Not Jabba's Not the Cacowards Review Corner (rd reviews The Iron Forge)

[baja blast rd.]

2 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

Unfortunately no, because they take a huge amount of time and I like writing other things more. I gave up on 2021 because I couldn't get smaller than a top 30 for that year (and like 50 runners-up) and it was hard to decide on an order.

 

More and more I feel orders are worth avoiding except for maybe some at the top. 

 

One reason is that they are very hard to do for little gain, and another reason is I've noticed a lot of people read them completely wrong. (And these are both the same reason.)

 

How orders should be interpreted is that the average 'gap' between two spots decreases as you go down. I have to use ratings here purely as a frame/metaphor (even though I don't rate anything) because otherwise it's impossible to compare evaluations in any meaningful way. But if ratings were involved, it would not be unreasonable for #1 to be a 9.9 give or take, #2 to be a 9.7 give or take, #3 to be a 9.5 give or take, which might be clear separation -- and then at some point you start having a logjam where successive spots are all super packed together on average, like 0.03 points out of 10 apart. 

The reason is naturally that exceptional work is typically rarer than very good work which is rarer than pretty good work which is rarer than decent/good work. That isn't really going out on a limb or anything; that should be a pretty safe assumption. So as you get lower down the list, it gets more densely packed. This happens whether you're explicitly rating or you aren't.

 

But what I've noticed, in many completely different contexts, is that many list readers don't intuit that at all. Instead people will mistake the visible part of the interface -- the numbers of the rankings -- for the underlying measure. So with a Top 100 Games list, you'll get someone upset that 67 and 87 are "20 spots apart" if they evaluate them similarly, even if 20 spots down there might very well be fractions of a point apart. It happens with sports lists too. It also happens with the Cacowards sometimes too. Even though there isn't an order there, some people perceive a clear gap between the distinct tiers even if though the number of works per each is constant so the cutoff has to happen somewhere and would happen even if it resulted in two basically identical wads being in different tiers. (If there was an order, it would be a safer assumption that #1 and something like #6 were as far apart in whatever underlying valuation applies as maybe #6 and #35. I don't know the exact numbers would be it sure wouldn't be #1 and #20 and #20 and #40, which would be pretty absurd.) 

 

So, yeah, there's a whole lot of fussing about with spots that are near-tied on the listers' part, and all that for many people to pull out of it a takeaway you aren't even making. (Using rating points explicitly might show the reader the non-linearity of the rankings more accurately but introduces its own, even worse problems, both for the reader who might misread them (obvious) and for the reviewer who now has to do them. So that isn't a viable solution.) 

Even if you do a partial order and say in bold letters, "everything past the top-six is no longer ordered," you might get people misreading or who insist that the order has to mean something? I don't know if that works cleanly either. See all the people who assume the first Cacoward is "#1." Last year we full randomized and then shuffled a couple around (just for a more logical reading order on a given page), and some people still thought The Magenta Spire (or anything) was #1 lol. But that's what I'd go for and hope, I guess. :P

[Not Jabba]

11 hours ago, baja blast rd. said:

 

More and more I feel orders are worth avoiding except for maybe some at the top. 

 

Agreed with all of this. The main fun of having numbered lists is putting your favorite stuff at the top of them, and the part of them that feels "useful" is being able to order things from "my absolute favorites" to "the other most exceptional things" to "a bunch of other stuff that was super good." The problems of numbered lists are frustrating, but if what draws you to creating a personal picks list is to say, "These are my favorite things!", then you lose something with an unranked list as well. There's not really an elegant solution -- anything between those two methods is probably more confusing for readers, unless you're doing a different kind of list altogether.

 

These problems may go away if you only include the highest tier and cover a broader range of time -- like if I listed my favorite maps ever, there'd be very little value in ranking them, because there's no countdown from great to greatest -- they're all my absolute favorites. But there's also obvious value in giving praise to a larger number of people who deserve it.

[Not Jabba]

"Memories of the Heart" by @Misty (Perpetual Powers map 11)
Played on UV

 

  

 

I managed to write a few blurbs for a Top Maps of 2021 list before the number of maps and the work involved became overwhelming. In addition to the sheer scale of trying to capture the best stuff people made in that particularly active year, the toughest thing about writing a lot of short blurbs is trying to avoid repetitiveness—it's difficult to capture the distinctive qualities of a large number of maps and make them all sound interesting when you're writing about them in the broadest terms possible due to space/size/time limitations. But I've got about half a dozen of them sitting around in various stages of completion, and I guess those must be the ones where I had the clearest idea of what I wanted to say. Here's what I wrote for Misty's "Memories of the Heart," a guest map for Perpetual Powers:

 

Quote

Misty is great at making what I'd call "feel-good" maps—ones that make you feel happy and satisfied the whole time you're playing them through a combination of great setting and gameplay beats and a difficulty bar that's low enough and steady enough to avoid frustration. That doesn't mean there's no bite to it; it strikes like a snake and keeps you dancing on your toes as it builds up to a high-energy climax with whole companies of Imps to gib. The high-ceilinged, overgrown ruins are a great backdrop for all this tight action, and the enigmatic title is just suggestive enough to make you wonder what you might have left behind in this crumbling, hostile place that you want so badly to get back. It's certainly made memories in my heart, in any case.

