SIGIL

I just downloaded it and unpacked the zip file.  I noticed this in the .txt file:


E5M9: "Realm of Iblis"


I was curious, so I Googled it.  And this came up.


en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iblis


Gotta throw something in there for the Muslims, I guess.

Well I just played the first level, E5M1 "Baphomet's Demesne". I can't decide if I loved or hated the fact that Romero placed a Computer Area Map in the lava, and then went into DoomBuilder and hid almost ALL of the lines that it would have revealed. It's a decent troll, but I think it would have worked better in another level. Actually, maybe it's a plot thing; like maybe that type of tech no longer works in the deep recesses of Hell. Or should I say "Jahannam", now that the game's religious backdrop has been changed to Islam.

Memfy has summed SIGIL up pretty well here. As to what else can we say? Romero doesn’t know fun and needs to look to community made sets, particularly by the likes of Memfy and Cuppy to see how fun is achieved in this Doom day and age.

Griping out of the way, SIGIL is indeed something new, with new concepts, butt ugly in places, and incredibly beautiful in others.

It’s outside of the box, and for that it gets two thumbs up plus my other appendages even though I don’t care for it personally myself... also Buckethead music fucken rules

I played it the night it came out for free. I watched civvie 11 and the beginning of gman's videos before hand. I very much like it. It doesn't rely on having a bullshit number of monsters to be hard, and on UV ammo is tight which makes the levels intense which very much appeals to my tastes. I thought the level design was done well, maybe not great but good enough, and the coloring was really good in some areas with all the red. There are very very few areas the don't look good to me and even then it's not a deal breaker.

Now I know UV is meant to be really hard (like harder then Episode 4) and HMP is like a regular episode in terms of difficulty, but I still played through UV first, and it was a bitch to play at times and I had to save a fuck ton, but I still enjoyed it. There a few areas where ammo is a bit too tight to make it possible to progress and I've never had to legitimately punch a cyberdemon to death until I played SIGIL, but I did.

I like it quite a bit, I'm I glad Romero doesn't pander to the modern doom mapping bullshit most people seem to be fond of.

The link I posted pretty much explains it.  Iblis is a Satan-like figure that frequently pops up the Quran, the main Islamic religious text.  Doom has, since 1993, used predominantly Christian/Judaic names and symbolism to craft what little plot there was.  Below is a list.

GENERAL
- Inverted Pentagrams (The pentagram was used in ancient times as a Christian symbol for the five senses, or of the five wounds of Christ.  Eliphas Levi called it evil whenever the symbol appeared the other way up.  He wrote, "A reversed pentagram, with two points projecting upwards, is a symbol of evil and attracts sinister forces because it overturns the proper order of things and demonstrates the triumph of matter over spirit. It is the goat of lust attacking the heavens with its horns, a sign execrated by initiates."
- Upside-down cross (Obvious.  The cross is one of the main symbols of Christianity)

DOOM
- E2M8: Tower of Babel (Babel is a Hebrew city)
- E3M5: Unholy Cathedral (a cathedral is a Catholic church)
- E3M7: Limbo (Limbo is a Catholic doctrine concerning the afterlife condition of those who die in original sin without being assigned to the Hell of the Damned)
- E3M8: Dis (In Dante's The Divine Comedy, which draws on Christian theology, the City of Dis encompasses the sixth through the ninth circles of Hell.)
- E4M2: Sever the Wicked (Matthew 13:49)
- E4M6: Against Thee Wickedly (Psalm 139:20)
- E4M7: And Hell Followed (Revelation 6:8)
- E4M8: Unto the Cruel (Proverbs 5:9)

DOOM II
- MAP 30: Icon of Sin (An icon is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Oriental Orthodoxy, the Roman Catholic, and certain Eastern Catholic churches.

FINAL DOOM
- [from the manual]: Baphomet (Baphomet is a deity that the Knights Templar were falsely accused of worshipping.  The image of a goat in a downward-pointing pentagram was later adopted as the official symbol—called the Sigil of Baphomet—of the Church of Satan, and continues to be used among Satanists.

My point was that Romero felt the need to throw an Islamic figure in there, breaking the lore of DooM, most likely to appease the Muslims.  It's trendy for leftists to be extra cozy with Muslims these days even though they have a long history as rapists and kill homosexuals, and Romero is both a leftist and trendy.

huh... I doubt picking religious figures from Islam has any political agenda involved. Sheol is predominantly related to judaism, do you think Romero is trying to please both jews and muslims?

Inshallah, brother.

