Uploaded July 2020 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago

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Pwad: Eternal DooM
Pwad name: eternal.wad
Maps: 26 - No Parking, by Jim Flynn

Author: vdgg

Comments:

This is a beast of a level! Watching existing DSDA demos helped a bit, but I still didn't understand what was going on in certain parts, not to mention absolute cluelessness about what to do? (where to go first, is switch X necessary, etc.) Only after beating the level myself in a more or less speedy way I became confident enough to really start building...

What we have here? A very ugly "city" map. The combat is very good throughout and it is hard not notice vanilla tricks all over the place (and become astonished by them). We have an "obligatory" voodoo doll, which this time needs to be "rescued" from the crusher, keens, stair-building madness area, "experimental rocket armor", incredible BFG building and more. Quite a lot for a single map.

Now about the demo. For a long time the monster killing rate was one monster per second, so with 335 monsters I was secretly hoping to get a time lower than UV Speed record (which I think is very good, honestly). After getting all the keys, however, this turned out to be impossible, as the remaining monsters were too far away from each other and most of the were the heavyweight ones. The main weapon is rocket launcher, for obvious reasons: rocket supply is almost infinite while cells are scarce and both plasma and BFG are not available without finishing certain tasks. Still though, I was switching weapons surprisingly often, and just once (at 0:27, RL-SSG) I think I made a mistake of a non-justified weapon switch.

Finally, let me try to explain this level a bit. It is so complicated that a few words may help. To exit, you must enter the park. To get there, you must find the blue key (hidden in a secret!) and press five switches, each of them in a small square room with a glass on one side and an arachnotron. One of them is accessible straight away (one with the voodoo doll). The others require keys or opening secret doors. At 0:12 in this demo the player is teleported onto a column, a rocket launcher, plenty of chaingunners and arch-viles, and a switch.
Pressing the switch activates a crusher which will kill all the arch-viles, provided they not teleport out to the same spot as the player, so it is best to stand still for a second under the chaingunners' fire, blocking the teleport destination.

Now, the three cyberdemon domain. The 3 cybers and 35 barons(!) can be crushed. The player is able to activate a slow-crushing mode (the most deadly), and do it no more than three times(!) (a switch consisting of three separate linedefs), activate a fast crusher by walking over a linedef and finally, stop the crusher action by walking over another linedef, which is at the end of a long corridor with a crushing ceiling and a baron at the end. On the automap the corridor is drawn at about 45 degrees angle, which means the baron is extremely difficult to bypass. I spent ages on getting out of this section alive (it starts at about 4:00). For a long time I was able to run to the end of the corridor and I was getting crushed at the very end. I was erroneously thinking that saving a few tics will be enough to survive, so I was "grinding", saving a tic here and there, but I was still getting crushed and I couldn't understand why. Well, I finally realized that sectors 583 and 570 have different floor heights (one of them has been raised), which is hard to notice because of a missing texture. Basically when the baron, which is 8 units taller than the player, has his head getting crushed, the player is doomed. Once I understood that I built this section pretty quickly.

Download this Doom replay from here: dsdarchive.com/files/demos/eternal/1194/et26x705.zip