Entryway

 

I like old shooters. Ever since Wolfenstein 3D, I've been fascinated by the first person shooter genre. I was drawn in by what at the time felt like the most realistic thing a video game could be -- a game played in the first person perspective. When I was real little, my idea of play was making sidescrolling 2D video game levels out of blocks and figurines, laid on their side. I remember spending all afternoon just laying out an entire level on the picnic table in the backyard. So Wolfenstein 3D was a revelation to me: it taught me that video games didn't have to be on their side. They didn't even have to be top-down (arguably a more realistic perspective.)

 

From there I moved on to Doom, Blake Stone, Ken's Labyrinth, Descent, and eventually Quake, Duke Nukem 3D, and Half-Life. I played these games on the N64 -- far and away the superior choice for shooter console ports of the era, don't @ me -- and on PC.

 

As I got older, though there were always new games for me to play, I found myself frequently going back to the classics of old, particularly Doom II, Quake and -- especially -- Duke Nukem 3D. It's this latter one that most occupied my thoughts; while it's not aged as well as it could have, in a lot of ways, it's the one I always come back to, no matter how much Doom I play. The Build Engine may be a mess of spaghetti code that has driven men to madness, but there's something about it that I just can't seem to let go of, and no matter how much GZDoom and Ultimate Doom Builder expand on the capabilities of the Doom engine, there's always been something missing, a certain je nais se quois that I've only ever been able to find in Build engine games. That's in part why this blog is titled June Gloom 3D: in tribute to the game that cemented my fascination with a video game genre that is older than most people realize, and often misunderstood -- but which, even in today's modern age of "live service" games and a pervasive sense that we're being bamboozled by a multi-million dollar industry, remains a font of creativity.

 

I started this blog because I like to review things. I started off on tumblr as a means to occupy myself after I lost my job at a major metropolitan newspaper, eventually making an ill-considered move to Twitter. In the last few years, I also have a pretty sizeable portfolio over on medium.com; but I wanted to make a separate blog just for old shooter reviews. I fully admit I am inspired by -- and taking design cues for this blog from -- KMX E XII's ONEMANDOOM blog, dedicated to reviewing the many, many, many maps and mods for Doom and its cousins that have been made over the last thirty years, but this isn't going to be just about Doom -- hell, the first shooter I ever did a level-by-level breakdown for was Blood, actually! There's an endless supply of material for a lot of the old greats, and I intend to cover as much of it as I can. Some of the early stuff is going to be backported from tumblr, and I'll also be reposting and editing relevant Medium material here as well (no sense in sending people to two different sites to read different parts of the same review, a totally stupid thing I have totally not done in the past. That being said, a lot of the stuff I intend to review for Medium also belongs here, so I will be crossposting on both sites. You won't find anything on Medium that isn't also on here, the Medium account is intended to cover a much broader spectrum of media than some old shooters most of the world forgot about 20+ years ago.)

 

And yes, with ONEMANDOOM being seemingly abandoned/retired, it is my hope that I can sort of step in where KMX left off. He's left behind a substantial body of work that I think has played a role in how we look at Doom mapping, even coining the now-common slang term "DoomCute." He's an important voice in the community and a big influence on me personally.

 

In short, you can expect this site to be a repository for my thoughts on classic and retro shooter games (the definition of "classic" and "retro" being rather flexible) and their many mods. This is nothing if not an extremely creative community; it's only fair that their work get some proper ink.

 

 

Methodology

 

While I cite KMX as an influence on me and this blog, I don't intend to mimic his methodology exactly, especially since I'll be covering maps and mods for several different games. Probably the vast majority of material I will be covering for this blog will be for Classic Doom, with Duke Nukem 3D and Quake 1 being close seconds. You will likely see mostly Doom for a good while; part of this is due to a personal criteria that I use to decide what to cover, when, and how (for example, as I go through a medieval/fantasy phase, I'd be playing a selection of medieval/fantasy-themed wads with the excellent Walpurgis, or I could play something set in contemporary times or slightly earlier such as Cold As Hell which is explicitly set in the 1950s) there is also thirty years of wads and mods, and not just from the annual Cacowards or the extensive libraries of big-name mappers of then and now, such as the inestimable Christopher Lutz. I will occasionally throw in stuff that wouldn't otherwise fit into my criteria, but I don't intend to really use the Cacowards or any other "best-of" list to structure how I pick what to review beyond simply finding new material.

What I'll be using and with what configurations (this list subject to change and expansion):

For Doom and other idtech1 games, I use GZDoom unless otherwise stated; compatibility options will vary depending on the wad but I will tend towards GZDoom's "default." I don't do pistol starts and I don't do iron-man (not saving mid-level.) I will heed authorial intent to a limited degree -- see below. Most modern commercial idTech1 games utilize GZDoom as well, some of them quite extensively like Selaco.

 

For Descent and its sequel I'll be using DXX-Rebirth. Descent 3 had a recent source code release and the current leading source port is Piccu Engine.

 

For Duke Nukem 3D and Shadow Warrior '97, I'll be using EDuke32 for most cases, almost always with mostly-cosmetic mods. EDuke32 is also what powers Ion Fury so I'll be using that as a matter of course.

 

For Blood, there's several options, but I've had the best results with nBlood.

 

For Quake 1 I will likely use either Darkplaces or FTEQW, or the official remaster for Dimension of the Machine.

 

For Quake II I will be sticking with the remaster at least for official material.

 

For Half-Life, while the official .exe is still perfectly viable, I have used Xash3D in the past and it's shaping up to be a solid alternative.

 

For Doom 3, research seems to indicate that Dhewm3 is the best option if I don't wish to use the BFG Edition.

 

Expect this list to grow. Some games have no source port at all, or were ported by hand to another game (Corridor 7 being rather famously ported to Doomsday, a Doom source port, back in the day.) If I'm playing a recreation I will note it in my review.

A statement on authorial intent vs player choice

As the boomer shooter genre enters a new golden age and the classics of yesteryear get source ports of increasing sophistication and modding capability, with certain games it becomes increasingly possible to, in effect, create your own total conversion by combining multiple mods. So, if you wanted to, for example, turn Doom into a Build-engine-style game, you could run Nobody Told Me About id on top of, say, AUGUR;ZENITH or Epic 2, and the only thing that could stop you is DEHACKED/DECORATE/ZScript conflicts.

 

But this plays into an ongoing debate -- exemplified by the argument on Doomworld over changes to the sector lighting menu options in GZDoom -- about authorial intent versus player choice. With the existence of gameplay mods, or even simpler things like how you configure your source port, these two concepts are going to be in tension. Most map authors, be they making levels for Doom, or Duke Nukem 3D, or whatever, are generally going to be making them with the original gameplay in mind. And that's totally fine within reason; if a Doom mapper told me not to use jump or crouch because I could potentially break the level, sure, fine. But you will take my mouse-look from my cold gay hands; I do not care if it "breaks certain visual effects," that's something I'll gladly take responsibility for. Ultimately that's how this is supposed to work -- once you release something to the public, you don't really have any control over how people will respond to it. You can say, "hey, this is the intended experience," and people might or might not heed that. But the audience must also take responsibility for how they experience a work; if you play a map and use unintended features or mods and wind up breaking it, that's on you.

 

Which brings me to this: sometimes -- probably most of the time -- I'm going to use mods in my reviews. This probably applies more to Doom than other games, though Duke Nukem 3D certainly has a few mods, on top of many user add-ons featuring their own built-in mods. Sometimes mods are relatively innocuous -- most of the weapon sets in Final Doomer+ for example don't dramatically change the base gameplay, especially if the monsters maintain their original logic. Sometimes they might be a bit more dramatic, such as GMOTA which effectively turns the game into a beat 'em up. I've been playing boomer shooters for 30 years and sometimes you just want something different. I of course am going to account for this when I write my reviews, and I am also going to be up-front about what mods I use, whether they be purely cosmetic, or gameplay mods.

 

That's all. Get psyched.