AT A GLANCE: This week's pick is sure to appeal to anyone who's sick of bright, garrish lighting in HL or just the basic concept of lighting in general. It's "darked" by Phil Holland, another map downloaded at random from the cesspool of mapping hell that is WonSwap.

DESCRIPTION: A map based in a dark enviroment. Some nice lighting and design but it can get quite slow in some places :( This was my first ever completed Half-Life map :)

Nice lighting?? I think "nonexistent" is the word you're looking for there, slick. Christ, this thing is so dark I can't even tell whether I'm playing it or just forgot to turn my monitor on. On second thought I take that back, the level is noticeably darker. Compared to it, the Doom 3 trailer looks like footage of CliffyB arc welding in a sunlamp factory (something I hope to god I'll never have to see).

THE MAP: The first thing that I thought upon loading this map was "Hey whaddaya know, looks like all those years of playing crappy Half-Life levels has finally rendered me completely blind!" No such luck though, as I soon discovered that the ridiculous level of darkness was an intentional attempt by Phil Holland to hide his astonishingly bad texturing and general lack of mapping ability. Traditionally, if an author doesn't want people to see his shitty map he simply doesn't release it. Phil, however, seems to favor the approach of "releasing the map and making it really fucking dark". I really wish SilverPhoenix would follow this guy's example. We'd probably see a nationwide drop in eyeball gougings or something.

Oops, this isn't a screenshot of the map at all, it's just a 230 x 172 black rectangle.

Anyway, this pitch-black shitfest takes place in some sort of huge warehouse area filled with boxes, office partitions, and other vague rectangular objects that I blindly stumbled into while attempting, without success, to navigate two consecutive rooms. That's pretty much all I can tell you about "darked" at this point. I never did find any of that "nice design" Phil mentioned and the only areas I saw that had adequate lighting displayed terrifying atrocities of attempted brushwork that made me thank the dear lord that the other 99.9% of the map was shrouded in darkness.

GAMEPLAY: With "darked" Phil has somehow managed to make HL deathmatch even more slow, awkward, and mind-numbingly boring than it already was. I attempted to play it with a few buddies of mine and found it completely impossible to locate them due to the god-awful mazelike layout and bargain basement lighting. Oh yeah, the fact that they all left the server milliseconds after this terrible map loaded probably had something to do with it too.

Ah, that's better.

I guess it's possible for theoretical combat between hypothetical players to take place around the RPG, crossbow, and shiny chrome fire hose gun, all of which are found under tiny light fixtures strategically placed 5 miles apart. The rest of the map is, of course, decked out in 300% darkness, giving blind men and Marvel super heroes with mutant night vision powers an unfair advantage. Damn you, Phil Holland!!!!!