I may have also modded it. I have no super appealing and spectacular state-of-the-art-anything by modern day standards, but I did make levels back in the day and wouldn't mind doing it again. One mod I do have finished I've received a little praise for is the Absynthium Music Pack for Doom II. It contains 35 background tracks to fully replace doom 2 music in any non-music mod you'd like. I recommend playing it to the old cheezy 90's megawads on the cdroms. You'll need a program like ZDL to launch multiple files within GZDoom. |
Before I get into my bad mods and somewhat better mods, I'll discuss one of my major projects I've wanted to do for some time but have been slacking on due to everything else. This is the Classic DOOM Megasite Project. It has animated baddies that rotate on the left menu when hovered, as well as real sketches of doom enemies across the top. There will be a lot of information, resources, and downloads for both playing and making doom stuff. This is one of my main focuses lately, and it will be done soon I hope, or at least have more than it does. |
Now for the bullshit!
Way back in '95 I decided to make magnificent levels for DOOM, only things didn't exactly work out that way. I found
editors previously and got the dooms, as well as played hundreds of wads off of both the internet and on various
CD-ROMS released like D!Zone and DemonGate. When I finally got around to trying to make my own, I couldn't figure
shit out at all at first. I wasn't using today's Doom Builder, I was using DEU 5.2gcc for MS-DOS. Not only was I not
using a mouse at first, when you created LineDefs, you also had to create 1 or 2 SideDefs. This took me FOREVER to
finally figure out. It wasn't just hey here's a wall! No. DOOM doesn't work like that. Here's a line for a wall and
here's what the textures are going to be. If you have an invisible wall or a platform, here's this texture and
here's that texture on that side up there or down below. It makes sense, but like today being automatic because you'd
think the editor would know this, it wasn't. These editors were written by people like you or me with programming
skills. They weren't hired by id software and certainly weren't paid for them. |
So anyway, that being said, I cherished that damn one level that looked like a deformed letter Z within a square so much that I copied it over and over because I really wanted to make a full game with different texture themes and enemy line-ups. I didn't care if it was the shittiest level either. Yes, this game, like many jokewads and really bad level mapsets, had multiple Cyberdemons on the first tiny level. The object of my little game wasn't to kill everything. There's not enough ammo for that in some levels, especially the first. The object was to get from start to finish and click the exit panels! There were 36 of these levels, including the hidden fourth episode that was episode 1 of a different difficulty. Download No. 1 |
As a sidenote this was my third megawad. The second, which was started slightly before and finished around the same time, was Battlefieldz, seen on a seperate page. Chambers of Death 2 began a small amount of experimentations. Not only was the full menu replaced graphically (and I did a much better job than when I remade the 1st later on) and I started having broken stairs and other broken mishaps that actually worked but looked like crap. There was also a better amount of enemies that didn't involve Cyberdemons right off! Download Chambers of Death 2 |
The third and final installment of this goofery... Chambers of Death III. I a glacier sky for episode 1 that I found on a levels CD-ROM in its own folder. I based most of the first few levels around this, and even named 2 levels glacier 1 and 2. The levels are getting bigger, and it's actually less monotonous to play! The MIDIs also brought up some classic rock as well as Nirvana, which wasn't classic rock at the time but is considered it now. One thing I really enjoyed about replaying this over and over while making it, was episode 2 and 3 being in space. Sure the levels didn't exactly always fit, but the skies were very pretty and gave it a paticular mood that mixed with the MIDIs definitely made me want to boot up my own disasterpieces and replay this one especially through the years. Download CHAMBERS3 |
You may see a reoccurring vibe of me not liking my early doom wads. This actually isn't true. This is just a warning to the doom community that is looking for something better than the last thing they played. These aren't the greatest I'll actually admit to them being the worst if anyone ever suggests that, because it's probably true. I uploaded them to /idgames with the mindset I was archiving them, not exactly getting them reviewed. I didn't know the /newstuff chronicles was a thing back then. But all in all (excuses approaching) I was young, dumb, and didn't understand it all yet. I also just got doom literally a couple of months prior. So eventually when the day came to acknowledge /newstuff chronicles existed, I had a panel of judges for Nightmares of Loki and probably all the previous stuff that I'm not even trying to see unless it's for a good laugh, and man did they hate my shit back then! Keep in mind I was like 14 and no one taught me anything. |
My second ever level "shape" was called Battlefields. Not to be confused, like it ever would be, with the new game series of modern day.
No, this is a 36-level mapset, the fourth episode being brutally impossible like nuts.wad, of the same level over and over. The level, however, is different from the Chambers of Death level. That one was a single zig zag and this one is like a long hallway of zigzags.
Sometimes its accidental outer wall holds imps and other things that shoot fireballs at you, so beware. I messed with key doors, platforms, stairs, all sorts of things, but still... same level. over and over.
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There, however, are cool things a' brewin' in the labs of boredom. A Sequel. Like Z-Chambers will be to the Chambers of Death trilogy, Battlefieldz will be a gzdoom/ACS-enabled sequel to Doom Battlefields. It will just be me testing tons of things for my future mod ideas here first, like I did before. I made comedy to test music, and now I'm doing this to test new mod capabilities and scripting. Now that ACS scripting is included from Hexen in the Doom world, and GZDoom does a perfect job of interpreting it, I'm going to have a hayday figuring more out. First comes Z-Chambers though. Then comes this. So expect even more crazy stuff on Battlefieldz! |
Before, when this was just up on /idgames archive, the only way to access these levels was to extract the lump NMARE1 from the insides of the Nightmares 2 wad I was so embarassed. Maybe if I named things without numbers it could have been forgotten forever. Doors and Floors, etc. This was a pretty good start to figuring things out finally, so this file got its own release to be (that I didn't expect to be) reviewed on doomworld's idarchive file system of course. These are all 7 a precursor to Doom Chaos 3 that had no prequels like I had planned, but hey! Complete with an awesome classical soundtrack, this is the first mod that I let others in my household play when I was young. These were also made for my adopted younger siblings that spanned 5-7 years younger than myself at the time, so traditional DOOM was too hard for them. This concludes the extremely laughable/horrendous wastes of time. Doom Chaos 3 is actually pretty good for a mid-90's wad. I am sad it was never on a CD-ROM of doom levels even by accident when shovelware for doom was popular. I would have put stuff out way faster than I did after this! |
After making this I "downgraded" level quality for Doom Chaos 1 and 2 on
graph paper. Then I just said no to that and moved onto the first Loki game.
Doom Chaos 3, though still not that great in quality, is my favorite of these old embarassments. There is even a special "Chambers of Death" tribute in one of the levels. Since there are no plans of a Nightmares IV you can just consider this a sequel that isn't part of a trilogy since... yeah. There aren't two others after all. This nearly concludes my wonky beginnings. It is very unfortunate that this and Nightmares of Loki were my most recent for years. I hope to change that with at least a classic "vanilla" throwback to start the new wave off. |
Lo and behold, my magnum opus of trash! Nightmares of Loki (1999)! This was made in a four year span, though I was also doing band practice, hanging out generally all the time with my friends, and coming home to "put some pieces" on something that I got sick of halfway through and just mindlessly finished. My passion or lack thereof mixed with the fact the levels were huge, I'm not a graphic artist, I couldn't get my MIDI stuff to work and make music, and there was zero detail, it got MURDERED at doomworld. In my defense I also released the stuff before with this, and had no clue stuff was always up for review when you snuck files into the /newstuff folder of the idgames server. It was primarily intended to be "stumbled upon" with creating a "who the hell made this" attitude, as I intended with early bizarre comedy/shock/whatever music. |
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