The Plutonia Experiment | HMP | Crispy Doom | Long OverDOOMed E5
0With TNT done, it's time for the more unforgiving half of Final Doom, which I took one look at as a kid in the 90s and said "lol nope".
Having now had the experience of going through various other rough-start map sets (e.g. Doom E4 and Heretic E4/E5), I was interested to see if things would get easier once I cleared the first few maps of Plutonia, and I was surprised at how some of its maps seemed somewhat reasonable (on Hurt Me Plenty, at least), and a lot of them are over relatively quickly. Meanwhile, the thing that might've hung me up the hardest in the early-game wasn't even combat-related, but rather the absurd and poorly-conveyed ending of MAP02.
While I may have been surprised at how quickly this went overall (I spent less time on this than TNT), there were certainly a couple of brutal snags. The worst was probably the collection of a half-dozen revenants and 2 arch-viles with zero cover in the immediate area (I still don't know what the intended "solution" is). MAP32 may have been intended to be the hardest map overall - and it certainly was ridiculous, and might be the one map in danger of wearing out its welcome - but I think the bits I had the hardest time with in isolation were elsewhere. MAP30 certainly would've been one of those if I hadn't lucked out considerably without even fully understanding everything that was going on.
While I knew Plutonia didn't have any original music, I was still surprised by some of the tracks they managed to work in - including multiple intermission tracks and even Doom E3's ending banner music (which might have the most amusingly appropriate usage of the WAD).
So with Plutonia down, do I feel more prepared to take on anything the community will throw at me? Hell no, but at least I'll hopefully have a bit of a point of reference for comparing community WADs when I get around to them.
(Note: I muted a couple of short bits of background music in the middle of this video, to avoid E1M1 music being content ID'd as belonging to some random entity in Brazil that is clearly very id-Software-related and definitely not illegitimately sending out sham claims for music they don't actually own any rights to. Really love how there's no "this claimant doesn't even own this music" choice in the dispute dialog.)
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