You should look at
http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Stronghold

It has monsters ripped from lots of different old sprite based shooters, all the player skins are characters from such games (various versions of Doom guy, plus Quake Ranger, Duke Nukem, Serious Sam, Caleb, Hexen and Strife characters etc) and it's secret levels are homages to such games (one you fight exclusively Duke3D monsters in an earth setting, another iirc is Heretic inspired).

behold the glorious copyright infringement
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8fD_PX3kJs 

http://www.frikac.com/?page_id=9
Was released at QExpo 2006 I think. 

http://qexpo.tastyspleen.net/booth.php?id=124&page=260 

http://www.quakewiki.net/archives/retroquake.planetquake.gamespy.com/blog/index3786.html?p=267 

and i know about the 2D platformer mods for Quake

i was not suggesting a platformer, but an old school FPS mod with combined elements from other games and lots of CRAZY stuff on top 

wasn't there also a dm-mod for Q2 called Generations which had doomguy, q1guy, q2guy and wolf3dguy in it? 

and it was awesome

I might even have a copy around somewhere. It was eventually FOX'd, and taken offline, but it was sweet. 

q3 Generations Arena. sadly with a non-free license. 

but the Q2 version was way better. 

i wonder if id 'borrowed' that q2generations idea of putting those game heroes together from the mod and used it in quake 3 arena 

since I remember that Q2 Generations came out way ahead of Q3 (original demo even).

With Q3 Demo, id had the general idea: the weapons are a combination of Doom1-Q2, and TEMPLE OF RETRIBUTION (the non-space map in the Q3 demo) was clearly a tribute to Q1.

id had already become a cover band to themselves. They'd already become sad and old and going nowhere. Q2 Generations was just a fan mod one step ahead of them. They were working on Q3 as a "id mega-dm game" but fans beat 'em to it, just like Q1 Tenebrae beat em to OH DOOM3 SO REVOLUTIONARY. They were done as game-changers after q1. q2 was them treading water. 

yeah well. true. i remember that q3test thing with what was it, 3 maps, and only 'visor' character model.

when ut99 came out (even before q3 was it) having more stuff to play in single player and continued to deliver content in its bonus packs or whatever, id released super fail team arena, which (again) used community mod ideas of course. harvester was sort of like head hunters (dating back to glory days of q1) and overload was based on something as well. 

Tronyn is pissed off. I remember Quake 2 being pretty tough on pcs at the time and Quake 3 was still better than most games (better than UT in terms of having skeletal animation and higher poly counts, though it wasn't as creative), Doom 3 was again very spec-heavy at the time and *still holds up well today*. RAGE is quite possibly the most beautiful game on consoles, though the game falls off terribly at the end.

id might not be at the very bleeding edge, but there isn't a bleeding edge anymore. After Quake 1 the graphics were always going to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Those times are gone. 

... wannabe... you should change your mind :P 

I started a map wherein there were traps and such that involved memorization, tricky jumps, not wasting one shot, and so on. This was inspired by kaizo mario, which has similar ideas for difficulty as "I Wanna Be..." My favorite trap was starting the player over lava, but by holding a certain direction at the very beginning after loading, you could live. 

UT had skeletal animation. And gameplay (oooooh!). 

was added in a patch, the actual game didn't have skeletal animation out the box ;)

I love the silly rivalry between quake and ut, I loved the hell out of both games...