DiL a.k.a. Death is Life
by Squonkamatic

Well well well ... Remember last week's review of Tatuone's Street, where I wasted about two paragraphs of print space whining about how I couldn't find the key to a door? Heh -- I was too stupid to figure out it's placement after all. Tatuone himself took time away from his busy schedule to ship off the following communiqué;

"The key indeed is hidden in the dark corners of the map.

http://www.ritualistic.com/articles/motw/images/street3.jpg in this screenshot the key is almost visible, right at the upper-right corner of the building, with the tunnel on it; it is in one of the window ledges. The key can be seen in map if you look really careful on the wall, the window is few units "inside" the wall. To get the key is a little bit more tricky. You can rocket jump to the roof, and drop on the ledge, or rocket jump straight to the ledge, from where the minigun is (Which is alot more tricky, as it needs some really careful timing and aiming). But on either case, it is not very easy task. As the reward of the key is so great, I did not want it to be easily accessible :)"

I stand very happily corrected. Check it out for yourself; it is exactly where he says, and keep those cards and letters coming, folks!

Now, this week I get to set some things to right with a look at Darklord's very interesting water processing plant themed DiL, or Death is Life, another one of my favorite addon maps. I say set things to right because during my SiN Gold: Map of the Week series at Macgamer.com the one level from the official SiN game package I was unable to cover was Darklord's highly entertaining SinLos_V2_CTF. While I still plan to get to that one at some point, a reader sent in a list of suggested levels and at the top was DiL, and being the full service reviewer I have been trained as I am pleased to oblige.

Darklord's level info comment from his author .txt says it all; "Death is Life is just a simple Deathmatch level for SiN. It's the first I've ever made - so please forgive me if you should you find some bugs." Hah! If this was the first level he ever made for any game then I think I should find myself a new hobby; My first map ever was a big box with like 100 monsters in it, enough weapons and ammo to crush the Taliban, and no way out. This guy has talent, and I yearn to see more of his work for whatever games he may have gone on to ... please email me if you know where to find some examples.

One of the things that I like to see in shooter levels is a flavor or feel to it that is consistent with the game in question, and DiL certainly caters to players who want to see more of SiN's funky urban/industrial universe. The level is replete with grated metal hallways, ladders, plumbing fixtures, readout panels, hidden sewer tunnels, swimming pool tiles, working doors, a Silencer, storage crates, warning signs, and even a beloved SpearGun waiting in the map's central tank of water. One of my little map geekazoid dork buddies constantly questions why people even bother to use the SpearGun in their SiN DM maps when all of the other weapons in the game work just fine underwater and the spear doesn't do much damage. DiL majestically demonstrates that the young chap is in fact completely missing the point ... People put SpearGuns in their SiN maps because we CAN. Duhh.

This might sound like a shot, but one of the things that I like the most about DiL is its almost clunky, simplistic charm. The map is as much about learning to build for SiN as it is about making a map to play in. You can tell that Darklord was having fun when constructing the map, and had some very specific ideas in mind as to what he wanted to try and build. One of the qualities of Sinlos_V2_Ctf that appealed to me was how the map seemed almost like a DOOM level, in that everything was set on more or less the same plane and made out of blocks. There weren't many elaborate three dimensional enhancements, the architecture was more or less matter of factly constructed rather than some bizarre, Drano fume inspired weirdness, and the level has a straightforward simplicity to it that works. It's a fun map, no question.

DiL has a similar sort of straightforwardness to it, but you can see that Darklord was working things out with SinEd and solving problems rather than just making a series of boxy rooms with two thousand guns everywhere and obnoxious flashing neon lights. He set out to make some very particular things and more or less succeeded; what I admire about DiL is that he had a vision of what he wanted to see, even if at the time he was kind of at a learning stage in using the editor. He obviously had an awareness of how to use the blocks and brushes that make up a map to construct hallways, catwalks, railings, tables and a charming little Control Room, but anyone can do that. What sets DiL apart is it's vision.

While the combat in the map tends to center around the huge tank with its nifty little sniper tower, it is the Control Room that I keep coming back to and looking at for inspiration. You can tell that it is a Control Room not only because there is a huge machine, a desk with lamps and a phone on it and a switch that controls some fascinating element in the map that I knoweth not, but he also slapped a sign texture on it that says CONTROL ROOM, leaving no doubt. As I always say, the one thing that really distinguishes a thoughtfully made level from a "Junker" map is a convincing sense of place, and Darklord went out of his way to let us know exactly where we were -- in a Control Room. Attaboy! My favorite touch? The half gallon of Ice Cream health sitting on the desk. I like ice cream.

