31/05/2009 @13:51:14 ^15:37:56

Site is down but that doesn't mean I can't update it.

Diet 32in24, as promised some time ago. We have sixteen maps, the layouts for which were made in a day or so, and then passed on to detailers who spent several months filling them with pointless eye-candy sprucing them up.

As one might guess I think this is exactly the wrong way round. I think a well-planned map layout is far more important than all the fancy detail and texturing in the world. That said most of the maps aren't bad, there's only a few that are little more than tarted up corridors, or too symmetrical or whatever. It is polished and free of obvious bugs, but all just felt a bit lacklustre.

The texturing is weird, many of the maps are based on modern settings, shopping centres, office blocks and the like, but the texturing is ancient stone and brick (except the doors, many of which seem to be from futuristic techbases - the dark green/grey version of BIGDOOR1 is all over the place) One particularly blatant example has a cinema textured like the ruins of a castle covered in snow. Also I must mention the map based around the end of a road, whose playable areas is small, with some buildings on either side. Yet for some reason the road extends into mountains 20,000 units into the distance. You can't even see most of it.

Finally, or perhaps immediately, you will also notice the billboards. Mappers were asked to leave spaces in their maps to have these billboard textures placed in (the theme of the wad was supposed to be a satire of corporate America or some such) Some of them raised a smile I guess - the big grin of a cacodemon looks good when it's trying to proffer you a bottle of Coke - but on the whole they weren't as hilarious as the authors seemed to think. Too many in-jokes as well. The funniest thing was having a map named "McDonald's Grease Processing Plant".

Summary: it's sixteen overdetailed speedmaps. Polished and good looking, but I found the gameplay uninspiring.