Evolution of the WAD E8: TeamTNT - Icarus & Eternal Doom 

"Searching" is one of the best MIDIs I've ever heard in any WAD.

Absolutely love these podcasts. I haven't been in the community long enough to experience this stuff, so it's great to get such wonderful insight. Also that forklift in Map01 of Icarus is fucking glorious.

In case someone missed it the "Icarus theme" at 6:00 is taken from Doom II's "The Demon's Dead" (Refueling Base and Suburbs) although who knows which metal band it originally came from :P Also anyone who's seeing the lag: it ends after about 20 minutes. Apparently this was a thing: "We've taken extra steps to make sure that every level is an exceptional Deathmatch level so that after you're done playing it alone, you can go through Icarus again and waste your buddies. Some maps have special features, and others reduce the level size for Deathmatch. In all cases, though, you'll know we had Deathmatch in mind when we made Icarus. And no more days of filtering through all the junky DM levels on the 'net."

Eternal Doom, for all it's flaws, does have some really groovy music. Sounds kind of Strife-ish actually.

I see a captnclever upload, I click instantly.

I greatly enjoyed the playthrough and discussion! 1995 was certainly a different time in the evilution (haha) of Doom mapping. Just some minor points on the soundtrack from Icarus: Alfonzo, you're right: the soundtrack is not entirely by Tolwyn, in fact he contributed 4 midis. Ty Halderman didn't write any of the music, most of it is by Jonathan El Bizri, Tom Mustaine (both of whom also contributed to TNT: Evilution's sountrack) and myself, with two contributions by Charles Li.

For some reasons I haven't played these maps before, especially Eternal Doom. Maybe it was more recently with modern ports, I heard about Eternal's legacy, became curious in history, but then saw it was all those files in the zip with this special executables, and I thought maybe I have to try it in Dosbox. I remember some old WADs doing their own tricks and not working properly. So, I left it. Or maybe I tried playing them and got so confused and annoying that didn't move on. Anyway, recently I went on with GZdoom, I don't think I have missed much, besides few bugs, and I tried to insist through some of the confusing levels. Some levels are huge but still not as confusing and fun to play. Some other levels, what would take 20 mins, took me 2 hours of switch hunting and looking at longplays. But it was worth it. Because there are some ideas, use of textures, lighting, special level tricks, there are some things that are beyond what I have seen even on Requiem and others. There are so many things, much more than the video can ever show. This WAD, if you can stomach the riddles, is a masterpiece especially for 1997 in terms of art and trickery, ideas, and so on. There are things I wonder, how the hell did they do that, and that's an impressive way to use Doom features for exposition. There is more, there is a consistent theme with the timetravelling, where you have the timetravel with 4 ways (-1000000 bc, 1250, +1250, etc,etc) the teleports will take you to sectors that are earth full of lava, futuristic destroyed city, etc,. of course you need to go to medieval. There is way more ideas, a secret level with a villa I think, where you enter a TV, the tv control materializes as a raising sector, there is much much more, a bank where you hack the password, or teleport in a cage of fire,. a revolving infinite stairs, that go from low to raise up the sectods, all by using assets and Doom level tricks. Ffffu,. this is epic, if you can get through it. Now that I know a lot of the riddles, I could replay it. It was beyond and did experimental things, that's why at some point it frustrated me as no other map, but go through it and... how I missed this gem?

The problem with levels as long (and largley empty) as Eternal Doom features, is that even when they do sneak in clever traps or combat, it's frustrating to be killed by it, rather than fun. You're not excited to replay the slow-paced, easy parts. You're not getting better at anything -- just going through the motions again. I think more map-makers need to be conscious of the idea that players will be replaying the map if they die -- either maintain the leisurely pace throughout, or keep the maps small and focused on interesting combat throughout. Plutonia's a game I can die all the time in, and still have fun getting back to where I was, getting better at each challenging encounter each time. Even with Evilution, though, I find it frustrating to simply plug my way through uninteresting hallway after uninteresting hallway of easy groups of hitscanners, only to get caught by the one challenging (sometimes not even challenging, just surprising on a blind play) trap in the map and have to go back through that slog again. For full disclosure, I haven't played it, but looking at Eternal Doom, but it seems obvious the monster placement was a secondary consideration to making cool map architecture. Unfortunately, since Doom's gameplay revolves around combat -- that's the way you're challenged, that's the way you interact with it as a game -- a map with poor monster placement is just ... not really a very good map. Jaw dropped when I saw the author of Dark Dome, because there's a night-and-day difference between that and his Master Levels (way more fun!) maps. Jim Flynn always does good stuff though; map 33 is quite funny.

5:05 map progression coincides with change in music, pretty cool

1:04:42 - Ah, hello Rookie! (Does he even have a proper name? I can't help but feel like he'd be a separate entity from the Vanilla DOOM guy.)

Now do an evolution of Memento Mori and Plutonia Experiment

Bring back EotW!

Pre-emptive like! :)

You guys keep talking a lot about Plutonia, are you ever going to do an episode dedicated to it?

In my mind, TNT Evilution is a better mapset than Eternal Doom, though there's a lot of weak maps in TNT, there's also a lot of really strong and good maps in it too, most of them I think range from decent to great, while only a few of them are just really boring and unengaging to me, compared to Eternal Doom, which fails to engage me much at all. I can see where Alexander gets the inspiration for it with stuff like Epic 2, but I also think that his formula is different, and far stronger.