3/12/2018 - "One Day in the Life of..." by Chris Burgess

[Jigoku]

Map Title: One Day In The Life Of...
Author: Chris Burgess
From: One Day
Filename: NIGHT.unr
Music Files: DisSh.umx and Newmca.umx






Synopsis: Brutes and other unplesentries invade this beautiful Nali castle.

Discuss!

[UB_]

I was supposed to pick the large temple map but ultimately I got confused and this was chosen instead. Not that's bad or anything really!
It's a decent finisher level, sorta memorable because it's weird as fuckballs. For a above-average tier mappack this level doesn't show itself as "YO I'M THE TOUGH LAST BITCH LEVEL" but instead it's very peaceful, keeping the consistency of the mappack with its bizzarre and dreamy progression. I'm still sure the whole thing is a dream sequence.

It's also yeah, sorta large, most of it just for show (the empty lake isn't anything more than a cool extra). The castle reminds me of old Spyro games - similar shapes, similar color choices, lots of z-axis and the ending has that strange Spyro presence to it where you glide toward a certain direction and so on.
The ending is weird stuff; it took me a while to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do. It's not anywhere near as hard as Thrall's ending but sure it doesn't make much sense (again I believe One Day is a dream) but it's cool, it's memorable, and stay in line with the mappack's theme and gameplay style.

As far as I know the true ending map never appears in MOTW because it isn't playable but at the same time the author put a crapload of effort in it; likely he had no time to balance gameplay or do anything cool with it, or was running out of time, so he decided to turn it into a flyby. Very memorable but overall a waste (though I think somebody made a purely playable version of it?)

[Semfry]

A pretty straightforward finisher past the initial impressive view but good enough; the main location looks good, and makes use of the skycity textures in a slightly unorthodox way, but there's not too much going on inside it (or outside, for that matter) beyond the Titan fight, although navigating it vertically has some challenges. Then you get the ending that wraps up the nature of this pack and has a nice reveal in the title (that I'm guessing a lot of people miss). When I first played it I did wonder if there was something more to the end when it just ended over the water, so it could have done with a transition to the Unreal flyby or similar, but I do recall it made the ending semi-mysterious to me back then...

[Sat42]

So I decided to play again through the mappack yesterday evening, in order to get a renewed appreciation for it.

Overall, it's great - the first level is only what I would call "good" (it works as an intro map), but I was reminded of how much I liked the Noon map's atmosphere (the music there fits it perfectly, and the skybox is surprisingly effective), the main temple map (Dusk, the only long map in the pack, took over an hour on my first playthrough and is actually quite hard) is still a great one despite lots of noobish stuff thrown in together with very decent level design and clever gameplay sequences, and the revisit of the first map thereafter is cleverly done (thumbs up for that ambush)... and the final level, Night (and this week's MOTW), is just about great too: memorable castle (shame the Titan fight is easy), memorable ending, and after the map finishes we get that memorable cinematic flyby (you know, Chris Burgess did put a lot of effort into it, but I remember watching the ending a second time back when I first finished One Day and something unexpected happened - I got crushed by a Titan when it happens during what is supposed to be "just" a cinematic, it's quite a bit of a shock ).

Anyway, UB is probably right, this was likely all a dream sequence - I mean there's just a bit too much weird stuff that somehow manages to be consistent between each individual bizarre thing, like for example the name of the Prophet ("Dane" .... I mean no offence to any Dane out there, but Dane the Prophet on what is presumably Na Pali is like having the planet called Bob or ... I mean, imagine if the hero/heroine of Unreal - dark, gritty, serious unreality - were called Twig. That's Banjo-Kazooie material. Imagine if I were called Twig? It wouldn't impress anyone. I mean, like, "oh, watch out for Twig!")
Also WTF with the reference to "Mein Kampf" - that's when you know you are playing community-made content of the highest calibre (joking).

Oh dear, I just re-read myself.
Anyway, I did play the other two Burgess releases, and they were definitely inferior to One Day but still good (and they gave me some ideas too). However, while One Day is a great old one (lol), I also think it is a bit overrated which is rare on this site, where things tend to be underrated (from a review score perspective, I mean). Like, for example UMS Solaris is just much more impressive (nod to UB ).

Looking forward to the next MOTW