Icedude's Island RR: 7.5 What we have is a good idea, nicely thought out by Icedude, and cleverly put together - but put together too quickly. The idea was to have a map "generally designed along the same lines as NN (chat and explore (but without much of the explore))" - but really, for that you need more than basic elements, you need to put the work in, offer some "eye candy", have visitors thinking "wow, that looks neat - that house by itself must have taken days to do"... So there are facing forts; so the river's current sweeps you away to your doom if you fall in; the swimming pool has a springboard and a working slide; the jacussi works as a healpod; so you have a grassy island, with a house with a sniping gallery upstairs reached by teleporter from the shower cubicle. I'm afraid recent maps have spoiled us. We want subtle stuff too, we want detail, we want to see something that has a lot of work behind it. I've long thought that Icedude is a talented mapmaker, and what he plotted out here goes a long way towards confirming this. But people like SLAM and Sk8er are raising our expectations, so the other mapmakers are going to have to try harder, and take longer, if they want to keep up... And Elven Nerfer has converted this map for Ace's 1.0 version of CTF, which is a nice idea. |
