I seriously have got a lot of Doom work done in these holidays.  I knew that I would have to leave to Manipal for my Management course at the end of this month, and so I decided to finish all the pending work I had.  Apart from that some interesting stuff has also happened, all of which I'm glad to talk about in this post.  To make things a bit more interesting, I've classified them into subheadings:

• The Ninth Gate: This project, as some of you may already know, was started in 2001.  It's a replacement for the entire Episode 4 of The Ultimate Doom.  I am contributing two maps to the project (E4M1 and 3), and I finished one of them a long time ago (E4M1 in 2001 itself).  But in the recent past, I finished the E4M3 I'd been gradually working on over the last one year or so, and I brought it up to a good standard.  But then, the old E4M1 was a very early map of mine, and therefore, a pretty poor one.  ESPECIALLY when compared to the high-quality stuff of the other mappers (Pablo Dictter, Toby Münch, Damian Lee and my brother Varun).  Also, using a mediocre map like my old one with Damian's awesome opening song was just criminal.  So I decided to make a new one.  I not only decided it, I've also completed the map (codenamed "N4M1", which stands for "New 4 M 1", which is in turn derived from "New E4M1").  It's one of my best levels till date (and a pretty terrific E4 style map if I do say so myself).  I finished that on 15th June, and sent off the map to the team.  Apart from that, Damian also completed another map for the project just a couple of days back.  Varun and myself are working on a Ninth Gate site update, so that should appear shortly (Varun has some exams now).
• Reviews: Eric Buck, a.k.a. The BluePaladin has done a large number of reviews for the Doom Wad Station.  Recently, he reviewed my Chaos Punch, Out of Phase, and Out of Phase 3: One Cloudy Afternoon (also Varun's The Anomaly Part II).  Well, thanks Eric!
• Demos: Yesterday, I went to Opulent's Doomed Speed Demos Archive (after hearing that he'd updated), and was a bit surprised to see a demo for my Out of Phase 3, by Michael Novikov.  Surprising, because he'd done a huge batch of Ultimate Doom demos as usual, and I was a bit puzzled as to why he would do a demo of Ophase3 out of the blue.  The reason was that this site, Doom Power, had started a speedrunning contest on June 5th or so, and they'd picked my map to conduct the contest on!  I thought this was a really cool thing, so I got all the demos so far posted.  The contest page is here, but you should know, though, that it is in Russian.  But you can easily make out the demo links (there were 21 demos when I checked).
• A map worth writing about: Last Sunday's Doomworld /newstuff Chronicles had a very good map for Doom II called The Wicked and the Damned by ReX Claussen.  I mention it here specifically because I really liked the concept and execution of the level.  It's unusual because you start off near the exit room, and travel through much of the map without meeting any monsters (all the switches also won't work).  Then, once you activate a "power switch", you'll have to backtrack from that point.  There are monsters now and the switches throughout the level now work!  Innovative map.

I'd also been chatting quite often with Pablo and Toby recently (and a couple of times with Damian and Ismaele), and I also downloaded Ismaele's latest two levels (which should appear in tomorrow's /newstuff Chronicles).  I played only one of them (Run & Kill, the other one was Outpost of Hell 2) though, but it was nicely done.

Well, there's still more good (Doom-related) news from my side, and that is important enough that it deserves a whole post all to itself.

Papa got my Net4India hosting renewed today, and we also got a new computer!  P4, 2.4 GHz, 80 GB HD, 512 MB RAM, DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives, WinXP + Win98, SoundBlaster LIVE! 2.1, super cool.  Also got a new pair of glasses.