H2H Xmas for Doom: Santa Slayer.

Every time December rolls around, I always feel a compulsion to writer about a Christmas-theme video game. There’s some pretty okay ones, but there’s one that’s always been on mind and have thought about writing about it, but just felt there wasn’t enough there to justify it.

That game was Duke: Nuclear Winter, an official expansion for Duke Nukem 3D by Simply Silly Software, a mod that while has some decent Christmas theme to it, really feels slapdash. Hell, the first two levels are literally just Red Light District and Hollywood Holocaust from Duke 3D but with snow all over them. Compared to the other official expansions – Duke Caribbean: Life’s a Beach and Duke it Out in D.C., respectively – it feels like the black sheep of all the Duke expansions.

But Simply Silly Software didn’t start from nothing. Its founder and head honcho, Joe Wilcox, was making middleware for games like Duke as well as Doom, where stuff like DOOM/Master were his big claim to fame. Of course, he dabbled in Doom mapping as well, making one map for a small Christmas-themed mapset called “Xmas Doom,” which eventually got a bigger, badder sequel in December 1995.

H2H-XMAS.WAD is the followup, made by several members of the Head 2 Head Gaming Network, a community of Doom fans where one could dial up to a network and play Doom multiplayer with others online, similar to services like DWANGO. And like DWANGO, H2H-Xmas was made as something to promote their gaming service.

The plot is simply silly: After returning from vacation, Santa Claus finds Doomguy bruised, battered and bloody, with Martha Claus being kidnapped by the demons. Unable to finish his mission, Doomguy gives Santa Claus his trusty pistol and tells him to rip and tear like unopened presents.

If you’ve played Doom, you know what to expect. A pistol, 50 bullets, kill demons, find keys, exit, repeat. Except now there’s a lot of snow on the field and Christmas music to get into the holiday spirit. Weirdly, the monsters look the same, which is odd to me considering Xmas Doom changed the sprites of the monsters to have santa hats, Cacodemons that look like christmas tree bulbs, and snowballs instead of fireballs. It’s entirely possible I might’ve botched something in the install – this was made in the days when you had to run certain EXE files to make the WAD, a much more complex process compared to the drag-and-drop usability of today.

Since Doom is 31 years old as of this writing, the community has basically figured out every nook, cranny and trick to Doom and its gameplay, something I pointed out when I wrote about Legacy of Rust earlier this year. But H2H-Xmas was made two years after Doom and a year after Doom II. Since it’s still fresh in people’s minds, there’s that sense of the community finding what works and what doesn’t. Some of these would carry over to future WADs.

For instance, Hell Knights and Chaingunners are used rather sparingly in this megawad compared to later WADs. However, the sheer amount of Revenants I saw on several maps could rival slaughter maps. The Casali brothers figured out that all of these monsters in sheer numbers were dangerous, when The Plutonia Experiment came out the following year as part of Final Doom. Plasma was oddly scarce, so I couldn’t BFG my way through everything, but shells, bullets and rockets were plentiful, and I had topped off my rocket launcher with the excess rocket boxes that it took until the very end of the level set to actually run out of rockets.

Since it’s a community project, the challenge can be a bit off kilter. Several levels have no secrets and are fairly straightforward, some not even requiring keys to progress, whereas some levels require a lot of backtracking to a plain exit where you open 3 key doors and fight an Archvile or Chaingunner guarding the exit switch. MAP05: More Sewers – yes, there are two sewer levels – has a lot of revenants that are tough to dodge without cheesing it. In a lot of cases I’d just spam rockets in one place and clear the area so I didn’t have to deal with them later. This isn’t bad per se, but Doom isn’t really enjoyable with that stop and pop kind of gameplay, I prefer when I’m moving around while fighting foes and dodging projectiles. I chalk this up to being another one of those things people were still figuring out back then.

A good chunk of the levels, especially in the middle third of the whole megawad, are surprisingly very symmetrical, which kept reminding me of stuff like Dead Simple from Doom II. It’s not bad at all, just an interesting choice. Since the team who made this were part of a multiplayer gaming network, I figure this was deliberate, just so folks can have specific arenas to pick during those frantic deathmatch sessions. Suddenly, this has me thinking if there’s a Doom mapping project to make nothing but clones of Dead Simple…

Even with all the Christmas cheer, it’s still Doom at its absolute core. And that’s perfectly fine, honestly. It’s definitely something you can get through in an afternoon if you got the attention span for it. Basically, H2H-Xmas is not like the early days of the infamous “1994 levels,” but it’s not polished to a perfect shine like it is now. I like that, it feels very B-tier, something that seems a lot harder to do nowadays due to the increased standards of the Doom community. Doomworld made the right call in putting this in one of the Top 10 WADs for 1995, it’s surprisingly better than I was expecting from it. Even though Joe Wilcox was merely one person in a group of at least a dozen or so people on this megawad, it definitely has the vibe of what would show up in Duke Nuclear Winter a few years later. Though Duke is a vastly different beast from Doom in terms of design and gameplay.

If you wanna play it for yourself, you can grab it on the idgames archive. I used prboom+ 2.6.6.6um to play, but I imagine this would work in the recent DOOM + DOOM II remaster put out earlier this year. Hell, considering there’s now a mod system on that version that anyone can upload to, you can probably just find H2H-Xmas uploaded by some random guy who gives “credit to the original authors.”

Merry Christmas, nerds. Hope y’all have a safe and happy holiday.