For months now, I’ve been toiling away on a huge, multi-megaWAD retrospective — playing these epic WADs that each take weeks to finish, and then trying to make sense of my thoughts and put it all down in writing. (EDIT: Hilariously, this is referring to my piece on skillsaw that didn’t get finished until 2022.) And while I’m smashing my head against a brick wall on that project, little WADs like Griefless give me the will to live.
Griefless is the latest from James “Jimmy” Paddock, the Doom community’s resident jack of all trades (and master of all of them). Jimmy’s mapping credits are a mile long, on top of 500 midi tunes he’s written which you can hear in hundreds more Doom maps. He even leads Bob Ross-style mapping classes to help newer designers figure out the basics. And just prior to Griefless, Paddock had held a big on-stream speedmapping session where he and a few friends belted out an entire megaWAD in 24 hours. The dude is a legend.
Who knows whether 10 years from now Griefless will stand out from the rest of Jimmy’s monumental body of work — but that’s not what we judge in this column. I’m just here to tell you what I think is awesome right now, and… well, you know.
Jimmy speedmapped Griefless over two consecutive nights, throwing down the layouts in about 10 to 20 minutes each on the first night, and then making them playable on the second. My question is: …How the heck? And if I’m allowed a followup question: Why do some guys get all the talent?
The only thing that Griefless skimps on is length. You can easily play through the whole thing in 30, maybe 40 minutes (which, honestly, I consider one of its strengths). Don’t for a second assume these maps don’t play as well as they should, or aren’t balanced due to the lack of development time. And they look fantastic, nestled in the Episode 4 aesthetic niche.
You start off in stony crags and wooden bases, take a quick techish detour in M3, and then settle mostly into marble, wood, and metal citadels for the remainder of the WAD. There’s a big focus on the color green, which is an interesting twist on the usual E4 visuals. Green marble, a green sky texture, new green skins for the health potion and soulsphere, and nukage, nukage, nukage.
I think ramp up is key to Griefless’ rapidfire potency. M1 is a quick roundabout in and around a cemetery haunted by zombiemen, but by the penultimate map you’re taking out barons, cacodemons, and cyberdemons in a pretty sizable, nonlinear mire studded with islands and half-sunken structures. The first three maps keep things to straightforward action, introducing more keys and switch-finding as they go. M3 busts out the extensive damaging floors to keep the pressure on, and then M5 and M7 have the ol’ cyberdemon turret laying the explosions on you from a distance.
There’s also a teleporter puzzle in M6 and, most importantly, a double-mastermind showdown in M8. I always love to see what a mapper has done to try to make a mastermind or cyberdemon battle interesting, or at the very least something more than just circle-strafing and shooting. Jimmy doesn’t disappoint, with a tight horseshoe layout where you need to encourage infighting between the two masterminds and the map’s lesser enemies, but where there’s nowhere safe to hide even once the infighting has commenced. I died here three times (compared to the one or two deaths across the rest of the WAD), and every time bounced right back to the start of the map, excited to attempt the battle with a slightly different strategy.
A perfect end to a perfect WAD.
(I watched a video of someone just now playing this final map with the BFG and ammo carried over from previous maps. I’m not gonna tell you what to do, but… don’t do that. This map loses 95% of its challenge and fun if you can just blast the masterminds in two seconds.)
Griefless requires DOOM.WAD and should run in vanilla Doom (though a limit-removing port is recommended to prevent visual glitches on E4M7). If you’re not sure how to get it running, this may help. And for more awesome WADs, be sure to check these out!