Wednesday, December 11, 2019

800 Reviews and a Happy Doomsday!

When I posted the 700 review milestone back in January I wasn't expecting to hit 800 at the end of the year. Close, maybe, but not within ten months! This was a crazy year, my most productive since 2012. I've been writing a lot about a twenty-six year old computer game.

In review (with a repost of my mid-year state of the blog to start):

  • 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 ALL 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 ALL 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 ALL 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 RebornSubP:AR, and The Dying End for Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2003 and the 2007 Cacowards 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

  • Dug deeper into 2017 with Mechadon's Counterattack, cannonball's Return to Hadron E2, and Chris Lutz's Hellscape and Dark Tide (the latter two finishing off his entire catalogue)
  • Started Will Hackney's solo catalogue as a less prolific CCHEST contributor
  • Jumped into the /idgames-available solo catalogue of Pablo Dictter in part to build to Andy Leaver's No Hope For Life E1 as a buildup to CCHEST
  • Kicked off the megaWAD grind through Kaiser's early material with DSV due to his history with CCHEST as well as Doomworld's Top 10 WADs of 2003 (The Absolution TC)
  • Started Gene Bird's solo catalogue as a contributor to both CCHEST and CCHEST2
  • Played Enjay Doom as a soft request and also due to its historical importance 
  • Played Project: Slipgate and Dissolution in the build to Dark 7 and its mission pack
  • Played 10 Sectors Part 2 to fill in a historical gap that I had been curious about
  • Played Kevin Reay's two magical solo releases to round up yet another less-prolific CCHEST contributor
  • Played Russian Overkill as part of my slow-ass mod campaign
  • Played Mayhem 2016, the next step in another campaign to have the entire Mayhem series reviewed
  • Played 3 Heures d'Agonie 3 as a breather from the Abyssal Speedmapping Sessions roundup
  • Started to flesh out Brad Spencer's solo catalogue because of his joint venture with Karthik Abhiram as well as being a contributor to Hellcore, not to mention his Alien Vendetta pedigree 


Where ONEMANDOOM is headed in the immediate future:


Finally, I am going to stop reposting the request list. It's just a weight that hangs me down and I feel more motivated to pursue /idgames with my own methodology, maybe cherry-picking some of the esoteric requests.

7 comments:

  1. Being following your blog since i was in the middle of Uni! Now working for 3 years now still passing by for new content!

    Thanks so much for the dedication and legacy you will leave to the community!

    Cheers.

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    1. Thank you very much! Glad to hear from a long-time reader!

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  2. Thanks for reviewing all these WADs (and of course Titan 2). Your reviews are always very in-depth and useful, both to the would-be player of a WAD as well as the author. Keep up the good work!

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  3. Thanks again for all your hard work. Your idtech 1 misadventures have always been a favorite goto read :)

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  4. I feel your site lacks what I crave most from Doom reviews: criticism and just generally all sorts of authentic and opinionated thoughts on good vs bad map design. I am almost never left with an impression that you dislike anything you play. I can't use your reviews to figure out what maps I won't like, and I don't even use them as a way to pick random wads that I should try. All of these issues also apply to Cacoaward writeups as well, it is endemic in the Doom community.

    My method of finding good wads to try is to use random doomworld posts, which is fine but could be better. I want to see *somewhere* in the Doom community where select wads are actually elevated above the rest and where select styles of map design can be claimed to be ideal, with NO apologies given to creations (especially high effort wads/award winning wads/popular wads) that don't have value to that person.

    Anyway, sorry for being overly honest. I admire you passion and work into reviewing community Doom creations. I've been checking your work out for a long time.

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    1. what you're looking for is in opposition to the tone that I eventually established for myself as a writer somewhere around the 2013-2014 period. your words re: "authentic and opinionated" kind of sting because they imply (consciously, unconsciously, or accidentally) that my reviews are not an authentic product of what I thought and felt while playing PWADs. the suggestion appears to be that I could not possibly enjoy playing so many PWADs given how many of them are generally regarded as mediocre.

      every PWAD is to me an adventure into someone's private universe, reflective of their character, and I treat each one accordingly as a valuable work of art. I detest the idea that a particular map's design could be claimed as "ideal" because it is stifling to the creativity of the medium. I think that you can still pick up on level design that I find to be unsatisfying but it's communicated in a generally subtle fashion and is probably best interpreted by the author of the work in question. I did have a plan at one point in time to create cliff's notes lists of outstanding PWADs in genre-ish categories but I could never work up the time or energy to see it through in a way that I would have been happy with.

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    2. I should address the most important part first, where using the phrase "authentic and opinionated" unfortunately communicated something that was very hurtful. I can only imagine it could not be joyful to get an internet comment like that about your personal project out of the blue one. I'm sorry for coming across like that on something that is obviously very important, and will try to avoid something like that again.

      Those two words were superfluous modifiers, not to be taken as essential and stand alone adjectives. I want to expunge the associations they have created. To communicate better, I'm saying that the "lacking" part I want to see more in the Doom community is a voice that clearly sets out to label the good vs bad creations. And by clearly, I mean in a way that doesn't give most maps nearly the same status as the rare best.

      Your goal of finding the valuable bits of art in each community creation is an admirable project. But over time, the number of wad reviews on this site has become so comprehensive and so wide ranging. This has a secondary effect of creating a public edifice that doesn't match most people's experiences which are less accepting. Most people's experience will include some amount of "ok, let's try this one --> bail after X maps because it failed to be satisfying".

      I hesitate to use more emotive language again, but I really do feel a craving in the Doom community for something that is presently lacking. Every time I read about Doom I feel people don't even have disliked maps. I don't feel anyone else gets frustrated by lazy maps, or maps with too much detail (or not enough detail, depending on the individual), or maps with too much door fighting. I could get 100x more specific into the nitty gritty, but this is already gesturing at what I perceive as the missing void. It is bizarre that on doomworld I can read a 500 word essay on any particular Cacoaward winner, receive the impression that there is a lot to like, and then boot it up and find it nearly unplayable or laboriously boring for reasons that could be very plainly described.

      Anyway, it doesn't have to be you or anyone, but I thought you would be the most interesting person to get this off my chest with. Have a good night.

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