Aye, yiy yiy .... You gotta hand it to Tom "Paradox" Mustaine:
when he gets an idea for a map he pushes it to the point where it
might just go fall off the edge of the world, and he doesn't have one
problem with that at all. Levelord
is the King of Shooter Design and Tim Willits The Consummate
Craftsman, but Mustaine is the Experimentor/Visionary. Usually those
visions pay off big time, like his glorious CTF_Para
and the overlooked Desolate,
a deathmatch level not included in the SiN package. Other times you
end up walking on the ceilings, unsure of which way is up and trapped
in some claustrophobic, dyslexic nexus of utter, deliberate
confusion. Sometimes the result is infuriating, whereas others just
inspire laughter. This time I choose to laugh so that I may not
cry.
Dig is an awful
map, but I admire it for the totality of its awfulness and the
professional nature with which it was executed. I have been taught to
admire well made trash -- Christopher 'Saruman the Snow Miser' Lee's
Hammer Horror Dracula films, Larry Flynt's various periodicals, the
music of The Sex Pistols, and those dopey little ceramic figurines
you get in boxes of Red Rose tea are all precious to me. Dig's trashy
issue is not that it's silly like Spool
or cataclysmically redundant like Mustaine's Paradox
[God I hate that map] from SiN's deathmatch game, but
is imbued with a sense of such sheer, terrifying confusion that you
just have to marvel at it. How do people think crap like this up?
Inhaling Drano fumes, maybe. Drug abuse? Nahh, Mustaine is far too
much of a pro [and that's Levelord's
territory anyway -- the Stoned Mapper]. Voluntary
asphyxiation might be an answer -- remember INXS's Michael
Hutchence's ultimately lethal, tragic game of self-gratification
involving hanging himself from various hotel room door fixtures while
doing ... well, you know ... I sense the same kind of logic here:
"Let's disrupt the oxygen supply to my brain, cut the rope at the
last moment and throw myself in front of SinEd and see what
happens." The best part about contemplating this map is reminding
one's self that he got paid for making it.
Hahahahaha.
WHAT A GREAT WAY TO MAKE A LIVING!! Screw all this struggling
artist/writer nonsense -- where do I send my resume and work
samples? Not that I would be capable of creating something like
this, just that it seems like a fantastic way to make a buck.
Where was I? Oh yeah ... For almost a solid year now I have
been debating how to describe The Dig to my readers. The most vivid
description I can come up with is that the map is like some kind of
giant interstellar alien insect hive, where the players are the
insects and walk around on the ceilings and walls while this
God-awful, knuckle whitening, annoying space machine sound grinds out
in our ears. Lights flash and the surfaces swim with texture
animation while you search desperately for the flags, and all the
while people are shooting at you. What fun. I suppose the map
is intended to represent some sort of extraterrestrial mining
operation in a place where gravity is an interior decoration option,
not a Law of Nature. Fortunately or no, SiN's distinct surface flag
definitions allow a mapmaker to assign differing gravity, friction
and animation coefficients to individual surfaces. What Mustaine has
done with The Dig is to indulge his fantasy about having conflicting
planes of gravity set within the same room, much like he did with
Paradox.
But where Paradox
was essentially a giant box with opposing gravity values on the
walls, The Dig seems more like a mutated genetic experiment in using
gravity that got loose from its cage, fed itself on nuclear waste,
learned how to reproduce by fission and duplicated itself into two
more or less identical "base" zones linked by hallways that have no
floor or roof, in the middle of which is this huge room filled with
these big crystal "things". One of my lost pals from high school
coined the phrase that best defines the nature of the map -- Space
Junk.
I mean, the hallways DO have floors and roofs, but just which is
which depends on what team you are on or what player start you spawn
onto [much like in Paradox].
SinTek players will be confronting HardCorps players who are upside
down and facing the other way, standing on the roof with their heads
pointed at the floor or vice-versa. The two 'team base' areas are
distinguished by having such improbable structures as huts sticking
out of the walls, control consoles on the floors and construction
tools strewn about here and there in addition to the traditional
boring game elements like weapons, ammo and armor items. If you look
at certain areas it is actually quite interesting how he created the
various forms that compose this highly improbable world -- crates,
bunks, pickaxes, hammers, toolboxes and other mundane, everyday items
are juxtaposed against animated lit textures that remind one of the
climactic "V'ger" scene in the first Star Trek motion picture
[which is what I think was the inspiration for the map].
