Medusa's Quake for SiN
by Squonkamatic

Thanks to all of the readers for putting up with last week's installment of "Skwank Pretends He's Roger Ebert"; after some interesting comments that turned up in my mailbag I'm going to agree that Terror Train should have been given a *** grade. The ever cheerful Captain Glom and I plowed our way through a couple twelve packs during a Halloween night screening of the film howling with laughter and agreed my rating had been a little miserly. It's a fun flick, and I had enjoyed doing a movie review.

Now back to mapping, and in a bigger sort of way then I have tried in the past [yes, this is going to be another long-ass review, but worth it]. One of the articles that I cooked up for the Macintosh gaming site I write for compares and contrasts the recent OSX patches of SiN and my favorite game to poke fun at, Quake III Arena. While SiN is still my preferred game of choice, there is no arguing the fact that Id's 1.3.2 Preview Point Release for Mac OSX is a superior update for a game that sadly needed ... well, something. I recently sprang for a new hard drive, RAM upgrade plus a Radeon card, then weaseled a copy of Apple's new pride and joy, OSX 1.2, out of an employer's expense account to top it all off. I was downright startled by how much better the Quake III update ran on my machine, almost like a whole new game. Maybe it's just the system upgrades, but there is something about the new version that says to me "This is the game they wanted to release all along, but it's only now that Apple has caught up with them." Three cheers; I may have to reconsider Q3a.

What I am sad to report, and this is not spilling the beans to anyone who has tried it, is that Macplay's officially released 1.1.3 Updater for Mac SiN: Gold, now featuring OSX support, pales in comparison. I'm not going to bother you with all the statistics, but leave it as that I will continue enjoying my SiN in Mac's "Classic" mode of OS 9.2.2 while they figure out what to do next. No skin off my teeth; most of the applications I use in my daily routine are not "carbonized" for OSX so I'm running Classic a lot anyway. Dialing up a SiN game isn't any more difficult than it ever was, and the 113 update runs great under OS 9.2.2.

But I must admit that one of the reasons I'm not bitching up a storm about it is that the Quake II Arena game has been such a riot to revisit. I will always fondly remember that fleeting moment in the fall of 1999 when Quake3Test placed gamers of all platforms on more or less the same plateau with something none of us had seen before. It was fun to enjoy the revolutionary approach that the game had to regarding itself as an engine; the gameplay came second to networking, eye popping graphics and far out physical properties. By the time I had the full Quake III Arena by January of 2000, though, much of the fun seemed to be over. The discovery period had ended, when the joy of seeing a new world rendered by new technology had been replaced by constantly getting my ass smacked down. Quake III's hyper competitive nature was kind of a turn off for me -- I am more interested in interacting with the worlds depicted in the levels than coming in first or whatever. Having some Boss Macho voice boom out YOU LOOSE over and over again kind of gets to a man ...

Which is a polite way of saying I sucked donkey nuts, played keyboard-only up until last fall, didn't understand things like how to tweak a config and one's system settings to accommodate for one's inherent lameness. Now I do, and it was a riot to beat up on the Bots in the single player game under my new OS.

All well and fine, but what does this have to do with SiN? Well as I was playing through my little Bot fests I remembered that there were a couple of valiant attempts at "converting" some of Quake III's maps to work for SiN that I had deliberately neglected because of my longtime dislike of the game they were based on. So I dug through my library of maps, and low and behold if all of them aren't by the same person.

Medusa is our mapper's name, and she [there's hope for us yet, ladz!] actually "ported" five memorable Quake maps over to our preferred SiN -- Quake III's trademark Q3DM17/The Longest Yard, and the Tourney2 + Tourney5 levels. Q3tourney2 has of course been around since Q3test2 [the one with the stupid Lightning Gun -- ohh how I hate that thing], and Q3tourney5 is actually one of my favorite maps from the game: That is the tier ending tournament map loosely based on DOOM2 Map07/Dead Simple, that is completely shrouded by a yellowish curtain of fog. Medusa actually started her Quake conversions with a SiN take on Quake1's DM6/The Dark Zone, and her pinnacle effort was a SiN port of Levelord's Hip1_DM level from Ritual's Scourge of Armagon Quake 1 Mission Pack. Why not look them all over at once, and pay tribute to Medusa's hard work in one fell swoop?

It really is impressive to see all of her .bsp's lined up in a column, sorted by date, in my maps folder -- there are even a few more of his [Sin1kcd, Sin1rock and Sin1sg] that we'll look at in a later review. Between November 1999 and July 2000, Medusa churned out no less than eight maps, many with custom textures, sound and music files. Three are apparently original, the rest all remakes of other levels. Some of them have little goodies for players who run it under Wages of SiN, but they play out more or less the same over each variant, not counting for the Nuke blasts.

Her first effort, Sin1q1dm6, is very accurate in recreating that maps original spaces. It is so good that I am wondering of she used a .map file of the original dm6.bsp and retooled it using Worldcraft or SinEd to texture the surfaces and add SiN goodies. Her construction of the support beams and upper platform from DM6's memorable central battlezone is quite remarkable, and if she did in fact construct them from hand it is an impressive accomplishment for an otherwise first time mapper.

Medusa's work on the whole cries out to me with a lesson to pass on to anyone who makes and releases game levels over the Internet -- document your work, people. You can tell from reading the info texts that for this particular mapper the whole idea of documentation was "routine", but I can't even find an email address to ask this lady how she went about doing these maps. We can tell she was familiar enough with how to compose the elaborate file resource structure for her custom additions to know what an author info text would probably look like, but couldn't be bothered. Please, people, document your work so that nerds like me can sleep at night, and feel free to email me if you can help shed some light on his work process. I love figuring out how people do things.

If Medusa was able to import the .map file into an editor and retexture it, she apparently lost the lighting coordinates somewhere along the way. While the SiN texturing and weapons replacement is more or less what one would expect from a straightforward recreation of DM6, the lighting in the map is a textbook example of "spotty", and underscores the usefulness of the -ambient radiosity compile setting, which evens out those dark corners into something that looks a little more natural. Other than the lighting, Sin1q1dm6 is probably as good of a conversion of the level as one could hope for and looks like a one-to-one accurate reconstruction of the original spaces. It makes for a nice bit of nostalgia for us really old skool veterans. Nice work.

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