30/08/2010 @11:37:44 ^12:46:34
Quadruple Threat
Four speedmaps, joined together in the middle, one mapper's work making a central hub leading to three others' as separate sections.
Central A semicircular staircase around a courtyard that contains three pillars. You have to press one button from each of the other sections to raise the pillars to reach the exit. Starting from the bottom of the staircase:
South A rocky canyon appears in front of you, crawling with imps. Behind that is a dark cave crawling with all kinds of stuff, in particular the back wall is a row of guys with shotguns. It's quite annoying since it's just a bit too dark to see anything and the stuff on the floor of the cave stops you jumping down into it. You can charge in aggressively but then you're getting pelted from all direction with bullet weapons you can't really avoid...
East Possibly a small part of a green stone castle/fortress, this one is pretty small and gives the impression that it is the easiest section, but after repeated failures I guess it isn't. I suppose you need to go somewhere else to get some ammo first. (I haven't actually manage to do this map on UV skill yet.)
North A booby-trapped dark corridor leads to ledges surrounding a large courtyard. This part is probably the hardest, and certainly the one with the nastiest monsters, with five archviles and a cyberdemon to get past. (The south section might have a higher monster count, I'm not sure, but this one is the most like a slaughter map.) It gives you lots and lots of shells, but frankly I needed a faster weapon to deal with having to fight two archviles and several revenants and imps in a small dark room, for instance.
A good map, a bit too hard for me on UV (and skill settings didn't seem to do much) and with a couple of annoying parts. Very disjoint of course, but what with the way it's been made, you can't really help that.
Grind II (v1.3.0)
This is a small level I vaguely remember playing in 2002 when it came out. It is divided into a half dozen or so sub-areas which all vary wildly in theme, making it a little odd. There's a library, a dark underground cave, an outdoor area with a big helipad, an old storage warehouse that you need to blow up a wall to get inside, a pair of bathrooms with big mirrors in them, and a couple of others that are harder to describe.
Most of the areas are interconnected in some way so you get a lot of choice about how to do the map, but that also means you can get lost if you're not paying attention. The architecture is pretty detailed and the texturing of each area was done properly as far as I checked. As for resistance, there are only about 20 monsters. So, the map is quite empty, but ammunition is very tight, you can't really waste any at all.
Possibly of further interest:
