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.