Here's my entire pack (color scheme for most icons is green and I will not change it because I would have to tint 30 different nonanimated cursors and RE-DO 27 different animated cursors).
There are 19 cursors (one for every windows cursor and some alternatives). Help, Link (plus two alternatives), Unavailable, Working (plus two alternatives), and Busy are animated (see a below for sample). All cursors come in large (generally 32 pixels), medium (generally 24 pixels), and small (generally 16 pixels) varieties.
EDIT: added Link V2 and V3, but its not in the pack yet. I'll finish this later.
EDIT2: Done! There are now three versions of Link and Working.
- Link - Link V2 - Link V3 - Working - Working V2 - Working V3 - Busy - Help - Unavailable
Whats with the pregenerated shadows? I kept getting annoyed with the fatness of it so I made my own set, then made some animations.
Also, how did you antialias the edges of the icons? I had to manually blur the edges to get rid of the jaggies, but it looks like you anti-aliased it. How? BTW, I am using PhotoShop to do the initial fixup.
I had a power outage for a day, and then internet loss for a day. I had to go back to college to post this. Also, for this reason, there will be no reviews for at least a week.
Letter Scores: Grades can be F, E, D, C, B, A, and S in order from worst to best. + and - modifiers indicate slightly better or slightly worse. An A is essentially a 5/5 while an F is similar to a 0/5, but the letter grades are purposefully meant to be ambiguous. I am aware that Europeans may be unfamiliar with letter-based grade systems, and I apologize for any confusion this may cause.
Replayability: Score ranges from 0 to 5 with + and - modifiers. It follows a logarithmic scale; the difference between 4 and 3 is much more than the difference between 2 and 1.
Review:
On occasion, someone will create a rare map that attempts something new and experimental, with a low chance of success. Most mapmakers avoid situations like this because most mapmakers care too much about the success of their maps to consider doing work in vain. Debates is Rodrigo’s social experiment that forgoes any sort of standard gameplay or graphics in order to force the players to use logic in order to beat their peers in a battle of eloquence.
A game of debates will have three to six (or was it five?) rounds depending on the number of players involved. Each round starts with the players choosing whether to change the topic of debate or to judge, oppose, or support the thought. Depending on the players’ selection, a random set of people will be designated to judge the debate between the guy selected to argue against it and his counterpart who will defend it. Both players will get a minute, in turn, to argue their point. After that, both players each get an additional 40-second argument to wrap up their points. After the debate, the judges determine the winner of the argument. The winner gets points toward his ongoing score, though tied players will both earn half the score. The game ends after the last debate.
A typical scene in a game of Debates. This is as interesting as the graphics get, though.
There is no clear winner or loser in each game of Debates, as each player will usually argue only once. The closest thing to winning the game is winning the argument, but half of the players in the game will also win their arguments. There are no units, no models or sprites; only a light interface and a lot of text. This is a stylistic choice with its own merits; the players can focus on the debates, the map is easier to run, and the black void is an effective thinking backdrop. However, some kind of atmospheric background terrain, even if it was dark or mostly static, or some kind of way to replace the matte black backdrop with something more visually appealing would improve the feel of the map considerably and raise the flavor score from the near-rock-bottom level it is currently at. There are multiple ways to approach this, but I do not think that the minimalistic look is the best look. However, this is not nearly enough to make the difference between Silver and Gold.
It is always a difficult task to pin down what makes a social game such as Debates work out. My best analysis is that Rodrigo spent a long time fine-tuning how the debates are handled and picking a good group of thoughts to get discussion going. Plus, the round-based setup with player judges and random selection works well toward the goal. The equilibrium between the players’ ability to skip thoughts and the usual forced discussion topics creates an interesting blend of choice and obligation that strikes a chord with me. It all works together very well and proves that, with proper direction, social experiments like Debates can be successful. It’s in a very similar vein as my Mafia map (WarCraft III), which is its own kind of social experiment involving a type of debate, though the topic is usually either “Who should we lynch?” or “What role is player X?” Take my word for it; Rodrigo nailed the social direction down admirably well.
When a social experiment goes well, it’s extremely rewarding. When a good debate gets going, even the players know, to an extent, that they’re witnessing something special. Socrates would be proud. Well, except for the fact that some questions are ambiguous, worded weirdly, or have typos.
I find it difficult to talk about the actual gameplay of Debates because it depends entirely on the crop of players you happen to get. When the players are good at debating, the game is entertaining and fun. When the players are amateurs, the only fun you’ll be getting is a good laugh at their stupidity. This is most of the reason why Fun and Gameplay are not scored as A’s. It’s mostly out of the mapmaker’s control and remains a problem in every type of multiplayer map, but it’s especially bad in a social game. I might have given an A, however, if there was more to the game than just debating a handful of times and then calling it quits. Pardon my shameless self-promotion, but Mafia keeps it interesting and causes the debating process to be much less ephemeral, simply because everyone’s words and actions carry a lot of weight. After all, what you say can get you killed, and once you die, you’re permanently out of the game. Debates cannot do exactly the same thing, but having a greater goal of victory, a supplemental gameplay mechanic, or some other creative addition or change would be a great help for this map: this would make the difference between Silver and Gold.
