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Machaward - Most creative, unusual, or artistically compelling project of the year
GOODWAD, which msx2plus understatedly describes in the release thread as an idea sketchbook -- while showing off screenshots that range from strikingly gorgeous to "eye assault" -- might be the best of a recent rush of wads that explore new shortform philosophies of map design, and bridge the gap between high-effort work and more playful, informal work. For some, the idea of making something deliberately ambitious and grand leans on being a stressful experience, rather than an enjoyable one. The way GOODWAD funnels such offbeat creativity into a string of little speedmapped vignettes speaks to the idea that one can work in this space of "mini-experiences," or "micro-maps," and still make an emotional impact on somebody.
Even as Doom's format is so accessible to get into for newcomers, what inevitably happens among so many creators is ambition creep, a constant race to outdo your past selves in effort and creativity -- and stories of this are legion in the community. GOODWAD's message is thus a wonderful antidote to that feeling, showing how you can indeed do better, but without straining against a progressively heavier burden.
As a play experience, it draws on a mix of styles popular in niche challenge scenes -- platforming maps (the Frog and Toad series), move-and-chill maps (JUMPWAD), obstacle course challenges, and very quickly made speedmaps (the D5DA series) -- along with all sorts of little experiments, and wraps it up with msx2plus's gift for audiovisual polish and striking creativity. Many of these maps also double as silly, tongue-in-cheek references to things that they love, in ways that make (light-hearted) fun of them, or simply show appreciation for the original experience.
What makes GOODWAD such a compelling experience is how dedicated it is to being a set of raw, yet digestible sketches of what Doom can be. The WAD contains many unique takes on its platforming, something of which msx is a very passionate defender. The cold, meditative journey back home in map11: "Please Wait For Me" and the silly, "momentum storage" gimmick of map15: "How To Manifest Your Ideal Self" are two radically different takes on designing a navigation-based challenge for the player to understand and then execute. GOODWAD's takes on slaughter range from lovingly spoofing a well-known macroslaughter mapper’s style in map13: "I Can Think Of A Few Reasons Actually," to tossing the player into a one-room "figure it out"-style mob flood in map19: "Collapse," and to an emotional uphill battle against blocks of meatshields and clouds of everyone's favorite flying tomato. These showcase the diversity within the genre, even when the ideas are finalized in their rough, micro-map form. There's this touching dichotomy between humorous, silly experiences like building your own slaughter map in the aptly titled map23: "Build-A-Slaughtermap Workshop," or crushing a bunch of dudes and watching the engine lose its marbles in map18: "Watch This," and the serious, emotionally heavy experience of map26: "Derelict Heart," or the meditative remix and reconstruction of Nirvana into an inhuman void of platforms and player movement.
The gameplay can be abrasive, but even players you wouldn't think of as challenge-driven really resonated with it. What helps the most in overcoming the apparent hurdles is to just play into the concept for a minute. Even if you hate it and think it's the worst thing ever, it will be over in a minute anyway and you might discover something new about yourself.
GOODWAD goes against the grain of so much of traditional Doom -- its gameplay loop and its formal concerns -- and as such, is one of the most refreshing releases in recent memory. As a creative object, it speaks to the people who may love art, who spend hours drawing in their sketchbooks, but don’t often have the desire to turn those sketches into a more ambitious or grandiose piece. There's absolutely no reason this can't be more of a thing.
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Codeaward - Most noteworthy programming effort of the year
When we last saw @Erick194, I was raising a toast to his efforts on reverse-engineering the mobile Doom RPG, and expressed my wishes that further games get ported to modern systems. Not only have he and his brother delivered in style, but they’ve also had an absolute barnburner of a year releasing tools that have built upon their past reverse-engineering efforts by allowing the console-games to be more easily modded, an impressive feat (and manifestation or more than a few childhood dreams out there) that deserves greater recognition.
Leading the charge is, of course, Doom 2 RPG. A far more technically complex game than its predecessor, with a proper polygon-based engine and enemies made out of multiple sprites, allowing for more area-specific, limited animation while avoiding memory issues on ever-constrained J2ME devices, Erick has managed to drag the deluxe HD version off of the low-spec 32-bit iPhones to which it had been eternally confined and faithfully ported it to modern PCs. This allows a new generation of players to explore the stranger and more experimental corners of the Doom universe, with its multiple playable characters, squirt guns loaded with holy water, remote-control security bots and throwable bathroom fixtures. If you don’t mind Id Mobile’s perhaps-not-amazing HD artwork and can enjoy a slightly sillier, less furrow-browed take on the Doom universe, Doom 2 RPG is a fantastically fun little dungeon romp and Erick has produced an excellent, high-quality port of it.
