Quake-style-old-school DM arena

From the depths of Ethereal Hell comes an actual HL map from a mapper who has an almost complete history of making Quake maps. You can see his level of expertise in the Quake style architecture when you load this map. This map looks like something straight out of Quake 2. If you open the readme and see the list of maps this author has made you won't see one HL map (but future readme's should include this map, since it is a good one). The author is obviously influenced by Quake's architecture and it is shown in this map. This map looks very good. It's been a good while since I've seen an arena style map. But this isn't a "traditional" arena style map (by "traditional" I mean that a map is identical on both sides and has no other purpose besides killing). If you look at a more traditional arena style map, you'd see that if you cut the map in half, the two sides would be mirror images. Not in this map. It almost looks like it's a mirror image, but it's not. It's just that the architecture is the same all around the map. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. When you've got a good arena, such as this one, you really don't need anything fancy because of the fact that an arena has only one purpose : frag the hell outta anything that moves. And this map accomplishes just that.

This map, as I stated earlier, is not a traditional arena, in the fact that either half of the map is not a mirror image of the other. This map is one large, very erratic, circle with three main levels. Each level is accessible by stairs only. There are no ladders. There is a gauss cannon for the gauss jumpers out there, but you don't need to be an expert with the gauss to do those jumps. There are lots of hallways and ledges, which practically make up this entire map. But it is an arena, so all this is acceptable as the norm.

For all of us old-school DM'ers out there, this is the map to get. Good arenas are hard to come by, especially in HL. This map is fun for the arena player in all of us. If you don't like arenas, then this isn't the map for you. There are no tricks, no secret areas, and no moving parts. What you see is what you get. Old-school players you may stop reading this review here and start downloading. Everyone else, please feel free (and more or less obligated) to read on.

The r_speeds are more like what I expected from a map like this. All of areas in this map have r_speeds under 600. There are only a few areas that go over 500, but this should not be any kind of problem. This map is perfect for any kind of setup you may have, high or low end machines won't have any kind of problems. You can use this for LANs, online, or for bots when you play with yourself (somehow that doesn't sound quite right).

The lighting used in this map is actually quite good. The author put in a lot of color variation, but not so much that it looks like a disco (thank gawd). The lighting is also pretty dark and gloomy, but not so much as that you can't see anything. Everything is illuminated which eliminates darks spots. But there are some "secret" (and probably unintentional) sniping spots, but you've got to be really good to find them (unlike me, since I found them by accident). The gloomy lighting is a good thing since the sky texture the author chose is the outer space texture. It's always nice when the brightness of the lighting corresponds to the chosen sky texture, isn't it?

The texturing used in this map actually comes from Activision's FPS SiN, which was pretty good game in itself. I'm not sure exactly how the author got the textures out of SiN, but he got them out, by gawd. The author really chose the right textures to use in this map. It really seems to fit. And the gloomy lighting really helps to make this map into one heck of an arena. Good job, d00d.

You won't find a gluon in this map but just about everything else is there. Weapons can be foundon small square pedestals, one pedestal in every section of the map. Ammo, health kits, and batteries are spread around evenly throughout the entire map. This is the norm for an arena. There is no "weapon/ammo" cache. No matter where you start, there's a decent weapon and med-kits/batteries waiting to be picked up. There is a slight problem here though. There's a whole lot of rocket launcher ammo lying around, but no rocket launcher. How are you supposed to use rockets without a launcher? That was probably a careless mistake. But mistakes cost you in points.