can have specific arenas to pick during those frantic deathmatch and co-op sessions. Suddenly, this has me thinking if there’s a Doom mapping project to make nothing but clones of Dead Simple. If they can make a megawad like 50 Shades of Graytall, then someone had to have thought about a megawad of nothing but Dead Simple knockoffs.

Since Doom is 31 years old as of this writing, the community has basically figured out every nook, cranny and trick to Doom and its gameplay. This is something I pointed out when I wrote about Legacy of Rust earlier this year. But H2H-Xmas was made two years after Doom and a year after Doom II. Since it’s still fresh in people’s minds, there’s that sense of the community finding what works and what doesn’t. It’s not like the early days of the infamous “1994 levels,” but it’s not polished to a perfect shine like it is now.

This level taking place on an ice skating rink is neat, only because I like when people try to make Doom levels that look like real life places.

I like that, it feels very B-tier, something that’s not outstanding now but was pretty cool at the time. Even with all the Christmas cheer, H2H-Xmas is still Doom at its absolute core. And that’s perfectly fine, honestly. It’s definitely something you can get through in an afternoon if you got the attention span for it.

If you wanna play it for yourself, you can grab it on the idgames archive. I used prboom+ 2.6.6.6um to play, but I imagine this would work in the recent DOOM + DOOM II remaster put out earlier this year if you have it on PC. Hell, considering there’s now a mod system on that version that anyone can upload to, you can probably just find H2H-Xmas uploaded by some random guy who gives “credit to the original authors.”

I may not be completely in the know about Doom and its custom WAD community, but going through this was a nice blast from the past. This kinda has me wanting to play the rest of Doomworld’s Top 100 WADs of All Time as well as the Cacowards, so I can find more cool out there Doom stuff. Doom may be a fairly old game at this point, but damn if it isn’t still fun to play today.

This was available for patrons a few days earlier. If you wanna be one of the cool kids, perhaps maybe consider contributing to my Patreon? Just $1 will give you early access. And if you can’t, just sharing my work helps a lot too.

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