Having just started Ultimore, my IIGS is once again playing up and the playthrough will be on hold for at least a week or two while I get it fully working again. Apologies for that but in the meanwhile I thought I’d have a look at a few bits and pieces that I may not get around to otherwise starting with an Ultima Underworld level 1 map that was created for Doom back in the mid 90’s by Jon Charlson.

What drew my attention to this was a brief mention of Ultima Doom maps in Dungeons and Dreamers which I read about a month back. It sounded like as good a reason to fire up Doom again as any so I had a search for Ultima maps with this being the only one that I’ve found so far.

I’ve played the original Ultima Underworld enough that I reckon you could drop me anywhere on any level and I’d probably know where I was. The basic layout may be the same here but I still had a tough time recognising a lot of the map mainly due to the world being a lot flatter. Some of this is the limitations of the Doom engine that Ultima Underworld didn’t have despite being several years older (i.e. bridges and jumping) but I’d imagine it was mainly for gameplay purposes. The abyss’s tight corridors don’t make for the best FPS environment.

It’s a large map by Doom standards with one room stuffed full of more soldiers than I can ever recall seeing in one place. This room would have probably killed my PC if I’d run it back at the time. The level is nothing special but a solid enough effort especially since it was the first attempt by Charlson. I was hoping for something a little closer to the original map in all honesty but Doom is still as entertaining as ever especially with modern ports like ZDoom. If you fancy a go the wad is on here (Do a search for ultima.zip). If not I recorded a quick run through below:-