Jump to content

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


Recommended Posts

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

Share this post


Link to post
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.

Share this post


Link to post

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. 

Share this post


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

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. :)

Edited by Dynamo

Share this post


Link to post
  • 4 months later...
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 😎

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post
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

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post
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.

Share this post


Link to post

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 :)

Share this post


Link to post

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!

Share this post


Link to post

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...

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Edited by cannonball

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post

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!

Edited by Somniac

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post

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!

Share this post


Link to post

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) :)

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post

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.

Share this post


Link to post

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...