#642: MAYhem 2019: Blood for the Doom God!

Gothic horror community pack for Doom sure is a bloody ride

Initial release: 2019 (idgames release February 5th, 2020)
Platform: PC (Doom mapset for MBF-compatible source ports)
Developer: Doomworld
Mods used: personal edit of Gothic Doom, High Noon Drifter 1.2c, Earthbound palette, RetroFX with Dither, Flashlight++ 9.1

I’ve been thinking about it for a while and I think at this point we can probably safely say that Doom is no longer just a game: it’s a platform, something we can use to make our own games, craft our own experiences. After all, the community has been lifting ideas, textures and more from other properties for decades: everything from total conversions themed after popular movies to stuff like QDoom making use of (at the time) cutting-edge mapping features to create a reasonable facsimile of the original Quake 1 experience. (I actually owned, and might still own, a copy of Marc Pullen’s Fragging Fanatical album, composed for QDoom.) And when Daniel “Tormentor667” Gimmer successfully ripped the textures from the classic Build engine shooter Blood for the community to use, he was adding to an ever-growing pool of themes and ideas the community would build on. Which leads us to MAYhem 2019, and High Noon Drifter.

MAYhem is a yearly (well, minus 2021) month-long mapping challenge held every May, usually with a particular concept unique to that year. Sometimes it’s a mapping restriction, like restricting designers to a 2048x2048-unit space; sometimes it’s a broader theme, like a loose interpretation of Super Mario Brothers or Pokemon. 2019 was the year they went full gothic horror; making heavy use of textures from Blood as well as Clive Barker’s Undying (a game I was disappointed in but couldn’t fault for atmosphere) the denizens of Doomworld have crafted an impressive, if uneven, megawad for MBF-compatible source ports.

The usual disclaimers: I’m a firm believer in playing games however you want to, and while MAYhem 2019 features a large collection of new monsters, items and weapons, I chose to apply a few mods to enhance the experience. For starters, I used HorrorMovieRei’s excellent Gothic Doom reskin mod — specifically, I stripped out most of the sprites, leaving only the cacodemon, arch-vile and zombieman replacements. This latter one made the zombiemen — otherwise presented in the wad as headless versions of the default sprites — identical to the wad’s chaingunner replacements, but I personally thought that made it a little more interesting, particularly since the chaingunners have been somewhat defanged here. I also used Ashtralfiend’s “Earthbound” palette, which did a lot to bring the game more in line with the classic Blood palette. Old standbys RetroFX with Dither and Flashlight++ 9.1 — the latter set to a very dim, shoulder-mounted flashlight, similar to what you’d find in the interwar years of the 20th century — were also included. And last but not least: High Noon Drifter.

While MAYhem 2019 includes two new weapons — a flamethrower, and a Necronomicon that casts powerful spells from health — I made the choice to include High Noon Drifter in part because I felt it fit the Blood theme very well. “Occult gunfighter” is a fun character archetype, embodied in the likes of Caleb, and the description for the mod certainly seems to hint at the concept, nevermind the use of an occult staff and even that demon mask that transforms you into a giant monstrous entity. It’s great fun to play and made most of my time with MAYhem 2019 an eldritch blast; the downside is, it doesn’t really handle slaughter very well unless you’re willing to turn on the option to allow the transformation to be infinite (i.e. not use your magic ammo.)

MAYhem 2019 is something of a mixed bag. There are some truly great maps, there are some less great maps (none are truly bad, not even joe-ilya’s) and then there’s the slaughter stuff that borders on old-school at times. The finale in particular is essentially a puzzle — the proper way to do it is to use the central platform (which hurts to stand on) as a shield from the arch-viles and to take them out as quickly as possible so you can focus on all the other bullshit coming your way. It’s my impression that a lot of people struggled with this fight as well as the final map in general (that crusher sequence, arrrgh.) But beyond the slaughter maps — of which there are only a few — it’s honestly an extremely fun experience, especially when it moves away from more abstract designs towards something DoomCuteish.

Quite a few folk from around the Doom community answered the call to map or compose for this set. While the soundtrack has a few things sourced from elsewhere (including, obviously, Blood, but also such diverse sources as Terraria and Breath of Fire II) there are a few bespoke tracks as well, including one from Jimmy Paddock. Mappers include several community project veterans, among them Ryan “obake” Anderson, Artem “DukeOfDoom” Orekhov (for whom this was his second project), Walter “daimon” Confalonieri (who has contributed to so many community projects that his Doomworld forum title makes note of it), NeedHealth, Worm318, DMPhobos, Cacoward winner A2Rob, whirledtsar (who seems to be semi-retired from the community in the years since), speedrunner, speedmapper, and slaughter aficionado Bdubzzz, and slaughtermap extraordinaire Benjogami. We also get the irreplaceable, multi-Cacoward-winning Darryl “dobu gabu maru” Steffen, who has hosted the DWmegawad Club for years and years in addition to having hosted several community projects of his own. The finale map was constructed by community pillars rd and Nine Inch Heels, the third (and so far final) collaboration between the two. Matt “RottKing” Cibulas contributes a map with his typical idiosyncratic style and naming convention. Ilya “joe-ilya” Lazarev — a speedrunner whose maps are strictly love-it-or-hate-it, contributed two maps, one of which was a collab with fellow Doomer Board Project veteran Redead-ITA. The always unconventional Mike “Impie” MacDee, man of a million total conversions, contributed no less than three maps, all of which rank among my favorites in the set. And last but not least is James “Obsidian” Caldwell, who aside from leading the project, contributed both a regular map as well as the credits map.

There are a ton of new monsters, most of them outright replacing or modifying existing ones. Some are the same, just with new graphics; others might resemble their default appearance but have slightly new behavior. Some, like the bat-summoning vampire, do both! Brand new monsters include the skeleton, which runs around like a naked revenant and throws bones at you; the arachnorb (and its bigger relative) which resemble the brainy demons from the base game but without their spidery platforms, floating around and throwing plasma bolts at you; deathcubes (resembling the Icon of Sin’s monster spawners) that spit more plasma at you; mummies, ghosts, flying explosive lightning balls (and the Tesla coils that spawn them), l’il Cthulhus, chainsaw maniacs, and more! It’s a shockingly large monster roster that doesn’t map cleanly onto the original bestiary, allowing for some interesting encounter setups.

In spite of some hangups towards the late game I had a really good time with MAYhem 2019. If you’re looking for a solid gothic horror experience, especially if you like Mike MacDee’s maps, this is an excellent choice.

-june❤

MAYhem 2019 can be downloaded from /idgames.
This review has been crossposted with additional level notes to JG3D.