Ideally, Debates is played with a group of open-minded intellectuals, but often the game will be filled with trolls of various calibers. It can be fun to see two trolls trying to out-troll each other, though, but that’s obviously outside of Debates’ intended entertainment value. To Rodrigo’s credit, he added a method to kick trolls. However, in games that are under the maximum player count, mustering all of the kick-votes required is almost impossible, especially if the trolls are organized. To prove my point, I intentionally trolled a few games with a group of my troll friends. We couldn’t be kicked and we effectively raped the game.
Trolls trolling trolls. Luckily, there are many kinds of trolls. You can see two distinct types in this screenshot.
There’s not much else to say about Debates. It’s a simple game that accomplishes its stated goal well. Just like any other game, there is room for improvement and expansion, but even without such changes, Debates remains a solid map that ought to be played by everyone at least once, just to say you did it. As of the time of writing this review, Debates is the highest-scoring map in the Central Review Conglomerate.
We even trolled Rodrigo. This is supposed to be encrypted, but my friend is a special troll called a hacker. He cracked the encryption in a couple hours and essentially released a “virus” spread by playing debates. The effect: have you ever seen this as the “All-time Best Players”? However, a few days after the event, I told Rodrigo about it (the whole thing was just for the lulz, anyway) and he released something of an “anti-virus” to nullify it, just so you know.
Kudos to whoever actually reads these reviews.
RATING:
Silver: This map is not perfect, but is entertaining and of good quality.
Retroactive edit: My standards changed, so all the older reviews have their scores dropped by 10%. This affects the rating of Level Up Bound:
It's been a while since my last review. The next one is coming up today or tomorrow. I'll upload the scorecard for Doodad Hunt momentarily.
Letter Scores: Grades can be F, E, D, C, B, A, and S in order from worst to best. + and - modifiers indicate slightly better or slightly worse. An A is essentially a 5/5 while an F is similar to a 0/5, but the letter grades are purposefully meant to be ambiguous. I am aware that Europeans may be unfamiliar with letter-based grade systems, and I apologize for any confusion this may cause.
Replayability: Score ranges from 0 to 5 with + and - modifiers. It follows a logarithmic scale; the difference between 4 and 3 is much more than the difference between 2 and 1.
Failures
Bad Explosions - [- -]
Lag-Dependent - [- -]
Bonuses
Difficult - [+]
Good Puzzles - [+]
Review:
Level Up Bound is a holdover from StarCraft: Brood War, a game where the players must navigate through many variations of a 5x5 grid of explosions and blockers using their skills of timing and problem-solving. Unlike the Brood War version, this incarnation has a slightly different system of counting lives, involving a short minigame after every 5 levels. This version also has 25 levels, whereas in Brood War it had 100.
Since the original Level Up Bound was a great success and was fun to play, it is no surprise that Chrinux’s version was a featured map and is somewhat fun as well. It’s heart-pumping fun to successfully navigate a level, you rage when you just barely miss your mark, and you yell in victory when you just barely make it. This style of map just works at a basic level; it’s a tried-and-true formula that, when done right, will definitely be a good map. So, where does Level Up Bound go wrong? I’ll start with the obvious.
One of the 25 levels. Oddly enough, the solution to this one is to sprint through it at exactly the right moment. This can be extremely difficult when the game is even moderately laggy.
It’s immediately apparent when one plays Level Up Bound that any sort of lag will ruin one’s day. With so much as a 0.3-0.4 second delay, the player will find himself ordering his unit many steps in advance. Level 17 and level 24 in particular are disgustingly hard when there is even a smidgen of lag present. I’ve never been able to get past level 24 despite trying on four separate occasions because each time, Battle.net decided to give me a progressively worse delay as the game went on. This problem is very annoying and can cause the map to be frustrating, especially if you have the timing right but your unit stalls or overshoots because your latest order came in too late. However, this is something that probably cannot be fixed by Chrinux because the map itself does not influence the delay. Though it may be unfixable and not be Chrinux’s fault, it still is a valid problem that will forever lower this map’s score slightly.
