[Doom] WAD.WAD - E1M1 UV Maxdemo

Pwad: Waste And Destroy v1.1 (Wad.wad)
Author: Johnnie Chan and Simon Griffin
Date: 15th June 1994
Map: e1m1
Category: UV Maxdemo
Executable: Doom.exe
Time: 7:57
First of all, good job on snagging the meta filename of "wad.wad", plus coming up with a reasonable backronym (Waste and Destroy) to justify it. There are three reviews for this level on the idgames archive, and it's fair to say that opinion is mixed. The first two reviews pan it, one star only, while the third gives it five and tells us not to listen to the idiots above. After playing this a few times and trying to optimise it for time, I think I lean more toward the third reviewer.
Yes, this level shares a lot of features in common with contemporary bad levels. It's kind of bland visually, and criminally underdetailed. And most of the rooms are huge expanses with not much in them. But played through from start to finish, there's actually a fair bit of variety here. The key to it is how the monsters are used. There are a lot of large near empty rooms, plus some rooms with a few monsters here and there, and then a few more that are packed with monsters to a ridiculous excess. One room is so packed with imps that you start to get a slowdown effect in the vanilla engine from all the sprites. As a result you're never quite sure what you'll be faced with round the next corner. Could be a minor room with some badly needed health and powerups, or it could be a dozen cacos. You start to get uncertain, which increases both the tension and the immersion. This level draws you in. And like a good drama it builds to a big climax.
The layout isn't linear either, there are two main sections which can be tackled in either order. Both approaches have their upsides and downsides, but in the end I opted to go for the blue key section first so I had as much ammunition as possible for the imp slaughter by the red key.
There aren't too many puzzles, but one is notable. Early on you come to a chessboard layout that when you try to cross it teleports you back to the start. Indeed idgame reviewer complains about the "bloody irritating teleport maze". But actually it's very simple. You run between the posts, make one left turn midway through, then run out through the posts on the far side. You don't even need to be very precise about it, as you can see from my play at 1:35. And having the posts as guiding markers certainly makes the puzzle fair.
In the textfile the two authors give a par time of 20-35 minutes for a 100% kills run on UV, so under eight minutes isn't too bad. Most of the run went fine for me, but the big time saving came right at the end, where despite going for one door too early I managed to get all the infights started pretty much as quickly as possible, and the Spider, Cybie and Barons all killed themselves very efficiently with me only needing to spray a few bullets at the end to kill off the last Baron. Can't see this part going much better than that.
Download the wad here: www.doomworld.c...

[@Spectans1]

Dat final fight, awesome!:)

[@pwnerofthemonth]

I'd love to see a heroes.wad play through. Stuck on E1M7 D:

[@oil_moon]

Think you might consider uploading in 60fps now that youtube supports it? I'm not sure if you play with the capped framerate or not.

[@rybacksda]

Yeah, I only capture at 35fps, but it's something I've been thinking about. Would be good to get some smoother motion here.

[@oil_moon]

It's proved really successful with other video game channels I follow. I tend to always play with the framerate uncapped. Currently playing through DTWID - LE right now after being on a Doom hiatus for a while!

[@PepperDoom]

And that is Hangar

[@UnchainedEruption]

This is a really bad wad.