You Found a Secret Area!

Tag: Doom

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.
(more…)

December 24, 2024
A little thing about Legacy of Rust, the new Doom level set.

They really didn’t need to do this.

In 2019, Doom got a remastered port handled by Nerve Software, and while it wasn’t perfect, it was serviceable enough. It got a few updates that fixed a few of the major problems – including requiring Bethesda.net to login – but it was fine. A perfectly playable version of the 1993 classic.

DOOM + DOOM II is a bit of an unwieldy title, tbh

Five years later, at Quakecon 2024, they remastered Doom again. This time handled by Nightdive Studios, the wizards who remastered a whole bunch of games, from Turok to Quake II. This time they added support for Boom, a Doom source port framework that added a whole bunch of new features and expanding older ones. But they weren’t done with that. Of which has become tradition with all id Software remasters by Nightdive at this point, they added a new episode called Legacy of Rust.

Mild spoilers for Legacy of Rust within.

(more…)

August 12, 2024
Doom Eternal: Time to Rip and Tear once again.

Something I’ve constantly talked about on this blog is how eternally behind I am in games. Procuring a massive backlog, buying games thanks to Humble Bundles, cheap Steam sales, and gifts of spare keys from friends has been the primary causes of my never ending back catalog.

Yet, I try to keep myself in arms’ reach of the current video game landscape, even if I’m not a fan of the direction the industry is going sometimes. This results in me playing the newest games usually years after their release. Anyone who’s been a reader of this site has seen me write about big popular games after their popularity, such as BioShock Infinite last year. But this time around I kept myself a bit closer to the zeitgeist this time, by playing a game a year or so after its initial release. And it’s from one of my favorite game developers.

Still fun as heck to this day.

Let’s talk a bit about id software. They’re the absolute pioneers of the first-person shooter realm: Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake. Important games that really made an impact on the industry as a whole. However, there was a sea change by the late 1990s. When John Romero left id on less-than-pleasant terms to form his own studio, there was a very clear change on how id Software worked as a company: Pushing technology at the cost of making games that while good on a technical level, were kinda boring to play.

Any excuse to use this screenshot again.

I’ve talked about Quake II a few times on here, and while my opinion has softened a bit in recent years, I still think that while a technical marvel was just boring to play.This was id’s MO during the age of John Carmack. Stuff like Quake III Arena, and Doom 3, while solid games, didn’t have the massive highs that their early works did. Indeed, their competition – Epic’s Unreal Tournament and Valve’s Half-Life 2 respectively – were making more of an impact on the industry in a way people could easily see.

Rage was sort of the lowest point of this era, the unremarkable first-person exploration game of which the only good things about it were John Goodman voicing a character and its reload canceling mechanics, of which I wrote about way back in 2016, and that was around the point id was no longer the amazing developer it once was. Hell, I even had doubts id Software were ever gonna release an awesome game ever again.

Then John Carmack left, a bunch of people got shuffled around, canned a version of Doom that was more like a big-budget shooter like Call of Duty, and gave us the 2016 Doom reboot. While the multiplayer beta was enjoyable but boring, the rest of the game turned out to be the return of id Software as an awesome company that could make good games. With an amazing game like Doom 2016, it’d be pretty hard to follow up. But in 2020 they decided to give it another try, with Doom Eternal.

Not to be confused with Eternal Doom, a pretty alright megawad for Doom II released in 1996.

The story of Eternal is a bit more pronounced than in the previous game: The Doom Slayer has noticed that there’s been Hell on Earth with demons destroying what’s left of the planet. In typical Doom fashion, the Doom Slayer must travel around Earth and Mars to eventually stop the Khan Maykr’s hell demons from invading everywhere once again. Pretty simple stuff.

It doesn’t help that you can customize the look of the Doom Slayer, thus making them look like an absolute goofass in serious, emotional cutscenes.

It’s kinda weird to see Doom Eternal go all in on story. While Doom (2016) had a story, it was just about enough of it to give motives on why the Doom Slayer must rip and tear and it worked. In Doom Eternal, they go all-in, with cutscenes that take place in third person, giving diatribes that would seem in line with many contemporary games. It’s not bad per se, but compared to the previous game where there was basically one motive — Stop the demons by any means necessary — it just feels a bit ridiculous here.
(more…)

February 22, 2022
Operation Body Count: A little-known FPS reborn.