The other rooms and chambers are equally well constructed and the whole level is ingeniously lit in a manner that makes sense and doesn't look spotty or haphazard. One of my favorite lighting touches is how there is a little chamber you can crawl into outside of the pool that leads to a healthy stash of ammo and a Pulse Rifle: sitting in a corner right in front of a powder blue light fixture is a Bio Shield powerup that truly looks like it is glowing with some sort of weird cosmic energy. I also like how he did the lighting in the sewer tube, using little blocks of a "light" texture and then placing a bluish spotlight next to them so the tunnel looks like it is being illuminated by specific sources. The storage crate rooms also make sense, the textures on the crates nicely scaled to size and stuff placed on and about them in a manner that suggests intentionality. I also like the bay window he made looking out onto, well whatever, because it extends the "reality" depicted by the map beyond its borders. There is more to this world he created, if we could only find a way out there.

My second favorite little touch is the intricate series of ladders and catwalks he made surrounding this huge vat of water. When I make ladders they usually end up looking like strips of texture slapped up against a wall that you can just happen to climb up, if you have the foresight to bother trying. Darklord made actual ladders that look like ladders, and must have spent some homework time studying other people's work to figure out how to do it: I like it when people do their research. There is one little intersection in particular that I find quite impressive where two catwalks overlap, each with their own access ladder. Not only did this probably take quite a while to build, but he must have sketched it out -- at least in his mind's eye -- before executing it because there is an exacting nature that it was constructed with that does not come from random spontaneity. This guy had a vision of what he wanted to see, spent time trying to get it right, and it shows.

GRIPES DEPARTMENT ALERT; I have to admit that the Gripes Department is one of my favorite sections to delve into, and while I look at DiL as a successful map, it does have a couple of shortcomings that always kind of make me wince. First off, the level is dead silent. I don't know what it is with me and using sounds to flavor an environment ... maybe I spend too much time looking at these things all by myself without some idiot chasing me around with the Ion Cannon and need sounds to drown out the voices in my head telling me to go to the mall and get naked. I dunno, but I can't help but look at this map and think about how much more complete the picture he painted would be if we heard the sounds of humming machinery, flowing water and buzzing lamps as well as the noises of feel clanking on metal floors and rockets zinging past our ears. Oh well; it was his first SiN map.

The goodie placement also gets a little random at times, relying on formulas of item distribution [i.e. a new ammo clip or health jar every ten steps] and the guns/items sitting in default x-y-z axis positions. Weapons wait upon tables or the floor just kind of plopped there, the Machine Guns as usual looking especially awkward as they sort of balance on their ammo clip. But you know, it takes a while to get a feel for how to manipulate the editor for detail like that, and I guess he did a good enough job in just making sure there was plenty of stuff in the map to go around. And then there is always that Ice Cream ... and the SpearGun. We forgive him, and besides he got better at it anyway, as SinLos_V2_CTF attests.

So what we have in the end is actually quite a little testament to what an ingenious mapper Darklord was/is. The level is very competently constructed, giving snappy frame rates and featuring all sorts of little nooks and crannies to explore. Weapons, ammo, health and armor are in abundance [though there seems to be a few extra Leg Armors], and there is a logical way to which the action centers on the map's showpiece, the central tank with it's little sniper tower. I wish the map had some U4 in it and looks like a few monsters could have been tossed in as a single player timekiller, but as is DiL is more than satisfactory for a first-timer, even if the file size is a little big. Then again he packed so much detail into the map [glowing textures on the stairs, all the nice warning signs, and subtly colored lighting that makes sense] that it's 1.7mb size is entirely justified. I'm surprised it isn't larger, actually.

So congratulations, Darklord. Your first at-bat and you hit a stand up triple. Keep him on the roster, Ritual: the kid has talent.

Download DiL from Ritualistic's stash of SiN files at 3ddownloads.com by clicking here.

NEXT WEEK: The return of Cranky Squonk!!

SQ062802

email: squonkamatic@excite.com

You can access Squonk's archive of SiN: Gold Map of the Week reviews over at Macgamer.com by clicking here, and don't forget to visit his multi platform friendly SiN site for custom map and skin pack downloads and other goodies at http://www.squonkamatic.net/sin.

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· Ritualistic's Sin Section
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