MarsHappyNation

One of those timeless questions. The different reacts being so meaningless is part of their charm, I almost always use the soul sphere just because it's the default option but I love a cheeky invisibility powerup every now and then. Keeps you folks on your toes.

I live under a rock (quite possibly the largest of all rocks) so I'm finally getting around to Skyrim. More than a decade late but I picked up the newest rerelease a couple weeks ago on a whim and I've been binging it like hell. I really missed out big time by ignoring it for so long. Fantasy settings like this are kind of a turnoff for me but to my surprise it's been real easy to get invested. Big fan of the exploration and all the pretty snowy areas around the map.

I can't speak on the newer stuff but I've got a soft spot for the oldies. One mod that always has to be mentioned whenever the subject of wads for Halloween comes up is definitely Zombies TC, a bit dated now but it's an absolute blast. It's got so much personality and it's the quintessential spooky mod as far as I'm concerned. Another notable and obligatory mention would be the Ghoul's Forest series (anyone remember these?), more floating skeleton heads than you can shake an SSG at. Very cheesy and played-out but it's hard not to love. As for what constitutes a good Halloween wad, anything that goes out of its way and dedicates itself completely to either being a horror mod or strictly seasonal appeals to me above all else. There's just something so charming about a wad that knows exactly what it is and makes no mistake about what its purpose is. Gotta embrace being the yearly Charlie Brown cartoon special of Doom modding.

I have what feels like every source port under the sun sitting around on my desktop just for kicks but I've grown to prefer running Doom straight through DOSBox. Most cozy way to kill things. I love Chocolate and Crispy too for the faithfulness to vanilla without tweaking many of the settings. Otherwise PrBoom+/GZDoom is my main squeeze if a mod or map requires something that either of the two bring to the table.

Gotta saddle the aliens with the worst before introducing them to the best. Extensive exposure to STARTAN2 and D_RUNNIN before laying a quality wad on 'em. Trial by fire and all that. Builds character. That's the most hilariously apt way I've ever seen anyone describe a Terry wad. Absolute fever dream.

A megawad I've been exceptionally fond of recently has been @Deadwing's Moonblood. Playing through it for the first time and enjoying it immensely. It's really difficult for me to become too invested in most mapsets because they all feel either out of my skill range or too far removed from the gameplay I'm used to. Moonblood feels just my speed though and I love it to bits. It doesn't seem to deviate much from vanilla conventions, very comfy playthrough. I'm still fairly early into it after entering the second episode but it's already one of my favorites.

I don't know how moderation here is handled but I don't think it should be locked unless things get miserably, irrecoverably out of hand. Better for everyone to air their grievances now than to have the conversation end abruptly with so much tension still hanging around. With everyone already conducting themselves so respectfully for the most part, this seems healthy even if not entirely productive.

I watched the episode before I even knew there was any controversy surrounding it, so imagine my surprise checking back here to see it blowing up the way it has. The ego remark struck me as a throwaway line to close a review and I never would have guessed it would get such a passionate reaction out of people. With that being said though, after reading over everyone's thoughts here, I still fail to see it as even half as problematic as it's been made out to be. If the mappers discussed take personal offense to it then it's a different situation entirely, but from my perspective as it stands right now, a single off-handed comment conveyed through a joke about someone having a bit of an ego shouldn't be held up as an example of malice or "stepping over the line" on Dean's part at all. It registered to me as nothing more than a personal observation all his own. I've always appreciated hearing his personal takeaways on the mappers themselves whenever he touches on it, because I like to think the mind and the map are impossible to divorce; sprinkles of personality and charming little quirks unique to the individual unavoidably slipping into a project. That's exactly how I took his assessment in his most recent video. It didn't seem ill-intentioned by any stretch of the imagination to me but an example of him trying to glean a bit of "soul" from whatever mapset he's covering. I'm sure nobody (and Dean least of all) was ever expecting it to become such an incendiary topic but I'd never fault any of the people who felt targeted by his statement for feeling hurt by it. I'd also like to mention how impressed I am at how civil the discourse has been from everything I've seen, it's a very pleasant surprise. I've gotten so jaded to seeing forums like this go up in flames over significantly less so just happy to see you all keep things level-headed. Admittedly I've been very detached from this community in recent years and even then, my contributions have been sporadic at best. Just felt tossing in my two cents on the whole situation would be useful, if only as an example of how someone who is mostly uninvolved in this place feels about it. See you next year.

