I've been dicking around a lot with Doom, for the first time in many many years. Downloaded and played a few maps, started a few megawads but didn't save and kept thinking "I'll do a proper playthrough later", but the net result is the revival of that Doom itch.
One of the things that I only realized more recently is that the console versions of Doom really are their own thing; I'd always assumed they were just inferior ports, even though many people had told me Doom 64 especially was a very different beast. In any case this made me want to look into a PC conversion of the console-exclusive levels of Playstation Doom. I came across
The Lost Episode but while it was interesting in some ways, it's really "vaguely inspired by" rather than a port of the console levels. The architecture and visuals can be quite unique and trippy, but the difficulty is all over the place and sometimes more obnoxious than challenging. It's also pretty ridiculous that PS Doom took Spawning Vats and cut down large chunks of it, then TLE took this cutdown version and reexpanded it into something that is similar to but not quite like the original.
So I kept looking and I found
GEC Master Edition, a not-quite-TC (it converts original console WADs, rather than recreate them) that converts all of Doom 64, and Doom and Final Doom for PS to a modified GZDoom to allow all the special rendering and physics of the console to work. Maybe not so useful for Doom 64 since EX exists, and initially I didn't particularly feel like playing through the entire 90 PS levels just to check out a few unique levels. Then I came across
ConDoom, which tries to integrate the console levels into their logical place in the progression of the PC Doom and Doom II. I thought that was a really cool idea and was exactly what I was looking for, but the levels don't seem to have been adapted very well, and are missing their original unique textures, monsters, and special effects, including complete lack of scripting (which both PS Doom and ZDoom support, but not the original obviously). Since the GEC WADs for these levels do include these specials, I tinkered with them a bit to see if I could replace the ConDoom version of them with the GEC ones. I think it's possible, but not as easy (for me at least) as I had hoped. I said fuck it and decided to play GEC PS Doom instead.
I must say I was surprised by how different, and how good, PS Doom actually was. The port has to deal with some severe limitations with geometry and with how many textures and sprites can be stored at once (and therefore available to use in a single level). Many levels are just completely gone. To compensate for this, the simplified levels really try to do their best with lighting to make everything better looking than it really is, and to my surprise it actually works. The music is fantastic, instead of Bobby's metal/ambient sometimes-pastiche, it's all dark ambient. The lighting, the colours (the palette is VERY different from PC Doom), the music, very different sounds, the new enemies, changes in the placement of old ones (including Doom II's pain elementals
in Map01 out of almost 60!), it all creates an atmosphere that I guess is much closer to Doom 64's but that completely different from PC Doom's, even when playing familiar levels. Turning all 4 Doom episodes, plus Doom II, into a single continuous mega-episode does strange things to the progression, but then that's already thrown completely out the window with late-Doom II enemies appearing in E1 levels. In any case, I liked enough of what I saw to decide to play through both Playstation ports as if they were their own games. It helps that it's been a long time since I last played original IWADs, so I really can't tell what's new, what's changed and what's the same but I'm not remembering it. Which is a good thing. It would be nice to have a more faithful ConDoom, and I might try and get it working myself, but this GEC Edition is quite worth it too.
I have about half a dozen unfinished Doom 2 maps. It would probably take me about half a year to finish them and let's say about a dozen others for which I've made some notes, so that would be half a campaign. I could post some screenshots in a couple of weeks to generate some hype. Style would be somewhere between original Doom 2 maps and inspired by Sunder (and some other community wads of course), but somewhat lesser quality (and a bit less slaughter style) than Sunder of course:
My advice if you have something partially made, and are trying to motivate yourself, is to post stuff. Put up screenshots. Even, put up whatever incomplete pieces you already have, and let people see/play them. You'll get some "this looks cool!", the obligatory "lol u sux", but you might also get specific constructive criticism, and that more than anything might push you to want to get it out in finished form.
As something of a compulsive tinkerer when it comes to WADs, I can say I'd definitely load up and have a look at whatever gets released.
