A mod for Doom II: Hell on Earth
Back to Saturn X is a series of megawad/partial conversion projects for Doom II, designed to be compatible with DOOM2.EXE. Created by the Back to Saturn X Team, it features an exclusive texture set, original music, and a new palette and colormap.
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I finally beat this on Hurt Me Plenty difficulty today with a drifting Nintendo Switch Pro Controller and it felt like a greater achievement than a lot of Ultra-Violence pwads I've beaten on PC over the past year.
It took me almost a year to beat this, and I don't think that was simply down to my insistence on pressing onwards with a controller instead of giving up and switching over to PC. The maps are huge, sprawling affairs that can sometimes take upwards of an hour to beat (if you know where you're going) and just about every switch-press or item pickup triggers a huge monster ambush, which adds up to a gruelling marathon search-and-destroy loop that often left me more exhausted than other infamously difficult wads like Sunlust and Plutonia that have the good graces to make a solid level last only a little longer than the average coffee break.
The grind is exacerbated by the insistence on theming all 20+ maps with the exact same texture pack and style guide, leading many levels to blur together into an unremarkable treadmill of glammed-up METAL1 and SUPPORT3. Despite being a community project with dozens of mappers in the credits, homogenous texturing strips many levels of their identity, and that's more of an issue to me than believing that the whole wad is a cohesive adventure through a single installation. Every level is impressively detailed and architected, but about halfway in I stopped being impressed with air vents and shipping containers and lifts with accurate mechanical details because the wad was offering me nothing else in between.
When things are good though, they are very very good. It's worth noting that this is a pwad that's fully compatible with the original DOOM2.EXE from 1994 - there's no additional coding tricks or source port wizardy or anything else of that nature enabling the sprawling space vistas and underwater adventures. Many sequences really highlight the genius of the Doom engine in ways that the game's original programmers and designers didn't even come close to realising - every enemy type is used in increasingly devious ways and paired up with other members of the bestiary to challenge the player into maximising use of their arsenal and the environment. It's an eye-opening example of what Doom II is truly capable of, and effectively demonstrates why people are still making maps for a game that launched on MS DOS almost 30 years ago. Cool!
It took me almost a year to beat this, and I don't think that was simply down to my insistence on pressing onwards with a controller instead of giving up and switching over to PC. The maps are huge, sprawling affairs that can sometimes take upwards of an hour to beat (if you know where you're going) and just about every switch-press or item pickup triggers a huge monster ambush, which adds up to a gruelling marathon search-and-destroy loop that often left me more exhausted than other infamously difficult wads like Sunlust and Plutonia that have the good graces to make a solid level last only a little longer than the average coffee break.
The grind is exacerbated by the insistence on theming all 20+ maps with the exact same texture pack and style guide, leading many levels to blur together into an unremarkable treadmill of glammed-up METAL1 and SUPPORT3. Despite being a community project with dozens of mappers in the credits, homogenous texturing strips many levels of their identity, and that's more of an issue to me than believing that the whole wad is a cohesive adventure through a single installation. Every level is impressively detailed and architected, but about halfway in I stopped being impressed with air vents and shipping containers and lifts with accurate mechanical details because the wad was offering me nothing else in between.
When things are good though, they are very very good. It's worth noting that this is a pwad that's fully compatible with the original DOOM2.EXE from 1994 - there's no additional coding tricks or source port wizardy or anything else of that nature enabling the sprawling space vistas and underwater adventures. Many sequences really highlight the genius of the Doom engine in ways that the game's original programmers and designers didn't even come close to realising - every enemy type is used in increasingly devious ways and paired up with other members of the bestiary to challenge the player into maximising use of their arsenal and the environment. It's an eye-opening example of what Doom II is truly capable of, and effectively demonstrates why people are still making maps for a game that launched on MS DOS almost 30 years ago. Cool!