In the many years I’ve been writing about games, I try my best to broaden my horizons and check out stuff that’s not as well known, or written about. In some cases I just end up writing about obscure first-person shooters from the ‘90s most people don’t know about. Such as Operation: Body Count.

Gotta say this is a rather dull title screen.

For those unaware, Operation: Body Count was a first-person shooter released in 1994 by Capstone Software. In it, you play as a nameless commando who has to stop the evil Victor Baloch and rescue world leaders. It had a fair share of interesting features like AI buddies you could control to help you complete floors, semi destructible environments, a map of the area to avoid getting lost, and a semi-realistic environment in the days when things looked pretty abstract.

I knew I had to get my hands dirty, but I didn’t think they literally meant it…

The game gives a really bad first impression where Our Hero has to fight the dreaded sewer rats under Baloch’s brainwashing for the first several levels. It also doesn’t help the game looks like… well, this.

This guy couldn’t stop walking into me until I backed up so we could even hit each other.

It looks like a bad Wolfenstein 3D clone, doesn’t it? Well, it uses id’s Wolfenstein 3D engine as a base, which looked pretty cool in 1992-93. Many games ended up using the engine for their games, including Apogee’s Blake Stone: Aliens of Gold and Rise of the Triad.

But then Doom happened. Basically any FPS that still had the 90 degree maze-like look of Wolfenstein looked extremely dated, especially by 1994 standards. Even Capstone’s other big FPS of the time, Corridor 7: Alien Invasion, didn’t fare so well either for the same reasons as Operation: Body Count. I wouldn’t be surprised if many FPS developers were swearing their heads off when the shareware episode of Doom hit in 1993, with its open areas, tall floors, and level geometry that went beyond 90 degrees.

Ah, to think of what could’ve been…

Despite the game’s relative obscurity, a Doom modder by the name of Impie decided to take the fairly maligned DOS game and give it a Doom-style makeover. The result is nothing but amazing. Also called Operation: Body Count, the game is similar to the 1994 Capstone original, but with significant changes that make the gameplay more fun and exciting.

I can’t see this without hearing him go “YOU LOSE!” at every opportunity.

Our Hero now has a name, Hector Juarez. The villain’s still Victor Baloch, but now instead of taking place in a single building, Juarez now must stop Baloch’s evil terrorist activities, killing big bads, and destroying anything in their path.

Sometimes you gotta kill a few big bads to save the day.

Since this is a Doom mod, it still has a lot of Doom’s trappings. Still gotta find keycards, hit switches, and shoot your way through occasional maze-like areas to make it to the goal. It’s still got some of the elements of the original, from the mod’s weapons to the hostiles you fight.

(more…)

March 17, 2018
Mods and Maps: Classic Doom for Doom 3, A Combination of Two Classics.
Doom 3 was a pretty cool game for 2004. I replayed it recently since it had been several years and I was initially down on it, but after replaying it, I have some newfound respect for it. While not as groundbreaking as Half-Life 2, it was still a good game. Though it’s hardly a “masterpiece of the art form” as the box quote says.

I still have that PC Gamer issue. They were actually god damn serious with that quote!

Alas, from what I gathered, the Doom 3 modding community was sparse compared to classic Doom, even compared to its competitors like Half-Life 2. But one particular mod stood out, and it’s not surprising it exists considering id Software’s legacy:

It feels like 1993 and 2004 combined into some freakshow.

Classic Doom for Doom 3 was one of those hyped mods in its heyday. Boasting a small team of developers at Flaming Sheep Software, these guys aimed to remake the 1993 classic on a modern engine. Of course, what better way to show off the modding skills of Doom 3‘s engine than with a remake of the original Doom?

So much for doing a UV-Max run…

There’s only four difficulty levels in this one, similar to Doom 3‘s skill levels. Alas no Ultra-Violence, but I’ll play on Hey Not Too Rough, the equivalent of “Normal” difficulty.
A gold star for originality, I guess.
Surprisingly the development team made an intro to explain why you’re going in. It’s so corny, filled with amateur voice acting and really jerky animation. Basically they give a reason for Doomguy to enter Mars and kill demons, eventually fending for yourself. Granted, the intro can be skipped, but it’s fascinating to put a story on why things went to hell. It’s a sight to behold.