New players are thrust into a difficult and confusing situation when the game starts. The following is from the point of view of an archetypical player that has never played a bound before: What the hell is this terrain? A mini chess-board? Whoa, blue wavy blast things are coming down. Oh, look, they are coming down again. I guess it repeats. I wonder what that’s all for. What’s this 7x7 square off to the right? What is this orange circle I’m standing on? What’s that blue circle that’s half-obscured on the top? Hmm, people are running across. I guess it’s safe to- MY UNIT DIED. What the hell, give me some warning! I guess I’m dead forever. Oh, wait, I have another zergling. I guess that’s what Lives are for. What are Points, though? Hmm, maybe I’m supposed to dodge the explosions? Oh well, here goes… ARGH I DIED AGAIN! It’s so hard to see shit with all that distortion. Oh well, I’ll probably do better with the sound up… OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT MUSIC? Screw this map.
At that point, the player leaves at around level 5. Sadly, this is a common occurrence in Level Up Bound.
An awful lot of people leave out of frustration. Take note, mapmakers; good documentation and a smooth learning curve are of the utmost importance if you want your map to be popular.
The reasons for the map being unintuitive are numerous. First of all, many players will look at the loading screen, “read” it, and then play the map without having taken in any of the information on the loading screen. The loading screen, for starters, is fairly busy, has a white background, and will cause the players to scan the text while not actually reading what any of it says. There are multiple ways to use color and design psychology to make the players read it more. Even without the loading screen, the map should still be intuitive, which it isn’t. The terrain is not very high-contrast, for one. In the original StarCraft, everything was sprite-based, meaning that the lines were sharper and the different textures were more defined. In StarCraft II, all of it is a noisy normal-mapped pool of mud, in essence. Change the lighting settings to lower specularity and make the terrain more contrasting to help fix this. Also, the music is almost calming, which contrasts too much with the premise of “dodge explosions or die in a shower of blood.” Even the goal circle is sometimes out of view and the camera can be scrolled, which causes the players to have to spend more time wrestling with the point of view and wondering what the blue circle than is necessary. A locked cam that has everything in view would be preferred.
However, all that is peanuts compared to the fact that the explosions themselves are really awful. All three explosion types (blue and orange, plus the red flavor that appears only once or twice in the game) make a massive distortion bubble and spawn an explosion with a lengthy animation. First of all, they look a lot less deadly than the really are. This causes new players to, on occasion, not realize that they are deadly until they die once or twice. Seriously, lots of players just run across the board without so much as a moment’s consideration on the first few levels. After that they die. The second problem is that the explosions have an ambiguous starting frame because explosions in the same square will often overlap in animation, have a lengthy scale-up sequence, and cause distortion. Basically, it makes timing one’s movement needlessly difficult because it’s tough to tell when the explosion actually starts. The third problem is somewhat related in that the distortion will make it difficult to see your own zergling. All this combines to a hot mess that is admittedly difficult to describe. It’s kind of like trying to play the game while underwater in a bubble bath. All of this applies to the blue and orange explosions. The red explosions are even worse because they are even more exaggerated and tough to spot.
This is all in contrast with the original StarCraft, which had very short, clear, nasty-looking explosions that filled the whole square and not much else. It’s just about the opposite in StarCraft II.
The explosion animation is long enough to leave a permanent blue puff in every square. Also, notice how the middle row of squares actually appears to be a row of circles?
Another weak point is the damned zergling-clicking minigame that awards the players the majority of their extra lives. A whole mess of zerglings is spawned in the 7x7 box and then they randomly move around. Five of them have wings. The perspective is top-down. Which direction do the wings face, again? That’s right, they face up. You have to spot the zerglings that have razor-thin protrusions on their back side. It’s tough to find them even in the still screenshot further down the page. It’s impossible to find them on the noisy backdrop they scurry across. The method to find them and get lives is thus the venerable spam-click. Yep, it works.
The minigame does not interrupt normal gameplay, however. This means that the players who take the time to get extra lives for the whole team can be screwed out of some potential gameplay because they will be spending 30 seconds to spam-click a group of zerglings while some asshole ignores the minigame to run through three levels as quickly as possible. This is supremely annoying. I think that the minigame should pause the game or else be removed entirely. I vote for removal, since the minigame was never fun to begin with.
If you can spot the winged zerglings, you do not need glasses.
The cornerstone of Level Up Bound, or any other bound-style map, is the level design. Specifically, the layout of the traps makes or breaks the map. The maps intuitiveness, the difficulty curve, and the style of the traps (theme) are also paramount. The original Level Up Bound had 100 different levels that got progressively harder and took a long time to get through, but the difficulty curve was smooth and each successive challenge was difficult but not impossible, so that once the players beat that level, they would get a different challenge with a totally different approach to beat it (thus, a different feel, keeping the map interesting). I could complain about the few levels, but to be honest, with the kind of designs that Chrinux put in there, I think that 100 levels of that would be boring. No, the biggest problem with the new Level Up Bound is the difficulty curve. Obviously, the first few levels are easy. They remain easy until the level with the series of row-explosions going from top to bottom. After this point, the difficulty curve hits a cliff. I’ve practiced, so I’ll beat it on my first or second try, but most players run into a brick wall at this point because from then on, the necessary timing is exact. A fraction of a second off and you die, basically. It would have been nice if the difficulty curve was more like a rolling hill as opposed to the Alps.
