AT A GLANCE: This map is proof that you should not be allowed near a computer if your blood alcohol is above the legal limit or if you have more than a pound of undigested paint in your bowels. I think it’s a capture the flag map, but that’s only because the text file told me to “Go into the enemy base and steel their flag”. If I hadn’t been mercifully informed of this by the wonderful all-knowing text file, I would have been reduced to stumbling around the map like an idiot and trying to figure out where all the pretty colors were coming from. Lucky me.

DESCRIPTION: Red and Blue teams: Go into the enemy base and steel their flag. Bring it back and put it on your team's logo, up in the small sniper tower.

Yellow team (Rebels): Your objective is to kill as many people as possible. You have two huge sniper towers and some secret entrances and exits at your disposal.

The yellow team has a few unfair advantages. Not just because of their HUGE sniper towers or their SECRET entrances and exits, but because their base has absolutely no colored lighting whatsoever. This means that a few yellow players may inadvertently finish the map without beating themselves into unconsciousness with a socket wrench.

THE MAP: When you first spawn, you’re sitting inside a box with a horrible blue glow radiating from everywhere at once. Then when you run very very quickly out of the door, you find yourself in a box with a horrible blue glow radiating from everywhere at once. The next door you find leads you to a magical faraway land that I call “a box with a horrible blue glow radiating from everywhere at once”. After this happened about eleven or twelve times, I started to notice a pattern. If you’re as smart as me, someday you will too.

Wh...where am I?

(SPOILER WARNING) You’re not supposed to know this without purchasing the official 3fort Strategy Guide (available at your finer Geocities e-commerce websites), but part of the map doesn’t have colored lighting. One of the 1200 doors in the blue base leads outside, where the lighting is nice and natural. I didn’t venture there myself (sunlight scares the shit out of me) but it’s safe to assume that it leads to the red base, which has grotesque amounts of red lighting. See, having blue lighting all the way through the map would be too predictable, so the author is ‘changing it up’ on you to be ‘edgy’ and keep you ‘on your toes’ while you ‘run around the map’ screaming ‘MY PHOTORECEPTORS JUST EXPLODED’. Having two different kinds of glaring, obnoxious colored lighting is extremely important to a good gameplay experience.

GAMEPLAY: Keep in mind that it’s a capture the flag map, and the only way to get to the flag is to navigate a labyrinth of cramped, brightly-colored boxes all stapled together. Then if you manage to find the flag room, you have to climb some kind of weird cylindrical statue thing to actually get to the flag. While you’re doing this, you’re in very close quarters with several enemy players who more than likely do not want you in their base. With all of that in mind, just how likely is it that the flag is going to end up being captured? If you manage to get across the bridge without being sniped by those yellow bastards, the idea of running within three feet of an entire team of people with guns and rocket launchers should deter you from even trying to accomplish the map objective.