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11.13.2000: Squonkamatic - Q3 DM: "Pindm2"
Ohhh yipee.

Author: Pinball
Reviewed By: Squonkamatic

Game Mode Supported: DM
Overuse of Colored Lighting: Nope.

Spelling Errors in Text File: You betcha

Pain Level: The ol' "hand in the blender" trick.

Download Here (172k)

Boy, that's item placement for ya.

AT A GLANCE: Another entry on the list of levels for players who don't like their Quake games encumbered by such petty concerns as terrain changes, architectural variation, doors, walls, hallways, rooms, open-air "outdoor" sections with bodies of liquids, imaginative item placement, creative use of lighting effects, traps or triggered items / effects, sensitivity to textures and appearance, concerns like "mood" and "atmosphere", the idea of setting or place, and insight into what a game engine is possible of. It may well be a minor masterpiece under those regards, and Kudos to LvL's Tigger-On for alerting us all to the map's existence.

DESCRIPTION: Buried in the uncompressed .pk3 file is an epic document; atestimonial to the stubborn nature of the human spirit and its eternal struggle against the tide of reason.

This map is For FFA, DMTP(but not recomended) and 1on1 (very higly recomended) i tryed it out and i just roled over dead it vas soooo good and i turned of the sound and just listend to the music i had a Blast and if you have tryed it you´l wonder where the BFG10K is vell just search :) this map is mot for camp or any runaway chickens.

the best way to play it is to turn of the sound not the music add one bot change the game speed to 500 (g_speed 500) run over the map and frag some bots ore players. the big difrence of this map is that the items, weapons and ammo are all over the map so you cant miss it.

Nope. You can't. But as for the idea of making the game faster and playing with that fucking disco pop techno metal pumped to the max, I only offer one thought: SPEED KILLS.

THE MAP: It is a large box with a collection of vertical slabs stuck in the floor here and there with enough weapons and ammo strewn about the floor for an entire tier of levels. A totally nondescript puke gray / pink texture is used uniformly in the map in a manner that suggests to me that Pinball didn't give a flying fuck what it was going to look like. He also apparently forgot what game engine he was using and made a half-assed DOOM level with Quake 3 items and weapons. To prove this theory I dusted off my HellMaker MacDOOM editor and slapped together a DOOM 2 version of the map in exactly 42 minutes, twelve minutes longer than it took Pinball to make his with "Q-Radient" (as he refers to it). The only real differences between the maps are the texture graphics (I opted for something a bit more interesting since there wasn't an acceptable DOOM 2 texture equivalent) and the player movement / targeting differences between the two games. Pinball chose to explore this advance in game engine technology by placing these goofy, teetering ledges on top of some of the vertical slabs upon which he perched a couple of boring items that are already amongst those scattered on the floor. I saw no purpose in bothering to rocket-jump up to examine them or do some sniping (which is probably their real function) because I was too busy running around like an idiot with a gun. By the way, to HELL with wasting valuable minutes searching for the goddamn BFG; I gots places to go and people to see, dig?
An overhead view of Pinball's idea of "lighting design".

Anyway, to give the map 'variety', Pinball inserted a batch of spotlight entities (thankfully monochromatic) that don't really illuminate anything and just sort of point at the floor, helping to underscore the haphazard and thoughtless manner in which the map was executed. The saving grace of the level is that it is so brain-dead and simplistic that it makes for quite an enjoyable Bot-fest, and if you can switch off your mind, it actually is worth a game. I found the great "challenge" of the map to be how with its default config Quake 3 has the player switch weapons every time you pick one up (unless that setting is disabled, obviously), and since every eight feet or so there is a new gun lying on the floor to trip over, one is constantly switching. It becomes a test of your ability to adjust for the differences of each weapon while on the run and already firing, which becomes interesting at close-range with Quad and explosives. Sure, we've all played the game in maps that allow for strategy when implementing weapon changes -- imagine one that totally does away with that factor.

GAMEPLAY: Once again, it actually isn't that bad if your sole interest when playing Quake is running around like a retard and shooting a gun. I'd rather have you do it in this map then in my local shopping mall's food court, so go nuts.

FUN FACTOR: "Whatever."

THE BOTTOM LINE: As usual, before you start sending in the flames defending the virtues of this map, I readily admit that it is quite playable in spite of my low opinion of it. I'm also sure that there will be a number of readers that will be impressed by its utter lack of nuances or imagination, and will enthusiastically seek out further examples of Mr. Ball's work. I'm happy to have turned you onto his stuff, so to speak. Now pardon me while I delete it.

- Squonkamatic for the People!!

 

Category: Rating:
Aesthetics: - 8
Gameplay: - 3
Item placement: - 5
Layout: - 5
Detail: - 5
TOTAL: - 26

Individual ratings go from 0 (bearable) to -10 (painfully terrible). Total score goes from 0 (ok) to -50 (the worst piece of shit you'll ever play).

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