Doom - ICARUS : Alien Vanguard

 

Icarus : Alien Vanguard is a 32 level vanilla compatible megawad released in 1996 by Team TNT, the very same team which made TNT : Evilution. Just like Evilution, this wad is quite a strange yet wonderfully interesting grabbag, full of that mid 90's charmful and cryptic level design. When I first played Icarus' first few maps, I immediatly fell in love with them and wanted to keep playing. To me, Icarus is the prime example of why I love 90s mapsets and others of similiar age; it's the small things. It's all the details you stop to think about, thinking to yourself, "that must have been a pain to make back then."

MAP01 - Shuttlecraft

The wad starts with MAP01, Shuttlecraft. A very warm beige-then-gray introduction to the crazy world of Icarus. Things like the big fuel tanks you turn on in the back of the ship, the front of the ship with that pitch-dark ambush, the random corruption of the ship's church... Moments like these that immerse you into what are meant to be real spaces with retro sci-fi (and sometimes paranormal) concepts are what makes up a lot of the experience in this wad, and I love it so much. I love doom wads that feel more like places and more exotic experiences rather than "doom wads", if that makes any sense. It's a big part of why I love 90s wads like Icarus.

MAP06 - P.E.T. Rescue

From the skyhacking of MAP06, to things like the midtexture doors in MAP16, the amazingly clever design of MAP20 and it's gravity flipping gimmick, everything in MAP32, this wad finds a way to wow you with every map, or at very least have one sweet piece of eye candy. There's 3 types of levels in Icarus: ship, simulation, and planet levels. Having this amount of variety in a 90s megawad is insane. It's amazing how in a 1996 megawad, you're going from a massive ship going through space, to a simulated computer program, or in some alien planet at midnight. And there's variety within those themes for each map too! There's always something, even in the smallest of it's simple details. Did I mention this is vanilla compatible too? You can play this wad on anything!

 

MAP12 - Hydroponics

 

MAP19 - Blessed Are The Quick

The gameplay in Icarus is, I'd say decent. Combat is merely something to keep your attention held while you encounter cool setpieces and details, and sometimes progression can be a little bit cryptic. The ways the mappers want you to get things like keys or hit important switches is sometimes very confusing, so you better play the wad with the idea that everything can do anything, and just start thinking outside the box to figure out progressing through a map.

Even despite Icarus' problems, I deeply love the wad and everything about it- flaws and all. I'm kinda tired of modern doom wads feeling more like levels rather than places, there's nothing wrong with this, but I personally love when maps have a sense of place. It doesn't even need to take over a map's gameplay to get this effect; Wads like Liminal Doom 1 & 2 do this balance perfectly, you can give your map that little flare of emotion it needs to be a little special. I like my wads being able to give me feelings besides fun, after all I deeply believe Doom is an art-form, and just like how things like music and paintings make us feel things, Doom maps can do so too! Even if its just entertaintment- that's a feeling as well, but y'know... I want folks to explore other feelings.

MAP24 - The Haunting

MAP30 - Nucleus

Icarus : Alien Vanguard is a fantastic wad that I believe people who like the doom wads of old should definitely play. If you love maps with a sense of place, that are odd and not the standard anymore, yet are great in their own right, you'll love this wad. Go get it on idgames!

Music - The Vehicle Birth

 i thought it'd be a good idea to start off this blog thing with something i'm very passionate about, so i'm gonna talk about one of my favorite bands of all time: The Vehicle Birth.

The Vehicle Birth (or TVB / VB for short) was an indie/math rock band from Fairfax, Virginia, which formed sometime in 1993. around 1994 the then young quintuple moved to Boston, Massachusetts, which is the state they'd stay in for the rest of their time as a band up until their break-up in 1999.

VB was well known back then in the indie boston scene for their unique, slint-esque approach to making music, as well as how explosive their performances were. Especially with their vocalist/frontman Timothy James who would make up most of what he sings on the spot, and often would scream and act manic on stage, the band very clearly also shows a lot of inspiration from dischord/D.C. indie bands as well as their shows being often described as intense. With VB, you never knew what you were gonna get, and that's exactly what the band wants- not to give you what you like, but to give you what you don't know you want.

The group would mostly give out tapes at shows, but they did put out a few records, plus a couple appereances in compilations. Their discography goes as follows:

- Limousine 7" (b/w Zero Work, Amsterdam, 1995)

- River 7" (b/w Level 90, 1995)

- Tragedy (LP, 1996. Later reissued in 1998 in both vinyl and CD through a deal with Crank! Records)

- They Came From Massachusetts (Comp, 1996. song: Coltrane)

- Pipeline! Live Boston Rock On WMBR (Comp, 1996. song: Two Minutes Hate)

- Split 7" w/ The Wicked Farleys (song: Toronto. 1999)

- Afterbirth : Unreleased Recordings (official comp of unreleased/rare songs, 2016)

- rock (EP, released thru bandcamp. 2021)

"Where are these guys now?" you may be asking, well...

Sometime in 1998 while the band was still active, guitarist Chris Jackson became part of stoner rock band Cracktorch, which became quite successful in it's own right. Nowadays he runs the Dharma Coffeehouse, which he had since the early 90s. I actually got to talk to him through Discogs! Real sweet guy.

In the early 2000s, Timothy James formed The Movies, another awesome indie rock band, very similiar to VB in style too. I guess their style goes wherever tim decides to go. 2nd Guitarist Leigh Thompson went on to form Milliseconds back in 2023 with members of The Dismemberment Plan (fun fact: Travis Morrison of DPlan helped VB with recording a lot of their early material, mainly from 94 to 95.), they'd release the album So This Is How It Happens. Bassist John Stephens seems to not have done much, aside from posting some stuff on soundcloud (including some previously unreleased VB songs). Finally, drummer Jeff Galusha went onto... help with The Dismemberment Plan's Uncanney Valley album.

Also, in 2011 TVB quickly reformed for two reunion shows back where they originally formed, in Fairfax. It's really cool!! I'll leave a playlist for some live recordings of one of their reunion shows.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqvqE9FMS7w&list=PL9FBfP3yJfhbsZnLsZgtuGoMLrgqEQK9v

All in all, The Vehicle Birth quickly became one of my favorite rock bands of all time, simply because of how creative and abstract they were with their music. If you're a fan of Slint, Shellac, and D.C. Post-Hardcore, you might love this band. I'd heavily recommend giving Tragedy a spin! It's a fantastic album, and frankly I just wish these guys had gotten popular. They were decently well known in their time, but man, I wish they had put out more stuff. But hey, at least Afterbirth exists! It includes their 7" records, their compilation songs, so much live and unreleased material- its insane. It's got everything except for Tragedy. It's so amazing, there's so much stuff that if this wasn't released, we'd be missing out on so much great math rock.

I'll leave the Internet Archive link to Afterbirth here, if you like this band then this album is a must-have.

https://archive.org/details/afterbirth-unreleased-recordings_202504