Austrian Avian Association | AAA.WAD
MundyC
One of the more unique aspects of games like Doom is the total conversion. You don’t see these too often for more recent games, but for a select range of 90s shooters, they were a regular treat. From Aliens TC for Doom to Zombie Panic for Half-Life, you could expect some of the bigger shooter titles to have mods that completely overhaul every aspect of the game to create an entirely new thing. A lot of the time these were pretty jank: the art assets didn’t have a united aesthetic, often being pulled from different commercial games, or worse, made in Poser or something; if they had new coding at all, it was often buggy. But they were usually great fun regardless, building on the base game for a wholly new and often unique experience that you just couldn’t get from a commercial title.
Yeah. It’s that kinda game. Welcome to Austrian Avian Association.
AAA has some backstory to it, as found in the readme. The short version is that you play Maria Katarina Berger, a middle-aged Percht who got her doctorate in Vienna and has served as the town doctor for her flock most of her adult life. Schnabelperchten sleep during the summer, waking up towards the end of autumn. Katarina is usually the last to go to sleep and the last to wake up, which means she’s slept through an apparent invasion of monsters from legend, which is causing havoc all over the Alps. Gathering up some supplies and weapons, she sets out to right this wrong.
What this shakes out to, in short, is eight levels (plus a credits map) of Alpine mayhem, starting in the isolated mountain passes near Katarina’s home and ending in a forgotten temple deep beneath Castle Grossglockner. Along the way you’ll visit ruined villages, deep haunted caves, and a twisted carnival. The game plays more or less the same as Doom, with some subtle differences. Your weaponry is not 1:1 with Doom’s, for starters, though in practice the big differences are your number 2 and 6 slots. Instead of a pistol, you’re armed with throwing axes, which do more damage but you’re limited to 40, or double with the carrying basket. As this is the late 1800s, there are no fancy sci-fi weapons, so instead you’ll get a Maxim gun, which uses the same ammo as your Automatic Mosin-Nagant rifle (the chaingun replacement) but treats each shot like a shotgun blast, thereby multiplying the potential damage several fold. With its rapid fire it’s an extremely busted weapon that will make most large encounters trivial. All your other weapons are more or less the same as vanilla, with subtle tweaks here and there (for example, the Super Shotgun replacement is an elephant gun that uses four buckshot shells, rendering it more of a specialty weapon, but the regular shotgun makes for a good main gun due to its faster fire rate.)
The bestiary in contrast has seen some big changes. Every enemy (except maybe the Spiderdemon) has been swapped out using impressive DEHACKED — even the SS and Commander Keen sprites have been replaced. From possessed humans armed with throwing axes and firearms, to rogue Krampuses (Krampi? Wikipedia tells me the plural is Krampusse, which… I’ll stick with Krampuses) to other creatures from folklore and myth, it’s a wide and varied cast of monsters, and true to the classic total conversion tradition, they do not all fit together aesthetically. Most of the bestiary are modified sprites from Doom and Raven’s fantasy games, but the Knochenhunds look like they were made in Poser and are quite large, which means their sprites will sometimes clip through walls. They look silly, stick out like sore thumbs, and in all honesty I’m fine with that because it makes me feel like I’ve been sent back in time to around 2000 when I was playing a lot of Duke Nukem 3D total conversions like Starship Troopers and Mystique: Ages in Time. All that being said, while the sprites for monsters and weapons might not all have unity (compare the Mosin-Nagant to the axe, or the Maxim gun) the texture choices generally blend well together, a mixture of various textures from other Doom games, first person fantasy games like Daggerfall and the Raven games, among others.
AAA is hard. While MundyC has adjusted the ammo balance for a smoother experience, enemies do quite a bit of damage, even hitscanners, and it’s only the abundance of health laying around (in the form of sausages, sewing kits and bottles of laudanum) that makes this manageable. But your weaponry is just as high-powered, even overpowered — that Maxim gun is busted, I tell you — and good at everything from killing small groups of enemies to rapidly deleting big crowds. The only thing I wish it had more of is range: your Mosin-Nagant is the only weapon you can snipe with, while your other weapons are better for close to medium range.
In spite of some design issues, I liked Austrian Avian Association. Clearly the Doom community liked it too, granting it a Cacoward last year. As hinted by the mod’s ENDOOM screen, Katarina isn’t done tidying up the Alps yet, and MundyC intends to release a small sequel, possibly quite soon as of this writing. But it’s well worth giving the mod a play right now — just make sure you read that readme.