 

That blurb is mostly an emotional impression of someone's mapping style, but since I'm covering the map in more depth, I'd better try to explain what I actually mean. There are a few things Misty does with this map that make it feel so exciting and satisfying to play. The most important is what I think of as a "modular" style of creating the layout. Take a look at the shapes in this automap:

 

 

You'll see that the architectural spaces are all composed of closely packed segments, a bunch of what are essentially simple polygons grafted together into something that looks a bit like a honeycomb, but is more flexible and dynamic in design. Hence the term "modular"—since the component pieces are so small and simple, you can arrange the room segments any way you want to create any overall shape of layout you want. There are relatively few walls here, because every side of a room that borders on another room is a wide-open doorway, allowing you (and the monsters) to move through the honeycomb freely; the corners between the rooms are little more than wide pillars used to provide cover and create a partial sense of separation. Then, within many of these segments, there are smaller impassable islands such as planters or bookshelves that create further division of space (though you can't see all of these on the automap). Monsters move through the map like a liquid, flowing through the many small open spaces and around the many small obstacles.

 

This layout design accomplishes a couple of things. First, there are a lot of sharp turns within a small amount of space, which feels really fun when you play. Second, you can move really fluidly in and out of cover at all times, because there's cover everywhere, and most of it is very compact. Third, the openness of the honeycomb means that you can constantly be approached from at least two or three different angles, even when all the monsters are coming at you from the front, so even though there's cover everywhere, you can't camp. This is a particularly fun layout style for fighting what are typically the most threatening (and sometimes most frustrating) monsters in Doom, the Chaingunner, Revenant, and Arch-Vile, because all the bobbing and weaving you can do puts you at an advantage against them, but in a way that still requires skill to fight them. You can play cat-and-mouse with them, and they can play cat-and-mouse with you—it feels like you're on even footing. I think this is what makes the maps feel like the perfect chef's-kiss amount of casual challenge for me. The threat level of Misty's monster placement is comfortably moderate and the player is in control, but you also have to be aware of what's around you at all times, because you can get hit from anywhere at any time and monsters have as much freedom as you do, which lets them move in ways you may not expect.

 

Referring back to the automap shot, you can also see that the natural spaces are drawn in a very different way than the architecture, which provides some nice visual contrast but also serves a similar modular function. For rock formations, this is fairly common—mappers like skillsaw, Tarnsman, and tango can build entire landscapes using individual rock outcrops/ledges as though they were Legos, and like each of those mappers, Misty has her own recognizable style of drawing those building blocks. Similar to the modular room segments in her architectural interiors, the rock ledges form little mini-mazes with a lot of freedom of movement, where you can weave around individual formations and hunt and be hunted by monsters and, better still, integrate a bit of parkour into the combat while you're at it. 

 

To me, these modular layouts make the combat feel really exciting. Though the monster count isn't super high in this map (around 560 on UV), the monsters, when unleashed, are able to flood-fill these large, dynamic spaces, and you have a lot of ways to react to that on the fly and little chance for it to become truly overwhelming. That's why it "feels good"—it's a really strong balance of not holding your hand or making you feel patronized, but also letting you feel like the power is in your hands. A large fraction of the monsters are popcorn enemies that you can smash through quickly, but the more threatening enemies like Revenants and Arch-Viles trickle around them—as you crush the Imps and Pinkies like so many ants, are you exposing yourself to a more powerful enemy coming right up behind them? If a Revenant diverts its way around smaller enemies you're dealing with, will its course take it around the other side of a segment corner and allow it to flank you? Those sorts of micro-decisions and observations feel important here.

 

Toward the end of the map, this combat mold evolves to include some rolling setpieces, which shows how flexible it is. The Cyberdemon turreted in the center of the southeastern room feels very different from any other significant threat in the map, because it's static—but the shape of that room gives you a ton of angles for attacking it or leading it to kill other enemies for you, and options for how and when to deal with it. Meanwhile, the rest of the room and its accompanying battle are as mobile as the rest of the map. It's a shift in combat dynamics that, while simple, feels interesting to me because it's changing the beat of the dance. The final leg of the map after that turns to something more like heavy frontal assaults, giving you a few small but fierce battles with a bunch of packed zombies and Imps to gib, again with a few more dangerous monsters mixed into the mob to keep you on your toes. Because it's so fun to blow all your rockets and plasma on the cathartic shredding of these hordes, and because the exit room is revealed by a lowering wall rather than a player-controlled door, the final Arch-Vile has gotten the jump on me both times I've played, forcing me to switch to SSG and play a last tense cat-and-mouse as I fall back and he raises the Pinkies and Hell Knights I killed on the way to his reveal. It's really a great way to use the "exit Arch-Vile" trope, making it feel like a thrilling note to end the map on rather than a routine thing that you expect and deal with on your own terms.

 

Caffeine Injection by Misty
Played on HMP

 

    

    

 

For a long time, from around Speed of Doom's release in early 2010 until even just a few years ago, the Doom mapping "mainstream" was known for prioritizing a set of concepts I often think of as CLF, or Combat-Layout-Flow. I'm sure you're familiar with the basic idea. Everything moves fast, layouts are super flowy and interconnected to facilitate combat and movement, the maps convey where you should go next, you never backtrack, the fighting is tense and persistent, even nonstop, there's probably a keen separation between mobile incidental gameplay and setpiece arena combat, and the level of challenge is steadily moderate to moderate-high. In other words, Scythe-alikes. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Even among those of us who've been dubious of CLF-centric maps, our beef was generally with people insisting that there was a Right Way to make maps, not with CLF itself.

