I fucke dup.
I knew it was just a game, and I still freaked out and tried to get as far away as I could from that thing with its blank grin and its severed arms dangling like the limbs of a puppet, and my clan got wiped again.
They were pretty pissed, but funny thing, when I offered to let one of them take over, there wasn't a single taker.
Not one.
If I sound like a big drama queen about this, I guess, well, if you spend that amount of time staring at a corpse in a darkened room then maybe you're entitled to a little drama. And I guess it's kind of hypocritical of me to go off on one about teenage gamer hysteria and then vent about a spooky map for a long-dead FPS in the next breath, but you know what? This was tough for me. So bite me.
I was actually considering removing that paragraph, but I figure I ought to stand by my mistakes, even the run-on train-of-thought ones.
So anyway. Back to TRAINING.bsp.
It was around about this point that we decided to try breaking the map open in Hammer and skipping to the end. Aside from anything else, those of us who did dabble in mapmaking were itching to figure out how the designer had managed some of its tricks.
No luck, though. Opening the thing up crashed the editor catastrophically. wrinkles, our expert modder, reckoned that he'd filled the file with garbage geometry that made it impossible to open. It's possible that a modern computer would have the memory to handle it, but our shitty boxes back then didn't stand a chance.
In any case, I was ready for the jump scare the second time round, and I didn't even flinch at the sample of heavy, strained breathing that you get now that the dead girl is standing there, inches from your character's face.
It's at this point in the development cycle that the mapmaker must have had a brainstorm, because now it starts to talk to you. Not in the local chat. Not in text. Through a strained, high-pitched voice sample, that instructs you to nod if you understand. A simple swish of the mouse, up and down.
It's a cheap trick, because of course if you nod too much then you'll break eye contact with it, and in the dark it's difficult to tell exactly how far is too far. It also means that you find yourself nodding along at your computer desk, just like how you're probably nodding without realising as you read this.
So for a while you listen, while it talks and gets you to nod along to whatever it's saying, because while you don't know at this point that disobeying it will kill the rest of your team -- and you're not sure the game can even tell whether your character is nodding yet -- you sure as hell don't want to disappoint them a second time. It gets you to promise not to talk to them without its permission, and to agree about how exciting it feels to have the power to kill so many people with such little effort.
Again, all cheap tricks, but it plays them well, and -- for me at least -- it was playing them for the first time.
What screwed things up for that run was the game's next instruction to me: to type "Time to die" and the name of one of the players. It's probably easiest to just post the transcript after this:
Prof.Player(1): Time to die Jersey99
h0nk: pp what are you doing?
Jersey99 died.
Jersey99 (DEAD): What the fuck?
h0nk: not funny, man
Cpl.lpC: Did he fucke dup again?
90th: god dammit
Prof.Player(1): Game told me to type it, sorry. Part of its mind games.
Cpl.lpC died.
h0nk died.
Cpl.lpC (DEAD): YOU STUPID ASSHOLE
Jockstrap died.
90th died.
wrinkles died.
The death count carried on from there. When the game tells you to stop talking in chat, it's not joking around.