AT A GLANCE: If you're like me, you frequently stop in the middle of Team Fortress matches to say “Wait a minute, I know what’s wrong with this game…it’s my team!" After all, a team is simply a group of people who you can’t kill, and who exist only to get in the way of your rockets, steal your respawn packs, and make funny noises over the voice channel. Have you ever been upset when a teammate calls you a jerk just because you emptied 150 rounds from your autocannon into him and blasted him across the map with a mirv? Or when a teammate callously kills an enemy that you were just about to kill? Or when a teammate foolishly claims that the chat bind you hit every time you get a frag is annoying?

Then this is the map for you!

GetFried takes the two most important concepts in Team Fortress (namely, teams and fortresses) and throws them out the window. But don’t worry – some people are red and others are blue, and you can pick a class, so I guess it’s still technically TF. But instead of capturing flags, touching command points and slaughtering fat umbrella-wielding businessmen, you’ll be fighting an opponent one-on-one in what appears to be a giant square-shaped dumpster with crude stadium seating. You only return to the respawn when you die, or more likely, dive back in to avoid death and protect your uberkewl reputation after being hit by a bullet that takes your health from 100 to 98. Real wars would be so much more fun if both sides had the right to call a do-over at any time.

DESCRIPTION: GetFried -1on1 TFC
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Objectives:

The 2 gladiators:
Kill each other.

Observers:
Watch them.
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Scoring: 1 point per kill.
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Other Notes, Observers:
DON'T SHOOT,
DON'T TALK,
DON'T JUMP INTO THE ARENA!

YOU HEAR THAT, OBSERVING TEAM?? STOP DOING WHATEVER IT IS YOU ARE DOING BECAUSE I DO NOT LIKE IT!! I could understand wanting total silence from the spectators if you’re golfing or trying to decide whether to knock Roger Clemens’ head off with a slider or a fastball, but there’s no need to dampen a cheery event like a duel to the death by hushing the spectators just because you think the chat noises might drown out the napalm explosions. You’ll never see Jerry Rice drop a pass after hearing a hot dog vendor yell and forgetting whether the football is the brown thing or the big yellow thing in the sky.

Then again, if someone was in the mental state required to play this map willingly, they would probably have to stop playing and spend a good 30 seconds sounding out the message to figure out what it says. So okay, fine, the rules for the observers do make sense. Sue me.

THE MAP: Oh right, the map. Unless you’re on the observing team (in which case you’d better KNOCK IT OFF) you spawn in a little L-shaped room with an ammo pack. Once you grab the respawn pack and head out the door to discover your destiny, you find yourself in a little square-shaped arena that looks like a garbage truck overturned inside it and then had more garbage thrown at it by evil garbage-throwing goblins. The "arena" you’re supposed to fight in (note the use of quotes) is strewn with a bunch of random crap that is apparently supposed to make the fights more interesting, but instead makes it seem like you and your opponent are fighting over a hotly contested and strategically important landfill.

Most mappers would include some kind of see-through surface (i.e. glass) to keep the spectators from jumping into the fight, but Fried[DONut] shrewdly elects to use the honor system.

Also, the first time you step on one of the planks littering the ground it shatters and inflicts one point of damage on you. I can’t figure out exactly why the author did this. I’m guessing he might be trying to tell us something, maybe something along the lines of “Ha ha, you stepped on a plank and it exploded and hurt you for no reason!” I’m guessing either the author had a bad experience with a plank as a kid or he just hates feet. Or maybe he had a bad experience with a guy who had both a plank and feet. The possibilities are limitless; all I know is that this exploding plank in the middle of the map makes absolutely no sense, just like my attempt at an explanation.

GAMEPLAY: Once you spawn, you’ll grab an ammo pack and head out the door to meet your opponent. Then you’ll engage in an epic battle against your opponent until one of you realizes you might lose and scurries back to the respawn to get more health. If one of you actually manages to kill the other, you get the immense satisfaction of knowing that instead of running back to the respawn, you forced him to warp 15 feet to the respawn. The observing team is almost sure to behave itself, as the text file gives them instructions in capital letters, which are known to be very intimidating. But if one or two of them manage to escape the blanket of fear caused by the author’s capslock key, you’ll have to kill them too, only to have them respawn and jump back down into the arena two seconds later. It’s an exercise in pointlessness that’s sure to satisfy any fan of bowling or Where’s Waldo books.