Oh yeah, I do want to mention that while TGM2+ support was pulled from MAME a while back due to pressure from Arika, they relaxed that sometime last year and you can both play it single-player in MAME or over Fightcade with a friend (both versus or doubles).
Playing Quake the last two nights was incredible. I never got past episode 1 in single player cuz fuck the single player, it’s all fine and good but why am I gonna shoot shamblers when I can go online and frag a friend wearing a slightly problematic skin. It is such an amazing feeling game, the maps look so fucking good, all my favs tend to be tight and twisty and vertical, all laid out in a way that just seems mad to me, like how do you end up constructing spaces like this, how did all these folks nail it so early on, why is everything since so fucking dull in comparison.
We didn’t play abom.bsp though, sad we didn’t play abom.
I still voted for Demon’s Souls though. I think I value misery over fun.
basically, playtesting (ie playing deathmatch with your friends) until its good, along with some basic ideas of like knowing what’s fun to do.
If you want single player maps that feel like going through those tight twisty deathmatch maps, check out Coagula style maps. They’re usually this exact style of super vertical, super interconnected nightmares of bullets and hell knights.
did anyone ever play Cube, the FPS that had a built-in map editor you could use in real time? It was dope as hell, you could go straight from map-making to fragging and back again, and it was clearly a knockoff of Quake. It’s the first time I’d seen multiplayer editing like that, and would be the last time until I saw Infiniminer, which I immediately dismissed because it didn’t have cool guns.
It even had a sequel called Sauerbraten, which had some more advanced features (slopes I think was the big one, plus realtime lighting). I honestly wish it had caught on more.
Anyway it was cool as hell because the loop between Test and Make was so closely tied together, you could knock out really cool maps really fast, then just polish polish polish.
Link’s Awakening does have one (1) advantage over the original at least: the inclusion of the sweetest, dreamiest, most sought-after girl in the Zelda series — Crazy Tracy.
Clearly we need to change our approach a bit if we are to appeal to the tastes of the selectbuttondotnet commentariat.