Get out your table knife, and remove your shirt.

Alas, this wad was another disappointing one, but even more so than my previous experience with Landmine (Doom Roulette #1). Today’s compost-heap wad is MEGA. A MEGA WAD. Megawad. These four maps replace the first four of “The Shores of Hell”, but lack even the original maps’ sense of design and composition.

Indeed, these often denoted secrets.

Imagine that in your right hand is a circular saw. Now imagine that you drop your pants down around your ankles, set the teeth of that saw right against the skin of your thigh, and squeeze the trigger as though it… as though it needed to be squeezed with a great amount of force, although it really did not. VRRRMMMMMMsdfidfgphltlphtlhtht. The unbelievable ripping pain of the steel slicing through flesh and muscle, let us say, is one of the great terrible wads. This self-mutilation is what your mind experiences playing the result of that illiterate troll-newbie’s first fifteen minutes with Doom Builder. This is the feeling which I desire when I embark upon a Wad Roulette journey.

Now imagine gently massaging your belly button while gently rubbing the blade of a dull table knife against your leg. This is the slightly confusing boredom which these four maps of FOREST.WAD produce.

I smiled, plugging the circular saw into my mind’s electrical outlet, when the menu cleared and the first rooms became visible. The first map is bad. It is a green sort of Wolfenstein. Right angles are heavily abused, there is little height variation, and the wimpy firefights combined with the surplus of health and ammo mean that this will not present a challenge. Party like it’s 1996!

Like nothing I've seen before.

But, oddly enough, in the later levels some interesting design presents itself, juxtaposed with the UNFORGIVABLE MISTAKES of texture misalignment, stuck monsters, awful layout, and et cetera. The third map, for instance, is focused around a fairly convincing three-story building (!!!), done with no trickery and no source port technology. The skyscraper is as ugly and alignment-free as anything else in the wad, but really the author demonstrated some real potential with such a structure.

When decoration is present, it is usually decently-designed, but most of the time it is merely custom-texture grafitti (blagh). Everything, visually, in this wad, evokes either 1996 or a first map; for instance, the 64×64 flat grid is only rarely observed, and possibly by accident. There are a few custom graphics, but nothing that adds significantly to the experience. Recall the table knife.

My belly button quivers with hope, though, at a few points where the author offers actually challenging firefights, like one particularly good (for ‘95 and a bad map) trap at the bottom of a (horribly designed) staircase. Perhaps more notable from a design-philosophy standpoint, the author never asks that the player complete the entire map before exiting. You may reach the exit in a minute or less, but clearly there is more of the level to be discovered, whether you be driven by morbid curiosity or a legitimate apprecation of the author’s art. This aspect pleases me, but it is a shame that the concept is wasted on such levels.

The most architecturally interesting bit.

Overall, the few decent moments and ideas are not near redeeming the poor thought or inexperience in every other aspect of the wad. Had Mr. Gagnon continued his work, he could have produced something quite worth playing, but this apperas to be his only release. This is one to be played only if you have a ravenous taste for the mediocre and you enjoy the (brief) navel rub simultaneously with the (tedious) table-knife mutilation.

-Rusty