AT A GLANCE:

Battle of the cubes.

What? A map that's incredibly illogical, poorly planned, and radiating eye-scortching lighting that wasn't done by Erik? How can this be...?

DESCRIPTION: I have to admit, it was quite fun reading through the included text file. Well, at least more fun than playing the map. The author claims this map is "A realy cool city inside a room with lots of telepoters in the floor. It is awsome!!!" Notice that the author used the literal meaning for "in the floor", as there's a couple teleporters that are actually inside the floor which you cannot get to. I haven't found the "cool city" yet, but maybe the rotating Carmack's head prefab counts as a city or something. This map is indeed awesome though, awesomely amazing that Erik didn't do it.

I had a sneaking suspicion that weapon placement wasn't going to be exactly stellar as the text file also states, "You are in an indoor city with only one weapon. BLaster. This map will shoe who is the real good quake 2 platyer. This map requirs skill, timing, and strategy to play." Yeah, the blaster, the best weapon in Quake 2. And only this map has the guts to require you to use it exclusively. Well, this map and a few hundred other shitty ones that I've reviewed...

THE MAP:

Which do you prefer, the red square of light or pure darkness? Well in this room, you get the best of both worlds! HOORAY!

Squaretown, baby. Cruise from one square room to the next, marveling at the patented "lighting from hell" (tm). You can grab the megahealth, which is cleverly hidden inside a cube of yellow lava which floats above the main room. It's kinda tricky getting in there, as you have to walk into a teleporter and such. As you can probably guess, the problem is not with getting into the floating cube of lava, it's getting out. The exit hole / hatch is a bit too small to fall out of, so you end up taking a dive into the surrounding lava and getting killed. Is this a trap? A design flaw? Who knows... but it's fucking stupid.

As you can tell from the screenshots, the lighting is intensely red. I think this is a good idea because I like red alot. I often see the color red after reviewing a particularly bad map. I thought that this was because of my unbridled rage and uncontrollable urge to slaughter the mapmaker, but it turns out that my eyesight has just been damaged so much by colored lighting, red is all I can see. And I was wondering why my drinking water looked like strawberry Kool-Aid...

Anyway, there's no weapons. Or items. Except the megahealth. This brings up an interesting question; why would you want to prolong your life in a map this bad? I would personally make a direct run into the lava if deathmatching on this horror.

The teleporter room. There's one here that's actually IN the floor. And yes, that's Carmack's head floating up there.

Did I mention there's that prefab rotating Carmack head in this map? One of the requisites in "Awful Mapping 101" states that all shitty maps must have it somewhere in them, under penalty of death (making the author play his own map).

GAMEPLAY: Painful. As exciting as a "blaster war inside a red and pitch black room" sounds, it just wasn't all that great.