Wouldn’t be a re-imagining of classic Doom without the starting area and that iconic music.

Then you’re thrown into E1M1: Hangar, with just a pistol, just like the old days. A remix of At Doom’s Gate starts blasting through your speakers. It’s time to kill some demons!
(more…)
January 31, 2016
Doom modding in the ’90s: My recent fascination.

One day, I was checking out some YouTube videos, until I had stumbled upon this one by Pordontae:

I was gonna write something about that Doom level set featured in the video, but I realized there wasn’t anything particularly unique about it. Some of the levels feel bland and featureless, often with no sense of balance. E2M9 has a fight between one spider mastermind and three cyberdemons, for crying out loud! But it did give me an idea. that’s not the main reason why I liked this level set. It was the random sounds that the creator replaced.

Playing this level made me realize how amazing the Doom mod scene was during the mid-to-late ’90s. END1.WAD is the epitome of a 1994 level, according to the Doom Wiki. During the heyday of Doom modding, everybody was making their own levels to play around in Doom, in varying levels of quality. Some have held up and get universal praise from Doom veterans. Others are forgotten, an experiment often made by a teenager who didn’t pursue game development further.

Modifying an existing game wasn’t a new concept, but Doom was one of the few to openly embrace it in its early days. This lead to many creative levels, some made by people who’d later become famous in their own right.

Though this wasn’t always the case. Since the tools were fairly new, most people were making fairly dreadful levels, usually plagiarizing parts of the original Doom levels, or in some cases created tutorial levels. Such as FEAR21.WAD, which looks so obtusely designed that it’s like if Salvador Dali made Doom levels. Here’s a UV-Max (All kills, all secrets) run from Doom speedrunner ryback:

This above is an example of what most people had to offer. For 1994 standards, it was great to have another level to play, but it’s very tough to play today unless you’re like me and have a liking for crap, for sure.

(more…)

August 17, 2015
6 great Doom mods not called “Brutal Doom.”

I’m not a big fan of list articles. At best, you could find interesting stuff that might intrigue you and maybe share to your friends on Facebook. At worst, you find terrible click-bait articles that seem to be written more for a paycheck than any informative value. It’s something I’ve refrained from doing here, as I prefer writing interesting long form stuff instead.

Seriously, this is what Cracked is now. Remember when they actually wrote parody articles? Probably better than “11 Amazing Things You Didn’t Know About Your Pants,” anyway.

One particular list article by Cracked irked me considerably. A recent list, “6 Awesome Hacks That Did Mind-Blowing Things With Old Games” featured some cool stuff like Iron Man or the Incredible Hulk in Grand Theft Auto IV, or the entirety of The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind in Oblivion‘s engine. Even Just Cause 2: Multiplayer Mod, where you could go crazy in the world of Just Cause 2 with hundreds of people, made the list. But what was number one? Brutal Doom.

I won’t go too much into Brutal Doom as it’s made the internet rounds everywhere over the past couple of years, but it’s championed as the “definitive way to play Doom,” with more gore, violence, Mortal Kombat-style fatalities, even a key that’s simply dedicated to flipping off enemies. It’s amazing at first, but it outstays its welcome pretty quick.

I’m gonna be honest: I think Brutal Doom is an overrated, mediocre mod. The only thing it has going for it is the ridiculous macho factor, and that seems to be championed by every average dude who always writes about the Doom mod scene. Brutal Doom is usually mentioned as “the way Doom was meant to be,” but it really isn’t. Brutal Doom isn’t the way Doom was meant to be played, it’s Doom if it was a terrible caricature of itself. It’s the Doom comic in game form.

All this does is make Doomguy look like a god damn psychopath who should be in a mental asylum, not fighting monsters.

So, as a response to the article (as well as breaking my own personal rule of no lists), I’m making a list of 6 awesome Doom mods that aren’t called Brutal Doom. These are ones that the Doom community swear by, and are more worth your time than Brutal Doom any day of the week.

