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  • Machaward - Most creative, unusual, or artistically compelling project of the year


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    GOODWAD - @msx2plus

     

    GOODWAD, which msx2plus understatedly describes in the release thread as an idea sketchbook -- while showing off screenshots that range from strikingly gorgeous to "eye assault" -- might be the best of a recent rush of wads that explore new shortform philosophies of map design, and bridge the gap between high-effort work and more playful, informal work. For some, the idea of making something deliberately ambitious and grand leans on being a stressful experience, rather than an enjoyable one. The way GOODWAD funnels such offbeat creativity into a string of little speedmapped vignettes speaks to the idea that one can work in this space of "mini-experiences," or "micro-maps," and still make an emotional impact on somebody.

     

    Even as Doom's format is so accessible to get into for newcomers, what inevitably happens among so many creators is ambition creep, a constant race to outdo your past selves in effort and creativity -- and stories of this are legion in the community. GOODWAD's message is thus a wonderful antidote to that feeling, showing how you can indeed do better, but without straining against a progressively heavier burden. 

     

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    As a play experience, it draws on a mix of styles popular in niche challenge scenes -- platforming maps (the Frog and Toad series), move-and-chill maps (JUMPWAD), obstacle course challenges, and very quickly made speedmaps (the D5DA series) -- along with all sorts of little experiments, and wraps it up with msx2plus's gift for audiovisual polish and striking creativity. Many of these maps also double as silly, tongue-in-cheek references to things that they love, in ways that make (light-hearted) fun of them, or simply show appreciation for the original experience.

     

    What makes GOODWAD such a compelling experience is how dedicated it is to being a set of raw, yet digestible sketches of what Doom can be. The WAD contains many unique takes on its platforming, something of which msx is a very passionate defender. The cold, meditative journey back home in map11: "Please Wait For Me" and the silly, "momentum storage" gimmick of map15: "How To Manifest Your Ideal Self" are two radically different takes on designing a navigation-based challenge for the player to understand and then execute. GOODWAD's takes on slaughter range from lovingly spoofing a well-known macroslaughter mapper’s style in map13: "I Can Think Of A Few Reasons Actually," to tossing the player into a one-room "figure it out"-style mob flood in map19: "Collapse," and to an emotional uphill battle against blocks of meatshields and clouds of everyone's favorite flying tomato. These showcase the diversity within the genre, even when the ideas are finalized in their rough, micro-map form. There's this touching dichotomy between humorous, silly experiences like building your own slaughter map in the aptly titled map23: "Build-A-Slaughtermap Workshop," or crushing a bunch of dudes and watching the engine lose its marbles in map18: "Watch This," and the serious, emotionally heavy experience of map26: "Derelict Heart," or the meditative remix and reconstruction of Nirvana into an inhuman void of platforms and player movement.

     

    The gameplay can be abrasive, but even players you wouldn't think of as challenge-driven really resonated with it. What helps the most in overcoming the apparent hurdles is to just play into the concept for a minute. Even if you hate it and think it's the worst thing ever, it will be over in a minute anyway and you might discover something new about yourself. 

     

    GOODWAD goes against the grain of so much of traditional Doom -- its gameplay loop and its formal concerns -- and as such, is one of the most refreshing releases in recent memory. As a creative object, it speaks to the people who may love art, who spend hours drawing in their sketchbooks, but don’t often have the desire to turn those sketches into a more ambitious or grandiose piece. There's absolutely no reason this can't be more of a thing. 

     

    - @rd. & @Maribo


  • Mordeth Award - Surprise! Released project with the longest "development time"


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    TNT 2: Last Stop at the Border

     

    Congratulations to @Marcaek for overcoming the longest mapper's block in known memory.

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  • Codeaward - Most noteworthy programming effort of the year


    6_codeaward.png?_cb=1544275061Team GEC

     

    When we last saw @Erick194, I was raising a toast to his efforts on reverse-engineering the mobile Doom RPG, and expressed my wishes that further games get ported to modern systems. Not only have he and his brother delivered in style, but they’ve also had an absolute barnburner of a year releasing tools that have built upon their past reverse-engineering efforts by allowing the console-games to be more easily modded, an impressive feat (and manifestation or more than a few childhood dreams out there) that deserves greater recognition.