This map could have 100 levels if some better variety was added. What’s with the level that forces the zergling to move to the repeating explosion so that you have to spam-rightclick to survive? Why are there no more levels of that type? Twists could be added to some of the levels. Maybe some levels would have a 6x6 or 7x7 square, or maybe some levels would be played on a grid of triangles or hexagons. Perhaps one level would cause your zergling to slide at a constant rate so you can’t stop, and another one would cause your zergling to be slower than normal. Maybe another one would limit your vision of the level to just the squares adjacent to your zergling. There are many possibilities that are not being exploited.
I’ll conclude this by throwing out there that the scenery is very plain and there is pretty much no spice, flavor, or charm to the map besides the music, hence the bad flavor score. This doesn’t affect the score too much, actually, but it would be nice if the map was presented more interestingly. The real killer is the gameplay and content scores. There is an awful lot of room for improvement, Chrinux. I hope you keep going forward.
RATING:
Bronze: This map is decent, but rough around the edges or somehow lacking.
I'll review this map, for sure. It's one of the few maps on my to-do list that I actually played before going to college, where I have no access to a computer capable of playing SC2. (This will be my last review until the weekend.)
It's unclear to us whether you're saying Debates was removed from battle.net from Blizzard's interference or was simply put down in popularity for whatever reason.
Directly from the stickied Law thread. All new reviews will be held to these standards:
III. Reviews
General
A minimum quality will be enforced on all reviews posted in the Map Review forum, regardless of the thread's origin (ie. a moved thread will still be held under these guidelines). In general, reviews should be of a decent enough quality so that the map's author (who will undoubtedly read the review given enough time to find it ) will be able to gain more insight about his/her work.
Laws
1. Reviews must include a written analysis of or discourse on the map. A standard paragraph size is an acceptable minimum.
2. The author of the map and the Battle.net title of the map (if any) must be present and clearly visible in the original post or the thread title.
3. A score does not need to be given, but a general opinion of the map must be present in some form.
4. Insulting the author of the map is prohibited unless the insult is harmless and used for comedic value.
4.a. No insult will ever be condoned if the map author is offended or in any way discouraged from map-making by it.
Punishments
Breaking any of the laws in Section III. are considered minor infractions. In most cases, an offending review thread will be left open so that the reviewer may fix any issues with it. However, depending on severity, III.4.a may cause a major infraction. For the corresponding penalties, see Section I. and Section II.
0
Here's my entire pack (color scheme for most icons is green and I will not change it because I would have to tint 30 different nonanimated cursors and RE-DO 27 different animated cursors).
The Pack Version 2 (394 kB)
There are 19 cursors (one for every windows cursor and some alternatives). Help, Link (plus two alternatives), Unavailable, Working (plus two alternatives), and Busy are animated (see a below for sample). All cursors come in large (generally 32 pixels), medium (generally 24 pixels), and small (generally 16 pixels) varieties.
EDIT: added Link V2 and V3, but its not in the pack yet. I'll finish this later.
EDIT2: Done! There are now three versions of Link and Working.
0
Whats with the pregenerated shadows? I kept getting annoyed with the fatness of it so I made my own set, then made some animations.
Also, how did you antialias the edges of the icons? I had to manually blur the edges to get rid of the jaggies, but it looks like you anti-aliased it. How? BTW, I am using PhotoShop to do the initial fixup.
0
I had a power outage for a day, and then internet loss for a day. I had to go back to college to post this. Also, for this reason, there will be no reviews for at least a week.
Letter Scores: Grades can be F, E, D, C, B, A, and S in order from worst to best. + and - modifiers indicate slightly better or slightly worse. An A is essentially a 5/5 while an F is similar to a 0/5, but the letter grades are purposefully meant to be ambiguous. I am aware that Europeans may be unfamiliar with letter-based grade systems, and I apologize for any confusion this may cause.
Replayability: Score ranges from 0 to 5 with + and - modifiers. It follows a logarithmic scale; the difference between 4 and 3 is much more than the difference between 2 and 1.
Debates by Rodrigo
Fun (Enjoyability, Thrill) - (B+)
Gameplay (Balance, Dynamics) - (B)
Content (Completeness, Assets) - (C+)
Polish (Bugginess, Presentation) - (A)
Flavor (Style, Charm) - (E)
Replayability - [3]
Failures
Easily Ruined - [-]
Replays Don’t Work - [-]
Bonuses
Intellectual - [+]
Social - [+]
Unique - [+ +]
Review:
On occasion, someone will create a rare map that attempts something new and experimental, with a low chance of success. Most mapmakers avoid situations like this because most mapmakers care too much about the success of their maps to consider doing work in vain. Debates is Rodrigo’s social experiment that forgoes any sort of standard gameplay or graphics in order to force the players to use logic in order to beat their peers in a battle of eloquence.
