Mask of Sobek

 

Mask of Sobek | SOBEK.PK3

Mike "Impie" MacDee

underhalls.pk3

tamara mochaccina

Preacher

 

Preacher | PREACHER.WAD

Darch

One year later (and then some)

a portrait of the authoress, under heavy
sedation

You might not know this, but I have two blogs. (Actually three, but I no longer use my tumblr.) The other one is on Medium, and since autumn 2021 I have used that to post my reviews of various media -- movies, video games, comics, that sort of thing. But I kept running into an issue: I wanted to include my notes and screenshots of the various boomer shooter games and mods I played through, and to be quite frank, Medium is lousy for that, especially when you're playing big Doom megawads with 32+ maps. So, deciding to move into the space that KMX E XII had seemingly left behind (he has since come out of retirement) I began this blog in late January of 2024, last year.

The first review I ever published on here was for the original Doom -- specifically, the mail order version. It was actually a crosspost from Medium, which I had originally published the review to back in December 2023, on the game's thirtieth anniversary, with map notes originally posted to tumblr. It was the first step I took towards filling a niche that I think has kind of fallen by the wayside alongside forums when it comes to how the fandom engages with the reams of new content that we make as a community. While I still had some other articles originally written from Medium to get through, the first review I wrote with both blogs in mind was for Doom II, published shortly after I opened this blog. Over time I've since filled the space with reviews both crossposted from Medium and exclusive to June Gloom 3D, and I feel as if this Blogger has developed its own identity distinct from my Medium. But we could go further.

What's in a name?

I realized recently that "boomer shooter" is a pretty ephemeral term. I already dislike it as I feel that it's not-subtly derogatory, a reference to baby boomers who by and large do not play these kinds of games. As an elder millennial I take offense to being compared to my parents' generation for a variety of reasons that I won't get into here, but to get back on track, the actual meaning of "boomer shooter" is a bit of a moving target. Is Maze War a boomer shooter? (Actually, it might literally be so.) Is Half-Life a boomer shooter? For decades the common consensus is that it explicitly was not, but in recent years that consensus has come into question as it's become more obvious that the evolution of shooters is a lot less clear-cut than we believed it to be. So where does that leave us? Or, perhaps the real question is, does something need to be a Doom clone to be a boomer shooter? At the end of the day the only person who can really answer that for the purposes of this blog is me, and my take on it is that the line between Doom and, let's say for example, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019, is a lot blurrier than we've typically taken for granted. So that's something you might see me poke around the edges with a bit.

the authoress when she sees a really nice Thief
map. Or a chicken cheesesteak.

There's also the fact that I love immersive sims. I don't play as much as I used to, but they have had a profound influence on me and how I approach video games. I struggle with games that don't hide the numbers, don't hide the dice. This is why I don't like RPGs, that and I find most (western) RPGs, writing-wise, to be cutting checks their actual writing can't cash. But while the immersive sim field has certainly become much more active in the last decade, they all stand on the shoulders of giants: Thief: the Dark Project, System Shock 2, and Deus Ex. Released in the final years of the twentieth century, these three games and their predecessors have more or less been the gold standard for what immersive sims should aspire to.

But wait, you ask, what's an immersive sim? Well, that's an even trickier question to ask than what makes a boomer shooter. With murky origins as a marketing buzzword invented whole-cloth by Warren Spector to describe Deus Ex, people have spent years debating on what an immersive sim actually is. I see it less as a genre -- after all, the three games I named in the previous paragraph are all different -- and more of a design philosophy, where multiple independent systems interact in ways that the developer doesn't necessarily plan or code for. To give some context, some people see Baldur's Gate 3 as an immersive sim, but it really isn't. Leaving aside the debate about where player perspective comes into it, Baldur's Gate 3 codes for things that don't need to be scripted in imsims.

Get in, loser, we're going back to Web 1.0

All this is academic, though. The reason I bring all this up is that as part of the continuing evolution of June Gloom 3D as a sort of blog dedicated to not just boomer shooters, but to retro 3D gaming as a whole, you can expect to see immersive sims, especially the Thief series with its many, many fan-missions, covered here as well. There's also the small but dedicated milsim genre (which has a lot of overlap with immersive sims) to consider. Really, the one kind of thing you shouldn't expect to see here are ultra-modern shooters like PUBG or the like. But if it's old, or retro, or it's an imsim, and it's in first person (and even that I can make dispensations for on occasion) I might just talk about it on here.

the authoress checking on Twitter

Ultimately, thinking about it, you can think of this blog as a throwback in more ways than one. I want this blog to be a sort of reflection of an earlier era, when people made blogs like this to talk about Quake 3 Arena maps and posted on forums arguing about whether Thief and Ultima shared a universe. In these difficult days of morally-bereft social media platforms and services like Reddit and Discord replacing wikis and forums only to themselves grow increasingly more frustrating to use, it can be comforting to look back on these older methods of communication and community-building (why else would Doomworld still be going strong after all these years?) I like to think that as sites like Twitter and Facebook continue to bleed users we may start seeing a return to Web 1.0-style communities. It may even already be happening. And June Gloom 3D will be my contribution to that, an earnest hope from my heart that maybe we can make the internet a little better again. 

What to expect from Year Two (if we live that long)

I will continue to write guides for some of the most classic 3D engines of yesteryear. I just finished the Build engine guide tonight and I intend to start on id Tech 2 next (you can also expect some edits to the id Tech 0 and id Tech 1 guides, namely I'm swapping out title screens for box art and adding indexes with links you can jump to portions of the guide for easier navigation.) I've added an itinerary page so you can have a preview of what I plan to cover -- it's a big list as of this writing as I've got a lot of work as I continue to migrate some of my older stuff to this blog as well as big plans for stuff I wanna do. I'll be adding immersive sims -- probably mostly just Thief as those games have the lion's share of fan-made material -- to the index. I am active on Bluesky and will continue to poke at Doomworld now and then. And I'm going to keep writing for both blogs. There's always plenty of stuff to write about, new and old, so I've got my work cut out for me. I hope you'll stick with me.

-june<3

Voodoo Guns

 

Voodoo Guns | VG.WAD

Alexander "Eternal" S.

The Battlegrounds (and other Revolutionary War shooters)

Revolutionary War shooters

Various

 

Forgive Me Father 2

Byte Barrel