MAP01: Rauris Ranch
We begin in Katarina's house. It's a warmly appointed little place with lots of DoomCute and the remains of a strange autopsy going on in the examination room. But we can't stay here forever, as we need to start heading down the mountain. Most of the enemy resistance is going to be possessed humans, with a lot of them sniping down at you from high up. The mountain passes are pretty linear canyon type dealies, but it ultimately terminates in a packed church to assault and clear out. You also can see the nearby village from the graveyard, a cute little detail that makes me think of Build engine games like Blood.
MAP02: Seidlwinkl Circus
Something wicked comes this way as you reach the town of Seidlwinkl. You won't actually be seeing much of the town proper; instead, much of the action is in the park, where a circus has posted stakes. Supposedly, according to the readme, they were about to leave when all this happened, but as always, the show must go on, only this time the patrons are hordes of monsters, including the introduction of kobolds, harpies and Krampuses. It's split into a few different sections, with the park gate serving as a sort of bottleneck for the vanguard hiding in the park proper. The big tent is a three-ring circus of bullshit, but if you do some of the sideshow games you'll be well prepared for what awaits. The nearby house has some lore value if you read the readme, but in practice it's just a place for some ambushes and stuff.
MAP03: Cavern Bypass
Another map that's mostly stringy pathways, though at least this time you won't have to deal with snipers from above -- now they just shoot at you from the dark instead. You're looking for three keys, which go into locks at a small shrine. To that end the caves are a bit of a maze, with different sections (divided thematically by texture usage) that partially connect with each other. The combat here is mostly small ambushes and firefights in the dark, but the map is pretty cool looking for its relative simplicity.
MAP04: Zwillingsstrassen Junction
This one is even more open than the circus, a big semi-ruined village just overflowing with enemy. Possessed Schnabelperchten shoot at you from guard posts right from the start, so you have a pretty good idea of what you're getting yourself into when you start this level. If you can find the Maxim gun in the warehouse, though, it'll solve a lot of your problems very quickly. It's just a matter of surviving the swarms of flying skulls and other nonsense until you get there. Tough level.
MAP05: The Wharf
This one feels like something out of Heretic: a cute little Alpine village sitting on the banks of a semi-frozen lake. The safe method is to stay on the outskirts of the village and circle around, as stepping onto the shore invites trouble from the rather large garrison that occupies the area. It's pretty much nonstop combat as you hunt down the three keys that progressively unlock a series of doors that lead to the exit, but it's the ambush at the "Salzburger Alpenmuseum" that sticks out in my memory.
MAP06: Grossglockner Castle
And now we're getting into something that feels more like Hexen. Grossglockner is a sprawling castle complex with several distinct areas. The front yard has a gallows with a bit of a morbid secret, but it's the front hall that introduces the level's main conceit, with several plant pods (their sprites repurposed from Blood) that need to be destroyed to open the big door. To that end you'll be traversing the various parts of the castle, ranging from the more functional places like the kitchen and bedrooms to the dungeon that first needs to be unlocked. Much like Hexen there's a sense of "okay, what the hell did that do?" when throwing switches (for instance, opening the dungeon requires going to the belltower -- the readme thankfully points this out.) Almost every room has big encounters on UV, but it's the surprise uncyber-Cyberdemon (in the game's lore an overgrown, hairless Krampus with Arch-vile fire powers) in the previously-cleared Great Hall that caught me off guard.
MAP07: Heart of Fire
This one feels a little like a Blood level: a sprawling underground cavern, divided into a few distinct sections: an industrial zone that's rather pointedly anachronistic for the time period, magma chambers, dark tunnels, and the final resting place of a huge creature, its skeleton rendered as well as can be done in Doom. At the end, is a small temple (of which the exact mechanism to open is somewhat opaque to me, it just kind of happened.) Some pretty cool carnage, from the firefight in the fossil cavern to the big horde in what appears to be some sort of generator hall.
MAP08: Der Knochenhundkaiserin
The final level is a fairly straightforward boss level, split into three parts: first, you have to clear out the front chamber, which is chockablock with most of the game's bestiary. Once you've done that, then you throw a switch to reveal more of those plant pods. Each one you kill unleashes another enemy to fight, though if you take it slow it won't be nearly as hectic as the first fight. Kill all the pods and you open up the final chamber with the big boss, a giant hulking monstrosity that throws fireballs at you. If you can find the secret invulnerability this fight will be pretty trivial, but otherwise you might be in for a hard time.
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