Don't be fooled - it's not over yet. Nooo hohoohohh....

After triggering an unadorned switch sticking out of one of the walls like a misplaced, lonely cake decoration, one proceeds back out into the "start room/box" to watch one of the walls recede and present the player with a truly astonishing sight: a gay disco bar with a green neon lit bathtub sunken into the middle of the floor. EACH corner of this room is lit with a different color, the effect of which is that every three steps the player is bathed with a new shade of nauseating pastel shit. There are a couple more monsters placed in this room to round out the action, and the bathtub is filled with the weird phallic Quake2 interstellar piranah fish (hence the name of the map). One skips around like a moron, blasts the confused, irritated looking monsters, and then it is time to shoot the fish.

Anyone who is familiar with my work writing about game levels knows of my affinity for maps that have lots of digital binary water... and water in single player maps means FISH. What I am getting at here is that I have killed so many Goddamn Quake and Quake2 fish over the past three years that I deserve some kind of a fucking medal for it. I am a veritable expert on killing fish in the Quake engine games, and sometimes I actually do appreciate it when the insightful level designer places a couple of gross, slimy, hungry Quake fish in the murky pools I have a habit of hopping into without looking twice. But there is a point of exasperation that one reaches when they see something as stupid as a bathtub sized pool of green neon lit water with like six of the goddamn things undulating in it like a rotten bowl of Chef Boyardee Beefaroni waiting to be vomited out of my stomach. And the sheer ARBITRARINESS of being required to stand there like a cretin and blast each and every one of them into pulp just to be able to retrieve some stupid powerup on the bottom of the tub is nothing short of insulting. How many more times must I witness crap like this before I resolve to stop playing Quake? The element adds nothing to the map and could have easily been eliminated without causing anyone to bat an eye (except perhaps to ponder why the map was named "Piranah" while you watch the blood to ooze out of your slashed wrist and wait to waft into unconsciousness).

Umm... OK.

But it gets worse ... the amount of thought put into this map is exemplified by a notice that one gets on their game computer update after hopping out of the bathtub that announces "Mission Complete, find end". Huh? Did we miss something while we were gunning down the fish? The answer is YES - we missed the chance to play someone else's crappy level. With that said, at this point in the "game" the player is now expected to navigate though a stretch absolutely pathetic looking neon red and blue glowing "hallway" (with no logical illumination sources and more poorly aligned walls) to emerge into a large anteroom with a "sky" textured ceiling that is lit with so many gobs of gut-wrenching colored lights that one is tempted to switch to software mode just so your player model can BREATHE. I have never found colored lights in a big, stupid, empty room to be as suffocating and claustrophobic as this. There are a couple of more goons for you to ice, annoyingly stuck on a sloping brush that serves as a ramp up to the top of a large block to texture, and then the real fun begins - at the exit.

One of the reasons why Quake2 single player levels (including id's own SP game maps) have gotten such a bad rap is the propensity for authors to place the big badass "Boss" monsters in their maps in such a manner that there really isn't a way around or over them. One of the underlying laws of Quake2 single player map design seems to be that if you add a boss to guard the exit or whatever one should NEVER provide the player with sufficient firepower to deal with it. Frustration and death must be mandatory. That tendency is bad enough, but Daniel and Fredrik have successfully hatched an evil plot to hit the player dumb enough to even stick with the map this far with like four Big Badass Bosses in a room about the size of a Subway sandwich shop. The exit is placed at the far end, but it might as well be on Mars. Since Daniel and Fredrik have included a grand total of about 6 shotgun ammo and bullet boxes (along with a Railgun, because it's REALLY COOL) in the entire map, most of which was used to shoot the fish in the bathtub, there really is no point in bothering to engage the Bosses in battle without implementing cheat codes. Perhaps one is expected to Tiptoe Through the Tulips and try to wiggle and worm your way past them to engage an exit trigger before they grind you into hamburger: I did not bother. After seeing what awaited me I hit the "salute" key, sat back in my chair, let them gun me down, took a screenshot, and called it a day. Disgusting.

THE BOTTOM LINE: So what are my "To-Sum-It-All-Up" thoughts on this level? Well it's easy to say things like "1t SU><0R5" or "this is the worst fucking Quake2 single player map I have ever played", but those expressions seem hollow and lack the conviction that I feel in wanting to condemn this abomination and bring ridicule onto its creators. Quite simply, it should have NEVER been released. It should have stayed on their drives as something only to be spoken about with shame when the Interpol agents question them about all of the gay Asian animal child sex snuff porn they have amassed on their parent's computers while skipping their court-ordered therapy sessions. The level's only positive attributes are a minuscule file size, the inadvertent comedy that "playing" it might produce in someone who is stoned off their gourd or otherwise easily amused, and in serving as an abject lesson to most budding level designers as to why they should NEVER release their first map no matter how cool their friends tell them it is. It's just not fair to the rest of us.

- Squonkamatic