bioshockfan90

'07, year after the Wii came out. Didn't grow up in a very affluent household and I believe we picked one up second-hand. Got Mario Galaxy and Sonic and the Secret Rings, you can probably guess which one I liked better. I dunno, each one is special in its own way but in recent memory they've all been pretty relaxed in my adult life. I got a MIDI controller 3 years ago, still been meaning to make good use of that but theory scares me. Last year I went to a buddy's on Xmas eve and ended up getting no sleep, spent christmas morning cranky, exhausted, and not feeling good mentally until I cracked open the liqueur shooters my buddy gave me the night before. I think it also had something to do with catching my second wind. In short, probably 2007 but really all of the early-to-mid childhood ones were great. Christmas somewhat loses its magic once you realize for most people it boils down to commercialism.

This would be a hypothetical video-form alternative. Assuming, you know, people submit their wads ahead of time and hire editors for trailers and... you get the idea. Exactly why I said it probably wouldn't work out. I still stand by it being a neat concept however. :p EDIT: Okay, on PC now. Can give more detail. My comment was not meant to suggest the 'wards be put 'up-to-date' and compete with what is a soulless husk of commercialism. I love the Cacowards as they are due to their text-only format. I should've specified that if there were to be a Cacowards alternative, it'd be neat to have something like the aforementioned Fangame Awards in video format, preferably as a livestream.

In all seriousness, I've wanted a Quake equivalent of the Cacos for a long time, or just more games in general. Making it more like the Game Awards would be cool as well, having announcements for new wads (imagine seeing a trailer for BTSX E3 after you see a WAD win) and the likes. But it's hard enough on the team as is, so no pressure there. Actually to chime in a bit, the IWBTG fangame community has its equivalent to the Cacowards, called "The Fangame Awards". They stream it every January and it's a lot like what I just spoke about, announcements interspersed with award winners and the winners coming up to give a speech and interviews. Check it out if that's up your alley.

I'm not gonna sit here and call myself the best writer or reviewer of WADs... the primary reason my blog exists is to journal what I've played and give new mappers feedback, but this is pretty sad. Didn't read up on everything nor am I going to pretend I know the whole situation, and to echo what others have said in this thread it'd be interesting to see Cacowards alternatives. But it seems that really in a community as (I'm going to risk coming across as maybe a bit off in saying this) small and as niche as Doom's, we don't need that much variety. I see the Cacowards as a commemoration of what was accomplished that year, not a be-all end-all selection of what is objectively the best. There is no such thing as an objective best WAD. The wadazine's awards seem nice, Endless' top 50 of '94 was great, and as per usual there is the hidden gems thread. Do we really need much more? This reads as a poor trolling attempt from those that disdain Doomworld and like to wear tinfoil hats. Is what it is though. I wouldn't put too much stock into it, it seems admins have addressed the majority of concerns and discourse around it. Interesting situation nonetheless.

I play with my volume pretty low, it could've been a build-specific thing (not on latest version of GZDOOM) or a volume thing. I wouldn't stress it too much unless someone else brings it up.

Tumblr Review I forgot to write down what percentages I left the map with, my bad. I played on HNTR and my experience was mostly pleasant but I did notice some things you could improve on. Most of the doors in the map are flush with the wall which is a minor pet peeve of mine, having them be slightly recessed makes it look prettier. Small details like that go a long way in making it feel more whole. That's really just nitpicking though. The big things I wanted to talk about are how, when you go down the elevator at the start, a lot of the combat boils down to just standing in the elevator and gunning everything down from 1 spot. There's no opposition from behind to force you out into the courtyard. So it ends up being kinda sluggish. In the 'arcade' it's less of an issue, but everything teleports in so fast there's not much breathing room in the sector itself to have a fair shot. Additionally, the whole 'climax' arena is a bit odd. FIREBLU ranting aside, there is no music (not sure if this is intentional or not) and most of it can be averted by circlestrafing. The PEs at the top of the arena do nothing much other than make it more annoying to max (which I wasn't trying to do to begin with, so take that as you will). Also a bit weird how there's a couple more mini fights even after you get the red key, it feels like I had my fun with the map and it's just trying to get my attention at that point. Sorry if all of that seemed harsh, I in actuality do like the map a lot, I think it's worthy of a play to anyone that uses these advanced ports, there's just a few things that it could do better. I haven't seen your name on the forums to my knowledge, so for someone relatively new to the scene this is really impressive. Doomcute is on-point, aesthetic is great, I didn't find that many secrets but I'm sure they were hidden well, and pretty much the entire layout sans the CYBER SANCTUM was really enjoyable to go through. Didn't feel like a sensory overload of UDMF features as well, and mouselook was not required which as someone that loathes using it was nice. So yeah, good stuff! Just a couple tweaks and this would be really good.

