Winter 2019-2020:

After a slow start to the year, two episodes were released a few days apart. Of these, Fernando Marquez's FM4X - The Uprising, has now been reviewed, so check it out. I'll get started with Alien Armageddon - Space Gladiators next week.

Sanek has the honor of having released the first map of the '20s; check out Dark Station.

As we're approaching the end of 2019, we're faced with the fact that the year was unquestionably the worst when it comes to Duke3D user-made content. Here's how 2019 compares to previous years, in terms of new releases published on this site:
2004: 50 new releases
2005: 36 new releases
2006: 30 new releases
2007: 21 new releases
2008: 40 new releases
2009: 34 new releases
2010: 26 new releases
2011: 21 new releases
2012: 29 new releases
2013: 28 new releases
2014: 22 new releases
2015: 19 new releases
2016: 24 new releases
2017: 13 new releases
2018: 20 new releases
2019: 11 new releases

There were some considerable positives though. The third episode of the epic AMC TC was released in the spring, while Ion Fury finally saw the light of day in late summer, and I myself returned to the legendary MSSP series with MSSP9. Retro gaming seems to be doing well in other regards too, with Blood seeing a proper re-release on Steam and Exhumed/PowerSlave (which I have yet to play) finally getting a proper port. But who cares when you can now just play Red Dead 2 on the PC, right?

The biggest downside to 2019 was no question the passing away of our good friend Zaxtor in June. A huge amount of creativity went along with him for good; nothing can replace Zaxtor, his wildly creative and unique ideas and the passion with which he approached his projects.

Since no new Duke3D maps were released this month to mark the end of the year, I give you reviews of Dark Gate, a classic from 1996, and Merry Christmap, a usermap for Mr the Killer (and thus not strictly speaking a Duke3D usermap but hey it's almost Christmas so I'll make an exception).

Happy New Year and a very late Christmas!

This one is almost a year late, but better late than never: check out Null Moon by DannyFromNewOrleans; a rudimentary review had actually been lying on my hard drive for many months until someone dared point out the map hasn't been reviewed yet.

Also wrote a review of Observer, a first-person game starring the late and great Rutger Hauer.

Furthermore, in June I published several map-packs, collecting MSDN "Hot Map" releases starting from the year 1999. However, a few 1999 maps (Flood and The Mission) by Juha "Turpuli" Laaksonen were missing, but thanks to a tip from ViDi Games, I was able to salvage these maps and put them back in the 1999 collection; for some reason I never thought of checking out the Archives (and quite frankly didn't even recall "Turpuli" having a website back in the day). See the top of the Hot Maps section for the zip packages.