As always, these require Doom to run. You can get Doom II on Steam for the low low price of $5. After that, you’ll need a source port to play these. I recommend GZDoom (for Singleplayer) and Zandronum (for Multiplayer). While these mods will work perfectly fine with the default Doom II levels, I do recommend playing these with custom levels, or PWADs, which I’ll link to as well. Unless stated otherwise, these are all focused on single player.

Police Brutality: Wildweasel presents Terrorists!

(idgames link)

Ever wanted to be an action hero? Terrorists! will live out your dreams of being the next Chuck Norris. Armed with only a pistol and the ability to kick dudes in the face, this mod adds real life weapons and enemies for you to fight in.

Stopping crime the only way possible: with a six shooter and a bunch of bullets.

In addition to the weapons and enemies, there’s also a new feature where you level up your guns by killing enemies with them. Upgrades start out simple, like faster fire rate, but as you level them up, they get more crazy, like a Beretta that converts to burst fire, or a revolver that becomes a long-range rifle. Even your melee and grenades can get upgrades, from electric grenades to explosive roundhouse kicks.

Our hero, kicking robots like it ain’t no big deal.

Wildweasel’s made some other great mods, like the WWII-inspired Nazis! (which goes great with the Egyptian themed EPIC 2), and the action packed Diaz. Terrorists became one of my favorites, only because of the weapon upgrades. The three I just mentioned are all pretty good mods for Doom, and give enough gameplay changes to make it just as fun. For those who want to live out their action movie dreams without actually getting hurt, Terrorists! will do the job nicely.

(Full Disclosure: I am friends with the guy who made this mod, so I might have a slight bias on this choice. It’s still high quality, though!)
(more…)

June 8, 2014
Mods and Maps: Sonic Doom II: ‘Bots on Mobius.

I love Doom. The fast-paced action, the creative levels, the large variety of weapons and enemies. It’s no wonder it’s held up as a classic in the first-person shooter genre. In recent times, people have made Doom last longer by way of modding – changing Doom‘s weapons, levels, even adding stuff never before seen on the Doom engine.

Some of these mods, like Alien Vendetta and Doom the Way Id Did, take an existing spin on the tried-and-true formula, while others like Brutal Doom change the game drastically. Those mods are famous and well-known among the Doom community for their good quality. I wish I could say the same thing about the mod I’m talking about, featuring a certain blue hedgehog.

It’s like I’ve hopped back into 1998! and not in a good way!

Sonic Doom II: ‘Bots on Mobius is the work of one SSNTails, a Sonic the Hedgehog and Project GeeKer fan. It’s okay if you had to Google search that last one, I don’t remember the show either. Back then, mashing existing franchises with Doom was pretty common – there was the Aliens TC for Doom, as well as Batman Doom, made by the guys who would later go on to make Zeno Clash. Naturally, SSNTails decided to mix the speed and fun of Sonic with the run and gun tactics of Doom and see if he could make something truly amazing in the Sonic fan games realm. Unfortunately, he didn’t succeed in that.

You get to play as either Sonic, Tails, Knuckles or Metal Sonic. The only differences between each is stuff like firing speed. You choose the character of your choice and hop in, shooting a bunch of reskins of existing Doom enemies in retextured Doom levels based on levels in Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Sonic & Knuckles. Grounder replaces Zombiemen, Shotgun Guys and Chaingunners; Coconuts are your imp replacements, and various new badniks replace the Demons, Spectres and Barons. You grab emeralds to unlock doors and eventually find the exit. It’s typical Doom fare. That’s all the good I can say about it. Because everything after it is much worse, especially for Doom mods.

Seriously, this Shotgun reskin makes it look like Sonic’s holding something rather phallic.

Do you like running through large, square rooms with nothing to make it stand out besides a prop or two? Do you like areas where you have to move quickly through the area, otherwise you get stuck and are forced to slowly lose health and die? Do you like fighting reskins of Revenants and Arachnotrons that are ripped straight from Sonic the Hedgehog 3, looking terrible as a result? Do you like terrible-looking gun reskins, even for 1998? If you said yes to any of these, you’ll have a blast with Sonic Doom II.

(more…)

June 2, 2013