Sequel to Escape from Phobos, Snake arrives on Deimos with a call from Carmack. With the Red Skull power reserves down to 20% all hope in escaping is now lost. It’s over. Unless a miracle happens to stop the invasion. With nothing else left to lose, Snake should head to Carmack’s office, reactivate the portals, grab the Yellow Skull from the Deimos reactor and take the fight back to Natas, the demon’s home world.
First entry for the Escape series that merges the continuity of both DOOM and the conclusion to Escape from LA, introducing us to Snake after he awakens from a fifteen year cryosleep having been imprisoned by UAC. His past actions helped them gain power which has now lead them to tampering with things they shouldn’t have. CEO of the Deimos Moonbase, Carmack, gets in touch over a monitor feed demanding Snake to help. He must seek out a Blue, Yellow and Red Skull to power up the shuttle on Phobos and take it to Deimos to save him before the demons come knocking at his door.
Having not seen Boom’s friction sectors used to any large extent in other releases, Eater29 designed a swamp themed level that takes full advantage them. Trudging around the mud slows movement down to a crawl while having no effect on monsters, leaving players no choice but to adapt and pay attention to their surroundings.
CALDERA is a single level demonstration WAD exclusive to the author’s own PsyDoom port that brings over the PlayStation version of DOOM to PC. It was built to showcase various modding features from a backported and extended PSX DOOM engine, a hellish themed level blending together open and tight quarter environments utilising new textures pulled from OTEX and an extensive use of coloured sector lighting.
It’s been 10 years since the events of Duke Nukem Forever and things have changed, Duke is no longer seen as the heroic figure he once was, his name has been dragged through the mud because of fans digging too deeply and is now forced to lay low from the public eye. Turns out the whole ordeal was an elaborate smear campaign by the aliens no longer satisfied with just his death. Having tracked down a warehouse containing the beta materials for Duke3D and DNF, this becomes a city wide journey to reclaim those files and clear his name.
Over the years I’ve always typically associated ck3d’s levels to have similarities to Roch in style, going for these richly decorated urban playgrounds like Poison Heart, otherwise leaning more toward dark moodier pieces like Rural Nightmare and End of the World. Then to my surprise a speedmap made in three days is suddenly pushed out the door that shared nothing in common with prior bodies of work up until that point, perhaps one of those occasional experimental excursions before returning to familiar ground, but this mapping style eventually sticks around going forward as development on his Blast Radius episode went into full swing.
Duke has been invited to the EDF Research & Development, a laboratory focused on mining and examining green Terratin crystals serving as ammunition for an alien tech weapon, the Shrinker. Just before descending deeper underground to the main labs, an explosion sends a raging fire into the room behind him as familiar roars invade the halls. Duke must continue underground to find an alternate exit, all while cleaning house and solving a few problems along the way.
Special Forces officer Captain Percy Freeman has been partnered up with Barney to track down and assassinate the renegade Colonel Kurtz. The situation soon takes a turn for the worst when higher ups in the chain of command decide they want Freeman dead. To make matters worse, someone out there has been breeding an undead army of mutants who are rampaging across the jungle causing problems for everyone. Whether completing the mission may lead to answers, it will be a struggle for survival to discover an end to this madness.
Faces of Death was a mean spirited level that stacked the odds against players using Battlelords from start to finish. I remember playing that gauntlet without much fondness, no thanks to its counterpart from the Playstation port of Duke3D, having been included as a secret level during its fourth episode. BATTLEDUKE is an episode inspired by this particular scenario, dedicating several maps to follow in its style, one which that hasn’t been explored much within the mapping scene.