Energia: Somewhere Lost in The Depths of Time
Doctor Who is a show that has somehow been able to stay on TV for over 50-years, despite most of its airtime being filled with terrible writing. Regardless of this, three guys took the time in making a 20-level-pack megaWAD inspired by the show, in the space year of 1995.The WAD puts you in the shoes of a un-named fighter agent the full forces of Hell on the planet Skaro, home of the evil Daleks, where you must fight your way out of the jaws of defeat. Your mission is to infiltrate Skaro, find the Time Disruptor, and tag it for transmission away from the planet.
Energia 1.01 running on Crispy Doom version 5.1, with Doom II
You first start the mod on the outside of Skaro, there's really not much to see or do in this level apart from looking at the architecture, and shoot one monster. To be quite honest, the map looks fairly unfinished. The mod as a whole looks unfinished.
A few levels are a ballache to play; level 07, for example, is a total joke, and quite unfun to play, it's a big-ass level with lots of dead-ends (saying that the end room is quite cool, same for the room with the unborn Daleks). The last level, map 20, is also annoying to play, just like with map 07, it's really big, and it might not even be possible to complete, or it might be a Bloodroom type of situation, where there's a switch that is hard to find - so be prepared to use the good old IDNOCLIP cheat.
What's quite a shame about this mod is that seemly a lot of the maps were made for deathmatch; with a lot of ammo, large, empty maps with no keys, all while there are hundreds of BFGs to kill the evil Daleks with -- pity there are often fewer than a dozen Daleks in sight. Admittedly, this WAD might be fun to play with a bunch of friends (especially via LAN so you can banter with each other), it would be quite fun to kill the Daleks with other Doom fans - but trying to play the WAD with other people in the first place might seem unlikely.
Overall, Energia feels like a mod that still has a lot to be desired, it has a few good ideas, but it could be better. What's annoying is that version 1.01 is seemly the only known public version available of this WAD. Looking up the authors online might have been a pain in the arse to do so, as not only do they all have quite generic screen-names like "Strangelove", "Watcher", and "Inspired Chaos", but also all of the websites/E-Mails listed in the README are now offline (and were never archived via archive.org), however, as luck would have it, one website in the file is still online -- dimensionality.com. From browsing around the website, it would seem that Energia was the first (or at least an early) project of Dimensionality, "a small computer gaming company".
The website links to two other Doom WADs made by Dimensionality; "The Ruin" for Doom/Doom II that is "A standalone version of one of Watcher's maps for Energia, including a port for Doom I", and the second WAD, "The Center" for Doom II; "A nasty Death Match level originally intended for Energia which was removed and released separately".
What would be amazing is if someone took this WAD, and made it better, updating the levels, touching up the graphics, and such, just like with the 1994 Tune-up Community Project. This WAD could become great, but a few things need fixing.
WELL, GOOD THING YOU CAN! In the README file for this WAD, James Gholston (Strangelove) writes;
Update: This was an amateur fanware project, and as such Dimensionality cannot, in its present state, perform any further development on this project. Anyone wishing to resume development, port to another engine, develop the two sequels, or other can contact me at:jamesg [á͉̲̜̲̪̯t̥͍̖̬̣] dimensionality [döt] com
On a final note, in the README file, from line 232 to 234, the author writes "[with thanks] to id Software for developing the Doom engine (although this goes without saying!), and the Quake Engine, for which Energia 2.0 is intended for... it may take a little while, tho..." it seems quite weird to be developing a game with one game engine, but intending to be updating it to another, more advanced one. For one thing, in Quake, it's full 3D (Doom wasn't true 3D, same for Wolfenstein 3D), you can also have room-over-room, you are also able to jump, and look up, and down. If any of the authors ever made the steps to move the mod to the Quake engine is still unknown, same goes for if they ever made a newer version beyond 1.01.
ReferencesI. Energia 1.01 - Doomworld/idgames https://www.doomworld.com/idgames/themes/drwho/ener1-01
I. Energia 1.01 - Internet Archive https://archive.org/details/ener1-01
I. Energia 1.01 - Dimensionality Dot Com (Direct download) http://www.dimensionality.com/download/ener1-01.zip
Written by Clive "James" Python, 30/10/18
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