BBQWITTEHBEAR - GrandmasterJ

 

    Are you ready to barbecue with the bear? There is a story about a zoo being closed due to Covid but the gameplay is all about shopping in the supermarket down the road. The map is very British and has a lot of jokes and references about being British.

SCMapDB page

Author: Captain Scarlet

Date of final release: 2021

Maps in package: 1

Map review of BBQWITTEHBEAR

(originally posted on SCMapDB)

by GrandmasterJ | October 6, 2022 | 6874 characters

    Well that certainly was something. This map contains no combat and instead focuses on running errands at a supermarket. There is a whole story about a zoo and some anime girls that have voice acting and large illustrations that float in mid-air. I don't get any of that, it all feels like a bunch of in jokes from a forum or group of friends. It's still a great experience even if I don't understand everything.

    Players start off in a room with three doors. One could almost believe this is a generic and uninspired map from just the spawn room. One door is a room with a discord conversation on the walls that I didn't bother to read. If the author wanted me to read it then the text should probably not have gone so high up the wall that I would have needed to jump to read the top lines. Another room disables custom content, I'm running a local server so that does not matter to me. The last door opens up into the zoo, a large open grassy area that immediately starts playing the game's first cutscene. When the voiceover audio came in my teammate and I sort of stopped and started listening, I noticed that large pictures with captions were appearing over the rock pit, the captions matched the voiceover, we were getting story exposition. I really like how this is delivered, not only do we get crisp, clear, and decent voice lines but we also get what amounts to subtitles and illustration.

    Our mission is shopping, we have to hop in the zoo van and drive to the supermarket, we had to deal with func_vehicle. It was great. I was shocked, I didn't die during my time as a driver or passenger in these vans. They have some real nice looking chairs for seats, the kind of chairs you'd see in a church, base metal with some cushion that stack together neatly. I really like the whimsical texture on the cushioning. In order to fit into the driver seat I had to crouch which I thought was going to kill me, but like I said before, I was fine. The momentum died very fast when I wasn't actively driving forward which made the drive choppy, but it was probably my best vehicle experience in Sven, even when I intentionally drove into things. There are things to see on the drive over to the supermarket, but we'll come back to that.

    We get to the supermarket and the parking lot if huge. There is a weird structure that I think may be a bus stop, there is a teleporter back home at the zoo and it drops players here, no driving needed. There are a ton of copy and pasted Black Mesa SUVs in the parking lot. I love the people, as far as I can tell they are flat sprites in the place of what I think is a gonome, I think gonome because they keep the idle sounds of the original monster giving each person some very heavy mouth breathing action. They wander the store and sometimes (always?) follow set paths making disconcerting heavy breathing monster sounds. I love them all.

    The shelves are mostly empty, but have some large bricks of product. At one point after exploring pretty much the entire place my teammate crowbarred a shelf and it broke. I loudly exclaimed "This changes everything!" and we began destroying everything. The only shelves that break are the ones where each shelf is a different height, the blocky flat shelves don't break. Some other things break too, like random railing. The product stays though, floating in the air with untextured bottoms allowing players to see right through the world. I think two products actually fell to the floor. Also all the textures are very good here, all the text is readable and most of it is very funny.

    There is a lot to see and do in the supermarket, I won't go over all of it. But I will say there is a flat old lady out front next to a badly parked copy pasted Black Mesa SUV and she demands I do her shopping for her. A massive brown box appears over her head, and over the entrance to the supermarket, listing all the new stuff we had to buy. I was kind of miffed at that. But then we go in and the stuff we need has these big sprites over it showing us where to go. But things aren't so simple, in order to get break we need to find an employee hiding in the back who tells us to bring him soggy rolls, we have to leave the market and go to the soggy roll store we passed on the way here. It's on a lovely roundabout with a couple of protestors out front and a flat picture of a London block. We give him the stuff, he gives us the stuff, then we have to go to the checkout. After this we left and went home, but nothing happened. We somehow missed the trigger for the next sequence. I stayed behind and my teammate drove the van directly into the old lady, successfully triggering the end game cutscene.

    There is a lot to see and do in this map, its big and has a lot of fun stuff tucked away. I hope you like anime because there is a lot of that. There was some very good background music in the beginning, the next track was so-so, and then it just kept repeating. When we got to the end game the music changed again and it was pretty terrible. The music starts strong and gets worse.

    One more thing to add, I started having some real bad framerate issues near the end. My teammate was connected to my server and he seemed fine but I was getting clear and annoying drops. It only happened in the late game and the map was finished soon after, but wow.

    I really liked the map. It was cute, whimsical, funny, British, and had unique gameplay that reminds me of other maps like Ressya no tabi - The Train Travel. The texturing was good, I loved the British people walking around, the music made for a strong early game, and the mission objectives reminded me of the ridiculous mundanity of Postal 2's objectives. Even if you are not into the story or mission objectives players can still have a lot of fun just exploring. Here is a protip: have somebody enter the supermarket and go the the back left corner, open the big white doors, have another player drive a van in there, now run over all the people.

Pros:

• Good atmosphere, map looked good with lots to see, A+ music
• I particularly love the British people and the sounds they make
• lots of interactivity, the door we could open to allow vans in the supermarket was just wonderful
• story presented in a very clear way, with both sound and visuals. Good voice quality
• objectives are marked and display messages when interacted with
• this map has superior func_vehicles

Cons:

• We missed some triggers, prompting us to go back and forth from spawn to supermarket
• some edges are not textured, particularly the undersides of floating product
• I had alarming drops in frame rate
• I wish the vans accelerated a little better

Score: 8 / 10