 

It's never been very important to me, though. Some of my favorite maps and megawads are anti-CLF, and some are pro-CLF; for the ones that do use it, I usually like them for other reasons, or for a combination of other reasons plus particularly good CLF. So it's kind of interesting to me that I like Misty's maps so much because of CLF. A lot of the purpose of this suite of reviews is to try to analyze why that's the case.

 

The gameplay in Caffeine Injection has a lot of similarities to "Memories of the Heart," and a lot of those simple polygonal segment shapes are still present here, but the "modular" layout style is mostly absent—which is fine, because you want a mapper to have more than one trick up their sleeve. The five maps of Caffeine Injection were all created individually or as cast-offs from unfinished projects and then compiled into a single set, so it's a pretty eclectic bunch of maps united more by energy than any common theme. Each map takes place in its own little world—marble halls, an overgrown techbase, an organic hell infestation framed as a Quake-esque slipgate disaster, a library in the void, and wireframe cyberspace.

 

    

 

Each map has some discrete gameplay stylings as well. The first map, which bears the look of Ultimate Doom's E4, has a pretty small and tight layout and a lowish monster count, but tends to hit you with ambushes and tight brawls, using the rocket launcher within a couple of coiled or curved spaces as grounds for its setpieces. The second map starts out in a somewhat similar mode, but as the map progresses, walls lower and segments open up, so that the second half of the map eventually becomes something more like the large, open honeycombs in "Memories of the Heart." The third map has what you might call the most "traditional" form of layout among Scythe-inspired maps, one that follows large architectural loops and repeatedly reconnects back to the central areas as you're given keys to open new sections. Map 04 is more spicy because you have to tread carefully; it's got a lot of platforming around dangerous void pits, and the monsters will generally try to push you into these, though the pace of the actual combat is a bit more cautious to accommodate. Map 05 keeps the deadly pits but throws more at you, including generally heavier monsters and slightly bigger battles fueled almost entirely by rocket and plasma weapons.

 

A big difference between "Memories of the Heart" and Caffeine Injection is setpieces. "Memories" has so much fun with incidental combat that it almost feels resistant to the idea of setpieces, which is actually cool in a way. It has a few things that could probably be called setpiece fights, but they're more like waves to surf rather than mountains to summit; the energy of the combat soars a little higher, rather than stopping and exploding. In contrast, Caffeine Injection is very setpiece-focused, which is also cool, because the setpieces are exciting and creative, but like the rest of the gameplay, aren't high-pressure. There are several in the first two maps that happen in layers—multiple waves of enemies are triggered by sequential switches in the same arena, so you can either take it one wave at a time or plunge ahead and bring a bigger, more chaotic swarm down on yourself, according to your own preferences. The climactic fight of map 02 is the biggest of these, pumping wave after wave into a diamond honeycomb arena and turning it into a sandboxy hunting ground for player and monster alike. There's another great two-tiered fight in map 03, first against lighter enemies with barrels spread around and then with Arch-Viles and other tougher enemies that port in very suddenly. My favorite thing about this fight is that the main piece of cover, a giant alien flesh slug, is stepped, which makes it completely passable—you can run around behind it for cover, or you can run straight over the top of it to strike at an enemy on the other side. Map 04 includes a particularly fun and memorable free-for-all where the total glee of obliterating popcorn hordes keeps dragging you headlong into a room as more monster closets spring open all around you, each stage adding to the sheer chaos like a series of confetti blasters. And finally, the consistent use of faster, lighter monsters in the first four maps pays off in map 05 with a couple of really fun Cyberdemon fights, one circling the rim of a damaging pit and the other...well, yeah. You'll see.

 

Despite the differences, the overall gameplay loop is similar to "Memories of the Heart" and brings a lot of the same joys. Popcorn monsters are ever-present, and powerful weapons are commonplace. The reason I like Misty's maps so much is that you get all the excitement of CLF—the sudden ambushes thrown right in your face, the dance and pulse of incidental combat vs. setpieces, the freedom of movement, the adrenaline of going toe-to-toe with fast monsters—but there's never any stress. However hard and fast the enemies may hit you, there's always plenty of cover to weave through, plenty of room to react, retreat, and rethink, but always in a way that feels dynamic and never makes you feel like you're resorting to cheesing tactics. You're always on your toes, but always have easily accessible options. And the fights start quickly and end quickly, without grind, frustration, or extended cleanup.

 

If all this just boils down to "the combat is kind of easy," then so be it. We all have levels of challenge that we're most comfortable with, and it may be that Misty's gameplay is just at exactly my level. But I think there's too much energy and dynamism in these maps to simply write it off as purely a matter of comfort zone. These are *great* chill maps. They're the epitome of one possible ideal for how to make chill maps. 

 

Finally, before I sign off on this review, I want to give a nod to the visual craft in both Caffeine Injection and "Memories of the Heart." Misty isn't building a ton of narrative here, because the CLF really is the heart of the maps (although the Doomcute slug monster is pretty great). However, the environments are quite pretty in an ambient way that works well as a backdrop; you absorb the beauty of it more through osmosis than by stopping to look at things, which works here, because stopping to look at things would require...well, stopping. As little as the individual details may matter, the vibrant settings are important in these maps, and so are the shapes, and so are the colors (particularly thanks to the use of PalPlus), and so is the lighting and atmosphere. There's a lot to appreciate even in the final moments of calm when everything lies dead around you. Even the silence feels good.