     

    Leading the charge is, of course, Doom 2 RPG. A far more technically complex game than its predecessor, with a proper polygon-based engine and enemies made out of multiple sprites, allowing for more area-specific, limited animation while avoiding memory issues on ever-constrained J2ME devices, Erick has managed to drag the deluxe HD version off of the low-spec 32-bit iPhones to which it had been eternally confined and faithfully ported it to modern PCs. This allows a new generation of players to explore the stranger and more experimental corners of the Doom universe, with its multiple playable characters, squirt guns loaded with holy water, remote-control security bots and throwable bathroom fixtures. If you don’t mind Id Mobile’s perhaps-not-amazing HD artwork and can enjoy a slightly sillier, less furrow-browed take on the Doom universe, Doom 2 RPG is a fantastically fun little dungeon romp and Erick has produced an excellent, high-quality port of it.

     

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    Less grandiose, yet just as important, are the recent releases of D64TOOL and HexenN64Tool, building upon Team GEC’s long-running projects of reverse-engineering the various console games. Using these tools, one can cheerfully extract the IWAD data from Doom 64 and Hexen 64, convert them into formats modifiable with PC tools, make assorted changes to the maps and assets, convert them back, and then stuff them into the ROM file to be played on a real console. The Rubicon of custom Doom 64 maps had been crossed long ago by Doom 64 EX, but playing those maps on an actual N64 – or some smartphone or handheld or FPGA-based thing pretending to be an N64 - is a fascinating new realm of Mod Science that I’m eager to see explored further. The prospect of greater research into the console ports of Hexen – an underexplored realm of Doom’s genealogy – is an additional surprise, but to be sure a very welcome one.

     

    The console and mobile games tend to be a very underexplored corner of Id’s history for a variety of reasons, and I’m over the moon that Erick and co. continue to explore its innermost corners and make them accessible to the wider community. I’m excited to see what weird chaos the community is able to explore within the confines of Nintendo’s strange black box, and where Team GEC roams next in their quest to unearth more of this corner of history and bring it to life.

     

    - @Kinsie


  •  

    2143949703_6_creatoroftheyear.png?_cb=15Creator of the Year@Pieruskwurje

     

    I should probably start with an apology; it was far more difficult to keep track of all the Doom mod releases back-in-the-day™ and I can’t believe I missed the release of Darkness Falls all the way back in 2008 (I checked my old documents just to make sure). Had I played it, Starscream Pyroscourge Pieruskwurje would have been on my radar as one of this community’s greatest content creators long before the release of their Cacoward winning project, Winter’s Fury. This year, I wouldn’t make the same mistake and overlook Pieruskwurje’s magnum opus, Insanity Edged… instead, I would be moved to call him the Creator of the Year.

     

    Despite fifteen years of community involvement, Pieruskwurje doesn’t have a prolific mapping history, instead focusing on high-profile releases every few years. Looking at his early work, like Insanity’s Edge, it’s fair to say that Pieruskwurje has always been a step ahead of the majority of mappers in the community. However, in 2014 with the release of Winter’s Fury, Pieruskwurje vaulted himself ahead of most of his peers landing among the elite content creators for Doom. Two years later, S.U.P.E.R. Natural overshadowed the vast majority of community works despite being an (as of today) unfinished demo of an even more comically ambitious project.

     

    Nine years pass.

     

    Many in the community were aware he was working on a follow-up to Winter’s Fury, many even play tested maps for him over the years, but it began to feel as though Pieruskwurje had exhausted his creativity and simply burned-out, leaving his magnum opus to languish on a hard drive in an unfinished state.

     

    August, 24th: “Insanity Edged is completed.

