I respect the hell out of the people who sit down to program .wads, the fan-made add-on levels to the original Doom that’ve helped a blocky, pixalated FPS first made all the way back in the tail-end of 1993 keep relevant and fresh even today. Maybe iD have turned their back on their primitive masterpiece, but there are talented people out there still who understand the need for sadistic level design and clever enemy placement, and my hat is off to them. For a while now, I’ve found myself enjoying a trip through such .wads as Cyberdreams, which tries to alter archetypical Doom’s formula by factoring in a pseudo-puzzle element based around seven-foot goat demons with rocket launchers grafted to their arms; or Alien Vendetta, which takes iD’s maniacal level design (back when they clearly cared) and added in a new sheen of spite. It’s because of them, because of their care and hard work, that I’m still as in love with Doom in 2008 as I was some fifteen years ago.
And then, there’s Wow. Something so painstaking awful that all those people that sunk hours and hours in to homebrew maps feel completely embarrassed by association.
Wow is a single room. It’s not a big room; it’s square and it has one corpse hanging from the ceiling in a seemingly random fashion. You start in a small indent in the floor and there’s a BFG and a few plasma cells slightly to your left. Other than that, the room is featureless -- no doors, no pillars, no enemies. No exit and, seemingly, no way to progress or finish the level.
At first glace, it’s just an empty room. After moving around for a while, it remains an empty room. You will decide it is an empty room and is the epitome of awful .wad construction. You will be proved wrong. Against all odds, it manages to get worse. Worse than an empty room.
The room’s not empty.
There’s a pit in the floor. You can not see the pit because it still has a floor over the top of it. The inside of the pit is more noteworthy; because no walls have been coded in, the entire underground section reverts to a hall of mirrors -- a section providing nothing but a constant stream of blurs, the type used by lazy animators trying to create an illusion of speed. It’s an error that even a basic bit of .wad coding could have cured but, instead of work on his flaw, the author decided to try and pass it off as intentional. Here’s his overview:
"A cyberdemon has escaped from a lab, where they are trying to find his weakness. He was injured by a marine,which was made short work of, and he was trapped inside a illusio-pit. Your job is to find it, and kill it."
Which causes the following problems:
By the way, they lied. The cyberdemon isn’t injured at all.
In fact, there’s probably more lines in this review than there are in the level's entire coding. Create square room, make hall of mirrors error, claim it was intentional, look like a prat. The legacy of one Paul Thrussell.
Perhaps this would be somewhat excusable if it was a .wad made back when the fan-made programs used to construct levels was still unevolved and misunderstood by most, but the most depressing factor of all? This was made in 1999. The only excuse imaginable is blinding incompetence.
Let’s close things out by enjoying the written prose of one of Paul’s level’s many, many fans:
For an injured cyberdemon, this one did a pretty decent performance in obliterating me as I mysteriously happened to fall through the floor, as if pulled by some strange vacuum, and than BLAM!!!, the screen went red and all I can remember was that I died! Paul Thrussell was an intelligent man for actually giving away his name and surname in the text file, so that everyone can see who was the mastermind behind this creation! GO! PAUL! GO! We're waiting for your next map!
Waiting we might be, but with a decidedly marked sense of dread.