 

 

Divergence by Misty

Played on skill 4

 

    

 

Divergence is Misty's take on Heretic in a similar style to her Doom maps. It's a very bite-sized little set, just a pair of regular levels plus an end map. Here she more or less returns to the modular honeycomb style of layout, except that each of these maps takes an almost fully linear path that happens to loop around a lot and give previews of areas to come through fence bars and such. 

 

Misty's treatment of indoor and outdoor spaces looks really good in Heretic, and the settings are once again really nice here. The first map is sort of a watery dungeon, with the individual honeycomb cells being used to vary the floor heights almost like stair steps, so that you ascend and descend into different parts of the dungeon as you progress. It creates a nice sense of space, and Misty's often characteristic combination of narrow horizontal spaces with tall vertical spaces adds a lot here. The second map takes place in a snowy landscape, with snow falling heavily in the outdoor sections—weather is something I always find pretty in video games, and in this map, it gives a strong feeling of chilly calm. The densely packed trees serve a pretty interesting function here too, as they tend to mask the drifting movements of flying monsters as they toss projectiles at you (particularly in a later section, where a large squad of Disciples gets unleashed and is able to move more freely through the honeycomb than you are).

 

The combat does feel a bit more frontal in Divergence, and the pacing of Heretic struggles to make up for that. The stock monsters can be a bit challenging to use, since the non-boss monsters only fill a couple of combat niches. However, both maps (and particularly the second one) offer some swarmy fights where you still have to carve out and defend space, or dart back and forth through the map segments to keep from getting overwhelmed. The final few fights of map 02 were the most fun, as they gave me ample opportunities to use the Tomes I'd been saving up. The Iron Lich and closely packed Disciples in the penultimate fight were great targets for the Tomed Hellstaff's tower-defense rainstorms, and the final horde was ripe for plowing down with the Tomed Crossbow and Dragon Claw. Though I played pretty defensively and methodically due to the map's linearity, I noticed a whole stash of Urns at the end of the map after I'd already killed everything, and it makes me wonder if I could stir up all three of the last fights at once for a truly insane battle. Mandatory chaos does tend to be the key to great combat in Heretic, and I do think that something more in the sprawly, wide-open modular style of "Memories of the Heart" or Caffeine Injection map 02 would work beautifully with the game's bestiary.

 

Regardless, I had fun with these maps, and fresh takes on Heretic are always welcome. The end map is an interesting reward, a pair of lush islands on a blood-red sea under a blood-red sky. It seems highly questionable to take a vacation in such a threatening-looking place, but the suggestion that you've reached another planet or dimensional realm does seem to hint at a larger goal for the player, possibly one not accomplished yet. Maybe there will be more of this story to tell, someday.

 

Edited July 4, 2023 by Not Jabba

[Misty]

Thank you for looking at my recent contributions! There are lots to say, but as usually I don't have good ways to express myself, I'm just happy that some people are enjoying my output, there will be more projects and contributions released in the future, just didn't find right time to return at mapping, since past few months I was quite busy with university. 

[Dynamo]

On 6/25/2023 at 3:22 AM, Not Jabba said:

Greenian by @BeeWen

Oh damn, sorry, I only just now saw this! I am glad you chose to cover Greenian because it is one of those projects that I felt went a bit under the radar back when it came out (no doubt partially because it was only on Doom Power for a while and not on DW), and of course, I feel honored that you brought up my own writeup when doing your review. When it comes to the level layouts, there's a bit of everything in terms of how close it stays to Herian 2, at times it seems almost indistinguishable, but at other times it feels completely different... part of it being the geometry, and part of it being the setting itself, of course. For example, MAP31 in the original Herian 2 is set in a harbor city at night, with a comforting blue sky... the Greenian counterpart, just through its firey theme alone, could not be more different if it tried.

 

Now, I happen to be particularly knowledgeable on and fond of the original Herian 2, because I've always found it to be dripping in atmosphere and very fun to just explore in spite of its flaws and antiquated design. I do however think, as already stated anyway, that it is precisely this marriage of the old and the new that makes Greenian so compelling, and if it is successfully able to evoke this feeling even for those who do not have familiarity with the original project, then I'd say it is a success on all fronts indeed! I am glad I was able to bring this project to the fore so to speak, and if what I offered was merely a cursory glance, I'm sure anyone reading your much more substantial review should owe it to themselves to add Greenian to their backlog. :)

[Not Jabba]

2023 Post-Mortem and Cacoward Picks

 

As you know, there's no such thing as a bad year for Doom modding. By my measurement, 2022 was perhaps slightly a "lull" year following the enormous harvest of 2021, but there was still a lot to keep up with. In keeping with that cycle, 2023 has been a "regular" year (which is to say, I didn't feel *enormously* punished in trying to narrow down to 24 award picks, but it was still pretty hard), and we can anticipate that 2024 may be completely insane again. A lot of people this year have speculated whether there will be a creative explosion of some sort and a large influx of new mappers as a result of MyHouse. I'm thinking, "You mean like the creative explosion and large influx of new mappers that we already had?"

