I started this Blog back in April with the intent of posting the various notes I'd made of WADs as I played them. You could call them reviews, and I've labelled them as such, but I don't intend to judge Doom's user-made content on an empirical basis. I just want to say what it is, what I liked, and what I didn't like, attempting to mention one memorable encounter (especially when reviewing the hulkier MegaWADs). Hopefully what I like outweighs what I don't like, but even if I find myself disliking something, I try to find at least one novel thing, one reason why playing something is worth your time.
It's evolved a bit, as I'm also adding general news I pick up from the Doom community, some of it easily found at Doomworld and some of it not. I've also sneakily reformatted pages, cooked up second drafts, and added screenshots to every review page, something I hadn't intended, and made review indexes by filename and title (author and possibly initial release date to come). And now, Doomed makes a friend.
I don't know how many Doomers have Doom blogs. I know some of them have websites. But Herculine has the first Doom blog I've come across. She's a mapper and a modder and a WAD reviewer, probably more known for her modding at this point. She's crafted a gameplay mod for GZDoom in the vein of Aeons of Death and Scaliano's 667 Shuffle. It's an item and monster randomizer with new content, some things coming from Realm667, and some things I understand are illicit cocktails of the author's own design.
She's also released two maps of her own design to the archives which have unfairly fallen to an anonymous Oblige accusation frenzy, which is interesting as both maps underwent some open criticism in Doomworld's forums with none of the critiquing authors crying foul. Just gonna chalk it up to archives being archives, I guess, as both maps got encouraging feedback on the forums and had positive reviews on the archives before Oblige trolling.
She's pretty heavy into mods at this point but I hope she dusts off her mapping tools in the future since the veterans at DW saw some promise rather than uniformly trashing her work like they usually do with undesirables. Practice makes perfect and from what I see every mapper has some unreleased skeletons in their closet. No one has to toss out a MegaWAD on their first shot; Hell, Skillsaw's Vanguard got cut down to a 13 map affair and is a lean, mean Dooming machine.
Doomed salutes you, Herculine. Keep fighting the good fight.
It's evolved a bit, as I'm also adding general news I pick up from the Doom community, some of it easily found at Doomworld and some of it not. I've also sneakily reformatted pages, cooked up second drafts, and added screenshots to every review page, something I hadn't intended, and made review indexes by filename and title (author and possibly initial release date to come). And now, Doomed makes a friend.
I don't know how many Doomers have Doom blogs. I know some of them have websites. But Herculine has the first Doom blog I've come across. She's a mapper and a modder and a WAD reviewer, probably more known for her modding at this point. She's crafted a gameplay mod for GZDoom in the vein of Aeons of Death and Scaliano's 667 Shuffle. It's an item and monster randomizer with new content, some things coming from Realm667, and some things I understand are illicit cocktails of the author's own design.
She's also released two maps of her own design to the archives which have unfairly fallen to an anonymous Oblige accusation frenzy, which is interesting as both maps underwent some open criticism in Doomworld's forums with none of the critiquing authors crying foul. Just gonna chalk it up to archives being archives, I guess, as both maps got encouraging feedback on the forums and had positive reviews on the archives before Oblige trolling.
She's pretty heavy into mods at this point but I hope she dusts off her mapping tools in the future since the veterans at DW saw some promise rather than uniformly trashing her work like they usually do with undesirables. Practice makes perfect and from what I see every mapper has some unreleased skeletons in their closet. No one has to toss out a MegaWAD on their first shot; Hell, Skillsaw's Vanguard got cut down to a 13 map affair and is a lean, mean Dooming machine.
Doomed salutes you, Herculine. Keep fighting the good fight.
Thanks for the good words.
ReplyDeleteI haven't lost my creative desire to draw up another map or two but haven't done so not because of worries about how the public might receive my works but rather because it's simply so time-consuming. Just doing the randomizer mod has taken about a month, but that's nothing compared to the time I've learned it's necessary to invest in creating a detailed map, not to mention a set of such maps. Thus I've also learned to truly appreciate the fine works others have shared with us, like Arma Kero's ARMADOSIA which was at least three years in the making. Perhaps I will make another attempt at some point, but at the moment I'm trying to get back to what I enjoy most about the game and that's playing it.
But thanks for the encouragement just the same, and I look forward to finding some great new maps to play here at DOOMED.