Lately I've been on a bit of a Doom kick. I always get the urge every so often, but the itch has really been getting to me the past few months really.

This is an overdue post that I started writing at the end of May after spending the month playing through Zone400. In this case, I found the wad thanks to the DoomSpeedDemos Twitch channel. I don't remember which map I saw on it, but it looked neat and so I made sure to look it up later.

The wad gets its name from a restriction on all the maps (save for map32) where only 400 lines are used. It's not a lot of lines, and you can see see the literal cuts that need to be made for it, like elevators often being triangle-shaped to save a line. (For reference, the first map of Doom 2 is 370 lines. The second map is over 500.) Despite the pretty hefty limitations, it offered a ton of variety, creative fights, and was a great challenge to pistol start.

Even without the linedef limit, there was a fun sense of consistency to these maps. There were sort of design rules in place for every map. There was a pool of items being used across every level with some appearing on the map directly and others being the secret item. After a point I'd find myself hoping to find "the secret with the plasma rifle" because so often was it a reward from level to level.

I was really impressed with its encounters! The maps are generally fairly small due to the line count, but there were a lot of tight fights. I think the rocket launcher and later weapons usually being secret only for quite some time allowed for fights with fewer and weaker monsters to be more dangerous. SSG clears out enemies, but slow reload. Chaingun can't cut through large numbers fast enough...

There was a little trick used often that I was impressed with how effective it was. Since it would be a bunch of extra lines to make spaces outside the map to store monsters that teleport into encounters, the wad liked to have walls drop in front of the player with monsters inside instead. But rather than just dump them all in your face, the lines would be set to teleport monsters when they moved towards you to lord knows where. Some monsters then would be teleported, while others would shoot at players first. Since teleports don't happen if the space is already occupied, it made it hard to know if an enemy was going to keep going towards you or suddenly be elsewhere behind you.

It had a cute little motif where the exit door always opened into a long and narrow corridor with demon corpses on the ground, a real fun play on how often there are some live ones that don't matter in there.

Then eventually it did start sometimes having live ones. A little Schroedinger's Demon situation.

It covered a wide range of themes, breaking itself up into mini-episodes of your staple Doom locations. Techbases, Urban environments, Hell, and even a Heretic textured one. With only 500 lines, it wasn't the prettiest wad out there, but I was continually impressed with how good it looked. I want to make maps myself more often, and wads like this feel very easy to study, with this one excelling in basically every aspect.

Limited lines means not going overboard with detail, finding ways to cram monsters into small spaces, and figuring out how to make maps that aren't just large boxes. Every invisible tripwire line that starts an encounter, every door added, and every change in elevation eats into that limited budget. How many ways were found to reuse space, and the number of surprises able to be packed in each map are really impressive.

Honestly, it's one of my favorite wads now. Were it not for those occasional signs of triangles where rectangles were more natural, you wouldn't even know that it had such a limit imposed on itself.

As always, I took a ton of screenshots during my playthrough, so here are ten that stood out to me when flipping through them. Apologies for no alt-text. It's almost bedtime and if I don't post now it'll be another 2 months probably. This isn't even the latest wad I've finished.

Early into the first map.

Cool sky.

Lots of different paths visible, and I believe the space in front of the player was originally closed off with monsters inside.

Verticality still played a role. This spot had players on the middle level with enemies showing up on top and also coming up from below. It was the first map to give me any trouble

And even without using actual lines, it was really good at creating scenes. I have another screenshot of this from a second before that's behind the cacodemons, with that pillar in the middle blocking the spider mastermind, which was quite the surprise!

Just an action shot in the Heretic section.

One of the urban maps surprised me when there was an entire rooftop section.

And it didn't pull its punches. This was a fun door to open.

The first secret level was a creepy low-monster count but also low-visibility level with a cyberdemon stalking you. For the second one, the limit was thrown out the window and you got this massive outdoor jungle level.

Another great encounter. A scary amount of hitscanner chaingunners, able to be taken out in one shot thanks to the barrels behind them. Don't feel too smug though, as later on you pass through here again with an archvile up there reviving everyone!