December 10, 2018 marked the 25th anniversary of Doom. There were about as many different ways of celebrating the occasion as there are people who play Doom. Countless retrospectives dotted the internet landscape. Tons of new mapsets were released around that date, including one of my own. That’s not to mention other big projects like the colossal OTEX texture pack. It was a big day, but to my reckoning the biggest thing by far to come out of Doom’s 25th birthday was Eviternity. The reasons are many, not least of which is that Eviternity was the flagship WAD to feature
Tag: James Paddock
Faithless
What if — and I know this is hard to imagine — but what if… Hexen was good? I kid the Hexen fans. I know there’s a lot of love for the game for some reason, and I don’t mean to offend. On the other hand, this is my review series, so… indulge me just a moment while I tell you a few of the many ways that Hexen sucks. I mean, Heretic’s enemies weren’t tanky enough already? Okay, with modern modding tools you could easily tweak the HP values a bit yourself for a significantly better experience, but what’s
Griefless
For months now, I’ve been toiling away on a huge, multi-megaWAD retrospective — playing these epic WADs that each take weeks to finish, and then trying to make sense of my thoughts and put it all down in writing. (EDIT: Hilariously, this is referring to my piece on skillsaw that didn’t get finished until 2022.) And while I’m smashing my head against a brick wall on that project, little WADs like Griefless give me the will to live. Griefless is the latest from James “Jimmy” Paddock, the Doom community’s resident jack of all trades (and master of all of them). Jimmy’s mapping
50 Shades of Graytall
Limitation projects. Love ’em or hate ’em, there’s no escaping them. You see a lot of the standard bemoaning about the concept — “Why can’t anyone just make a normal WAD anymore?” — but the truth is you could do a lot worse with one of those “normal” WADs than you could with something like 50 Shades of Graytall. Of all the limitation projects that’ve come out in the last decade or more, 50 Shades may be the most compelling. The idea behind all these projects is to put creators in increasingly restrictive boxes — to force them to be