Winter 2020-2021:

Nope, I'm not dead, but it took a while for the first new maps of 2021 to appear. The first, Stowaway, was released less than a month ago, and now it's available here. This one is from the author of Duke Express, the Futurama-inspired map.

In other news, Luciano "Gambini" Gallo, one of the greatest mappers of our times and the co-collaborator on DNF2013, finally released his Southernmost Combine mod for Half-Life 2 a few weeks back. This one has been under construction for much too long and for a long time it seemed like it was never going to come out but it's out there now, so give it a try (including some "epic" voice acting by yours truly!). I feel like I should give it a proper review, but I'd be much too biased, having played through various iterations of it over the years, but we'll see.

A few shots to help you make up your mind on whether to download this fantastic mod or not:

Oh, and I'm working on something Duke3D related, so keep following this space over the next few months.

Another year is past us, and we head into 2021 with Fallout Freeze, a shopping center map with some of the best design I've seen in a Duke3D map.

And, as is of course tradition, we're gonna take a look at how 2020 looked in comparison 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
2020: 15 new releases

Note: I'm counting Big City toward new releases as it was published for the first time this year despite being very old. Similarly Fallout Freeze was released a few days ago, I played and started writing a review of it yesterday, so that too counts as a 2020 release. There are still a few 2020 releases that haven't yet been reviewed here, but I'll get around to that soon. All in all, we improved somewhat in comparison to 2019, especially in the second half of the year (10 of the 15 new releases).

Anyway, happy New Year!

I'm again slightly late with this review but hey, what's one week when it took nearly 20 years for Back in Business to go from zero to finally being published at the very end of 2020? This one is from Alex Pistol, who was very active back in the heydays of Alejandro's Mapping Center. Waste no further time and give this 4-map episode a try.

Also finally got around to replaying Malice, a relatively unknown commercial Total Conversion for Quake that actually inspired my very first Duke3D episode.

Merry Christmas!

Corentin managed to obtain a previously unreleased map from a former Sunstorm Interactive mapper, Bill Buchalter, for his interview with him. So, give Big City a try and check out Corentin's page here.

Upcoming Maps section updated with Merlijn van Oostrum's Shaky Grounds project.

We seem to be picking up some speed as 2020 is about to be wrapped up. Here's Chillin', a Hot Map worth 91 points.