 

In 2022, I noted that there had been a lot of quick-and-easy Doom maps, a trend of people wanting to create and play something a bit more casual and perhaps more straightforward (though I did miss a few major releases like The Magenta Spire). To my mind, this year's microtrend is that people were more interested in creating weirder or more gimmick-oriented maps. I'm inclined to reject terms like "experimental" or "avant-garde," because these types of maps, while exciting and very creative, have never been particularly uncommon. Doomweird is an established genre with its own tropes, and grab-bag megawads where every map is its own wildly different thing are about as old as community projects, to say nothing of the storied history of single-mapper endeavors like The Alfonzone and UnBeliever. "Surreal" is a term that can be applied to Doom maps made every year since 1993, starting with E1M8 of the original game (hell, the original Backrooms liminal horror maps are probably "The Chasm" and "Monster Condo"). But certainly we've seen a lot of all of the above this year, and it's been a joy. That drive to embrace the strangeness of existence (whether it's seen as tragic strangeness or happy strangeness) through mapping has been present in everything from more "underground" releases like Defy the Omphalos and I Can't Give You Any Thing to community projects like 1x1 and Pleasant Vibes From the Party Garage to debut maps and mapsets like Confusion Constructions and Liminal Doom, to MyHouse and Insanity Edged, two of the best and most mind-bending Doom releases I have ever played. And if stuff like Sepia, Boomer, and UDINO passes for mainstream now, we are living in great times indeed.

 

As usual, the following are personal picks and not affiliated with the Cacowards or based on insider information (ok, I have a couple tidbits of insider information this time, but you can be sure they haven't affected anything listed here). I'm hoping for a little bit more accurate of a forecast than last year, simply because I've played a larger swath of stuff and am more confident that I didn't miss many releases I would've been excited to play. However, just to be clear, this isn't actually a "forecast" -- it's the releases I liked best. I'm relatively unfamiliar with the tastes of the current team (insofar as individual tastes matter in a venture like this), and I wouldn't try to emulate them if I did. Additionally, there's always the question of what counts as "released" and what doesn't -- based on last year, I'm more likely to disregard shareware-style partial releases than the Cacowards team is, since I usually like to hold off on playing a mapset until it's declared complete (from an award standpoint, I realize this is a double-edged sword). 

 

These are my picks as of November 15, the most common cutoff date. For the sake of my sanity and broader coverage, I'm going to continue to blithely pretend that each award tier has 12 awardees annually since 2021. The official Cacowards team has to make more people happy with fewer slots, poor saps.

 

 

Gold: (Top 3 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

1. MyHouse by Veddge

2. Insanity Edged by @Pieruskwurje

3. Zeppelin Armada by 40oz et al.

4. I Can’t Give You Any Thing by @Maribo 

5. Sepia by @Petyan

6. Tetanus by @Egg Boy et al. (Team Squonker)

7. Hexen: Veil of Darkness by @Captain Toenail

8. Mudman by @eater29 

9. Boomer: Beyond Vanilla by @Fernito

10. Godless Night by @Tango et al.

11. El Viaje de Diciembre by @Cacodemon187 

12. Ultimate Doom in Name Only by @cannonball, @dobu gabu maru et al.

 

Silver: (Top 2 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

1. Jaded by @lunchlunch 

2. Break Point by @Major Arlene et al.

3. Shrine of the Silver CyberPrimate by @Big Ol Billy et al.

4. Uroboros by @Ravendesk 

5. Goodwad by @msx2plus

6. Moving by @GermanPeter

7. Deadliest Dem(o(li)ti)on by @Scypek2

8. Pina Colada by @myolden et al.

9. Oubliette Fatalis (demo?) by @RDETalus

10. YouDoVoodoo by @Grimosaur

11. Terminal Stages of Nostalgia by @AD_79 

12. Black Diamond by @suzerduzer

 

Odyssey of Noises:

MyHouse (@esselfortium and @Jimmy)

 

Creator of the Year:

lunchlunch or Pieruskwurje

 

Honor Roll: (top 3 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

worm\V/wood

Parallelism (demo?)

Atrophy 

1x1

Abscission

Arriving Early

Arrokoth

Austrian Avian Association

Cognitive Dissonance

Condemned

Corruption

Deep Breath

Defy the Omphalos

Diseases and Casualties

Escape From Slime City

Jack Builds a Techbase

Liminal Doom

Penelope

Pleasant Vibes From the Party Garage

Return to Hadron E4

The Cognition Engine

Trouble Over the Rainbow

What Lies Beneath

 

Stuff I Really Liked by Newer Mappers:

@ArchRevival: Lakeside

@AshtralFiend: Head Trauma

@dashlet (and @Lhyntel): Liminal Doom, Terrianis, The Settlements, A Continuous Tale

@DM_Workz: Trenchworkz Facility

@EduardoAndFriends: Grime, Relic, Deep Breath

@evil_scientist: Everything Is Going Crate

@Kisadillah: Death Guard, T.N.Terminus

@kwc: Escape From Slime City, HOTFIX93

@Laser Doom: Witch’s Flakes Candy

@LindaIsHere: Commerce-hell Park

@raddicted: Cognitive Dissonance, Glacier Town, What Do I Do, etc.

