Nooo I only care about Dungeons & Dragons
Almost all of my maps are found in Doomer Boards Projects (‘DBPs’) mapsets, which is a continuing series in which participants are charged with making a map in one month using a theme of the project leader’s choice. The deadline really focuses the mind on the task at hand.
Great maps all round, not just mine, plus poo jokes (the best and funniest kind)! Obviously a personal favourite, even without the nostalgic fuzzies for my first ever released maps. I was inspired enough to make two maps for this, MAP03 and MAP08.
Another comedy set, based on the Mel Brooks movie. My map, MAP07, here was a collaboration with Doom_RO and making it was a a lot of fun – bouncing off the ideas of someone else was a novel experience and a great way to break “mappers’ block” (even if I had to yell at him a bit not to remove my lava floors).
My baby. In addition to making MAP05, MAP08 and MAP11, I was the project leader, and this is still a pretty unique project – these maps are designed for the Nightmare! difficulty mode, which gives the monsters big boosts to their speed and aggression; not to mention that they respawn after being killed.
There is at the time of writing exactly one other mapset with a similar gimmick, called NERF, but NERF sucks. Play this instead! I would say that as I am inordinately proud of this but I promise it’s true.
An anime/cyberpunk themed masterpiece. A true work of demented genius. Just play it!
I would normally hesitate to recommend a one man megawad (as mapsets that replace all of Doom 2’s 32 maps are known) as generally such things get a bit samey as most people, frankly, don’t have that many ideas. Fortunately in this case old mate ‘Phobus’ challenged himself to use all of Doom’s gameplay features at least once in this set so he wouldn’t just stay in his comfort zone, with great results. A grossly underrated mapset.
Music themed set. I spotted a few visual influences from DBP25 which gave me the warm fuzzies. Some pretty cool gimmicks here too, including a playable keyboard! Unlike my maps, this requires GZDoom or a derivative.
Beautiful visual design and some really tasteful and well-considered use of advanced features and new monsters make this a really, really strong set, and kind of an exercise in minimalist maximalism if that makes sense – it doesn’t, but I wrote it anyway and there’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll need GZDoom for this one too.
Playing Doom is a little esoteric these days so here’s a short guide.
First you need a doom2.wad file. This contains the game assets. You can buy it on Steam or GOG or just pirate it.
Doom is now open source and has many ‘source ports’ that each offer slightly different gameplay features above and beyond what the original game provided. This does make it a little complicated to get started, as some maps simply will not work with some exes.
Unzip your source port of choice and copy doom2.wad into the same directory. Once you have downloaded a mapset to play unzip those where ever you wish. Drag and drop the .wad file from the aforementioned .zip file onto the relevant .exe (eg. if you downloaded DBP16: Cyb’s Freaky Colonoscopy, which you should because it’s great, drag ‘n’ drop dbp16_distro_v0.99a.wad onto crispy-doom.exe). If all has gone well, Doom will start and when you click on New Game and select a difficulty level, you will see a new first map.
GZDoom, assuredly the most popular Doom source port, makes some changes to Doom’s gameplay by default. You’ll need it for DBK01 and PCP, and my maps will work if you really want to use it but there may be bugs or other issues.
If you insist on using GZDoom, I strongly recommend changing the compatibility settings in the menu to either Doom (Strict) for the DBPs or Boom (Strict) for DIY. This should get you the intended experience.
(The defaults are fine for DBK01 and PCP).
To change these settings, start GZDoom as usual, press ESC and open the Options menu.
From there, navigate to “Full Options Menu” then “Compatibility Options”. Hover over the “Compatibility Mode” option and click until it changes to either “Doom (Strict)” or “Boom (Strict)”, depending on what you’re playing. Then start a new game.