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Today’s advent calendar window is a past window on Xmas. It takes us back to the days of LAN parties and dial-ups, demo discs and FilePlanet, before multiplayer shooters fell under a developmental spell. That’s not clean, maybe. There were a lot of holes back then. Some of them now run very large software companies. But at least it wasn’t grinding to ruin your bunny.
But of course, he… Crime!
EdwinHere’s a holiday project for you: install Straftat’s base, find a sympathetic and relatively cunning mind, and try to play all 70 random maps at once. It’s a game that I can only describe as a combination: both arty-farty and scented that hinges on mind-reading and foot-listening. Both a fantastic fighting game based around choices on a map, and a fantastically beautiful montage torn from old-school motor-shooters, Soviet carparks and entertainment legends.
The layouts are somehow both cute and disposable: you can burn them all like popcorn, lean into their borderline-poetic sight lines, or slowly chew on one of them and enjoy the atmosphere as seen in the developers’ previous single-player explorations. Game Babdi. The guns are irresistible, lending themselves to open playstyles. One map gives you single-shot guns and teleport doors placed on exposed gantries. Another common feature of Laser Mines is the large and wide wording hidden in a space on the back panel of the door. The 1v1 format creates a level of intimacy that feels unique today, more of a fighting game than an FPS. People are going to pick you up in the chat box, but it’s really fun. Well, bye!
Amazingly, everything is free, but you can show your appreciation by purchasing the Weapons, Maps, and Hats DLC, which adds another 70 maps to the game. Also some weapons and helmets. I can’t wait to see what brothers Sirius and Leonard LeMite do for their third project. Maybe the next city developer? Or a single city block detective game.
Brandy: Are you insulted in the chat box? i am not! One night I played Straftat for 20 minutes and was confronted by a decent hitter who kept interrupting me several times between stopping to chat about the game. I felt like I went back to playing multiplayer Soldier of Fortune on semi-abandoned servers with questionable modem connections. But yes, Edwin is right. There is something pure and beautiful about these miniature maps. It was enough to make me go back and finally play Babdi. It itself took 40 minutes. Two amazing games fell within the span of an hour. And both are free. It’s absolutely bonkers. What do these brother fruits drink?
Graham: My favorite part Tremblingits followers and its branches, Half-life It wasn’t the games themselves that were involved, but the culture that developed around them. As a teenager, I was browsing dedicated servers, IRC rooms, and message boards, chatting with strangers, and eagerly downloading the cultural art these communities produced. That means mostly user-made levels, and mostly crude, gimmicky, throwaway levels at that.
In fairness, the games themselves usually contain a few levels like this, anyway. Crossfire, in Half-Life’s Deathmatch, when pressed, shakes everyone on the map who couldn’t run into a cliff before the door closed, for example, or Facing Worlds and 2Fort or the mirrored islands of Quake 3’s very end. All of these maps were hopelessly unbalanced or borderline unfair, resulting in repetitive and occasionally frustrating experiences. They were also exciting, dramatic, and especially impressive in one-on-one battles.
Gone is the trend of shipping multiplayer games with massive levels and letting the community pick their favorites. Today, developers choose to render a single level as balanced as a football field, or they choose to choose the current level, turning off modes and maps to lighten up the player this way or that. If anything uneven got into the developers’ testing, it was quickly sanded down or sent to the attic to smooth out the sharp edges of the player base.
Then there’s Straftat, which takes mix ‘n’ mix to the extreme by shipping in 70 maps and then letting you buy 70 more. These maps are all designed for one-on-one fights that last a few minutes at most, and therefore have no chance of being disabled by gimmicks, exploitative lines of sight, and unbalanced kill zones. They simply pushed the experience to the extremes of shock and laughter in one round.
Like all folk art, there’s something more honest about Straftat’s rough edges in a way you won’t find in the metric-tested designs of modern live shooters. It’s an ugly trillian skin in Apple’s white design world. Blur_-_woohoo.mp3 is a Napster download in the world of monthly subscription streaming services. He’s a teenager from Glasgow producing hardcore tracks happy in the world of popular DJs. In the corner of an upstairs rug is a beige Compaq family PC, a Gamespy server browser, a dial-up modem connection, a download link sent by a Swedish guy on QuakeNet. It’s pure nostalgia and completely forward-thinking. It is Straftat.
Head Back to the advent calendar To open another door!
