AT A GLANCE: BEHOLD! From the depths of the screwed up mind of George Fiffy comes this horrible, disgusting, sorry excuse for a Doom map. In all of my Doom playing/editing years, I have never come across such an ugly, putrid, vile mass of sectors and linedefs in all of my life. From the horrible monster placement to the overloading of weapons and ammo, this, my friends, is a map that George Bush Jr. himself would declare a war against. And I'm just being nice introducing it.

DESCRIPTION:

Wow! It's like "Barrels 'o Fun," but without the FUN!

The text file included with this dry-heave inducer is named "!!READ!!.TXT", so my brain has no choice but to read it (because anything with that many fucking exclamation points has to be important!).

"After fighting your way through the final end boss of INFERNO, you return to the plannet Earth after a mission well done. You, B.J. BLAZKOWICZ, were part of a big N.Y.C. ticker tape parade to celebrate the end of hell's reign of terror! You then go back home to your wife and kids in your 5'th Avenue penthouse."

Holy crap! What a striking revelation! You mean to tell me that America has found a way to boost human life expectancy so that B.J. Blazkowicz, supposed WWII hero, can live on about a century and a half into the future and battle evil on Mars and Hell?! No fucking way! LAY IT ON ME, REOL!

"While watching Wheel Of Fortune, right when you think you solved the puzzle, a special report interupts your programming. You change the channels, but ALL the stations are airing a report on something horrible happening near the top of Mount McKenley. Daemons from hell are building a main HQ building to try and take over the earth! This gets you very angry, after all, you thought you solved the puzzle on Wheel Of Fortune! You knew what you had to do. You had to go to Mt. McKenley and teach those ingrates a lesson before things get out of hand. You arrive to the base from Hell atop Mt. McKenly. It's a big metal building filled to the rim with hell's creatures. You walk in and find you are too late. Hell already started throwing Earth into total chaos, but YOU can reduce the effect!"

Awwww... now I feel all important! And those fuckers made me miss my damn game shows too. THEY WILL PAY! I guess I will have to go to Mt. McKenley/McKenly/WhateverTheFuckItsNameIs and teach those hellspawns a thing or two (which shouldn't be too hard - after all, Hell always seemed to be packed with ammunition and guns and medkits and such).

I guess this is "the great plunge" that Georgey-Poo was talking about.

"Reports state that 24 hours ago they started sending daemons out into the world, through a special EXIT switch scattering these bastards all over the plannet. You trip an infared beam, and the creatures re-wire the switch to only bring you to E1M2, and all enemies are on full allert to earch and destroy you! Most of them are hiding secretly throughout the building waiting for you! You never knew anything about their technology anyway, so you're objective is not to fix the switch, but to clear the "metal halls of hell" so no more creatures will wreak havoc on Earth. After all, if all are dead, no one can fix the switch, and no one can transport themselves to the four corners of the globe! Go in there and kick daemon butt! If you fail, Hell on Earth will become a force too great for all armies to face."

OH NOS! I must go in and stop them or all will be lost! It's do or die, now! Way to give a lame excuse why the switch sends the player to E1M2 after you exit, REoL! I guess those monsters outsmarted me, B.J. Blazkowicz, super space-marine, animated cadaver, and savior of humankind!

But that was just the story, ladies and gents - there's much more patheticness in the rest of the text file, such as:

"FLAWS: There's only ONE graphic flaw throughout the entire level! When walking through the doorway to "the great plunge" (you'll know it when you see it), you'll see a band of gray and black "snow" in the doorway, if you're looking back at it walking through it. That's the only time that happens, and the ONLY graphics mistake made.

That's great, Fiffmeister, but I found another graphic flaw! THE ENTIRE LEVEL! But am I just exaggerating this? Is this map really that God-awful? You be the judge!

Hey you stupid demons, COME AND GET ME! Oh, wait, that's right! You're STUCK TOGETHER and can't move! Bahahahaha! Stupid REoL.

THE MAP: I guess the place that makes the most sense to start in would have to be the beginning.

The first room, the one that Georgey-Porgy stuck you in, is a square-shaped room with a bunch of doors. Each of these doors either leads you to a bunch of monsters, a bunch of powerups, a bunch of monsters AND powerups, or another fucking room with more doors that offer the same. Leave it to REoL to bring back the irritating room-door-room-door scheme of bad Doom maps everywhere. Every place is crammed with monsters, so much so that some can't even leave their desired positioning because they occupy each other's space like obese Siamese Twins.

From the many screenshots, you can see that this map has tons of powerups and ammo in it. You see, folks, King_REoL suffers from what the Doom editing community likes to call "Overactive Thing Placement Syndrome," in which the mapper tends to place tons upon tons of items/monsters or whatever in their map because they soon find out that item placement in Doom is damn easy. On a related note, it seems that the Fiffster, here, loves to put Explosive Barrels everywhere, thus making it all the more easier to kill the denizens of hell than ever (as if the ammo overload wasn't enough - I swear to God, it looks like a friggin' armory threw up in this shitbox). Some rooms in this map utilize these barrels as if there were a special method to kill monsters, a la "Barrels 'o Fun" (Map 23) in Doom II. I could only imagine what REoL was thinking when he designed these areas:

Here, the monsters are arguing over who is the first to die. I guess they can't take the embarrassment of being in REoL's map any longer.

FIFFY: Hey, you know what I think would be a good idea? Let's put a ton of demons in some room and enclose them in barrels so that when a player blows up one, he kills all of the demons in the room because all of the explosions! It will be a cool effect! HA HA I'M SO CLEVER AND THE GREATEST DOOM MAPPER WHO EVER LIVED!
VOICE IN FIFFINATOR'S HEAD: But George, what would you use all of your extra ammo on now that a bunch of the monsters in the map can be killed like this?
FIFF-A-RAMA-DING-DONG: Shut up brain! I don't need you anymore! I will release my SUPER-PROFESSIONAL maps to the public and everyone will love me! YOU HEAR? I WILL BE LOVED BY ALL! Now I shall silence you with Drano and Alcohol! DOWN THE HATCH!
VOICE IN FIFFY'S HEAD: NOOO!! Curse you, GEORGE! CURSE Y..DFASSFDSklasjIUYKJFHvoiuopnlkdfGGGHHHH....

It's always great to see that those Doom tutorials paid off - simple doors everywhere, and the "Overactive Thing Placement Syndrome" to ensure that I have enough ammo to kill everyone in the level, the rest of the episode, and everyone else in Hell ten times over.

GAMEPLAY: The level was nowhere near as "REoL TOUGH" as King_REoL would like one to believe. Sure, it was challenging in the beginning, but then I opened a door, picked up a better weapon and tons of ammo, and I was in the clear. REoL TOUGH indeed. To balance out the ammo : health : monster ratio and give this map a suitable challenge, 'ol Kingy would have to add 1000 Barons of Hell, 30 Spider Masterminds, and 25 Cyberdemons (and I wouldn't doubt that this was his first intention when he was designing this binary wasteland). As far as other modes of play are concerned, I'm glad that this map doesn't support Cooperative OR Deathmatch, because it boggles my mind as to how even REoL himself would implement such features. But if it does, and he forgot to mention it in the text file, then he must be a worse Doom mapper than anyone has ever thought... and I don't believe that is technically possible. But Jesus, since this map even exists - that's proof enough that there is no God up there in that void dubbed "Heaven."