The 2022 Cacowards

[Lizardcommando]

Kudos to all the winners of this year's Cacowards and happy 29th to Doom!

Edited December 10, 2022 by Lizardcommando

[Uncle 80]

All right! I'm loving that Mount Killmore banner! Great job on that.

Reading the article(s), I see I've fallen way behind on checking out some sweet-looking vanilla mapsets. I'll get onto it during christmas break.

Well done to all content creators, writers, and of course the players!

[Deadwing]

Holy fuck! That's completely unexpected! >.< 

 

Thanks a lot guys!! It's really great to see Ozonia among other fantastic releases! I see it as an collective effort instead of something of my own, with the huge support and help from the community I got even before its release. Really honored with the guest maps from Antares, Lorenzo, A2Rob and Riderr, as well with Cammy new graphics/sounds and all the testing support (Francis, Psycho, among others) and suggestions!

 

Really surprised for the Dootaward and Creator of the year award as well (holy..!!). Never though I would be considered for any of these awards! >.< Thanks a lot again!

 

I'm still reading everything, but this year was impressive with the new releases. A lot of overlooked gems getting mentioned which is fantastic!

Edited December 10, 2022 by Deadwing

[Xymph]

Wow, that was a big surprise this morning, and a wonderful honor. Thank you so much to the Cacowards team, and to everyone here for their kind words.

A tip of the hat to @Dynamo for the eloquent write-up, and of course for everything you contribute to the wiki yourself.

 

Last but not least, congratulations to all other awardees and everyone else who saw their work highlighted. Cheers, and happy birthday Doom!

 

Btw, I would totally support re-sculpting the real Mount Rushmore akin to that lovely masthead. But I'm Dutch, so have no say in the matter I suppose. ;-)

Edited December 10, 2022 by Xymph

[Lorenz0]

Congrats to all the winners!

 

I find it really funny that I've had the biggest Doom burnout ever this year, but 3 of the projects I participated in were mentioned in the Cacowards (Ozonia, Solar Struggle, Capybara). None of my maps in those wads were my best work though, so I can't take any credit for that lol

 

[Valboom]

Congrats to all winners!

[LadyMistDragon]

Congratulations everyone! All of the winners are well-deserved, even if I was hoping Dance on the Warer would get a gold but you can't have it all.

 

 

 

 

 

I won't say too much but I believe her and Bridgeburner are moving on to focus on largely non-Doom related projects (and some other stuff happened too, but I think that's a little confidential for a forum).

5 hours ago, Rudolph said:

 

 

But what is this about Major Arlene leaving?

Edited December 10, 2022 by LadyMistDragon

[SleepyVelvet]

On 12/10/2021 at 3:15 AM, Catpho said:

Happy birthday Doom and grats to its community! I don't want to jinx anything, but i honestly would be fine if all the years after this never reach this level of quality output or enthusiasm again -- maps, midis, art, social media Doom stuff like review videos or streams, etc.; goes to show how ridiculous the productivity has been (though the momentum train is still chugging along for the foreseeable future!). Would it be a stretch or premature to declare this year one of the peaks of a Doom silver age¹?

 

You jinxed it.  I can't decide for myself how it sizes up to 2021, but 2022 felt nutty for Doom output.  I barely scratched the surface of this year's releases myself, but even of the stuff I played that didn't get a Caco mention, there was a lot of brilliant stuff this year.

[Major Arlene]

24 minutes ago, LadyMistDragon said:

I won't say too much but I believe her and Bridgeburner are moving on to focus on largely non-Doom related projects (and some other stuff happened too, but I think that's a little confidential for a forum).

I don't particularly want to derail or take away from anyone's moment here so I'll just quickly address it.

 

Generally you are right, I've just wanted to focus on things other than Doomworld (but still working on Doom things along with the non-Doom things). I also wanted to focus on my mental health which has gone to a much more positive direction since I made the decision. No hard feelings against anyone!

 

That said, back to the awards (which having read through them all, are really great. can't stress enough what a good job the team did).

[Wavy]

While I haven't been as active here as I once was, it's great to see all the WAD's I've missed out on. Only thing I've been playing recently is KDiKDiZD, which has been a blast. Solar Struggle getting a mention is cool to see too, as it's the last thing I've mapped for since April (I really should get back into mapping, heh).

 

With that said, congrats to all winners and nominees!

 

(Also, the ChatGPT intro was hilarious)

Edited December 10, 2022 by Wavy

[Redneckerz]

1 hour ago, Major Arlene said:

I don't particularly want to derail or take away from anyone's moment here so I'll just quickly address it.

Happily take your place.

Love this community.

 

This isnt written in a clear mind, haha.

 

Thank you for all you have done.

 

Quote

 

[Captain Ventris]

Rewards were awesome as always. So many wads to try! Can’t wait to see what’s cooking for the big three-oh!

[Snaxalotl]

omg I'm honored to be mentioned twice! happy doom birfday everyone :>

[United VirusX]

Congrats everyone! deff see some stuff I'm interested in playing now

[tei tenga]

I'm so psyched to show up in the promising newcomers section! What an excellent write-up. I feel an embarrassing amount of artistic pride when a reviewer really seems to 'get' my WAD. Thanks everyone

[head_cannon]

I remember last year, when the "21 more for 2021" explosion in the honorable-mentions (each getting the full treatment of Screenshot + Paragraph Writeup!) was then followed with a "Phew, that was a lot. Calibrate your expectations, folks: next year we won't be going quite so overboard and will scale things back to a more sane, concise ceremony." And you wonderful mad folks did it again!

