/vr/ - Retro Games

>>5842060
Doom 2 would probably have been so different that it wouldn't be easily comparable to what it is now.

>>5842069
>Dead Simple, Refueling Base, Circle of Death, Inmost Dens, and The Living End are all fantastic maps that rival even a lot of good pwad maps,
This is true, Doom 2, for its criticism, has a lot of very good maps.

>plus Refueling Base was originally a Tom Hall map. Generally speaking, maps that were started by Tom Hall and finished by Sandy Petersen were arguably where Petersen shat the bed the least
That's not how I'd put it, because Sandy is unironically a very good mapper. I will say that some of the best maps of Doom 1 are maps which he recycled from Tom, like E2M2, E2M4, E2M7, and E3M3, but Sandy also manufactured such maps from the ground up, without using Tom's leftovers, with E2M5 and E2M6.
A lot of Doom 2's best levels were by Sandy for that matter.

>>5842334
Because with Doom 2 Sandy got a way bigger workload dumped on him than he should have, so though he put together quite a lot of good maps, a few of them are really weak, it doesn't help that Shawn is a mediocre at best mapper, and Romero, who's actually a really good mapper, doing less maps than he did for Doom 1.

>>5416413
>Sandy, who's really more of a tech person, than a creative person. He's not lazy, he's just isn't an artist.
He's a writer, he wrote for Dragon Magazine, and has published pen & paper games and modules (and still does). I'd say he's very artistically inclined in a way.

He's good at coming up with scenarios, but given his love for H.P Lovecraft, and the theme of Doom, then presented with all new technology, he experimented a lot with abstract ideas. He'd lay things out as dungeons in an RPG, stage encounters and come up with traps and setpieces, generally they play well, but some of them could uh, maybe not look that great.
Mind there was a time crunch, and he did half of Doom and Doom 2's maps, with initially rather limited familiarity with the engine, and they had to make sure it wasn't TOO taxing for computers at the time.

If you look later at Quake, Sandy did a bunch of maps, which all played great and looked great. Quake played a bunch towards Lovecraftian themes, which is his favorite, so he was very much in his groove in that way.

>>5212091
Adding Doom, Ultimate Doom, and Doom 2 together, he made just about half of all the maps.
Mind that for Doom 2, he probably wasn't meant to do as many levels as he did.

>>3595762
As much as I love the guy, I probably wouldn't want to play that.

>>3595769
Sandy is cool though.

>>3388727
I think he's overall a pretty cool guy, very /tg/.

>>3232616
I like Doom and Quake 2's music the best tbqf

>>3232645
It's more like Doom 2's level design is such a mixed bag, the first third of the game is mostly really good, then after that part the levels are either very mediocre or not good at all, mostly anyway.

Like, Ep1 and 2 of Doom is my favorite, and Ep3 and 4 feel not always quite as fun (but never bad), then the first 10 or so maps of Doom, I love them, but map 12 just completely makes it lose steam for me and it's hard to get it back after that point.

>>3232670
I think the problem is that Sandy Petersen, while not a bad mapper, was left doing more maps than he probably should have.

He's at his best when doing abstract and surreal maps, like a lot of Ep3, but the thing is, Doom 2's supposed to be Hell On Earth, and they needed some more realistic environments, like the city and industrial kinds, and since he was left having to pick up a lot of Romero's slack, he had to do some city levels, and Sandy just isn't good at making sensible or realistic environments, his style is also kind of noticeable, and you sort of feel it a lot, you get some fatigue with his maps after a while of playing them one after the other.

>>2616448
His levels weren't unvaried and bland, in fact they were crazy and spaced out in concept and full of odd visuals (many which were pretty ugly).

Some of them were genuinely not fun (Downtown or Mt. Erebus), but at least he put effort into making them.

>>2564790
There's quite a bit with Sandy.
Go to Youtube and simply search for Sandy Petersen

And yeah, he's a jolly guy. Lots of kids and grandkids.
He's a mormon, though he has a very firm grasp on what fiction and escapism actually is, which can't be said for a lot of others of his kind. In his mind, there was nothing that was actually controversial with Doom, it was cartoons to him, and you as the player are the hero fighting the forces of the devil, who are portrayed as the ultimate evil, which to him is absolutely reasonable, while at the same time a lot of other christian conservatives condemned Doom for depictions of satanic imagery

He's an OG fa/tg/uy, a bona-fide nerd, and that's what I love about the guy, way before Doom he was doing pen & paper stuff, he even wrote a Call Of Cthulu RPG out of his admiration for Lovecraft.

Sure, his levels were frankly really ugly, but they were also fun, and I can never hate the guy, he's too cool.