When I first played this with UV on pistol starts without saves, I couldn't finish some of the maps due to tedious amounts of trial and error, I found them a bit more bearable after beating them a couple days later, this mapset on UV with pistol starts is not recommended to play in one sitting in its entirety without saving, there's too many heavy amounts of tedium, too many barons and cacos are forced to be killed with a shotgun, if the filler placements would've been replaced with a couple of extra imps instead or god forbid have a decent arsenal in the first place, I would've found the mapset generally more enjoyable than how it is right now.
The deathmatch layouts are even worse believe it or not, they're just so bare, boring and awfully symmetric, they will not be the new classics that will revive the deathmatch scene, and for shame!

M1 (Favorite)- Strong opener that sets the mood and the gameplay very well, really wish the rest of the maps were kind of like this one with introducing new gimmicks like in here, the secrets are good fun too.
M2- Not as good as the first one, but still a decent map except for when you want to max the map, prepare to kill barons with the shotgun if you haven't found the chaingun secret and prepare to TRY and telefrag a moving cyberdemon that's in your face with some unclear teleporters.
Half the secrets are in a bunch of bullshit locations with no clues to them, so yeah, the mapset quality is lowering.
M3- Somewhat better than M2, but still too meaty for its own good, it feels like playing E2M9 where you have to just ignore the cacos so that they'll all kill the baron, though I doubt that's how it was intended to be played as I exited the map with a huge amount of shells and bullets and even a couple of rockets.
Those cages had so much good potential to be fun, but for some reason Romero decided to put the rocket launcher way at the end inside a secret instead of the end of the catwalk for example.
M4- The first really bad map, Paths Of The Bullshitness.
Right path : Two mazes filled with slow crushers that will kill you for making one mistake, there's also a misleading invulnerability secret that looks like you should use it for the crushers, but it doesn't help there, better use it in one of the other bullshitness paths. That soulsphere secret however is pure brilliance.
Middle path : This is the path you should use the invulnverability for as it's a dumb run through forced lava and the most pointlessly long door ever.
Left path : Not bad if you find at least one of the two rocket launcher secrets to kill that stupid pointless baron.
The end : Another fucking E2M9 encounter, FFS Romero.
M5- Even worse, while the previous map was only half-bad, this one goes full on.
Unclear progression with forced damaging floors, poor ammo balance, overly cramped, tedious encounters, broken cyberdemon telefrag mechanic (again, this time twice) and looks as ugly as a rushed Sandy Petersen map.
M6- Decent map, good weaponry is finally given after all those maps, though enemies are too easily skippable, the cyberdemon especially, I feel like if the towers were drastically lowered, the cyberdemon could've posed an actual threat instead of just pathetically shooting walls while you're above taking teleporters.
M9- Ok, this one's an actually good challenge, the cyberdemon arena could still use some work to make it more threatening by making the walls way lower, so that the cyber won't shoot up walls again like a doofus.
M7- Mixed map, a good layout but with some bullshit encounters like that shotgunner teleporter trap, quite a shame, because otherwise this would've been my favorite map.
M8 (Least Favorite)- Weak uninspired boss map, it's clear that Romero felt purely obliged to make a boss map, which is weird because his Doom resurgence sprung with E1M8B, which is an amazing boss map, so you will never know how disappointed I was with this one.

Rate : 3/5 : An ok episode, let's play Knee-Deep In The Dead again.

It's impossible for Romero to make an another Daikatana-level letdown with Doom maps, these are always welcome.

I don't have to same long-term experience with Doom most of you guys have only coming into the game around 2010 after my long Quake career, so I don't have the same familiarity with user-made maps most of you do. Many of the Sigil maps were interesting, and maybe a little annoying. I got lost really badly in one map for not falling off a ledge into a tiny alcove with a switch in it. Really??? I appreciate the effort but i don't see myself playing these as frequently as the original episodes. They're just not that fun.

Now if Romero does another Quake episode, ....fuck, then we'll have something to really talk about!

Looks like KMX E XII posted a review of Sigil. As usual, his assessment is very well-written and insightful, and although he had a more favorable overall view of the wad than I did, he explained his stance very cogently and I tend to agree with the majority of what he said. Check it out.

And Justince, I totally agree that if Romero ever does a Quake episode again it would be a dream come true. I think Romero really shines as a person who can create cool gimmicks and set-pieces tied together with interesting motifs. He approaches level design differently than a person outside the industry who just makes maps, because he's been involved with game design on a holistic level. And whereas the Doom engine is rather limited in what gimmicks can be cooked up, Quake's engine offers so many more potential gameplay scenarios and puzzle combinations that Romero's creative mind just has more to work with.