Great palette, really makes the blues shine (which is probably fitting given the title). Screenshots look marvelous as to be expected from a veteran mapper - consider me excited.

Scorn by @Bri was one of my favorites this year, really showed me what MBF21 is capable of. Surprised it didn't get mentionated, but I suppose another one of their projects did so it's all good at the end of the day. There were some neat mapping mini single-level experiences that came out this year, just single maps for the most part that were fun and deserve a look if you missed them. That's about all I can think of.

HNTR feels way too easy, but I'm not complaining, that's on me for not wanting to deal with Romero's Cyberdemon fetish. Liked the secret exit, this feels like a sequel to its predecessor through and through. It may not be the best thing I've played, but it's Romero, there's a certain charm to it. I'd say it stands on its own as a neat PWAD as is even if it was released by a stranger. He sure has a thing for narrow platforming-hugging nowadays, huh? Will probably update this post when I finish the WAD. I've been busy with Pina Colada.

Thank you for the amazing writeups as usual, I have yet more to play on the endless backlog. I'll get a little anecdotal quick and recall my Doom past: I wasn't alive for its release, but around 2003-04 when I was a young boy, my mother sat me on her lap and played Doom 3 for me to watch. I had nightmares for a couple weeks after that, but it got me interested. My father ran Doom95 back in the day and claimed to have been one of the first to host LAN deathmatch setups for him and my mother, as well as others that came around. I still remember playing Doom with Skulltag using only a keyboard and beating E1 of Doom 1 over and over again. I played things like Fava Beans, I read 10 years of doom, I submitted a dumb first-ever-map for DUMP 2 when I was in highschool and made a few more maps after that. At the age of 23, I couldn't be happier to be a part of this community even if it's just chiming in for the occasional comment or review on my Tumblr blog. Super glad at how Myhouse was handled, probably the best way to go about it. Now if you'll excuse me, I feel like I just ate 2 Thanksgiving dinners and need a long nap. Of playing these excellent WADs, that is. Congrats to all the winners and here's to me being in my 50s one day still playing this game! Much love, y'all.

Alright, I played this and LOVED it. I doubt the thoughts in the hyperlink really would mean much to you, Pieruskwurje, but let it be known that if you're hesitant on playing UDMF PWADs, this is the one that'll sell you. In the past, it was Winter's Fury (funny how that works out, doesn't it?), but this just takes it to a whole 'nother level, man. I did find a small area where I assume I got stuck in MAP07, among the landscape whilst trying to find my way around. I didn't play with mouselook on, and that led to me missing some things that I probably should've picked up on earlier, but that's about all the bad I can say about it. Wish I had screenshotted the softlock, but I'm sure if it could be found before, someone else'll pick up on it eventually. Or maybe there was a way out, and I just didn't notice. Casual difficulty for me was plenty hard, thank god for the autosaves or a couple of deaths would've made me very, very upset. Overall, yeah, this is fantastic. Give the Tumblr post in the hyperlink a read if you want, but I'm happy with just telling you that this (although I played it way later than I should've) is fantastic.

Sweet, way to surprise me about this! Remind me to finish the PUSS episode playtesting bud. PRO-TIP: Embed the link in some text and change the "dl=0" part at the end of the URL to "dl=1". Direct download that way, no fussing about with dropbox clicking. Congrats to all involved! Screenies look good.

Congrats! Sorry I never gave any more feedback, kinda got tangled up into one thing and then another... you know how it goes. Holidays have been hella stressful so wheeeeeeeeeeee that's fun. In any case glad to see it's on the almighty /id and I do want to beat this sometime and blog about it. Thanks for addressing the stuff I brought up while not compromising your vision. :)

Oh man, between the UAC Crate Project and STRAIN I may have to make room for a 3rd WAD to play before the year ends. So much quality stuff coming out, plus whatever ends up being at the cacowards. As I usually say on topics like these, great job on making something and uploading it that appears to be high-quality, and I will seriously try to find time for this. Speed of Doom is something pretty special to me and screenies sold me so I'm betting I'll have fun with it. :)

17 monsters on HNTR? I'll take an easy win against the demons any day but surely Hell has more opposition than that, even for the newcomers. Either way, cool architecture and texturing! Reminds me of something straight out of a quality Community Chest 2 map. I'd record a demo if I weren't using GZDoom. Me no good at platforming otherwise the completion time probably would've been at least a minute lower. Not bad, I should probably play it on Nightmare as intended sometime. You have what it takes to make a cool layout and definitely a pretty cool aesthetic style, just maybe a bit of work on the gameplay front. RE: loud MIDI, I didn't run into this problem but then again I play with my music at 0.25. Was noticeably louder than the titlescreen music but it wasn't that big a deal. Thank you for the upload! ^^

Ah yes, my bad. I should've just said Steam release. I guess one more I forgot to mention but should be obvious: AlephOne for the Marathon games!

