Game:

Doom II: Hell on Earth (1994)

Duration: 0:57

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49 quest
good punch luck on the first vile ✅
good punch luck on the first two spectres ✅
acceptable infighting in the chainguner room ✅

copy and pasting this from the old PB so it doesn't get lost
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Some broader thoughts on this project:

When I was participating in the most recent winter demo month, a few maps from this WAD came up. I checked them out and went to the archive to check the current records, and to my shock there were basically no runs. My experience with Plutonia sequels up untill now has only been 7 by which time things were firmly off the rails so I didn't really know what to expect here. I didn't know the story behind this at all, that this was the pebble on the tracks that started the entire trainwreck. I thought it was very strange that a WAD of this level of notoriety had nearly zero demos, so I set out to fill the max table. A couple of months went by because I had other stuff going on, and here we are now. Andrea calls it "underrated" in her MAP01 txt, and after having seen it all I definitely agree.

Difficulty-wise the thing is pretty easy. You'll very often just find a huge pile of more cells than you could ever spend and a BFG less than 10 seconds into a map. The adjustments to the monsters are (with one glaring exception) not offensive. The imp is replaced with a slower zombie that fires a two-rocket volley, almost always eliminating itself in the process. The mancubus curiously recieves a range nerf, with its projectiles expiring a medium distance away. Everyone's favorite custom monster the evil marine is here too, but he now has a BFG in addition to his plasma gun. This makes any maps on which he appears 100% about finding ways to manage him. You'll notice that, to my great shame, there's no MAP23 in this dump. There are intentional ghost monsters on that map and one of them is this guy. I never was able to get even close to killing it without IDDQD and even then it took far, far longer than is realistic to survive. Revved must have had a plan for it though becasue his E1 is an abortive D2All, so I wonder if there is a way. It's possible to not trigger the lines that start the crushers that prepare the ghosts so speed is definitely doable but that ain't my style.

There's some neat stuff in here, some flashes of brilliance. "Pushable" blocks, the water ambient sounds and splashes, breakable walls, the way the teleport maze in MAP09 flashes to guide you instead of being pure trial and error (read: using the automap). Getting a bunch of cells and a BFG is just fun. The number of times a wall just bursts open with barrels revealing a monster that is instantly killed is somehow greater than one. The level design is in most cases unobtrusive. Most of my frustrations playing through this came from the evil marine. When he wasn't on the screen I was generally having a pretty good time, if a confused one - but I was definitely not shy about cracking open UDB if a switch did not readily reveal its secrets.

There are also of course a lot of what the wiki calls "rookie map errors." Many, many lines can and will be skipped whether you intend to or not (which can be helpful sometimes! MAP03 is a great example.) A good number of the keys are pointless. I don't understand why the teleport fog and sound were removed. Figuring out what a switch did is nearly always a nightmare and progression is routinely unclear and frustrating. Often a key is not actually needed to open a door, but a line that you end up crossing to collect the key will remove a barrier in front of the door so that you can open the actual door. Critical switches have no interaction sound. The backtracking required in any map where you can't devise a way to skip a key can be maddening. All of that said however there are no uncompletable or (with the exception of a couple of bugged secrets) unmaxable (theoretically, looking at you 23) maps which I began to fear more and more as the set wore on. MAP30 being a straight up copy and paste of MAP12 with an icon at the end is certainly a bold choice.

So should you play Plutonia 3: Going to Surface? If you're deep enough in this nonsense to be reading this, I think you should. Just maybe IDDQD your way through the meaner evil marine ambushes.

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