A game of debates will have three to six (or was it five?) rounds depending on the number of players involved. Each round starts with the players choosing whether to change the topic of debate or to judge, oppose, or support the thought. Depending on the players’ selection, a random set of people will be designated to judge the debate between the guy selected to argue against it and his counterpart who will defend it. Both players will get a minute, in turn, to argue their point. After that, both players each get an additional 40-second argument to wrap up their points. After the debate, the judges determine the winner of the argument. The winner gets points toward his ongoing score, though tied players will both earn half the score. The game ends after the last debate.
A typical scene in a game of Debates. This is as interesting as the graphics get, though.
There is no clear winner or loser in each game of Debates, as each player will usually argue only once. The closest thing to winning the game is winning the argument, but half of the players in the game will also win their arguments. There are no units, no models or sprites; only a light interface and a lot of text. This is a stylistic choice with its own merits; the players can focus on the debates, the map is easier to run, and the black void is an effective thinking backdrop. However, some kind of atmospheric background terrain, even if it was dark or mostly static, or some kind of way to replace the matte black backdrop with something more visually appealing would improve the feel of the map considerably and raise the flavor score from the near-rock-bottom level it is currently at. There are multiple ways to approach this, but I do not think that the minimalistic look is the best look. However, this is not nearly enough to make the difference between Silver and Gold.
It is always a difficult task to pin down what makes a social game such as Debates work out. My best analysis is that Rodrigo spent a long time fine-tuning how the debates are handled and picking a good group of thoughts to get discussion going. Plus, the round-based setup with player judges and random selection works well toward the goal. The equilibrium between the players’ ability to skip thoughts and the usual forced discussion topics creates an interesting blend of choice and obligation that strikes a chord with me. It all works together very well and proves that, with proper direction, social experiments like Debates can be successful. It’s in a very similar vein as my Mafia map (WarCraft III), which is its own kind of social experiment involving a type of debate, though the topic is usually either “Who should we lynch?” or “What role is player X?” Take my word for it; Rodrigo nailed the social direction down admirably well.
When a social experiment goes well, it’s extremely rewarding. When a good debate gets going, even the players know, to an extent, that they’re witnessing something special. Socrates would be proud. Well, except for the fact that some questions are ambiguous, worded weirdly, or have typos.
I find it difficult to talk about the actual gameplay of Debates because it depends entirely on the crop of players you happen to get. When the players are good at debating, the game is entertaining and fun. When the players are amateurs, the only fun you’ll be getting is a good laugh at their stupidity. This is most of the reason why Fun and Gameplay are not scored as A’s. It’s mostly out of the mapmaker’s control and remains a problem in every type of multiplayer map, but it’s especially bad in a social game. I might have given an A, however, if there was more to the game than just debating a handful of times and then calling it quits. Pardon my shameless self-promotion, but Mafia keeps it interesting and causes the debating process to be much less ephemeral, simply because everyone’s words and actions carry a lot of weight. After all, what you say can get you killed, and once you die, you’re permanently out of the game. Debates cannot do exactly the same thing, but having a greater goal of victory, a supplemental gameplay mechanic, or some other creative addition or change would be a great help for this map: this would make the difference between Silver and Gold.
Ideally, Debates is played with a group of open-minded intellectuals, but often the game will be filled with trolls of various calibers. It can be fun to see two trolls trying to out-troll each other, though, but that’s obviously outside of Debates’ intended entertainment value. To Rodrigo’s credit, he added a method to kick trolls. However, in games that are under the maximum player count, mustering all of the kick-votes required is almost impossible, especially if the trolls are organized. To prove my point, I intentionally trolled a few games with a group of my troll friends. We couldn’t be kicked and we effectively raped the game.
Trolls trolling trolls. Luckily, there are many kinds of trolls. You can see two distinct types in this screenshot.
There’s not much else to say about Debates. It’s a simple game that accomplishes its stated goal well. Just like any other game, there is room for improvement and expansion, but even without such changes, Debates remains a solid map that ought to be played by everyone at least once, just to say you did it. As of the time of writing this review, Debates is the highest-scoring map in the Central Review Conglomerate.
We even trolled Rodrigo. This is supposed to be encrypted, but my friend is a special troll called a hacker. He cracked the encryption in a couple hours and essentially released a “virus” spread by playing debates. The effect: have you ever seen this as the “All-time Best Players”? However, a few days after the event, I told Rodrigo about it (the whole thing was just for the lulz, anyway) and he released something of an “anti-virus” to nullify it, just so you know.
Kudos to whoever actually reads these reviews.
RATING:
Silver: This map is not perfect, but is entertaining and of good quality.
0
As the saying goes, screenshots or it didn't happen (or at least, nobody cares if there's no pretty pictures).
