[h1]Master in name only[/h1]
So I finally gotten around to this offshoot official expansion pack. For the last few months I've been riding the Doom modding scene wave, starting with Ashes: Hard Reset (itself an offshoot expansion pack). Having recently settled on my Source Ports of choice (Crispy for official/vanilla, Woof! for Boom/ID24, and GZDoom for ultra modern WADs) playing through of some classic community made megawads over the decades became significantly more accommodating.
This expansion was id's hasty answer to unsavory release of various community WADs by the thousands from a crooked company which exploited and stole countless works of olden mappers. Result is fully contracted 21 maps hand picked by id. Unfortunately, weather due to haste or spite, the maps are more often a miss rather than a hit. Not to mention lack of design direction, experience, and the simplistic tools available at the time only contributed to incoherent pile of mess we got here.
Retail CD also included 1800+ maps of predominately ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ quality, called Maximum Doom, but is not included here thankfully. Remember trying some and I even made an attempt of organizing them but the amount of effort required soon stopped me dead in my tracks. What can I say we all done stupid ♥♥♥♥ when we were young.
* * *
Maps are meant to play individually from a Pistol start, after which you are expected to exit and start another. Lack of this familiar episodic progression was already a show-stopper for me back in the '90s. Knew right then and there I'll never play it like that. Anyway such short segments never allow the player to get strong enough or for any epic or memorable fights to develop. By the time you find a Rocket Launcher you are in the last two rooms and everything of the sparse enemy presence is long dead. Being made in 1995 also infers small, simple and sometimes perilous level design, unlike the modern variants which can be enjoyed for well over an hour. It's not for lack of trying but they just can't measure up to any sort of quality standard of today. Even if this was still sold it would be a hard pass from me. It is however included in the recent 8.8.2024 DOOM + DOOM II rerelease update along with everything original Doom related and then some.
Some notable exceptions include Black Tower, a large map with decent fights, available arsenal, and well designed secrets. Bit of a pain to traverse though with large open areas lacking creativity and purpose. Trapped on Titan, another sprawling level with interesting architecture, open areas and of course nice fight setups. The Express Elevator to Hell, complex and compact with intricate design culminating with creative secret level access although the implementation of said idea is much less so. Mephisto's Mausoleum features an interesting take on boss level mechanic but that all the good I can say about it.
Tower thematically splits the episode in half while the others are all in the last quarter. As good as they are, unfortunately it's not enough to justify crawling through amateurish mediocrity to reach them but then again you are free to play them as originally intended - individually with a Pistol start. Had id been more vigilant in picking levels it would have given the original Doom II a run for its money.
* * *
For those who have this in their libraries, the package is clinically obsolete and rudimentary. It runs in DOSBox (v0.71) and loads a menu which lets you select individual map listed alphabetically. It barely works but let's not kid ourselves, it's no way to play. What I did was take "masterlevels.wad" from the rerelease, set it up with my Woof! configuration, also borrowed rerelease Launcher.exe and its config file to intercept Steam default loading routine by renaming it to DOSBox.exe. Then edited its config to point to Woof executable. That way I got Steam playtime tracking, high resolution with modern controls, QoL galore, and something I never could before: episodic map progression as ordered by Xaser many years ago. No more plebian Pistol starts!
There were episodic mods before but they mostly just ordered them alphabetically which never attracted me. Years later I learned of Xaser's effort to organize them by difficulty and theme but it only worked in ZDoom-compatible ports which I deem unprincipled (eventual loss of self-compatibility, as in your old saves may no longer load) so that was unappealing as well. Then by chance I tried rerelease version and voila, it works on Woof (highly principled Port) and uses Xaser order! What were the odds? Turns out he of all people worked on the rerelease so I guess that's why.
In the end I got to play this how I always wanted but turd remains a turd no matter how much polishing it gets. Resulting taste will always be the same. Experience was like opening a time capsule and being disappointment even when you didn't expect much. Maybe playing "Going Down" megawad not long before this spoiled me too much :)