     

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    This is the part in the story where, full disclosure, I was so moved by the breathtaking beauty of these maps that I—the aging, washed-up artist—dusted off Paint Shop Pro for one last hurrah and proceeded, with the help of Cardboard Marty, to provide Insanity Edged with bespoke weapons befitting a project of its caliber. You see, what makes Pieruskwurje more than deserving of being the Cacoward’s ‘Creator of the Year’ is that he’s a perfectionist. While playing the pre-release, I was astonished how flawless the maps were; there were no misaligned textures, I couldn’t softlock the game, and despite some of the most technical and intricate geometry ever seen in a Doom map, I couldn’t find a single graphical glitch. After the initial release, he continued to tweak the gameplay based on suggestions from the community—hell, Winter’s Fury even received an update incorporating Insanity Edge’s custom weapons.  

     

    Terminus wrote everything there is to say in his Cacoward article, but it bears repeating; Insanity Edged is the masterpiece every mapper hopes to create at some point in their career—a series of maps that leave everyone in complete awe at their technical wizardry and aesthetic beauty. Whether Pieruskwurje has plans for a Winter’s Fury trilogy or the completion of S.U.P.E.R. Natural is anyone’s guess, but if Insanity Edged is the culmination of his Doom mapping career, I can’t imagine a more fitting conclusion for the 2023 Creator of the Year.

     

    - @Scuba Steve


  • 2023 Cacowards


     

    Espi Award for Lifetime Achievement

    • Chris “Lupinx-Kassman” Kassap

     

    Doot Eternal

     

    Top Twelve - Page 1

    • Dreamblood
    • Piña Colada
    • Insanity Edged

     

    Top Twelve - Page 2

    • Hardfest 2
    • Austrian Avian Association
    • DBK03: Shrine of the Silver CyberPrimate

     

    Top Twelve - Page 3

    • Sepia
    • Wormwood V
    • Godless Night

     

    Top Twelve - Page 4

    • Ultimate Doom in Name Only
    • TNT2: Devilution
    • myhouse.wad

     

    Special Features

    • Past Spotlight
    • Promising Newcomers
    • The Sunder Generation
    • Doom 64 Reloaded

     

    23 More for 2023

     

    Multiplayer Awards

    • Culling Strike
    • Vesper + VesperDM

     

    Gameplay Mod Awards

    • Doom Infinite
    • Volatile Material
    • Bring Your Own Class
    • Rampancy

     

    Other Awards

    • Mordeth Award
      • TNT2: Devilution
    • Codeaward
      • Team GEC
    • Machaward
      • GOODWAD
    • Creator of the Year
      • Pieruskwurje

  • EXPEDITED EXHIBITIONS


     

    Much as I'd like to ruminate about Doom's dirty thirty and the 4th consecutive recording-breaking year for demo count(!), there's no time to waste, but first a big thanks to Billa for providing a list of great picks that served as the backbone for this section.  Also, be sure to watch the demos forum early next year for a thread highlighting the notable demos of 2023 as selected by the viewers.  Now, onto the runs!

     

    Kicking things off in Ultimate Doom, newcomer kuckkuck shaved not one, but two seconds from the coveted E1M1 max, bringing the time down to 0:24 (yt).  The Hangar UV -fast run was cut down to 0:27 by scuffed, but kuckkuck removed another second for 0:26 (yt).  Moving ahead one map, kuckkuck brought E1M2 max down to 1:31 before Kinetic stepped in to shave two more seconds to 1:29, but kuckkuck felt obliged to share the spot with their own 1:29 (yt).  E1M8 was truly maxed for the first time by Zero-Master in 1:51 (vid, Karl Jobst's vid) while mhrz set E2M1 max down to 1:21 and Xit Vono brought E3M4 to 3:28.  E2M6 NoMo was voided to 0:11.83 by depr4vity.  The group of Phoenix, TheLoneliness, Coincident and dashiefrickintyan collectively conquered E1 max with 8:53 (yt) and E2 max with 10:55 (yt), while Bainshie-Doom solo'd E2 max with a 24:02 (yt).  In everyone's favorite sequel, the Underhalls were unhinged - Looper scored the first sub-minute run in 0:59, but Kinetic sandblasted the run several more seconds to 0:55.  The Focus was... focused down to 0:49 (yt) by Kinetic and then 0:48 by mhrz.  Brookie simplified the UV -fast for Dead Simple down to 0:50, Teedre decimated the Inmost Dens max in 1:42 (yt), while mhrz cleared out Grosse in 0:31 and did -fast in 0:30 for good measure.  The Dens were NoMo'd by depr4vity in 0:10.69, while The Zone was pacified by 4shockblast in 0:28.91 (yt), The Citadel by Pleymo in 0:34.97 (yt) and Grosse by El Juancho in 0:11.43 respectively.  Kyle McAwesome ran the Condo NM Speedily in 0:14.23, then in the cinema, Zero-Master nuked the NM Speed D2ALL in 21:01 (yt), again in 20:46 (yt)... then took it easy and went for a TAS stroll in 1:16:58 (yt).

