I suppose I need some sort of outro to go with all this, but it occurs to me that what I have to say may change the face of these videos forever, so I'll put it in tiny text and kludged-together spoiler warnings. Again, if you don't want to deal with the possibility of seeing the playthrough of an old FPS by some guy on the Internet you vaguely know in a dangerous and possibly world-shattering new light, feel free to ignore the following:
[spoiler]Much of my knowledge of the levels is second-hand: The only way I know where most of the secrets are in a lot of these maps is because I watched 100% completion speedruns of them at least twelve or thirteen years ago. Barring the first few maps, I only played a handful of them to completion after jumping to them with IDCLEV or the -warp parameter - MAP08, 31 and 32 most notably (great test beds for mods, those), although I missed three of the really obvious secrets in MAP08 because I was too distracted by me talking and I'm still kicking myself for that - and so was basically either flying by the seat of my pants or going off of vaguely-remembered bits and pieces of maps and traps that I first saw ages ago. I've played tons of user-made wads and megawads, but at no point have I actually done a straight run of the vanilla game from beginning to end. So in a way...
...this is the first time I've ever beaten Doom II.
I really want to say "it's like watching a friend of yours beat Mega Man 2 in grade school, then downloading an emulator when you're in college and beating it without getting a game over" but I'm not sure how valid that is. Regardless, I only died five times: The first was on MAP12 (The Factory) in the first video, in the southern building with a Baron of Hell, cacodemon and some imps. If you watch it you'll hear me mutter "I hate this part" before going into the teleporter. That's because you end up square in the middle of four imps; the first time I tried going through the level I went to punch them out, screwed up and ended up getting torn apart for my trouble. The second was MAP13 (Downtown), in the room with the slow elevator, after aiming too high with the rocket launcher in the doorway and hitting the ceiling. I was doing pretty shitty before that anyway, so it's no big loss. Third death was on MAP32, the first time I tried to Tyson the Cyberdemon, but I'm hoping that didn't count because I wasn't playing through for reals. Cyberdemon got his revenge on MAP29, though; killed me when I tried to get ballsy fighting him, fell into the pit before it finished rising and got one-shotted with a rocket (right near the exit, too!). The last one was on MAP30, but that's fairly reliant on luck when it comes to what the boss spawns and where it spawns it. Too many pain elementals that time, but a win is a win.[/spoiler][/glow][/color]
Okay, that's enough of that.
You probably noticed that after a while I just stopped quicksaving in the middle of the levels. That's because I knew that every single one of them could be completed from a fresh start (100% health, no armor, pistol and 50 bullets) without saving, and if I couldn't beat them without saving/loading mid-level with all the stuff from previous levels, well... where the fuck would that leave me?