@RataUnderground: Memories

@slowfade: Confusion Constructions

@StarTanned: Based Refueling

 

Other Special Mentions:

Utter Heresy: WIP project with 2 episodes done out of 3 (or 5?), but looks amazing.

Arlington: An adventure game with multiple endings, which appears to be the forerunner of a larger project. I wanted to play this but haven’t had a chance.

Quoth the Raven: omg, it’s a Heretic megawad! Lots of good community project flavor and weird Heretic inventory/physics stuff.

If you liked I Can’t Give You Any Thing, Let’s Be Enemies is basically an expansion to it by the same author.

If you liked El Viaje de Diciembre, also try Ciudad Empresarial, another map by Cacodemon187 with ALT vibes.

 

Other stuff I played (These are generally also good):

Spoiler

 

Alice Clancy’s Shattered Dimensions

Almistice

Angmngthoo

Batman: Rogue City

Bloodbath’s Terrible Vacation

Blue Straggler

Cold Front

Coughing Crag

Crusader

Dead End Dust-Up

Death at 632.8 nm

Desecration of Memory

Dirt

Doomkid

Dreary Hauler

Excruciation

Fallen Leaves

Flesharmonic

Garden of Plagues

Go to Sleep

Hairy Tick DM

Hardpoint Hell

Heelbain

Hotel of the Dead

Hovercab Station

Immortal Warfare

Inscrutiny 2

Ismo’s Quest

Knee-Deep in 2023

Lost Civilization 2

Malevolence: Shutdown

Midnight

New City

Night on Doom Mountain

Nostalgia 2

Precipitous Extirpation

Protoslayer: Judecca

Refinery Complex

Reprocessing Facility

Ring of Fire

Ruined District

Sensory Deprivation Chamber

Sphinx Lowering

Stanley

Tech-Heresy

The All-Ghosts Forest

The Ice Keep

The Parasite of Good Will

The Pilgrim’s Westward Way (demo?)

The Smoking Dog Part 1

UAC Underworld

Urban Crusade

Urban Side

Villa de la Muerte

Voidspawn

Wonder Wheel

Yavin’s Clone

Zen 2212

 

 

Edited December 2, 2023 by Not Jabba

[GermanPeter]

4 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

2023 Post-Mortem and Cacoward Picks

 

As you know, there's no such thing as a bad year for Doom modding. By my measurement, 2022 was perhaps slightly a "lull" year following the enormous harvest of 2021, but there was still a lot to keep up with. In keeping with that cycle, 2023 has been a "regular" year (which is to say, I didn't feel *enormously* punished in trying to narrow down to 24 award picks, but it was still pretty hard), and we can anticipate that 2024 may be completely insane again. A lot of people this year have speculated whether there will be a creative explosion of some sort and a large influx of new mappers as a result of MyHouse. I'm thinking, "You mean like the creative explosion and large influx of new mappers that we already had?"

 

In 2022, I noted that there had been a lot of quick-and-easy Doom maps, a trend of people wanting to create and play something a bit more casual and perhaps more straightforward (though I did miss a few major releases like The Magenta Spire). To my mind, this year's microtrend is that people were more interested in creating weirder or more gimmick-oriented maps. I'm inclined to reject terms like "experimental" or "avant-garde," because these types of maps, while exciting and very creative, have never been particularly uncommon. Doomweird is an established genre with its own tropes, and grab-bag megawads where every map is its own wildly different thing are about as old as community projects, to say nothing of the storied history of single-mapper endeavors like The Alfonzone and UnBeliever. "Surreal" is a term that can be applied to Doom maps made every year since 1993, starting with E1M8 of the original game (hell, the original Backrooms liminal horror maps are probably "The Chasm" and "Monster Condo"). But certainly we've seen a lot of all of the above this year, and it's been a joy. That drive to embrace the strangeness of existence (whether it's seen as tragic strangeness or happy strangeness) through mapping has been present in everything from more "underground" releases like Defy the Omphalos and I Can't Give You Any Thing to community projects like 1x1 and Pleasant Vibes From the Party Garage to debut maps and mapsets like Confusion Constructions and Liminal Doom, to MyHouse and Insanity Edged, two of the best and most mind-bending Doom releases I have ever played. And if stuff like Sepia, Boomer, and UDINO passes for mainstream now, we are living in great times indeed.

 

As usual, the following are personal picks and not affiliated with the Cacowards or based on insider information (ok, I have a couple tidbits of insider information this time, but you can be sure they haven't affected anything listed here). I'm hoping for a little bit more accurate of a forecast than last year, simply because I've played a larger swath of stuff and am more confident that I didn't miss many releases I would've been excited to play. However, just to be clear, this isn't actually a "forecast" -- it's the releases I liked best. I'm relatively unfamiliar with the tastes of the current team (insofar as individual tastes matter in a venture like this), and I wouldn't try to emulate them if I did. Additionally, there's always the question of what counts as "released" and what doesn't -- based on last year, I'm more likely to disregard shareware-style partial releases than the Cacowards team is, since I usually like to hold off on playing a mapset until it's declared complete (from an award standpoint, I realize this is a double-edged sword). 

 

These are my picks as of November 15, the most common cutoff date. For the sake of my sanity and broader coverage, I'm going to continue to blithely pretend that each award tier has 12 awardees annually since 2021. The official Cacowards team has to make more people happy with fewer slots, poor saps.

