baja blast rd.

not gonna post this in the Micro Slaughter Community Project thread because I don't like derails, but this is not meant to be a giant subtweet, just a bit of explanation of my previous comment on how "micro slaughter" is a thing that exists.

some works in the genre:

- phmlspd, Fruit Salad, Rush

- Water Spirit, Oceanside

- Survive in Hell

- the slaughtermaps in sets like Plutonium Winds

- (a bunch of standalones like) Brown & Red and Caco Bell 

- the New Gothic series is more small than big, especially movement 2. notable CPs like the Slaughterfest series and Slaughtermax have as many smaller slaughtermaps as big ones, especially in the earlier parts, where there is a deliberate skew.

- including speedmaps, like three-quarters of my own maps going back to 2015 are consciously "microslaughter" so I personally know it's not a new thing ;) 

- they are super common as entries in community projects, e.g. when Cannonball maps for Doom 2, it's often in that form; 50 Shades of Graytall have a lot. then there are almost ubiquitous one-offs in other works, like BTSX e1m32.

(this not an exhaustive list)

(and not everything in that list is completable in 5 minutes, but that is an arbitrary benchmark and I'm not going to endorse retroactively classifying something differently because it takes 6 minutes.)

so yeah, I'd get why someone who is mostly familiar with slaughter in the form of Sunder and Bastion of Chaos and such would think the idea of "smaller slaughter maps" is especially new or unusual. but I don't like the idea of suggesting it is or selling that angle, because that effectively minimizes (heh) and effaces a lot of past work in the genre. 

also the typical "big" slaughtermap, for example Combat Shock 2 or the not-quite-as-short parts of the Slaughterfests and Slauightermax, has generally been more like 20-30 minutes long than a huge Sunderian epic anyway.

one thing that MSCP does is offer more of it; apart from a few (phmlspd, Rush, Survive in Hell, Italo Doom), having a dozen and a half smaller slaughtermaps in a project, and pretty much nothing else, is unusual. and I think that sort of dedicated distillation of concept, paired with the quantity, can be thought of as relatively novel. the first five wads on the big list above are generally quite a bit easier than MSCP, so I'd consider them better "soft intros" to the form for newcomers, but MSCP works as a spicy and short trial by fire.