More Reviews

For those of you interested in such things, DoomWorld's Newstuff Chronicles #417 is out. I mention this here for a number of reasons: this edition of Newstuff contains two reviews written by me, contains one review of a wad uploaded by me and, for the morbidly curious, contains a couple of reviews of wads uploaded by our friend DoomGuy2000! Thus I thought regular readers of my little blog here might be interested in taking a look...

A New Shingle?

One of the things I had intended to do here on the blog when it was dedicated solely to Classic Doom was to occasionally review PWADs both past and present, providing some screenshots (or even videos) from the levels and my opinions of the works. I would still like to do so, but recently I became distracted by my own works-in-progress and the public opinions of them thus the blog took a bit of a different direction. Besides, I'm not ashamed to admit that I think KMX E XII does far better reviews than I in the DOOMED blog which are just as deserving of readers.

In the meantime, I decided that I'm going to continue to participate in the Doom community (whether they want me there or not) and submitted a pair of map reviews to DoomWorld's Newstuff Chronicles which (a bit to my surprise) were approved for publishing in the latest edition of Newstuff. So far no one has chimed in with any objections to my participation, so maybe I've finally found a niche there.

The only drawback to that is, as its name implies, the Newstuff Chronicles is restricted to reviews of content recently added to the id Games Archives. I still have a ton of older Classic Doom content that I want to share with my readers, so all I can do is ask for patience. If all goes well, I might actually get back to posting about some other video games here as well.

More Redactions

Frequent readers of this blog might note by comparing the screenshots in my previous post to the current list of comments on my randomizer mod that the DoomWorld "Archive Maintainer" has yet again been practicing his deleting skills... and yet has conveniently left the comment on my other file where I'm called a "stinky bitch" (which I had reported with the "report review abuse" button).

But I'm told it's nothing personal, all in my imagination, so now I'll just go on about my business...


EDIT: 04/28/2012

Okay, I take back some of what I've said. Maybe the Archive Maintainer isn't all bad after all. The "stinky bitch" comment has finally been deleted. Still, looking at my other uploaded files, I can't fathom the methodology he uses for deleting comments.

The Stinky Bitch of Doom

I actually saw this "review" posted on one of my files before I went off to work this afternoon but did not have time to blog it at the time. During the course of the evening I decided that it would be a waste of valuable time I could spend doing something more enjoyable if I were to type a long ranting response to it. Instead, I'll simply post a screenshot and let it speak for itself:

If any DoomWorld flag-wavers are thinking of leaving comments here attempting to convince me that this is the sort of thing that I should just learn to live with because it's just the way things are, let me assure you that it would also be a waste of your time to do so; no such arguments will persuade me to believe that this sort of trolling is acceptable.

EDIT: 04/28/2012

Okay, I take back some of what I've said. Maybe the Archive Maintainer isn't all bad after all. The "stinky bitch" comment has finally been deleted. Still, looking at my other uploaded files, I can't fathom the methodology he uses for deleting comments.

More Doomfoolery

Here's the latest anonymous accusation posted on my infamous file upload:

So with that I issue this challenge to anyone, friend or foe: find anywhere in this blog (or anything else I've ever typed anywhere on the internet, for that matter) where I have boasted that I am "the best" or that any mod I have ever made for any game is "the best" and point us to it. I'd love to read it.

SNAPSHOTS

I know it's only a matter of time before people start popping in here to tell me to stop my crying about this (likely would have already happened in spades if I didn't have the cowardly anonymous commenting blocked) so I decided I'll start keeping a visual record so there's at least some form of proof that comments on my uploaded files did in fact exist before they get redacted.

Let's see how many days or even hours it takes for those to disappear, shall we?

And again...

Another glance at my uploaded file over at the DoomWorld/idGames Archives shows that the trend is continuing; almost everything spoken in defense of the file is deleted while the trolling comments are allowed to remain and no one is permitted to respond to them.