 

 

Gold: (Top 3 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

1. MyHouse by Veddge

2. Insanity Edged by @Pieruskwurje

3. Zeppelin Armada by 40oz et al.

4. I Can’t Give You Any Thing by @Maribo 

5. Sepia by @Petyan

6. Tetanus by @Egg Boy et al. (Team Squonker)

7. Hexen: Veil of Darkness by @Captain Toenail

8. Mudman by @eater29 

9. Boomer: Beyond Vanilla by @Fernito

10. Godless Night by @Tango et al.

11. El Viaje de Diciembre by @Cacodemon187 

12. Ultimate Doom in Name Only by @cannonball, @dobu gabu maru et al.

 

Silver: (Top 2 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

1. Jaded by @lunchlunch 

2. Break Point by @Major Arlene et al.

3. Shrine of the Silver CyberPrimate by @Big Ol Billy et al.

4. Uroboros by @Ravendesk 

5. Goodwad by @msx2plus

6. Moving by @GermanPeter

7. Deadliest Dem(o(li)ti)on by @Scypek2

8. Pina Colada by @myolden et al.

9. Oubliette Fatalis (demo?) by @RDETalus

10. YouDoVoodoo by @Grimosaur

11. Terminal Stages of Nostalgia by @AD_79 

12. Black Diamond by @suzerduzer

 

Odyssey of Noises:

MyHouse (@esselfortium and @Jimmy)

 

Creator of the Year:

lunchlunch or Pieruskwurje

 

Honor Roll: (top 3 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

worm\V/wood

Parallelism (demo?)

Atrophy 

1x1

Abscission

Arriving Early

Arrokoth

Austrian Avian Association

Cognitive Dissonance

Condemned

Corruption

Deep Breath

Defy the Omphalos

Diseases and Casualties

Escape From Slime City

Jack Builds a Techbase

Liminal Doom

Penelope

Pleasant Vibes From the Party Garage

Return to Hadron E4

The Cognition Engine

Trouble Over the Rainbow

What Lies Beneath

 

Stuff I Really Liked by Newer Mappers:

@ArchRevival: Lakeside

@AshtralFiend: Head Trauma

@dashlet (and @Lhyntel): Liminal Doom, Terrianis, The Settlements, A Continuous Tale

@DM_Workz: Trenchworkz Facility

@EduardoAndFriends: Grime, Relic, Deep Breath

@evil_scientist: Everything Is Going Crate

@Kisadillah: Death Guard, T.N.Terminus

@kwc: Escape From Slime City, HOTFIX93

@Laser Doom: Witch’s Flakes Candy

@LindaIsHere: Commerce-hell Park

@raddicted: Cognitive Dissonance, Glacier Town, What Do I Do, etc.

@RataUnderground: Memories

@slowfade: Confusion Constructions

@StarTanned: Based Refueling

 

Other Special Mentions:

Utter Heresy: WIP project with 2 episodes done out of 3 (or 5?), but looks amazing.

Arlington: An adventure game with multiple endings, which appears to be the forerunner of a larger project. I wanted to play this but haven’t had a chance.

Quoth the Raven: omg, it’s a Heretic megawad! Lots of good community project flavor and weird Heretic inventory/physics stuff.

If you liked I Can’t Give You Any Thing, Let’s Be Enemies is basically an expansion to it by the same author.

If you liked El Viaje de Diciembre, also try Ciudad Empresarial, another map by Cacodemon187 with ALT vibes.

 

Other stuff I played (These are generally also good):

  Reveal hidden contents

 

Alice Clancy’s Shattered Dimensions

Almistice

Angmngthoo

Batman: Rogue City

Bloodbath’s Terrible Vacation

Blue Straggler

Cold Front

Coughing Crag

Crusader

Dead End Dust-Up

Death at 632.8 nm

Desecration of Memory

Dirt

Doomkid

Dreary Hauler

Excruciation

Fallen Leaves

Flesharmonic

Garden of Plagues

Go to Sleep

Hairy Tick DM

Hardpoint Hell

Heelbain

Hotel of the Dead

Hovercab Station

Immortal Warfare

Inscrutiny 2

Ismo’s Quest

Knee-Deep in 2023

Lost Civilization 2

Malevolence: Shutdown

Midnight

New City

Night on Doom Mountain

Nostalgia 2

Precipitous Extirpation

Protoslayer: Judecca

Refinery Complex

Reprocessing Facility

Ring of Fire

Ruined District

Sensory Deprivation Chamber

Sphinx Lowering

Stanley

Tech-Heresy

The All-Ghosts Forest

The Ice Keep

The Parasite of Good Will

The Pilgrim’s Westward Way (demo?)

The Smoking Dog Part 1

UAC Underworld

Urban Crusade

Urban Side

Villa de la Muerte

Voidspawn

Wonder Wheel

Yavin’s Clone

Zen 2212

 

 

Hell yeah, silver 😎

[Egg Boy]

Appreciate the Not Caco! While it wasn’t as big a year as 2021, it was definitely a competitive year in the way every year is. Way more than 10 or even 20 caco-worthy wads come out every year.

[Grimosaur]

7 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

Silver: (Top 2 are favorites, otherwise unranked)

 

10. YouDoVoodoo by @Grimosaur

 

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

[Bank]

8 hours ago, Not Jabba said:

Arlington: An adventure game with multiple endings, which appears to be the forerunner of a larger project. I wanted to play this but haven’t had a chance.