     

    Fighting further in Final Doom, starting in Plutonia max - Kinetic crushed the Congo in 1:49 while mrhz wasted the Well in 1:51.  Billa joined the max fun in the Baron(less) Lair with 2:35 (yt).  We had some major marathons with a new NM100S run by Zero-Master in 1:03:31 (yt), as well as the first ever UV -fast D2ALL completed in 2:44:29 (yt) by Tatsurd-cacocaco.  Over in TNT town, MAP01 max got roughed up a bit in by Kinetic's 0:43 and then mhrz's 0:42, while -fast was also taken to 0:42 by mhrz.  MAP17 max took quite a tumble as ELMLE opened with 2:40, then newcomer Apapappa joined in to take it down to 2:09 (yt) before ELMLE locked it with 2:08.  For movies, Zero-Master finished the first ever TNT NM100S run in 1:50:40 (yt) while Tatsurd-cacocaco gave another UV -fast performance and shaved off several hours to get 3:35:50 (yt).

     

    For PWADs, let's fire off some solo map runs - Alien Vendetta's opening Sunset was set down to 0:59 (yt) by Henning Skogsto, then 0:58 by mhrz, then eventually down to 0:53 by Kinetic.  Henning pressed onto map02 and picked up a 1:32 (yt).  The astounding (and elastic) MAP32 of Capybara was bested by Brainfreezzzzz in 29:30 (yt).  The last undone max of Death in Excess, MAP16, was finished by blue cultist in 1:35:50.  Dimensions MAP03 max was further refined by Kinetic, this time down to 11:18 (yt).  Eviternity MAP19 was tysoned in an endurance round by akolai in 2:43:04 (yt), then tyson veteran j4rio brought it down to 1:50:59.  Speaking of endurance, Coincident defeated the infamous Okuplok on ITYTD in 5:41:45 (yt).  The gargantuan, the absurd... Junkfood 2 MAP99 was taken down by two folks - brendondle in 9:50:58 and Bredd in 5:30:07.  In a recent string of "first letter" runs, brendondle closed The (E)vent Horizon in 12:58 (yt).  Starduster punished Poogers MAP28 in 21:25, while veteran maxer Ancalagon flushed away the World Orifice, first on MAP01 in 2:14:20, then MAP31 in 2:26:10.

     

