Hunter
by Squonkamatic
Hope you all had a good 4th of July holiday ... Just drank a lot of beer myself.
Lets start out with another nugget from Skwank's Mailbag -- Our old friend d34thm0ng3r
[one of my most outspoken critics when doing the SiN series at Macgamer.com]
wrote in lthe other week with the following thought, reprinted verbatim ...
"I liked it better when you trashed the Sin lebels at Macgmer - when are
you going to do a review where you crush someone's map? I have a few that RAELLY
SUCK, if you need some suggestoins."
Ooo kay ...
Well m0ng3r, first off thanks for keeping up on my efforts ... still
no spellchecker on that email client, I see. Second, one of the points of
this weekly series is to encourage people to play more SiN, by offering
additional high-caliber user made addon maps that are publicly available, and
help players extend the game's usefulness. The Macgamer
series were reviews, sometimes critical to be sure, of the maps that came with
the Mac SiN: Gold package, released in fall/winter 2000 by MacPlay
[consisting of SiN and 2015's
Wages of SiN Expansion Pack], in an effort to promote the game amongst my
fellow Mac users, and highlight the things that I liked the most [or, least :-]
about their multiplayer levels. If a review went in a negative direction,
it was because I prefer to write about what it's like for me to play the map in
question, and I call things like I see them. But it is also at least as
interesting to look at why a map fails as it is to sing the praises of a
masterpiece, maybe even more. Especially if you can have a sense of humor about
the whole deal and can be instructive with your approach ... I have seen so
many game levels in the 7 years I have been at this that I sometimes loose my
patience when encountering something "professionally made" that falls
short of my expectations or defies my sense of taste. It makes me a little
Cranky, sometimes.
User made levels, the focus of this series, are a different matter. I
don't mind picking on a "pro" for making a lemon, but you can't fault
some poor schmuck, who just happens to love a game, for making & releasing a
crummy map in spite of his/her best intentions. Many people just don't have it
in them to pull off what would be considered a "complete", successful
level, just like some people just don't know how to make a good pizza even with
all the ingredients there in front of them. And that's OK. I used to do a semi
regular series for the legendary Cranky
Steve's Haunted Whorehouse at SomethingAwful.com
that was devoted entirely to "trashing" ineptly made and unwisely
released 3rd party addon maps for Quake2 and Quake3, but gave it up at one point
after deciding there was something inherently unfair about such a process
... None of those budding young lunatics were making game levels for a living,
so who really cares what they came up with in the end? Heck for that matter,
most of my own game levels are binary atrocities that will never
be seen by anyone who's respect I wish to keep, so who am I to say "This
map sucks" about someone else's amateur work?
HOWEVER ... I had been sort of wondering how to work a couple of
"Cranky Squonk" reviews into this series, because there are
indeed some hilariously incompetent SiN maps that have been publicly released,
and one of the things I did enjoy about my Cranky
Steve pieces was looking at maps that were so bad they were
entertaining on their own without even playing the game. Kind of like the way
that Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space is such a classic movie: You just
sort of look at it for a minute and start laughing because it is so ... bad.
 Hunter
is such a map, and I freaking love it. LOVE this map. One of my all-time
favorites, and I am not being sarcastic. Seriously -- it has provided me hours
of enduring entertainment as I have both hosted deathmatch games in it for
bewildered players and enjoyed the map's preposterous "single player"
game features on my own [a buddy and I even played this coop once ... what a
gas]. You can tell that the map's anonymous author [please email
me if you can help attribute it's creator -- they seriously deserve
some form of award] kind of had an idea of what they sort of wanted to maybe
do, kinda, but didn't really have it in his/her self to make it happen, though I
give them a B+ for exorbitant enthusiasm. Almost, but no.
 And
what a glorious mess it is. The author was apparently thinking of some sort of
"jungle" environment [and as such the use of a city skyline makes so
much sense, once you think about it], limiting their texture palette to the
brightest, ghastliest plant graphics in SiN's game paks and chopping their
blocks into huge sloping slabs of really bright green "stuff" that
makes me think of congealed lime Jell-O salad. A nice pond of unanimated blue
water texture fills the middle of the map, complete with coral seaweeds [you
gotta love any map that has seaweeds], a SpearGun [ditto], and about six
of those Nautic underwater monsters who all attack you at once. Bubbles rise up
from the bottom, and the overall effect reminds me of the hazard ponds on the
golf course I grew up across the street from. There is even a valiant attempt at
making what appears to be a hill of some sort [or "incline" might
be a better term] that has a little 5 brush Guard House wedged on the top
with a Rocket Launcher inside. Wow.