0
Here we go. Doodad Hunt is pretty much just a different flavor of Haunted Temple. The score is almost identical, too.
This is a Map Scorecard, not a full Map Review. I will not make my usual elaboration of the scores this map receives.
Doodad Hunt by Bounty_98
Fun (Enjoyability, Thrill) - (B+)
Gameplay (Balance, Dynamics) - (C+)
Content (Completeness, Assets) - (C-)
Polish (Bugginess, Presentation) - (B+)
Flavor (Style, Charm) - (B)
Replayability - [3-]
Failures
Camera Issues - [-]
Lack of Action - [-]
Bonuses
Hilarity - [+]
Interesting Terrain - [+]
Suspenseful - [+]
Use Your Brain to Win - [+]
RATING:
Silver: This map is not perfect, but is entertaining and of good quality.
Screenshots
The terrain is interesting with its interior and outdoor settings. The occlusion and lack of shadows is fairly annoying, however.
Kill those hidden doodads with fire!
Occlusion does not work as intended; the wrong things turn transparent and the important doodads that your camera flies behind stay opaque.
All the doodads are just little zerglings trying to survive in a cruel world.
Death is near and there is no escape. Also, I learned the hard way that being submerged in water doesn’t protect you from the fire.
0
Retroactive edit: My standards changed, so all the older reviews have their scores dropped by 10%. This affects the rating of Level Up Bound:
It's been a while since my last review. The next one is coming up today or tomorrow. I'll upload the scorecard for Doodad Hunt momentarily.
Letter Scores: Grades can be F, E, D, C, B, A, and S in order from worst to best. + and - modifiers indicate slightly better or slightly worse. An A is essentially a 5/5 while an F is similar to a 0/5, but the letter grades are purposefully meant to be ambiguous. I am aware that Europeans may be unfamiliar with letter-based grade systems, and I apologize for any confusion this may cause.
Replayability: Score ranges from 0 to 5 with + and - modifiers. It follows a logarithmic scale; the difference between 4 and 3 is much more than the difference between 2 and 1.
Level Up Bound by Chrinux
Fun (Enjoyability, Thrill) - (B-)
Gameplay (Balance, Dynamics) - (C+)
Content (Completeness, Assets) - (D)
Polish (Bugginess, Presentation) - (B)
Flavor (Style, Charm) - (E+)
Replayability - [2+]
Failures
Bad Explosions - [- -]
Lag-Dependent - [- -]
Bonuses
Difficult - [+]
Good Puzzles - [+]
Review:
Level Up Bound is a holdover from StarCraft: Brood War, a game where the players must navigate through many variations of a 5x5 grid of explosions and blockers using their skills of timing and problem-solving. Unlike the Brood War version, this incarnation has a slightly different system of counting lives, involving a short minigame after every 5 levels. This version also has 25 levels, whereas in Brood War it had 100.
Since the original Level Up Bound was a great success and was fun to play, it is no surprise that Chrinux’s version was a featured map and is somewhat fun as well. It’s heart-pumping fun to successfully navigate a level, you rage when you just barely miss your mark, and you yell in victory when you just barely make it. This style of map just works at a basic level; it’s a tried-and-true formula that, when done right, will definitely be a good map. So, where does Level Up Bound go wrong? I’ll start with the obvious.
One of the 25 levels. Oddly enough, the solution to this one is to sprint through it at exactly the right moment. This can be extremely difficult when the game is even moderately laggy.
It’s immediately apparent when one plays Level Up Bound that any sort of lag will ruin one’s day. With so much as a 0.3-0.4 second delay, the player will find himself ordering his unit many steps in advance. Level 17 and level 24 in particular are disgustingly hard when there is even a smidgen of lag present. I’ve never been able to get past level 24 despite trying on four separate occasions because each time, Battle.net decided to give me a progressively worse delay as the game went on. This problem is very annoying and can cause the map to be frustrating, especially if you have the timing right but your unit stalls or overshoots because your latest order came in too late. However, this is something that probably cannot be fixed by Chrinux because the map itself does not influence the delay. Though it may be unfixable and not be Chrinux’s fault, it still is a valid problem that will forever lower this map’s score slightly.
New players are thrust into a difficult and confusing situation when the game starts. The following is from the point of view of an archetypical player that has never played a bound before:
What the hell is this terrain? A mini chess-board? Whoa, blue wavy blast things are coming down. Oh, look, they are coming down again. I guess it repeats. I wonder what that’s all for. What’s this 7x7 square off to the right? What is this orange circle I’m standing on? What’s that blue circle that’s half-obscured on the top? Hmm, people are running across. I guess it’s safe to- MY UNIT DIED. What the hell, give me some warning! I guess I’m dead forever. Oh, wait, I have another zergling. I guess that’s what Lives are for. What are Points, though? Hmm, maybe I’m supposed to dodge the explosions? Oh well, here goes… ARGH I DIED AGAIN! It’s so hard to see shit with all that distortion. Oh well, I’ll probably do better with the sound up… OH GOD WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT MUSIC? Screw this map.
