Braindrain - GrandmasterJ
This map touts many puzzles and platforming, some of it is even decently clever. The visuals are trippy and interesting and I just now learned from the map description that the whole thing is fullbright, it looks great for fulbright.
Author: TheBard
Date of release: 2009
Maps in package:1
Map review of Braindrain
(originally posted on SCMapDB)
This map has a variety of non-combat challenges. It advertises itself as a puzzle map but I would say it has just as many platforming elements to it as well. There are a couple areas that are annoying and tedious that I cheated around but I[m having trouble feeling guilty about it.
So my teammate and I start the level and we are at the top of a big room filled with red gridlines. We are standing on transparent floors that have light red gridlines on them and there are multiple floors of this down to the bottom of the room. The puzzle is to crawl around looking for the nigh-invisible hole down. That was the floor and the map does get better from here. Probably the smartest puzzle in the map was one that requires two people to complete, one to spin chambers around and one to go through the chambers shooting buttons. There's another one where players have to follow the eyes that is interesting.
The platforming is for the most part simple and not too involved. But there is one part with orbiting planets that my teammate and I just could not cross. The goal here is to press buttons that blend in with the background, we have to reach the outermost planets and look back to see them. But getting to Earth (third platform) was hard enough and I don't think either of us got any further. We cheated past here and didn't really feel guilty, the platforms are small, moving fast, and generally hard to land on. At the very least when we fall we teleport back to the Sun. Another place we cheated was in the big room where we had to use tripmines to crawl up the wall. I was over this puzzle before we even began. My teammate had almost gotten to the top before it all exploded and then we cheated. I can imagine on a public server this room would be impossible
I should mention that there were a lot of checkpoints in this map, I didn't die often but the map was always chiming in to inform us of new spawn points.
At the end we get a nice cutscene with some monsters with custom models chilling around the players. The whole map has an interesting look and feel, alternating between gridlines and scientific/astronomical imagery. We have big eyeball textures, all sorts of planets, as well as spirals, flames, and other fun stuff. There is also a lot of music to tie it all together. I remember back in the day playing Sven Co-op 3 and bing in the planet room listening to Dune's Million Miles Away From Home. I couldn't complete the platforming section then but I still listen to that song every now and then.
The map is great, but suffers from two specific tedious areas, the planet room and the tripmine room. I'm open to the idea that I don't like the planet room because I suck at it, but I will counter that with my good-at-platforming-teammate not being able to do it either. Besides those two puzzles and the lame opening one the map has some good sequences. The trippy and interesting visuals work well with the music to make the challenges fun and interesting. Lots of work went into this and it shows. Those planets and tripmine room can go straight to hell though.
Pros:
- Interesting visuals
- lots of really good music
- fun outro and custom models
- the puzzles were generally pretty good
- lots of updating spawn points
Cons:
- that spinning planet room is crazy hard
- the tripmine room is the most tedious puzzle I can imagine
- the first puzzle was lame
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