Why don't you assholes save us all some time and grief and just delete the whole damned file permanently?

Futility

Glancing today at my aforementioned file entry over at the DoomWorld/id Games Archives I noticed something quite odd. The voting stats have dropped from almost 80 votes back down to 30 votes and from 3.5 stars back down to 2.5 stars. So not only has the "Archive Maintainer" deleted over half of the votes for the file but he has also deleted the majority of the positive votes and left the majority of the negative votes.

Now, the folks over there love to tell me that I'm overly sensitive and should stop crying about this, but I can't possibly be the only one who can see that this is wrong, can I?

Happy Doomyear!

I just discovered this in the DoomWorld Forums news section and thought that it's worthy of sharing here since some of you might not visit DoomWorld often. It's a clickable, sortable list of every file that was uploaded to the DoomWorld / id Games Archives from Dec. 10, 2010 to Dec. 10, 2011. Files can be sorted according to author, title, date, et cetera and clicking on an individual entry takes one directly to the page where the file can be downloaded.

I'm finding this extremely cool because lately I've been spending a bit of time in the Archives looking for megaWADs that I've yet to play. The Archives (at least when accessed from DoomWorld's web front-end) provides a search function, but sometimes it can be a bit counter-intuitive and net 0 results unless one has entered EXACTLY what one is searching for. This list is quite convenient and easy to use, and I especially like the fact that it can be sorted by a column indicating the number of maps in a submission since it's sets of maps that I'm looking for at the moment. MegaThanks to TimeOfDeath for this!

Now, if we just had something like this that covered the entire history of the Archives...

Something I've never seen before...

Yesterday I sent out an e-mail or two to friends regarding the most recent inflammatory comment on the file upload for my Doom randomizer mod on the DoomWorld / id Games Archives. I'm not going to reprint said comment here, but suffice it to say that it was yet another of those comments that repeats a single derogatory term like a dozen times (albeit apparently somewhat in defense of the mod this time). Yet upon looking at the Archives this morning, I find that the comment and all subsequent comments have been removed while the previous comments remain for viewing.

So now I REALLY find myself questioning how the "archive maintainer" runs things over there. Exactly what kind of censorship is he practicing? If a comment uses a derogatory term a dozen times to criticize a mod it's allowed to remain for all eternity, but if a comment uses a derogatory term to defend a mod it gets deleted within 24 hours? This doesn't bode well for their defense that DoomWorld doesn't exercise personal biases. It really makes me wonder what other comments have been deleted before I was able to see them, this being the one time that I was actually paying attention.

I used the "report review abuse" button at the bottom of the page to submit a query on this. Only time will tell if anything comes of that query, but if it does you all will be the first to know.

Archive Updated

I'm not really sure why I bother to keep my works up-to-date in the DoomWorld / id Games Archives (the latest anonymously-posted "review" of my randomizer mod was simply the word "GACK"), but I suppose to someone it's worth mentioning that the FTP transfer was successful and the most recent version of my Doom Upgrade mod is now available for download there. Whether it be famous or infamous, it remains a part of Doom history...

The 18th Annual Popularity Awards

Those of you familiar with my gaming habits might be a bit surprised that I'm not more excited about the 18th birthday of my favorite video game and in turn the 18th Annual Cacowards (no, really... that's what they're called). (Or is it the 8th Annual Cacowards? They've called it both on different pages.) I guess it's just hard for me to get excited about a popularity contest in a clique that has done its best to make me not want to be a part of it. I'm not disparaging the quality of the projects that have received awards, mind you, I just don't feel like baking a cake is all I'm sayin'.

And just for the record, "Bloodshedder", the cake picture is on the right side, not the left.

Fed Up

Could someone please explain to me how is it that a mod uploaded just a few days ago gets moved straight to the DoomWorld Archives Front Page and yet my mod still can't get recognized in the latest files section?

On second thought, nevermind; I think I'm gonna play Morrowind for a while...