HALOWEEN.WAD

While looking at the README file that came with this early Doom I WAD, you will see something quite scary; the build time is said to be "About 25 - 30 Hours (On & Off)" - whenever a Dom WAD (especially one made in the 90s) was made under a week or so, it's usually a sign that the mod you are about to play isn't very good at all.

Despite the rushed time of this bad boy, HALOWEEN.WAD (and not "HALLOWEEN.WAD") is somewhat of a good WAD to play, for a WAD made in 1994, it doesn't really use a lot of the early tropes of Doom modding, the architecture is quite fun, and creative, there are no misaligned textures (or there might be, but none were found), and the monster placement was good, but saying that (slight spoiler (it's Doom, who cares about spoiler?)) the final fight with the cyberdemon was a little... muh... it wasn't really bad, but it could have been better, such as having the final room be bigger, and not just hand the player the BFG9000 (it would be cool if it was a secret to find).

One quite annoying thing about HALOWEEN.WAD is the authors need to replace the music track with the theme from John Carpenter's horror classic Halloween, this probably, would, might be fine, if it looped properly, and not fadeout, then start up again like it never ended. To keep with the music theme, why Doom authors (and also a lot of devs from the DOS-era) felt the need to place in cheesy music is unknown - is there anything wrong with just plane background music? There is a very quick, and easy way of fixing the annoying music issue: go into the settings, and turn the music volume waaaaay down, then double click on a warez copy of Metallica, Overkill, or any other heavy metal band your parents are sure to hate.

HALOWWEN.WAD running on Crispy Doom version 5.1, with Freedoom version 0.11.3

One of the highlights of this WAD was a little ironically the README file, that has some interesting things in, such as saying "try [to] first [this WAD] without any cheats", why would you cheat? It's not that hard! The README also writes "Plays solo only as 'Ultra Violent' or 'Nightmare' anything else isn't really Doom", just for context, Nightmare! difficulty is where monsters will attack more rapidly, demons, and spectres move faster, and several monster fireball types fly faster, oh, and also monsters will resurrect. Putting money on it, the author, Phil Pesano, has probably never beaten their own WAD in this difficulty. Or they might have, and their a god at Doom (but saying that, this might be their only Doom WAD, as looking up their name up online came with very little results regarding Doom).

One final note before finishing off, the README file also writes that "Halloween is just around the corner", but the file date for this WAD is the 18th of August 1994, well over a month before Halloween. It looks like Phil Pesano might have been a big fan of the holiday, much in the same vain as others are for Christmas (Halloween > Christmas), it's just a shame that this WAD isn't really Halloween themed at all - if it weren't for the MIDI John Carpenter music, you wouldn't really be able to tell that it was horror themed at all.

References I. HALOWEEN.WAD - Doomworld/idgames https://legacy.doomworld.com/idgames/levels/doom/g-i/haloween I. HALOWEEN.WAD - Wad Archive https://www.wad-archive.com/wad/HALOWEEN-WAD Written by Clive "James" Python, 08/09/18 ★