Staying up later than I should, I was just about to head off to bed right before I decided to take a quick wander over to my beloved GameHits forum from the years of yonder. 9 times out of 10, nothing new is posted; the forum has been buried by all of the dust it’s collecting these days. Occasionally an oldie AC friend from those golden days will post something, making me giddy with nostalgia. But most of the time it’s a ghost town. Sorta sad really.

Until I saw this thread. I’m sure if you’ve ever had a conversation with me, I’ve brought up that I’m a pretty crazy Armored Core fan. As of late though, AC4 and its sequel has left me kinda trigger-shy when it comes to From Software’s newest ventures in it’s super Japanese robot killing franchise. AC4 was ok and it’s sequel was slightly better, but they weren’t really up to snuff when I compare the fun times I had with Master of Arena, Another Age, and Silent Line, quite possibly the 3 best Armored Core games to date (in my entirely humble and unbiased opinion, of course ). Yes, I am a bitter fanboy who longs for the old days of Armored Core….shaddup . Heh, I won’t even begin to get into a long-winded rant about AC here; unless you’ve played the game or have been active in it’s community, I would just be wasting my breathe. But even given my past experiences with the next-gen Armored Core games, I always secretly held out hope that they would continue the franchise with a 5th lineup. It’s actually one of the biggest reason why I even bothered purchasing a 360. The AC franchise hasn’t been all that popular here in the states; the AC3 and SL years were the “golden” years as far as stateside popularity is concerned. I wasn’t even sure if they would port AC:For Answer to the states or not, and I was somewhat relieved when they did, even though I was expecting pretty much the same dismal flavor of game that was given to us in AC4. And my hope that they will port AC5 stateside is pretty much just as bleak as it stands right now. I guess I’ll just have to sit back and see what the news brings. Needless to say, I’m glad I stayed up late. Although I’m pretty sure all glad and happy feelings will be long gone when I have to wake up in 3 hours

Claustrophobia 1024 2: The Mystery of Too Many Maps (aka. just “Claustrophobia 1024 2), the direct sequel to Claustrophobia 1024 which was released on June 2009, was released today! Initially an overflow of subpar or unusable maps from the original Claustrophobia 1024 project, it has turned into a full-blown megawad. During the original project’s development cycle, we had way too many submissions. So towards the end of development, Jodwin came forward and offered to do a sequel-esque side-project featuring all of those maps. The maps that didn’t meet the quality requirement were fixed and polished up. There are also quite a few brand new maps from some of the original contributors of Claustrophobia 1024. I didn’t have anything to do with this wad, at least not directly (other than making the TITLEPIC and the rest of the graphics that were brought over from the original wad ). However, if your a fan of the 1024 theme and you were a fan of the original Claustrophobia, I highly recommend giving this a download!

Download @ Akinomori.com
Screenshots

It should be on /idgames sometime soon, so keep a look out for that link

*edit*

Here’s that /idgames link! Go give it a few downloads and ratings

I am now 23 years of age. Pretty cool, I guess. Thinking back over the years, it’s a tad depressing where I’m sitting at right now. I haven’t accomplished much since I finished up High School, other than flirting here and there with some interests of mine, hoping that they will lead me somewhere. I tried college but sort of fizzled out on that. Most of my other opportunities either never came or were pushed away because of my dag-blasted social ineptitudes. But I suppose as you get older you can’t help to think of these things and sometimes regret where your at in the present. Aside from continuing my game development interests, I’m not sure what other goals I have planned for my future. I would like to try and finish up my game design degree at the very least, and maybe even try for a degree in architecture (which I would then apply to my mapping…I find that somewhat humorous ). Aside from that, I don’t have any other major ambitions or plans on where I want to go from here. Just playing it by ear I guess. Nothing wrong with that, right? RIGHT?!

Also I hope everyone had an enjoyable and safe holiday! (if you celebrate anything, that is). This time of the year we usually visit with lots of our family since it’s one of the few times everyone gets together, so it’s pretty much always busy until the new year. By the end of the festivities, I’m usually wore out; this year is certainly no exception so far . We also did the traditional Christmas thing of having a big dinner and opening presents. I’m too old to really do the presents mess these days, but I did get some new pants, some DS games, some candy, and a few other things. Neat! We also made a trip up to D.C. about a week before Christmas to just screw around and take in the sights. Unfortunately this was the same time that massive snow storm hit the eastern part of the country. We got caught in the storm while there with about 12″+ of snow and had to stay an extra day until the roads were clear enough to make it back home. I love the snow and I love it when we get LOTS of it. I do not, however, enjoy driving in it. It can wreck havoc on an overly anxious person’s brain like mine. We made it back in one piece though