 A
bit of brain juice usage is seen in a couple walls of noclipped see through
foliage textures that you can walk right through [a trick that has been around
since DOOM and was actually seen used to great effect in an Alien Vs Predator
Gold addon map called, appropriately, Jungle],
which I guess are supposed to suggest a wall of leaves but look instead like a
huge sheet of Christmas decorations. My favorite addition? The strip of vine
texture stretched across the map like a bridge that lacks a friction surface
coefficient, meaning that if you even try to walk across it you will slip
right off into the hazard pond. Plant and tree models abound [some hanging in
midair], flickering in and out of view in-game due to the fact that the .BSP
hasn't been VISed, and the brainlessness of its execution is sort of
underscored by the fact that the level is, as we call it in the 3d shooter
mapping field, fullbright. That means that it hasn't been thoroughly
compiled or lit, and as such has a glaringly bright default light setting that
might encourage one to wear a pair of UV protective lenses when playing, or risk
serious retinal damage due to prolonged exposure. With the shimmering lime green
textures, flickering models and light setting of about 800 you can get a mean
headache just by looking too closely at this sucker with naked eyes. Hint:
turn the gamma setting on your monitor down about six notches.
 Something
that I actually never noticed until my screenshot session was that the author
has constructed a little underwater tunnel leading from the little golf course
pond into a "secret chamber" inside of this huge rock -- my favorite
touch was the use of a vine texture as the ladder to climb out of the drink.
There is nothing in there [my best guess is that it is supposed to be a hidden
sniper bunker] and really no point to bother venturing inside, but I think the
real reason why I never noticed it is that the texturing of the little pond and
the underwater shaft are the same exact lime green foliage graphic: You
literally cannot see it, and the only reason I noticed it was that I was
noclipping around the map looking for the source of the VIS leak. Live and
learn, I guess.
The single player "game" is a riotous cacophony of noise &
confusion, including Eon and little Peon running around loose, and there are no
where near enough weapons and ammo for the average player to take them
all out on the first try -- cheat codes exist for a reason, it seems. And as
with the best Junker game levels featuring single player 'support', there is no
working exit trigger. Attaboy. Hunter actually takes me back to the good
old days of DOOM2 .WAD editing when amateur mappers would plunk you into some
huge box of lava with a BFG, 200 ammo packs, 100 Megaspheres, 6000 Imps, a
Cyberdemon, and no way out. Have fun, sucker.
 But
like the all-time classic Quake2 addon level from Mars, "This
Map Is GoodFun!", I simply f&*#ing love Hunter, and
encourage anyone who likes SiN to give it a whirl. It is unforgettable. Not just
because of the cliched "so bad it's good" angle, but because
you can tell that in spite of his or her complete lack of talent and craft, the
author had an absolute ball when putting the map together. They were
having fun, and it shows. Some people make game levels because they are
interested in the act of mapmaking as a "craft", and other people make
maps just so they can have fun and run around in it with their buddies while
laughing like a Yayhoo at what they did. Hunter's author falls in the latter
category, and I almost envy him/her for the gleeful abandon they must have felt
when playing this map for the first time. That must have been a fun game.
 I
still remember my first map like I made it yesterday. It was for Quake1, and
consisted of a long narrow box half filled with forehead deep water and about 20
Biosuits ... I like Biosuits. I put in two of Quake's weapons and maybe fifteen
ammo packs for each gun. Then I added enough health so that every time you took
a hit there would be a health pack waiting for you two steps away. I added a big
block in the middle that was floating about a half foot off the floor and too
high in the water to climb onto [d'oh]. I used those glowing gold light
bulbs and default light spots without targets, with plenty of completely dark
patches because the lights got stuck in the wall or floor. One deathmatch start
was added at each end so I could play in it with my Reaper Bots, but the piece
de resistance was my selection of monsters -- About 30 of the killer mutant
Attack Fish, two Ogres in the exact same spot [oops], a Zombie every ten
feet, three of the huge iron clawed Demons, and two of those heat seeker missile
firing three legged things whose name I can't remember [Spores?] by the
far wall. On the other side of them was an exit trigger just kind of stuck to
the wall to let you know you were done. Sound impossible? Worry Not:
there were 4 Quad Damages, 3 Invulnerabilities and about ten armor jackets. It
was all good, yo.
The point being that it was an awful,
uninteresting, pallid, ill-conceived, ridiculous, and poorly constructed mess,
but it was MY mess, and I played in it joyously day after day like
it was the Oilrig
or something, until deciding it was time to try making another one. And then I
made another. And more, and for different games. Eventually I got relatively
'good' at it, and will probably keep churning them out for as long as I continue
to play shooters, even if they do all look like the same dumb JUNGLE DEATH
BOG idea. Someday I'll get it right.
 And
I hope Hunter's anonymous author kept making maps, because although what they
came up with is an anarchic mess, it is a totally lovable mess, and showed that
the author had a "vision" as to what they wanted to see in the map
even if they didn't have the skill to pull it off. It packs the entertainment
value of one of those classic Monty Python sketches that makes you wonder what
dimension they were getting their inspiration from, and where can I score some
of that stuff they were on? In spite of its many, many weaknesses, Hunter is in
fact an example highly Skwank approved mappage, though I will admit that
some players may not quite be prepared for what they are going to see.
Consider yourself warned.
Download Hunter
from my own personal stash of SiN levels by clicking
here.
SQ071202
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.
Related Links:
· Ritualistic's Sin Section
· Ritualistic's Sin Forums
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