There is absolutely no footing in "everyday reality" in the level: it
is a vision of science fiction masquerading as a shooter map. I
prefer one or the other.
So why do I dislike it so much? Because I am a boring, old twat. I
like maps set in jungles, swamps or even just some stupid Gothic
Death Castle with has-been game concepts like rooms, stairs and
courtyards. I like knowing which way is up, and I get annoyed when a
player comes upon me sticking sideways out of the walls and shooting
at me backwards while I sit in my chair asking myself What the
%$@# is going on, and Wasn't I just playing SiN? The Dig
keys into that scenario, and players who enjoy being frustrated,
confused, irritated, manipulated and mentally imperiled will go
bonkers over this level. The rest of us will need a handful of Advil
and 200 cc's of Librium injected into the base of our skulls after
about ten minutes of such nonsense.
But let's be clear about something: I don't 'hate' this
map, I just think it sucks. It's too much too quickly. I am reminded
of Miles Davis' classic rock/jazz breakthrough album Bitches
Brew from 1969. Being a big Miles fan I purchased the album with
baited breath, went home, fired up a Squonk-sized spliff and put it
in the CD player ... and four days later traded it to a co-worker for
her boring old copy of Frampton Comes Alive. It's not that
Bitches Brew is unlistenable or 'bad', it's just that
listening to it made me feel like I had a colony of
wasps crawling all over the back of my neck. The Dig has a similar
effect upon my sensibilities -- while I admire its technical
sophistication, playing in it gives me about as much pleasure as a
healthy case of Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
One of the regular "features" of these articles is my attempt to
draw a parallel between the level in question and a previously well
known example of shooter design that it reminds me of. The Dig does
not remind me of any previous examples of shooter level design that I
am aware of. Usually this would annoy me -- my courses in Critical
Theory trained me to classify forms and use descriptive analysis to
place a mental picture of the work in question in the mind's eye of
the reader. The Dig defies any such attempts at classification, but
I'll let it slide this time. Not only is there nothing else that
looks like it, there shouldn't be, in my opinion. One Dig is
plenty.
I do wish I could be more descriptive about exactly what the map
looks like [try the screenshots if you are curious -- that's what
they are there for, Einstein], but frankly I haven't spent more
than about 10 mind-numbing minutes in this level at any time, usually
by hosting a match in the map that quickly becomes an empty server
with poor Skwank wondering "What the Hell do you people want?"
-- it's in the game, you know ... If you want to play a given game
you have to learn to put up with some of the nonsense that comes with
it. But you can almost rest assured that this is also one of the maps
that you will NEVER see running on one of the "commercial" SiN CTF
servers [if any go back online, that is] simply because no
person in their right mind will play it unless they are totally
desperate for a game and don't have a bathroom to clean, plants to
talk to or toenails that need clipping. So in that sense I am
reminded of the Railroad
aka Tunnel of Love, a SiN deathmatch level that I was initially
enthusiastic about [but have seen too much of on the active
servers, just like last week's Pride] because it kept nicely with
the esthetic of SiN's overall game flavor, but now cannot
stand because it is such a nut buster to play, falling off the
train and dying horribly over and over and over again.
Dig's frustration comes not through arbitrary death but because it is
almost impossible to remember where the flags are and how to get back
to your team base, and so the match just grinds on and on and on in
search of a timelimit, just like with the Railroad.
Bahh.
I like games that go somewhere. I like to be entertained. I like
to have fun when I take time out of my busy day for a match. Sure,
it's a gas to have material to bash and trash in an article like
this, but I really wish it wasn't so. The Dig is a level that belongs
in the SiN package, though. It should be there to help
players like me, the "boring old twat" sect, more fully appreciate
the Dead Simple brilliance of SinCity,
the wonderful overkill of the OilRig
and even Spry's
playfully cunning Alice in Wonderland surrealism. If it wasn't
for levels like Dig, the grandeur of CTF_Brafish
wouldn't be as apparent, and Mustaine's wonderful CTF_Para/Military
Strongholds [either of which are arguably the best teamplay
maps ever designed, IMHO] wouldn't blow me away with
its110% convincing nature.
All that The Dig convinces me of is that we live in a crazy,
messed up world and it is mavericks like Mustaine that get all the
cool jobs, while I'm left working on a loading dock at a grocery
store chain 'till midnight five days a week.
Lucky bastard.
SQ011402
email: snyland@earthlink.net
Visit Squonk's mac oriented SiN website for custom map and skin
downloads plus other goodies at http://www.squonkamatic.net/sin.