    Finally, we have PWAD marathons... there's a ton, so get out the popcorn!  First, we have a pair of Sunlust runs - Kinetic shaved over an hour from the max to get a 2:57:59 (yt), then Starduster submitted the first UV Speed in 1:18:40 (yt).  Andrea Rovenski made several D2ALL max improvements - Demonfear in 47:14 (yt), Icarus in 1:56:57 (yt) and Memento Mori in 3:21:56 (yt).  Tatsurd-cacocaco submitted a trio of undone max D2ALLS - Memento Mori 2 in 3:51:34 (yt), Plutonia 2 in 4:46:35 (yt) and Requiem in 2:46:49 (yt).  BFGandorf brought the quad damage with four max D2ALLs - Auger Zenith in 1:29:01 (yt), Lunatic in 19:17 (yt), The Lost Magic in 2:03:49 (yt) and Zone 400 in 1:51:19 (yt).  Revved added more max D2ALLs to their collection with Autophagy in 1:09:05, Ichinichi in 1:36:48 and TWZone 2 in 1:46:26.  Wait, you want some UV Speed as well?...  We have kvothesixstring gliding through their birthday wad in 19:16 (yt), Brainfreezzzzz running DIY in 1:17:55 (yt), Ravendesk jumping through Jumpwad in 5:42 (yt), Meowgi memeing on NoYe in 4:32:31 (yt), Daerik hopping through Toad in 1:06:43 (yt) and an entire group of runners performing a segmented run of Haste in 23:39 (yt).  Shifting to UV -fast, Coincident's thorough analysis of Zone 300 resulted in a 1:06:43 (yt).  Finally, one more heaping helping of MAX - Dreamcatcher Apparatus by Rayziik in 1:11:11 (yt), Eviternity TAS by the legendary Bytefyre in 2:59:24 (yt), Glaive 3 by Maribo in 36:49, MSCP by blue cultist in 1:00:25 (yt) and Wormwood 4 by akolai in 50:07 (yt).

     

    - @Vile


  • WHAT ARE WE STILL WAITING FOR?


    Does this enormous list suggest the boundless enthusiasm for Doom and its relations, or the hubris that will inevitably lead to the community's downfall? Is this the same boilerplate text as last year's column? The answer to at least one of these questions is "yes."

     

    • A Boy and His Barrel
    • Action Doom 3
    • Adventures of Square Ep3
    • Age of Hell
    • Amiga Demo Party
    • Autobiographical Architecture
    • Annie
    • Autumn Flock
    • Avactor 2
    • Back to Saturn X E3
    • Bitter Dream
    • Cereal Killer
    • Cipher
    • Convergence
    • CyberShade
    • Dancing in the Abyss
    • Dark Universe E2
    • Darkmoon
    • Delirium
    • Deluge: Onset
    • Deus Vult II-2
    • Dissension II
    • Doom 64: Unseen Evil
    • Doom: The Golden Souls 3
    • Doom Refired
    • Dwelling
    • Earthless
    • Elementalism Phase 2
    • Epoch
    • Eschatology
    • Final Doom the Way id Did
    • Flashback
    • Gossip
    • Happy Time Circus III
    • Heretic: Curse of Darkness
    • HPack
    • Hunter’s Moon
    • Interstellar Enforcer
    • John.WAD
    • Kama Sutra 2
    • Kuiper
    • Kuroneko Project
    • Lunar Catastrophe 2
    • Lunar Strike
    • Midnight Isle
    • Mordeth E2
    • MyApartment.wad
    • Necromantic Thirst
    • Obsidian Doom (Bloodstone and Violence Edition)
    • Panophobia
    • Paralysis
    • Perdition's Gate Resurgence
    • Plutonia 3
    • Realm of Chaos 2
    • The Realm of Z-Magic
    • Revelations of Doom
    • Sigil 2
    • Sigma-X
    • Somber Density
    • The Space Pirate: Second Attack
    • Squenched Avacausage
    • Strife: Mothership
    • Sunder (v2)
    • S.U.P.E.R. Natural
    • Super Wolfenstein 3D
    • Threshold of Pain 2
    • Time Tripper: Circuit 2
    • Tomb Fetus
    • Touch Grass
    • Treasure Tech Land
    • TNT 2: Devilution map26
    • UAC Take Over
    • Undo

  • AS WE SPEAK...


    John Romero has released Sigil 2 at 2AM GMT, but the above list already went to press, so we had to strike it out on everyone's webpage manually. Is your floppy drive ready?


  • DID YOU KNOW...


    December 10th marked the 30 year anniversary of Doom?

     


    DID YOU KNOW...


    Mordeth E2 was still not released in 2024 despite over twenty-five years of development?

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