By the way, cookies to anyone who gets what “Geewiz” is all about

So Doom’s 16th birthday has come and gone. I was gonna celebrate by playing some Episode 1 while eating some cake, but I was too busy most of the day (I did play a little bit…no cake though ). For you Doom-heads out there, I’m sure you caught this year’s Cacowards. It’s been a really great year for releases and quite the busy one for me. Of the wads that won awards, I really enjoyed and highly recommend Harmony by Thomas van der Velden, Mapgame by Ravage, Plutonia 2, and UDMX by UniDoom. I’ve still got to play though some of the other awarded maps, but those that I listed are definitely my favorites this year. (I’ve heard very good things about Demons of Problematique 2 and Legacy of Suffering). But the biggest surprise of all…I won the award for the year’s best mapper!! Wow…, I think it didn’t really hit me until today. It’s really a huge honor and I’m still kinda dumbstruck by all of it. Of course the irony in all of this now is that my popular nickname of “Lazyadon” is now more ironic than true, which I find hilarious! Anyways, as I said in a comment of Carn’s Vega post about my award, I realize that in the larger scheme of things, this is just an award from a community of a 16 year old game that most of the regular video game population pays no attention to these days. So maybe my shock and appreciation seems a bit out of place given that. But for me, I find it too awesome for words. Doom mapping…well, mapping in general, has become a significant activity in my life and I enjoy it very much. This award only shows that people truly do enjoy my efforts and work and it makes me want to stick around for the long haul and keep contributing to the community at large. And that’s most likely what I’ll do . So thanks to everyone who thought I deserved this award! I cannot put into words how much I appreciate it and I intended to stick around and keep mapping for a long time to come. Also congratulations to everyone who won an award and to everyone else who was nominated! I’ll be looking forward to what’s in store this coming year with much anticipation. I can’t wait to get my trophy in the mail Scuba Steve!

….

Oh, did you think that was it? Well, it’s not. pcorf happened to mention that he would love to see a “WOS” style wad by me in the Cacoward thread at Doomworld. Incidentally, I’ve been planning just such a project for a really long time now (since IGPack release…maybe a little earlier). I wasn’t sure when I wanted to announce it to the public, but his comment made me want to just post a little snippet about it. The name of this project is “Supplice” and production officially started 6/14/2009 (around the same time I was having those computer issues and was unable to work on Vega). I’m planning on another post later on to discuss the overall goals of the project, but I’ll go ahead and say just a bit about it. It’s going to be a Boom compatible, singleplayer map set (possibly COOP compatible). Lots of my inspiration will likely come from wads like Scythe II, Suspended in Dusk, etc and from mapper’s such as Vader, Espi, esselfortium, Dutch Devil, Agent Spork, afterglow, and a few others. One big thing I want is for the majority of the content to be made by me and me alone. So things like new textures, monsters, graphics, music, sprites and maps (duh) will all be made by my own hands. Certain things I’ll probably have to outsource (like monsters sprites and, possibly, music). I want the general theme to follow closely to Doom’s theme but at the same time I want it to have it’s own feel and atmosphere. It may even have some sort of crudely written skeleton story that will stem from the Doom saga in some way. At the moment I’m doing ALL of the resources first; mapping will only start once that’s out of the way (I can only focus on one thing at a time). So far I’ve made some graphics, a bunch of textures, and some new monster behaviors but that’s it. I haven’t been able to work on it (or much else) since I’ve been working though. I’ll make another wordy, drawn-out post about it later on where I can go into more depth about the project’s goals. So let’s leave it at that for now.

However, if your reading this and your getting excited, then just get yourself unexcited . The biggest reason why I didn’t want to announce this was because I have no timeline set for this project. As in, I’m putting the largest majority of my free time into Project Vega first and foremost. I will only work on Supplice when I can, and I have no idea how often that will be. And given the project’s scope and size, it’s likely it will take a very long time before anything of interest is presentable. But I can atleast say this; I plan on working on it and finishing it as long as I’m able. So if you are truly interested, keep your eye’s peeled for my official announcement post sometime in the future.

Happy 16th Birthday DooM! I still find it very hard to believe that Doom still has an amazingly active community given it’s age. I’m looking forward to reading the 16th Annual Cacowards