Genesis Saga Aurora
is a full-blown, major modification for the Doom game, supported by the popular source ports ZDoom and GZDoom. It's a joint project between Ryan Cordell and Hellser, with the former providing the base, grunt work behind the mod, with regards to ideas, design decisions, coding, while the latter refines and adds onto the concept.
The modification is still a big work in progress, a project that has been going on for many years, having been under at least three different names before settling with Genesis Saga Aurora. Formerly, Hellser was busy with his own mod, but fell into a stump as far as ideas went, that's when GS project author Ryan decided to invite him to co-author the project.
Genesis Saga Aurora (commonly abbreviated to GSA) features a different, slightly more challenging gameplay than that of vanilla Doom. It features a larger variety of demons ready to tear the player apart, with a select few demons having so-called "Elite" monsters — rare, much stronger versions of their common, lowly bretheren. To combat the increased demonic threat however, two more marines have joined the fray, along with a massive arsenal of over 21 weapons, with 3 differing weapons for all nine slots.
This mod is under nigh-constant updating, and as such can be highly unstable, the mod authors do work quick to provide fixes and additions to the gameplay.
However, the project leader has been known to implement features that are otherwise not available in either of the mentioned source ports, resorting to forking off GZDoom to make his own called Tower of Babel
Genesis Saga Aurora provides examples of the following tropes:
- Boss in Mook Clothing: Any of the demon elites that tend to show up, such as the Shocker Trooper, and replace the lesser ranked.
- Charles Atlas Superpower: Fairly prevalent with marines Crash and Grunt.
- Crash has the ability of double jumping and dealing massive damage onto enemies when falling at a large enough speed.
- Grunt has the ability of dashing towards enemies, sending them flying away in a shockwave and hurting them in the process. He is also capable of enduring the strongest of attacks, reducing him to only 1 HP.
- Degraded Boss: The formerly feared Cyberdemon and Mastermind are now retooled. The former is now known as a Cyberdemon General while the latter is known as an Arachnimech. These are the most commonly used in custom maps, while their boss variants are exclusive to Doom.
- Determinator: Grunt's ability is to survive lethal attacks.
- Double Jump: Crash's primary ability.
- Fragile Speedster: Amber "Crash" Hale. She has the least vitality out of the three marines, but more than makes up for it with her speed and her curious ability of being able to double jump.
- Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Only one is known so far — Unending Genesis: A difficulty skill beyond nightmare. It doesn't feature respawning monsters, but to compensate, all monsters are more aggressive, deal more damage, and are capable of dodging your attacks.
- Jack of All Trades: John "The Doomguy" Grimm. The most well known marine out of them all, faster than nearly any human or marine, second only to Crash, and second only to Grunt as far as strength goes.
- Last Chance Hit Point: Grunt's Endurance skill.
- Only One Name: Grunt, due to his unknown past, covered up by the UAC.
- Power-Up: Several power-ups can be found scattered throughout the levels, these include:
- Blahsphere: Life-draining artifact.
- Infinite Ammo: Self-explanatory.
- Rapid Fire: Double every weapon's fire rate for a limited time.
- Invulnerability: Barely changed from the vanilla.
- Blursphere: Renders the character invisible to demons.
- Double Damage: Deals double damage to enemies.