Thank you for the special mention @Not Jabba and cheers to another amazing year of Doom wads

[dobu gabu maru]

Thanks for the UDINO mention!

 

This year has been crazy for both video games & Doom wads, and anyone trying to keep up with them is even crazier. Just so much cool and interesting stuff coming out (which makes me wonder how much of this year's rush of creativity isn't just due to MyHouse popularity but celebrating Doom's 25th anniversary?) A solid, diverse list Jabba; thanks for putting I Can't Give You Any Thing on my radar.

[StarTanned]

Thanks again, @Not Jabba! It's an honor to see my own work on such a list, given how much stellar content this community produces.

[baja blast rd.]

30 minutes ago, dobu gabu maru said:

(which makes me wonder how much of this year's rush of creativity isn't just due to MyHouse popularity but celebrating Doom's 25th anniversary?)

 

Would say very little is myhouse.pk3. A lot of work this year is from subcommunities that I observed (on Discord and elsewhere) to be apathetic about it, which includes most of the very experimental work and even vaguely myhouse-resembling work. And much has been in-dev since before it came out.

 

Same for the 30th anniversary, probably, although that probably has a slightly bigger effect. 

 

This seems like it's mostly a natural continuation of what has been happening since 2021.

[Lorenz0]

It's nice to see my Atrophy got into the honor roll, I'm glad you liked it.

 

Your list reminded me how many releases there were in this year of Doom mapping, so I'm definitely going to play some of the ones I've missed :)

[Death Bear]

On behalf of the QTR team, I’m glad you enjoyed it, and appreciate the mention. I’ve said it before, but I’m proud with what everyone came up with…and in such a short amount of time. Very much looking forward to creating more!

[slowfade]

Cool, I'm glad to see you liked Confusion Constructions! Going to check out stuff mentioned here to see what gems I've missed so far this year...

[Snaxalotl]

An honor roll for abscission!? I'm Glad you liked it c:

[esselfortium]

Thanks for the MyHouse music mention!

[cannonball]

Seeing UDINO in your top picks made me smile, thank you.

 

I don't know whether it is because I have been more active but this year has felt like there has been a tremendous glut of excellent releases and surprises. I think Doom has been given a great 30th birthday present with the sheer quantity of both high quality and at times very unusual releases, in a way it feels right that you have both blockbuster releases and wads that could have easily come from the darkest reaches of Sandy Petersen's subconscious.

I don't think things are going to quieten down either next year with several groups of mappers already working on new and exciting projects. I do wonder how much has platforms such as Discord helped too, given that several releases have come from these servers.

[Cacodemon187]

Thank you so much for the Gold Jabbaward™!!

It's an honor to see my projects be paired with so many awesome releases :)

[AD_79]

Surprised to see my map fairly high up in the listing there. Thank you for enjoying. Here's to next year, I'm aiming to have plenty of stuff ready by then.

[Somniac]

Its a bit surreal to see Arrokoth on this list, there's been so many impressive wads this year across a huge range of styles, and there are loads I still need to check out. Thanks for the mention!

[kwc]

You like me, you really like me 🥲

[Steve D]

Another UDINO mapper chiming in to say thanks for putting our project on the Gold list. I have a big thumping heart for UDoom and there are other such projects out there that I need to play, because they look so good.

 

In other news, I've played and loved MyHouse but can easily play it 2 or 3 more times to explore its vast mysteries. I've also played most of the incredible Insanity Edged, and need to get past some tricky Archvile encounters to finish up. Godless Night is another that I've sampled and found exceptional, but beyond that, I'm so far behind. As you can see, I'm even behind on what I'm playing and loving! ;D

 

I think that what I need to do over the next few months is play more stuff by creators I'm completely unfamiliar with, but who I know, thanks to you and others, are pumping out fantastic material. Doom seems to keep drawing in talent, and because of that, for me, it never gets old.

[Pieruskwurje]

Man, I'm really happy that you (and Steve D above as well!) got a lot of enjoyment out of my mod. I hope to continue to meet and exceed this standard.

 

But more importantly, I'm glad you pinged, since now I know this thread exists. If there's only one thing I like more than playing good mods, it's reading essays about them afterwards!

[Petyan]

Quite surprised to see that pretty much my first work made it that high up the list, i'm really glad that you enjoyed it. (despite it being very brown) :)

[RataUnderground]

You played my last map and you liked it, cool! 😁

[EduardoAndFriends]

Glad you enjoyed what I’ve managed to spew out thus far! Much more to come. Cheers! 😎

[Maribo]

Was a very pleasant surprise to find I CANT GIVE YOU ANY THING in your Gold tier, thanks a bunch. It's been surprising to see it resonate with so many people in some way. I got a lot more guest mapping contributions than I expected, and I've talked to a few people who IDDQD'd through the whole thing and still found it to be enjoyable, which was nice to hear.

 

re: Doomweird - anyone looking for more of it from this year should take a look at Dum-Dum Thoughts, some select maps from Hardfest 2 (most notably akolai's) and to some extent, Firerainbow.

[TheShep]

I really love this list for this year. Helps me to make sure I've kept track of all the goodies along the way :)

Thanks for everything.