I wasn't going to comment on this bash much, but the "future bashes" comment just got on my bad side.

I thought this was a particularly lame bash, made all the worse by the fact of being probably the last occassion for a huge and festive celebration of the game. Instead it was a wet fart with zero hype and poor attendance.

There was so much time to take any sort of action, like contact oldies about the bash far in advance to ensure better attendance, contact gaming news about how CliffyB's Jazz Jackrabbit 2 pulls more players on its 20th anniversary than his latest game, contact GOG and offer a special sale, or maybe even a "free weekend" kind of deal, etc. Good luck getting anything of the above done next year.

(Of course now I'm going to hear "well why didn't you do anything Cooba? " and I'm already reminded of FQuist's words from over 10 years ago how "nobody will make anything in this community if we don't organise it ourselves"...)

Disappointingly, the only thing the organisers thought of were the lists - in case of which, why were they so poor? At least they weren't a disaster like the in-progress lists of last year, which were so bad they made PJ personally intervene, but still the classics lists were pretty much a joke. Lots of levels that nobody would ever have called "a classic", and yet over half of the JCS award winning levels missing??, I would have thought winning best Battle/CTF of each year would be a good definition of what the community considers classic...

With 19 "best-of" lists from previous years available the only thing to do was to merge them all into one super big list, introduce a proper vote skip mutator (not that the one I wrote last year was any good, but at least it existed), and just let the thing stew for a weekend. Tada, there's your Anniversary Bash 20 list, no need for inventing two lists for each gamemode, asking people for suggestions (only to ignore them in the end) or cutesy "allusions" that nobody really cares about.

As I find myself growing out of the game and largely moving on from the community, I'm really disappointed that what was probably the last bash I attend was mishandled in such a way. I really hope the "future bashes" do better (though it's unlikely at this point), but for pepe's sake get some new blood in and don't let FireSworD anywhere near organising again.