Less grandiose, yet just as important, are the recent releases of D64TOOL and HexenN64Tool, building upon Team GEC’s long-running projects of reverse-engineering the various console games. Using these tools, one can cheerfully extract the IWAD data from Doom 64 and Hexen 64, convert them into formats modifiable with PC tools, make assorted changes to the maps and assets, convert them back, and then stuff them into the ROM file to be played on a real console. The Rubicon of custom Doom 64 maps had been crossed long ago by Doom 64 EX, but playing those maps on an actual N64 – or some smartphone or handheld or FPGA-based thing pretending to be an N64 - is a fascinating new realm of Mod Science that I’m eager to see explored further. The prospect of greater research into the console ports of Hexen – an underexplored realm of Doom’s genealogy – is an additional surprise, but to be sure a very welcome one.
The console and mobile games tend to be a very underexplored corner of Id’s history for a variety of reasons, and I’m over the moon that Erick and co. continue to explore its innermost corners and make them accessible to the wider community. I’m excited to see what weird chaos the community is able to explore within the confines of Nintendo’s strange black box, and where Team GEC roams next in their quest to unearth more of this corner of history and bring it to life.
- @Kinsie
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Creator of the Year - @Pieruskwurje
I should probably start with an apology; it was far more difficult to keep track of all the Doom mod releases back-in-the-day™ and I can’t believe I missed the release of Darkness Falls all the way back in 2008 (I checked my old documents just to make sure). Had I played it,
Starscream PyroscourgePieruskwurje would have been on my radar as one of this community’s greatest content creators long before the release of their Cacoward winning project, Winter’s Fury. This year, I wouldn’t make the same mistake and overlook Pieruskwurje’s magnum opus, Insanity Edged… instead, I would be moved to call him the Creator of the Year.Despite fifteen years of community involvement, Pieruskwurje doesn’t have a prolific mapping history, instead focusing on high-profile releases every few years. Looking at his early work, like Insanity’s Edge, it’s fair to say that Pieruskwurje has always been a step ahead of the majority of mappers in the community. However, in 2014 with the release of Winter’s Fury, Pieruskwurje vaulted himself ahead of most of his peers landing among the elite content creators for Doom. Two years later, S.U.P.E.R. Natural overshadowed the vast majority of community works despite being an (as of today) unfinished demo of an even more comically ambitious project.
Nine years pass.
Many in the community were aware he was working on a follow-up to Winter’s Fury, many even play tested maps for him over the years, but it began to feel as though Pieruskwurje had exhausted his creativity and simply burned-out, leaving his magnum opus to languish on a hard drive in an unfinished state.
August, 24th: “Insanity Edged is completed.”
This is the part in the story where, full disclosure, I was so moved by the breathtaking beauty of these maps that I—the aging, washed-up artist—dusted off Paint Shop Pro for one last hurrah and proceeded, with the help of Cardboard Marty, to provide Insanity Edged with bespoke weapons befitting a project of its caliber. You see, what makes Pieruskwurje more than deserving of being the Cacoward’s ‘Creator of the Year’ is that he’s a perfectionist. While playing the pre-release, I was astonished how flawless the maps were; there were no misaligned textures, I couldn’t softlock the game, and despite some of the most technical and intricate geometry ever seen in a Doom map, I couldn’t find a single graphical glitch. After the initial release, he continued to tweak the gameplay based on suggestions from the community—hell, Winter’s Fury even received an update incorporating Insanity Edge’s custom weapons.
Terminus wrote everything there is to say in his Cacoward article, but it bears repeating; Insanity Edged is the masterpiece every mapper hopes to create at some point in their career—a series of maps that leave everyone in complete awe at their technical wizardry and aesthetic beauty. Whether Pieruskwurje has plans for a Winter’s Fury trilogy or the completion of S.U.P.E.R. Natural is anyone’s guess, but if Insanity Edged is the culmination of his Doom mapping career, I can’t imagine a more fitting conclusion for the 2023 Creator of the Year.