Mid-Year State of the Blog: 2019

Mid-Year State of the Blog: 2019

Longtime readers may have realized that the pace of reviews has been faster as of late with all of the single-level posts. As of the beginning of July I have already posted more reviews than I did in 2017 overall (63 vs. 48).


What this looked like, in summary:

• Finished my exhaustive review of Malcolm Sailor's material
• Continued my exhaustive review of Memfis's material
• Samsara as part of a very slow makegood for reviewing gameplay mods, followed by Smooth Doom
• Played the complete catalogue of Capone (building up to and finishing a request for AOLGIRLS)
• Played the complete catalogue of Richard R. Ward (a request)
• Played MAYhem 2013 and more recently MAYhem 1500 in an attempt to catch up to the current year of MAYhem
• Played Kama Sutra as part of my slow build through the hardcore branch of Doom level design, followed by the One Week Mapping Contest as my beginning build to Erik Alm
• Played Abyssal Speedmapping Session 5 and later ABYSPED6 as a token effort to flesh out the current speedmapping scene
• Played most of Alex Parson's complete catalogue in a slow build to CCHEST
• Played Titan 2 as part of a make good in a build to Titan 1024, a long-standing request
• Played Alexa Gonzales-Jones's catalogue through Shadows of the Nightmare Realm for the 2017 Cacowards
• Played most of John Bye's complete catalogue as part of filling the blanks on early, classic authors and specifically filling in an influence on Malcolm Sailor's later style
• Played some of Karthik Abhiram's complete catalogue through Congestion Control for Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2002
• Played CRINGE! to kick off Mark Klem's complete catalogue as part of filling the blanks on early, classic authors (and maybe work toward reviewing the soundtracks that Klem was involved in!)
• Played Serious_MOod's 2019 releases by request
• Played most of Mike MacDee's vanilla gameplay catalogue to build toward his army of TCs and mods
• Played the original quake2doom in a build to Dark7 and its mission pack for Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2002 that is way longer than I had anticipated
• Played NIMROD for Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2002 and long-term work through Kristus's complete catalogue in the same way I've been working through Chris Lutz's
• Played Phobos: Anomaly Reborn, SubP:AR, and The Dying End for Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2003 and the 2007 Cacowwards as well as build to the 2017 Cacowards
• Played Grain of Salt's Fruit Salad by request
• Played SIGIL because duh
• Played DoomCenter E1 Mapping Contest to plug some historical holes before building in several other directions
• Played Simon Broadhead's complete solo catalogue to start rounding up the less prolific CCHEST contributors
• Played Doom the Way id Did: The Lost Episodes as a make good for being a dick about its long polishing period and then continually putting off doing it
• Wrote up an article that should hopefully help out folks who are interested in starting to play PWADs but feel completely lost at how to even start

A peek behind the curtain (the rest of the current review cycle or "season", so to speak):

• Continue to chip away at singles authors
• Counterattack and Return to Hadron E2 for the 2017 Cacowards
• DSV to kick off Kaiser's complete catalogue as a build to both the CCHEST series as well as Plutonia 2
• NJ Doom to fill in more classic community history circa 1994-1995
• Project Slipgate and Dissolution to continue the long build to Dark 7 and its Mission Pack
• Hellscape and Dark Tide for the 2017 Cacowards
• 10 Sectors 2, a housekeeping megaWAD that plugs in a lot of author catalogue holes.

Some of the stuff from the next cycle will not come as a surprise if you've been following my direction. Mayhem 2016 and ABYSPED7 are a given, of course, and die-hard Alm fans should be pretty happy if still chomping at the bit for me to skip ahead and play Scythe II. Fat chance!