 

I was particularly delighted to see Bellatrix: Episode 1 make the runners-up list: it's one of the best vanilla WADs I played this year, and while I may fear that its gradual escalation in complexity and brutality signposts that Episode 2 will probably be out of my depth if it continues along that same arc, I'm still glad to see the Orionis campaign getting some time in the spotlight.

 

My thanks to the entire stable of Cacowards writers, for doing their best to convey why these pieces of software are able to spark joy and dread and everything-in-between. (Special congratulations to Vile and Terminus for making such a strong debut, and to Major Arlene for the half-decade of contributions to this venerable institution.)

[Dweller Dark]

I don't really follow the Cacowards all that closely, but congrats to everyone involved!

 

I would like to share, since it is entertaining, that Pocket Slaughter and Corruption Cards is a hilarious and challenging combo to try out.

[RHhe82]

41 minutes ago, head_cannon said:

next year we won't be going quite so overboard

 

Quite so overboard, they wrote? Well, well...

[thelamp]

Wow this is super crazy unexpected! All I can say is that it's an honor to have my work placed next to so many other excellent projects!

[boltface]

The Multiplayer Awards section mentions Samsara Reincarnation and links to the zandronum forums thread for it. Unfortunately the links in there aren't updated and the classes and monsters downloads both point to a 404.  The zdoom forums thread has updated download links.

[Somniac]

I had a feeling Solar Struggle and Anomaly Report would be in there, rightly so, though I thought that Serenade was deserving of a mention. I really enjoyed that one. I'd hate to have to compile a list like this myself as something is always bound to be missed. On the other hand, it shows that community output shows no sign of slowing down, and that's the best part.

 

I've been reading these articles for 15 years, and I still don't think I'll ever play everything in every write up. They seem to get longer every time!

[Omniarch]

9 minutes ago, Somniac said:

though I thought that Serenade was deserving of a mention.

Just for the sake of clarity, anything released after the fifteenth of november is counted as part of the next year's cacoward cycle. Serenade only reached release-candidate status in early december if memory serves, so it wasn't eligible this year. fwiw, I already have the set on my 2023-cycle playlist, so there's no risk of it being overlooked :)

[FrancisT218]

This was a really good Cacos! Especially glad to see Jumpwad, 10x10, Overboard, and KDIKDIZD all make their way into the Top Ten. Ozonia was a nice surprise, I thought it might have to settle for Silver or runner up. Didn't see Creator award coming, congrats to @Deadwing !

 

The only wad I'm pretty surprised to not see in the article would be Wormwood IV - dannebubinja made a very nice comeback with his excellent maps in there :)

[TheShep]

I did a small scroll-through, commentary, and organizing of my newly created "cacoward22" folder on stream.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1676617650

 

[kwc]

Congrats everybody, a lot of excellent stuff this year!

Thanks for putting me up on the Promising Newcomers feature, feels really cool to be mentioned like this along with so many talented people.
I'm Knee Deep in finals right now so I'm still processing all of this, but this gave me a very welcome positive boost amidst all the deadlines! 
Cheers!

[Master O]

Regarding Cacoward winner Ozonia, that megawad has a great soundtrack.

[ToxicFrog]

This is not what I expected to wake up to yesterday, but it's certainly a welcome surprise! I was looking forward to spending some time over the holidays working on Gun Bonsai some more while I play through the Cacoward winners; never imagined I'd be one of them.

 

I was especially happy to see GB's compatibility mentioned; that's been a foundational part of the design from early on, and I've written a lot of code and sacrificed some cool ideas to maintain it, so that paragraph in particular made my day. :)

 

 

[Kinetic]

Good picks for the awards, as someone who resides in the challengesphere and speedrunning community of classic doom, I am thoroughly enthused seeing quite a decent chunk of challenge wads represented, as well as the speedrunning section recognizing so many great players and runners, thanks Vile :D.

 

Enjoyed mapping/playtesting for Dance on the Water and doing a small bit of playtesting for 10x10, both quality wads that rightfully got represented in the Cacowards this year, el_inferno is a powerhouse in challenge mapping, and lunchlunch did terrific work with a fresh mapping constraint.

[Maribo]

It was a nice surprise to see myself mentioned in a sidebar this year. :)

 

I really like to compare & contrast the way that different mappers handle specific themes in their wads, and also the way a mapper handles that theme now vs how they handled that theme five, ten, fifteen years ago... I think the Roots article is a pretty big reason why I started doing that, it's not very often that you get a game like Doom, where its history is so long and deep that the custom content for the game has its own art movements and significant trends, reactions to trends, little micro-communities with the community. You can really see that this year with the sudden wave of wads made by speedrunners. I also know there are Jumpwad-inspired maps in the works, and I can only imagine that the storm of Squonker team wads have left their mark on people in some way. 2023 is looking to be an exciting year for Doom. I would love to see more people write about things.

[dmplayer5]

Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to all who put the Cacowards together.