Bonding over Stardew Valley with a dear friend of mine.

The road to recovery isn't easy. 👥

I recently picked up Barotrauma by a friend's recommendation and it's one of the most fun multiplayer games I've played in a long time. It's hard to really do it justice through descriptions alone but it's a sci-fi submarine survival sim and inevitably everything goes horribly wrong, I'm in love with it. Giant alien-looking sea creatures try and break into the ship while the entire crew tries to hold it all together, whoever plays security is predisposed to go AWOL and take the ship prisoner, casual mutiny and trying to keep order as the captain. You really do need a good group together to experience it to its fullest but I've gotten lucky enough to have an amazing one. Hitman and Hitman 2 as well. Been really hooked on that too, used to love Blood Money and it's a wonderful extension of that.

Lost media is a topic I find deeply fascinating. I'm the kind of person who wants to know everything about anything so it really stokes the fire inside my Sherlock heart. There aren't any in particular that I'm interested in above any others but I did witness some lost media growing up and I didn't even realize it at the time. To set the scene, it was the early 2000's. I was very young, around 4 or 5 at most. Mindlessly sitting in front of the TV, nobody else in the room, Spongebob Squarepants in front of the wide-eyed little me. Same episode I watched dozens of times before. I don't know how many of you grew up with the show too but for the sake of reference, it was the episode about the hooks. It got to the scene where one of the characters rattles off some motto about never going near the hooks which again, I've seen so many times until this point. One thing changed though; all the characters became puppets for apparently no reason and the scene continued as normal, just with all three characters present being replaced by live action puppets. It lasted for the entirety of the hooks sequence and returned back to normal like nothing ever happened. I remember being understandably so confused by this and none of my friends or siblings ever believed me when I told them about what I saw. Fast forward to maybe three or four years ago, 15+ years after the whole ordeal happened and I still couldn't find ANYTHING about it online. I hadn't talked about it for years at that point because it sounded like a cheap Creepypasta, which it absolutely does. I legitimately started to believe maybe I just dreamt it up or I was so young that it became a case of somehow embedding a false memory into my psyche, I don't know. But lo and behold, after so many years and countless uncomfortable puppet-centric nightmares later, someone dragged up a screenshot of the scene and finally proved it wasn't just my imagination. The entire thing was some mid-show promotion for a new cartoon at the time. You can now find the full puppet sequence up on Youtube if you search around for it but this has always been such a funny story to me and I believe it was the inception for my interest in lost media as a whole.

Warhol chic.

I grew up with a really tight-knit community for a flash game making site so this hits especially hard. The memories I made during my 11 years there and the people I've gotten to know are beyond precious to me.

I've been lurking around here for ages and admittedly I haven't done too much, so I plan on getting more involved with mapping. Several ill-fated attempts were had over the last couple years but my godawful perfectionist mindset ceases work on any of it the instant I am even mildly unsatisfied, then I start something new after somehow reasoning that it can't be salvaged and the cycle continues. I'm putting a stop to that and I'll actually have something to show sometime soon. Mapping and the creative side of Doom has always been my absolute favorite part of the series, it'll be fun to finally participate. Another mildly Doom-related project I've been telling myself I'll start this year is properly streaming over Twitch or something, I don't really know. A lot of people have been encouraging me to do it so I'm at least going to give it a shot. Here's hoping I own up to all this and don't leave it in the dust like I normally do. Posting this here now means I have to do it. It's been etched into the annals of Doomworld, it's now sacred text.