Normall - GrandmasterJ

 

    Normall is a map series all about walking through hallways. Robootto, a mapper with a bad reputation, and RNG, a mapper with a good reputation, have teamed up to bring us these hallways.

SCMapDB page

Authors: Robootto, RNG

Date of final release: 2006

Maps in package: 10

Map review of Normall

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | March 31, 2022 | 2679 characters

    I've played a lot of maps made by this author, Robootto. All of his maps have a quality that is somewhere between bewildering amounts of incompetence and being trolled. So when I took a look at the map description 'Contains Hallways" and the screen shots of endless twisting hallways I guessed that this would be the absolute worst map series for Sven I've played yet.

    It wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. Yeah, I was right in that the whole map series is about walking down boring hallways where nothing happens most of the time. The hallways have mostly the same texture, along with the floor and ceiling, and have intermittent lighting. But there are some maps (most notably the ones credited to RNG) that have some fun quirks to them like invisible push brushes that fling the player around corners or fail to arrest the player's fall from a great height so we die on impact and start at the beginning of the goddamn long as shit hallway. 

    Don't get me wrong, the map series isn't great, it's thankfully just a really bad map series. I thought it was going to be absolutely torture and instead it was just really bad. The one interesting thing to me is the collaboration between Robootto and RNG, RNG has a reputation of making top tier Sven maps while Robootto has the exact opposite reputation. There is a story here and I want to know what it is, it's probably much more interesting than this map set.

    By the way, if you do decide to play this map series you will need the map description to figure out which maps end and which don't. The first map (Normall) has no end, it is a big loop (it's unbeatable without low gravity anyway), Normall3 doesn't exist so Normall2's level transition doesn't work, Normall9 has no end, and neither does extrastroke.

    This map series took about an hour and fifteen minutes and I don't have much to say about it. Anything interesting happens in RNG's maps and the rest is boring hallways. Extrastroke has an annoying headcrab swarm and a boss but it's still not very good. 

Pros:

• RNG's contributions are very interesting
• the maps look like an absolute nightmare, but instead are just really bad.

Cons:

• the entire series is comprised of long boring hallways
• the series does not have clean transitions throughout, maps are missing,
• everything was so boring
• RNG's attempt to stop players from falling to their death sometimes doesn't work
• if you happen to die, you spawn at the beginning of the long hallways again.
• the textures were flat, not varied well, applied badly, and boring

Score: 0.5 / 10