Doom is Seventeen

[Gez]

Yesterday was Doom's 17th birthday. As every years, Doomworld celebrated the event with the Cacowards, a selection of some of the best mods created within the past year. Stronghold won two awards (including the one for the longest development time), and Paranoid got a mention.

[Rachael]

Good job everybody on both teams!

I am sad Paranoid didn't make it though. That mod definitely deserved to be in there!

[Enjay]

OK, I don't like saying this but I may as well. I don't know if it is just because I haven't been able to play Doom properly for a while, and so I am a little removed from a lot of the WADs this year, but the 2010 awards seemed a little lack lustre to me.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that any of the projects awarded were bad - they weren't. There are some very good WADs in there and I don't want to detract from the achievements of any of the authors, nor do I wish to rubbish the work done by Scuba Steve and team on the awards themselves. As ever, all contributions to the community and the awards process are very much appreciated.

However, I just didn't feel that there was much to really set the world on fire either. Normally with the Cacos I unconditionally agree with 80-90% of the decisions - even the ones where I personally didn't like the WAD but I can see why it won - and the ones that I am less sure about are just down to matters of taste where I personally preferred another WAD and would have liked to see it recognised rather than the ones that were. This year, however, I found myself completely agreeing with about 20% and wondering to myself whether the remaining 80% was really representative of the best that 2010 had to offer. As I said, I don't think the chosen WADs are bad but the awards as a whole gave me a feeling of "is that it?".

Was 2010 a bit "pedestrian" or is it just that I personally wasn't able to engage with many of the projects that were released over the last 12 months and therefore have a skewed impression of the year? Quite a few of the WADs are ones where I can appreciate that they are well made, but are not really to my taste - and that is (of course) absolutely fine, though I realise that it may also colour my opinion. To be fair, for the most part I can't really think of many WADs that I personally would like to have seen getting recognition rather than the ones that did. It's just that I have a bit of a "meh" feeling about the awards as a whole this year.

[NeuralStunner]

Perhaps we've just hit the extent of "new". Personally, I have trouble thinking of projects that haven't been done before in some way.