At that point, the player leaves at around level 5. Sadly, this is a common occurrence in Level Up Bound.
An awful lot of people leave out of frustration. Take note, mapmakers; good documentation and a smooth learning curve are of the utmost importance if you want your map to be popular.
The reasons for the map being unintuitive are numerous. First of all, many players will look at the loading screen, “read” it, and then play the map without having taken in any of the information on the loading screen. The loading screen, for starters, is fairly busy, has a white background, and will cause the players to scan the text while not actually reading what any of it says. There are multiple ways to use color and design psychology to make the players read it more. Even without the loading screen, the map should still be intuitive, which it isn’t. The terrain is not very high-contrast, for one. In the original StarCraft, everything was sprite-based, meaning that the lines were sharper and the different textures were more defined. In StarCraft II, all of it is a noisy normal-mapped pool of mud, in essence. Change the lighting settings to lower specularity and make the terrain more contrasting to help fix this. Also, the music is almost calming, which contrasts too much with the premise of “dodge explosions or die in a shower of blood.” Even the goal circle is sometimes out of view and the camera can be scrolled, which causes the players to have to spend more time wrestling with the point of view and wondering what the blue circle than is necessary. A locked cam that has everything in view would be preferred.
However, all that is peanuts compared to the fact that the explosions themselves are really awful. All three explosion types (blue and orange, plus the red flavor that appears only once or twice in the game) make a massive distortion bubble and spawn an explosion with a lengthy animation. First of all, they look a lot less deadly than the really are. This causes new players to, on occasion, not realize that they are deadly until they die once or twice. Seriously, lots of players just run across the board without so much as a moment’s consideration on the first few levels. After that they die. The second problem is that the explosions have an ambiguous starting frame because explosions in the same square will often overlap in animation, have a lengthy scale-up sequence, and cause distortion. Basically, it makes timing one’s movement needlessly difficult because it’s tough to tell when the explosion actually starts. The third problem is somewhat related in that the distortion will make it difficult to see your own zergling. All this combines to a hot mess that is admittedly difficult to describe. It’s kind of like trying to play the game while underwater in a bubble bath. All of this applies to the blue and orange explosions. The red explosions are even worse because they are even more exaggerated and tough to spot.
This is all in contrast with the original StarCraft, which had very short, clear, nasty-looking explosions that filled the whole square and not much else. It’s just about the opposite in StarCraft II.
The explosion animation is long enough to leave a permanent blue puff in every square. Also, notice how the middle row of squares actually appears to be a row of circles?
Another weak point is the damned zergling-clicking minigame that awards the players the majority of their extra lives. A whole mess of zerglings is spawned in the 7x7 box and then they randomly move around. Five of them have wings. The perspective is top-down. Which direction do the wings face, again? That’s right, they face up. You have to spot the zerglings that have razor-thin protrusions on their back side. It’s tough to find them even in the still screenshot further down the page. It’s impossible to find them on the noisy backdrop they scurry across. The method to find them and get lives is thus the venerable spam-click. Yep, it works.
The minigame does not interrupt normal gameplay, however. This means that the players who take the time to get extra lives for the whole team can be screwed out of some potential gameplay because they will be spending 30 seconds to spam-click a group of zerglings while some asshole ignores the minigame to run through three levels as quickly as possible. This is supremely annoying. I think that the minigame should pause the game or else be removed entirely. I vote for removal, since the minigame was never fun to begin with.
If you can spot the winged zerglings, you do not need glasses.
The cornerstone of Level Up Bound, or any other bound-style map, is the level design. Specifically, the layout of the traps makes or breaks the map. The maps intuitiveness, the difficulty curve, and the style of the traps (theme) are also paramount. The original Level Up Bound had 100 different levels that got progressively harder and took a long time to get through, but the difficulty curve was smooth and each successive challenge was difficult but not impossible, so that once the players beat that level, they would get a different challenge with a totally different approach to beat it (thus, a different feel, keeping the map interesting). I could complain about the few levels, but to be honest, with the kind of designs that Chrinux put in there, I think that 100 levels of that would be boring. No, the biggest problem with the new Level Up Bound is the difficulty curve. Obviously, the first few levels are easy. They remain easy until the level with the series of row-explosions going from top to bottom. After this point, the difficulty curve hits a cliff. I’ve practiced, so I’ll beat it on my first or second try, but most players run into a brick wall at this point because from then on, the necessary timing is exact. A fraction of a second off and you die, basically. It would have been nice if the difficulty curve was more like a rolling hill as opposed to the Alps.
