[Doom] WALLS.WAD - E1M1 UV Maxdemo

Pwad: Walls.wad
Author: Kurt Schulenburg
Date: 16th August 1994
Map: e1m1
Category: UV Maxdemo
Executable: Doom.exe
Time: 2:55
Happy 21st birthday, Doom! To mark the occasion, I thought I'd try and upload a 60fps capture to KZbin. I've got no idea if this'll work or not so hopefully you guys can see it. Comp struggled a bit early on keeping up with data writes but most of the demo is fine.
This level doesn't look that flash and has some dull bits, but overall there's quite a lot of variety and action and choices packed into a compact layout. Which made it a lot of fun to record a maxkill demo on, since I had to do a fair bit of experimentation to figure out where the best spots to use the rockets were, how the invuln should be best used, the quickest paths to the main switches and so on. Early exits were in the 4:30 range but as I learnt more and more about the level I finally managed to bring the time in under three minutes.
One of the strongest level ideas is to have obstacles that disappear. The first few seconds I'm running through dull grey corridors, and the level isn't promising to be anything other than dull. But eventually you find your way to a brightly coloured secret area with some imps and a switch, and when you hit that most of the walls in that opening section fall away, revealing a warehouse-sized open space full of imps and cacos. It's a really good design instinct. I've made it through the tedious part of the level, and now I'll never have to worry about it again. In the textfile Kurt talks about wanting to design something "a bit beyond the 14-year old idea of packing a large room with tons of ammo and tons of monsters", and he did pretty well at that.
I also like the amusing exit. First time playing through you're likely to have a heart attack as you run through the final locked door, but the Cyberdemon is a paper tiger only - he's in a room too tight to move around in and so it's impossible for him to fire back at you. In early runs I tried to kill him from a short distance away with rockets, but that's no faster than killing with the berserk pack and the rockets are better saved for elsewhere. So you get to see me fearlessly punching away at a defenceless Cyberdemon for twenty seconds. Unfortunately this makes the level impossible to complete on nightmare, as the Cyberdemon has no trouble firing at you at that skill level, motionless or not.
Download the wad here: www.doomworld.c...

[@screech57]

Thanks for the nice review! I was about 36 years old when I created that level, one of my first. I'm glad to see it's still getting played 20+ years later. (And I do think my level building got better as time went on!)

[@mArt1And00m3r11339]

This reminds me of Whispers of Satan map 33, where you punch the cyberdemon to death.

[@MrCantStopTheRobot]

With a generic name like "Walls" I thought it might be an amateurish shit-show, but this actually looks like a quirky little adventure. Nice when a concept-map pans out well. Except that tedious Baron at the beginning. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump. Pump.