GZDoom/DSDA-doom for Doom, depends on what I want out of my experience. Sometimes I'll even use Crispy Doom. Aaaand Quakespasm for Quake? I don't really like Quake that much, my first time playing through the whole campaign was with the Unity port so I guess that takes precedence, but if I were to play Quake again I'd use Quakespasm.

Congrats A2Rob! Running Late I believe I've played a bit of but that was back when I wasn't so much into doom (the dark ages of my Dooming career, if you will). I need to catch up and not run too late on "Arriving Early"! I'm playin' through STRAIN right now but I'll dig into this series as soon as I get done with that as I am in dire need of modern PWADs to play after this dry dose of 90s dirt.

Probably not, I've always been very sporadic about the games I play (Doom or not) so short playseshes are my go-to. Like most others here I can probably stomach E1 of Ultimate Doom in 1 sitting at most. Also like others have said, there's been so much objectively better Doom content released that is easier to binge. If we factor in PWADs, I've gone insane sometimes on PWADs, playing for hours at a time either grinding out one map or beating 12-13 in 1 sitting. Right now I'm playing through STRAIN for the first time and it's one of those wads where I just feel like taking my time with it. So I fire it up during the morning after I've had my coffee and beat 1 or 2 maps, write about it in my Journal app, then go on about my day. I got sidetracked there, sorry! ^^ point being, the IWADs don't lend themselves particularly well to single-sitting playthroughs unless you're a speedrunner.

Exciting stuff, I'll play it and have a good time! SIGIL, despite its flaws, is pretty fun and it's not every day you see the dev of a (borderline) ancient game come back to make more levels for it 25-30 years later. Re: did SIGIL deserve a cacoward, I'd say yes, if NRFTL could get one and TNT could get mentioned in 10YOD I don't see why SIGIL (and its sequel) couldn't get a nod either. It technically got mentioned that year if I'm not mistaken, so I don't see why anyone should be complaining to begin with! I read somewhere on here once that it really doesn't matter on the order of the 'wards, the gold and silverness of it all, or even beyond that - if you get mentioned, you basically get the merit. And that's the way I've always seen it. There was a WHOLE ASS SECTION dedicated to SIGIL that year (once again, if I'm not mistaken) and the fact that people have the audacity to say "Oh well it didn't get the same honors as (wad I like)" (which is all preconceived anyway), boo cacowards" is pretty funny to say the least. But that's probably just feeding the trolls as it tends to go, back on track I'm curious if the episode will keep using the bright red hellcracks and evil eyes. I know he's been streaming development on youtube, can anyone confirm if these features were shown during a stream?

Well, no video for you but I did review it over on my Tumblr if you're interested to go have a look. Took me around 12 and a half minutes to get all secrets and kills on HNTR. I did get a bit turned around, but I'm kinda notorious for that in general so I wouldn't worry about it being confusing. Fun stuff here! Room for leniency in case you get zapped by an archie or two, which I'm always a fan of. Combat maybe wasn't like super orchestrated or anything, but for a roamer it's got all it needs to succeed. Thumbs up + additional thumbs up for vanilla mapping in 2023. :)

Gotcha, in that case I will try to give this a spin. Tangentially related but whenever I struggle with coming up with map names I think of horror movies or song names.

I'm not exactly I'm sure I'd call 3 scattered maps a beta, especially when one of them is the final map and the other is the 32 slot, but screenies look promising. I'm not really in a mapping state of mind right now, but I wish you the best of luck on finishing this!

In preparation for the recently-released sequel, I played this because I was not playing Doom when this dropped. Fantastic stuff, HNTR balancing was spot-on and I like how there's room for plenty of error in case you get zapped or botch a fight. Maps 20 and 28 were unusually high in difficulty compared to the base 32, but that could just be a matter of how I play Doom. The slaughtermap was really fun, gave me big "Going Down" vibes. Lots of emphasis on hot starts, newschool style play is not required but I ended up utilizing it quite a bit especially in E3 just to make things easier on repeat attempts. Ended up beating all 32 maps pistol starts saveless on HNTR without a preliminary saves playthrough. I like that you're not afraid to use boss monsters on lower difficulties, a lot of megaWADs hold back and you instead opt to just make it a fair fight instead of sacrificing the experience. I got a Cyberdemon stuck on a sector in one of the E3 maps, I forgot what map though. That was the only 'bug' I ran into and it's not even really a big deal. Review on Tumblr here in case you use that network, either way thanks for making this. It was fun to blast through in a couple days.

That's a lot of imps! Imp-ressive. Details are great for 3 hours and it was pretty fun but I died. Lots of enemies, not much firepower or ammo. The RL earlier would be nice. Idk, something about hordes of imps and the pump action is kinda unfun to me. Thank you for giving me something to play. :)