This map could have 100 levels if some better variety was added. What’s with the level that forces the zergling to move to the repeating explosion so that you have to spam-rightclick to survive? Why are there no more levels of that type? Twists could be added to some of the levels. Maybe some levels would have a 6x6 or 7x7 square, or maybe some levels would be played on a grid of triangles or hexagons. Perhaps one level would cause your zergling to slide at a constant rate so you can’t stop, and another one would cause your zergling to be slower than normal. Maybe another one would limit your vision of the level to just the squares adjacent to your zergling. There are many possibilities that are not being exploited.
I’ll conclude this by throwing out there that the scenery is very plain and there is pretty much no spice, flavor, or charm to the map besides the music, hence the bad flavor score. This doesn’t affect the score too much, actually, but it would be nice if the map was presented more interestingly. The real killer is the gameplay and content scores. There is an awful lot of room for improvement, Chrinux. I hope you keep going forward.
RATING:
Bronze: This map is decent, but rough around the edges or somehow lacking.
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It does indeed follow the rules of the review forum (it is a review). i.e. You don't need to score the map for it to be a review.
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I'll review this map, for sure. It's one of the few maps on my to-do list that I actually played before going to college, where I have no access to a computer capable of playing SC2. (This will be my last review until the weekend.)
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It's unclear to us whether you're saying Debates was removed from battle.net from Blizzard's interference or was simply put down in popularity for whatever reason.
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@Arelhi: Go
I will not be reviewing melee maps.
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I revised the review, JSYK.
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Retroactive edit: My standards changed, so all the older reviews have their scores dropped by 10%. This affects the rating of Destroy All Monsters!:
I did two of these at once, so here's the other.
This map was fun, but it was painfully easy. The monsters are really unique, though.
This is a Map Scorecard, not a full Map Review. I will not make my usual elaboration of the scores this map receives.
Destroy All Monsters! by KerenskyLI
Fun (Enjoyability, Thrill) - (B+)
Gameplay (Balance, Dynamics) - (C+)
Content (Completeness, Assets) - (B+)
Polish (Bugginess, Presentation) - (A-)
Flavor (Style, Charm) - (A)
Replayability - [1+]
Failures
Hard/Pointless to Micro - [-]
Map is Too Easy/Too Fast - [- - -]
Massive Lag - [-]
Bonuses
Cool Monsters - [+ +]
Good Progression - [+]
Urban Combat Gameplay - [+ +]
RATING:
Silver: This map is not perfect, but is entertaining and of good quality.
Screenshots
Your own forces will be putting on the hurt way more than the monsters ever could.
Infantry die fast.
You know it’s a bad sign when your own units have more beams than the mothership monster.
This monster didn’t even stand a chance.
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Went ahead and scored one of the maps. This is not a review, but just a general indicator of quality.
Also, with just a little bit of improvement, Ultimate Tank Defense could be Silver. As it stands, however, it just doesn't cut it.
This is a Map Scorecard, not a full Map Review. I will not make my usual elaboration of the scores this map receives.
Ultimate Tank Defense! by Cyrileo
Fun (Enjoyability, Thrill) - (C+)
Gameplay (Balance, Dynamics) - (B-)
Content (Completeness, Assets) - (B)
Polish (Bugginess, Presentation) - (A-)
Flavor (Style, Charm) - (B)
Replayability - [2-]
Failures
No Player Instruction - [-]
Strategically Unintuitive - [-]
Bonuses
Complementary Units - [+ +]
Good Path Design - [+]
RATING:
Bronze: This map is decent, but rough around the edges or somehow lacking.
Screenshots
The signature unit of the map: a tank that’s also a bunker.
This is one Mighty Marauder. Why is it mighty, you ask? Because it has two stacked marauder models!
A bad situation indeed.
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Directly from the stickied Law thread. All new reviews will be held to these standards:
III. Reviews
General
A minimum quality will be enforced on all reviews posted in the Map Review forum, regardless of the thread's origin (ie. a moved thread will still be held under these guidelines). In general, reviews should be of a decent enough quality so that the map's author (who will undoubtedly read the review given enough time to find it ) will be able to gain more insight about his/her work.
Laws
1. Reviews must include a written analysis of or discourse on the map. A standard paragraph size is an acceptable minimum.
2. The author of the map and the Battle.net title of the map (if any) must be present and clearly visible in the original post or the thread title.
3. A score does not need to be given, but a general opinion of the map must be present in some form.
4. Insulting the author of the map is prohibited unless the insult is harmless and used for comedic value.
4.a. No insult will ever be condoned if the map author is offended or in any way discouraged from map-making by it.
Punishments
Breaking any of the laws in Section III. are considered minor infractions. In most cases, an offending review thread will be left open so that the reviewer may fix any issues with it. However, depending on severity, III.4.a may cause a major infraction. For the corresponding penalties, see Section I. and Section II.
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@Bounty_98: Go
And you think that's an excuse to stop working on the map?