Doom Musings: The Plutonia Saga

Well with the new interface that Blogger has, I just have to say it, and I've said it before, and yet these stupid super-corps never ever understand things every time a customer complains about them.

IF IT ISN'T BROKE DON'T FIX IT

There. If you must know, the last Doom Musings was published today at 8/1/2020. But it says it was published on July 15th, which was actually the day I started writing on it, which sucks because I finished it on 8/1 instead. I decided to start this particular Doom musing at 8/1 and will hopefully get it published by 8/15, as I would usually do these bi-monthly and such. But I bet they'll be saying it was published today. Hell, I'm looking at the "Published" date right now and I'm annoyed by it.

So let's move on to the topic of Plutonia. Everyone by now knows it's one-half of Final Doom, and everyone knows it's basically the ultimate challenge as far as IWADs go. Made by the Casali brothers, at that point known members of TeamTNT and created a few levels in Evilution, their goal was to make Doom levels for battle-hardened players. Nowadays, there's plenty of those who have managed to beat far more than the Plutonia Experiment and probably think that standout level Go 2 It is too easy. And then you realize that the Plutonia wad features lots of green, brown, newer rock textures, as well as challenging, mostly claustrophobic encounters often with chaingunners, arch-viles, and revenants in notably tricky places.

The weird thing is this all holds up well to this day, as even now, I can still feel the challenge of playing it. The regularly tough levels are still regularly tough. Hunted, well-known for being the arch-vile maze, is still a harsh maze, and the secret maps do what they can to really drive their points home, with Go 2 It being a benchmark for slaughtermaps. Some of those annoying gimmicks like resurrecting chaingunners from beyond areas (MAP10, MAP15, and MAP27 all have this gimmick). The maps are original, but seem to have homages to classic IWAD maps to give you a small sense of familiarity overall. Plutonia not only holds up well, it even gets its own MIDI pack thanks to the community wanting to pitch in and change the IWAD music, as well as a few sequels.

Plutonia Revisited isn't necessarily a sequel per se. It is a community project, you know, like Evilution, which was a community project. Regardless, it's all about making maps in the Plutonia style, with the homage to levels here and there. It all is generally good, although one cannot help but think that a lot of these maps draw a lot of inspiration from Plutonia's levels, both in name and in design. MAP09 Ruined Kingdom draws heavily from MAP08 Realm. Maps 21 and 22 share slots with the maps they are inspired by, and so forth. Even with these obvious-seeming homages they're not to be untouched, as they all do what they can do well.

Except MAP15 Helix. This map actually sucks.

Finally I'll talk a bit about Plutonia 2. This one's an easy fan favorite. It takes general design styles from Plutonia, and makes them bigger and better overall. The short but hard romps of the original Plutonia are thrown off the table, but in their place you'll find medium-sized levels that all play with similar styles. There's generally no room for error in a lot of cases, and every map feels both fresh and interesting without relying too much on homage-y stuff. Overall though these maps are surprisingly well-balanced too. So if it isn't obvious, this one's my definite favorite of Plutonia's so-called "saga"

There's been plenty of other Plutonia-styled maps. Plutinya was a megawad for 1024-styled maps, then there's Skepland, a three-level wad designed to screw with speedrunners profusely more or less. These don't live up to the reception of the others, but they don't need to, as they are all still quite good challenges overall.