Snarkmaster's first map, "Hello Son" offers us conclusive evidence that violent video games like Quake 2 ARE in fact being marketed towards children. Specifically, retarded, colorblind children who enjoy sliding around in large, brown pipes all day.

Enemies that kill themselves as soon as the map loads: An idea thats time has come!

DESCRIPTION: We've got a real gem of a text file here and I think it deserves a closer look since Snarkmaster obviously put a lot of work into it. It appears as though he even at one point made an effort to write it in an actual language of some sort:

Well, in all honesty I didn't really enjoy your map as I found it to be nothing more than a huge mess of boxes and pipes. Playing it caused me to have multiple epileptic seizures and rendered me sterile. Consequently, I WAS planning on hating you, deleting your previous maps, "Box Wars 3000" and "Pipes Ahoy!", from my hard drive, and sending you a flesh-eating virus via your Yahoo email account but I guess I won't just because you asked nicely.

Haha, "bom bang there ya go ur stuck in the middle of some giant fucking box and pipe orgy" is more like it, chunky. Did I mention that the map has boxes and pipes? I think I did.

I'm not even going to comment on this paragraph as it seems to be describing an activity that's illegal in 47 states.

THE MAP: Pipes and Boxes. Boxes and Pipes. There's a box that leads to a pipe and a pipe that leads to a fucking box, folks. There may have also been a box that led to another box but don't quote me on that. It's a big, wacky obstacle course where players have to crawl through pipes, run through boxes, swim through mysterious levitating cubes of water, and try to make it to the end without slitting their own wrists. Maybe the mentally challenged pre-adolescent who made this map was trying to qualify for the Special Olympics and thought it would make an ideal "virtual training ground". Still, that's no excuse to unleash this monstrosity on the rest of the god-fearing Quake 2 playing public. Let's just see how well the little fucker does in the 500-meter dash without any kidneys.

I guess it's safe to say that as a Quake 2 map "Hello Son" is pretty damn awful, but as an accurate model of the human digestive tract it's remarkably good (in a "the guy who created this thing is a fucking moron" kind of way). The large pipe at the beginning is similar to a large intestine, the small tubelike uh.. tube 2 rooms later is like a small intestine, and the tiny alcove you can climb into at the end bears an eerie resemblence to the insulated crawl-space where "Snarkmaster" stores the dismembered corpses of his family. Wow!

GAMEPLAY: Thankfully, there isn't much due to the fact that only 9 enemies are present in the level. Ol' Snarkmaster probably could've fit a few more in but I guess he decided they'd be taking up valuable space that could otherwise be crammed with 50,000 more miles of pipe. If you look outside of the level you'll see that one of the 9 enemies is a dead fish that's floating around in the void. This is because Snarkmaster hates dead fish, Quake 2, and pretty much all of humanity in general.

FUN FACTOR: Well, given the map's very distinct "box and pipe" motif (which I think I've already touched upon) I'd guess that its target audience would be children who enjoy visiting Ronald McDonaldLand or whatever the hell they call that place at McDonalds with all the pipes for the little retards to crawl around in while their parents order food. If this is in fact the case then I suppose someone could argue that I'm maybe a little biased against "Hello Son" because I never particularly liked the aforementioned place when I was a kid (except for the time that fat kid got stuck in the pipe and me and Eddie Hanson threw french fries at him and stole his inhaler). They'd be wrong though and I'd tell them so while throwing gravel at them in the parking lot. The REAL reason I'm biased against "Hello Son" is because it caused me to develop an rare case of penis-based colon cancer.

THE BOTTOM LINE: It's called "Hello Son" and it's made by the last person in the world who should ever be allowed to have children. Ladies and Gentlemen, Only at Cranky Steve's is this sort of thing possible. Oh yeah, the map has lots of boxes and pipes in it too.

- Jed

Individual ratings go from 0 (bearable) to -10 (painfully terrible). Total score goes from 0 (ok) to -50 (the worst piece of shit you'll ever play).