[Vigor] MAP10: Alma Matters (UV-Max Demo)
i'm not sure where to start with this. i've played entire wads since the first time i played this map and now. i've walked away from it entirely a couple times, thinking i couldn't get the demo done. and yet, here it is, in the flesh.
this is the second juza map in vigor, and it is in my opinion significantly harder than map05 (vamos), which i already found quite hard. while the total monster count is not particularly high, the playthrough itself is intensely exacting, with very little margin for waste in either health or ammo. and very few of the kills are free. before you even can get a non-pistol weapon, enemies start flooding in probably much faster than you can kill them. this section caused me the most fits until i came up with the strategy used here of grabbing the shotgun, the shells, and then retreating to the start. don't forget the chainsaw, you're going to need that.
the next bits are a lot less bad but not free. after getting the rocket launcher, i deal with the archvile that spawns by the red key right away. i lured away the hell knights from its teleport destination to keep ammo usage reasonable. while that's happening, there's an infight jamboree happening in the next room over. a bit of monster positioning and it's easy enough to wrap around the far stairs and clean it out.
the warehouse area is also not bad and is prime chainsaw territory, although you'll want to chaingun all the imps first. i try and convince the archvile to resurrect a shotgunner for some free extra ammo. i only had a little bit of success with that. the upper level is also not bad and awards the super shotgun. you'll note there's an unreachable bfg. we'll get back to that.
then we get two secrets in quick succession giving a berserk and megaarmor. this is where you really start having to make your health last. and of course, one of the toughest sections immediately follows. hit a switch and enemies start flooding in everywhere, along with a number spawning outside. there's a pretty paltry number of rockets scattered around to deal with this, but i make grabbing them a priority. it's also important to clear out enemies that can get stuck against cliffs as they can impede progress. oh and did i mention this whole area is covered in nukage and there's a very limited number of rad suits available? because there is. so hustle is required to get this done. we also get the plasma in a secret here. absolutely do not spend those cells yet, even if it's tempting with the pain elemental outside. the next little bit through the building isn't so bad... unless you didn't clean up the enemies outside, because a window opens giving them a clean shot. fortunately we already dealt with all of them.
then... the cyberdemon part. this might actually be the hardest part of the map. dealing with the cyberdemon immediately would take far too much ammo; we need that BFG. so we duck inside to the next area; easier said than done with the arachnotron in the way. the inside has an archvile, which you could use to reach a megasphere via archvile jump, but i just kill immediately. the area is very awkwardly shaped for the number of monsters spawning but it's not so terrible. after a quick trip through the next room, we finally lower the bfg... only to find that it's completely surrounded by teleporter linedefs. to actually pick it up you need to do a linedef skip. and when recording a demo the resolution of your turning radius is drastically reduced (from 2 bytes of precision to 1; also referred to as shorttics) so there's no guarantee that any particular setup will be possible. i had two setups available to me, a sr40 and sr50, and fortunately the sr40 worked on the second try. then it's time for the cyberdemon, which i lure into the tight crate area, in theory to get away from the pain elementals. in practice i got a pain elemental plus the cyberdemon. i don't know how i didn't die here, but i pulled off the two-shot kill. we still want to save those cells.
after a kind of anticlimactic outside area, and a trip back inside and a tough archvile spawn i spend a bfg shot on, we reach the map's most evil point. you get stuck at the end of a narrow corridor and four evil marines spawn to rip you to shreds. this is what i kept all the cells for and just let the bfg rip; this was the most consistent strategy i came up with during practice. there's one more guarding the exit, but it's blocked into a small area and can be finished off with rockets.
i both hate and love this map; it is a work of beautiful perfection and irredeemable sadism. and it appears this might be the first single-level uv-max demo of it, so i might even make this the first demo i upload to dsda.
get the demo: https://s3.yrriban.net/doom/vigor_map10.lmp
source port used: dsda-doom 0.27.5
sound font used: arachno.sf2
flags: -complevel 2
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