Aquanet

I'm playing Soma, but it hasn't grabbed me yet. Amnesia wasn't my favorite Frictional game. For some reason, Penumbra really clicked with me, the feeling of going deeper and deeper underground in almost complete isolation.

Ken Silverman is a prince among men. There's a weird poetry to him releasing a full 3D engine. Ken's Labyrinth was way more fun to play in the 90s than it should have been.

I played Mining Quarry, and I liked it where the randomness of oblige+mapper created combinations that were unexpected but mostly worked. Maybe do for random gen what lilith.wad did for glitches. There are lots of expectations about levels (especially nowadays) to be messed with. I can't ever remember wondering in a level, did a person make this? Did a computer? Maybe there's a concept with the levels being (sorry) a cyberspace world created by a Shodan-like AI.

DAMMIT JUNO. Descent 2 is sadly nowhere near as good.

Game Night in the theater because screwed up and missed a showing of Annihilation. It's sort of an old fashioned comedy and worth seeing. It's funnier than most/nearly all new comedies I've seen. It's been awhile since I saw it, but The Florida Project was my favorite movie from 2017, directed by Sean Baker who makes awesome, realism-flavored movies (some of which are on netflix). It's the story of a cheap motel/apt. complex as told primarily through the perspective(s) of its children. The great irony is they're just down the road from Disney World but have to make their own fun and mischief.

Speaking very generally, mappers have gotten better and better over the years with tailoring custom textures and an overall aesthetic for the Doom engine. BTSX, for example, or Ancient Aliens. People have found ways (like the layer/segmented wall textures you can see in Dragonfly's post) to make maps look shapely and architectural even without floors over floors. Some older mappers were still great at creating memorable spaces with a sense of place, like Iikka Keranen.

It's nice to play a neon map that isn't super hard or a joke. This is a fun little playground.

Well you might also want to steer clear of map09. Different maps are tough and neigh on unbeatable to different people. I squeaked through 08 but haven't beaten 09.

This is a pretty fun, thoughtful little level where you're playing with some different visual ideas and themes. Only hangup I had was the crates in the west room were a big snug (I used gzdoom 1.9.1 on uv) to squeeze between for my taste. Cool stuff!

That was mostly a joke; I always feel like it's weirdly uninteresting and browser game like (still) for as hard as it seems to be trying.

Also the Binding of Isaac

e4m2 and e4m6 for me. I have a harder time pistol starting the latter. With e4m2, I think if you're good at finding routes and exploiting the layout it helps a lot. If you're like me and often play more casually, the level can close in on you. I like how it almost never leaves you feeling safe with different factors like height and barons and lava keeping you off balance (unless you're an automap pro).

Stabbed a dog? I can't find it now but a while back someone linked to a piece that discussed Doom and Ultima Underworld and said the industry fucked up by following the former (because no way could it go in multiple directions). I feel like a lot of Doom-is-overrated-and-maybe-even-sucks pieces use a rhetorical strategy of evaluating it as "a game" and not as an action or FPS game. The writers say Day of the Tentacle was so much more witty, and Ultima Underworld was more immersive. But these games had different goals.