Your old pal scwiba is ready to hang it up, folks. Certainly not ready to stop playing Doom WADs, but ready to stop writing about them. And thinking about writing about them, and playing them while thinking about writing about them. In total I’ve covered about 80 Doom WADs — with more than one thousand maps between them. What more is there to say, after all? You know, it’s odd to reflect on everything I’ve written here, because I always come back to this idea that I’m not cut out to be one of those great, lifelong reviewers. I’m no
Tag: Xaser
Sharp Things
Gosh, when was the last time we talked about an old-fashioned standalone map? UAC_DEAD back in… 2018? Oh boy. A bit of inside baseball here, but this episode was up in the air until last night. I planned Going Down as Episode 61 for at least the last couple months, and the remaining WADs from here on out are pretty set in stone — I’ve already played them and know they’re awesome. But the WAD I penciled in for this particular slot, after playing through in its entirety, sorting all the screenshots, and outlining a review… it dawned on me
Doom II The Way id Did
Doom II The Way id Did. You already know what this is. You know whether or not you’ll enjoy it. What are you doing still reading this? Doom II The Way id Did is exactly what you expect, even if you haven’t had the pleasure of playing Doom The Way id Did, or the number of WADs that followed on in that vein for years. It’s a collection of 33 maps by various authors in the community, all doing their best impressions of John Romero, American McGee, and Sandy Petersen (plus maybe a tiny bit of Shawn Green and Tom
Doom the Way id Did – The Lost Episodes
If you’ve played Doom the Way id Did, its Lost Episodes are essentially more of the that. A little less id-like, maybe, but with a wider quality spectrum. Doom the Way id Did: The Lost Episodes, to put it indelicately, is six episodes of leftovers and cut maps that didn’t make it into the official DTWiD release. What you have to keep in mind when saying these maps were “cut,” though, is why they would have been cut. The strict rules of DTWiD mean that submitted maps could easily be — and often were — rejected not for being of low
Doom the Way id Did
Another Doom anniversary, another classic Doom-styled mapset. What better way to celebrate Doom’s 22nd birthday than with what, in an alternate universe, could have been id’s official Doom levels? Doom the Way id Did is the Doom homage to end all Doom homages. Tired of mapsets only textured to look like E1 but don’t play anything like it? Done with the straight lines and right angles of modern maps? This is the WAD for you: for the first time, a full, three-episode megaWAD that attempts to recapture the essence of id’s original levels in every possible way. I can’t list
50 Shades of Graytall
Limitation projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s no escaping them. You see a lot of the standard bemoaning about the concept — “Why can’t anyone just make a normal WAD anymore?” — but the truth is you could do a lot worse with one of those “normal” WADs than you could with something like 50 Shades of Graytall. Of all the limitation projects that’ve come out in the last decade or more, 50 Shades may be the most compelling. The idea behind all these projects is to put creators in increasingly restrictive boxes — to force them to be