Game:

Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994)

Duration: 9:05

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WAD: Congestion 384 (cyc-384.wad)
Map: D2All (1-20)
Category: UV-max (100% kills and secrets)
Time: 8:11
Source Port: Crispy Doom 5.6.2 (exported to video using PrBoom+ 2.5.1.5)

Congestion 384 is a 20-map wad (+1 ending map, not shown in this video) by Cycloid. In the vein of earlier projects like Congestion 1024, each map is restricted to a minuscule 384x384 play area (for scale, the player's hitbox is 32x32). Enemies are allowed outside this area, but the player is not.

I wanted to try recording movie demos (multiple levels in a single segment) and decided to start small. I decided to try Congestion 384 since while the individual levels are too small and simple in my opinion to be much fun to optimize (I don't want to grind the same few seconds over and over again hoping to shave off a second), it comes out to a very palatable length when run as a set. When I watched the existing 11:54 demo on the Doom Speed Demos Archive, I saw that there was a lot of room for improvement, which filled me with motivation to give it a try myself.

I was originally aiming for under 10 minutes, but practice soon showed that I could be more ambitious than that. I'm pretty satisfied with this 8:11, but under 8 minutes should be possible with little optimizations here and there. After getting this demo I found that someone else had also run this wad for the "May Movie Madness" on the Doomworld forums, with a time of 9:05, so I'm glad I beat that.

This ended up being more fun than I expected after I started stringing the maps together! That said, the first ten maps were getting pretty frustrating with all the hitscanner RNG and one too many revenant punches to the face. After Map 10 it's mostly smooth sailing as far as survival goes, since there are few hitscanners after that, you have a super shotgun after Map 8, and Map 10 has a berserk pack to reset your health. Map 18 was an unexpected nemesis; I had two runs foiled by ghost monsters there and another by accidentally hitting the "end demo" button there (needless to say I rebound the key after that).

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