After our humiliating defeat at the hands of a subway carriage, TRAINING became kind of a byword for so-bad-it's-funny map design: any time we got wiped by a particularly low trick (and trust me, there were makers who delighted in exactly that kind of deathtrap) we would console ourselves "At least it's not TRAINING".
Even so, we stayed determined to beat it. The second time it showed up in the random rotation, we made a plan. For all that h0nk had hated KING's military-discipline style of leadership, he was great at getting people moving in the same direction. So some of us stayed behind in the starting room; we had one of us check each side of the tunnel for alcoves we could dodge the train in; and the rest of us (including myself) went forward to deal with the ambush.
The starting room spawned a killer turret as the train showed up, wiping out the rearguard. It turned out that there were alcoves to hide in, though, that we'd missed our first time round. It did mean that the team who went forward to trigger the ambush were at much lower strength, and ended up getting picked off.
To cut a long story short, TRAINING required the players not only to take out unexpectedly spawning enemies much tougher than themselves, but to do it quickly and then flee back to the alcoves before the train hit again.
It wasn't a map that played fair, but that -- coupled with the fact that it had rubbed its gimmick in our face before we'd even started playing -- just added to our determination to beat it. It wasn't long before we decided to stop leaving it to the random map rotation instituted by Zeke (whoever he was) and start hosting it on our own servers.
Now that we were playing TRAINING.bsp on loop, dying and dying again as we perfected our technique and dodged that asshole train and the whistle of shame (which, we learned, it would only play if it was actually killing a player), it wasn't long before we mastered it. The ending was kind of a let-down: at the end of the tunnel there's a stairway leading off the tracks to a platform with one of the familiar Black Mesa airlocks, and opening the airlock ends the level.
There were still a few things that didn't make sense to me, though. Unless the map was very lazily coded, or unless that whistle sample was absolutely enormous, there wasn't anything on there that warranted the enormous download. But then, the whole thing was a mystery. I swapped virtual high-fives with the rest of the clan and we moved back to playing Zeke's random rotation of maps.
The next time TRAINING showed up on Zeke's random rotation we aced it. We didn't lose a single player to the Whistle of Shame or the teleporting soldiers. We had just reached the platform when h0nk spoke on public chat.
h0nk: wait
h0nk: don't finish yet
He'd spotted something: there was a vent in the wall of the platform that had some level geometry on the other side of it. A player wouldn't be able to reach it normally, but by building a human ladder we were able to get one of us up to check it out. We'd learned from the map's previous tricks, so we just sent one of us through.
divisible_by_zero: Guys, this is weird
divisible_by_zero: There's a bedroom on the other side
h0nk: any doors?
divisible_by_zero: One, plus a window. Both locked. Gonna check the room out.
divisible_by_zero: Oh gross
At that, we couldn't stop ourselves. Everybody who could make it climbed onto h0nk's back and crawled through the vent. On the other side, the maker of TRAINING had built a surprisingly detailed replica of a bedroom: far better-built than the rest of the map had been. The window looked out on a grimy, moonlit parking lot, as if we were in a motel room somewhere, but the room itself was incongruously clean and well-lit. And covered, as so depressingly often seemed to be the case among amateur mapmakers, with 'posters' of anime girls in not-quite-porn poses.
I was the last to get there, so I was crawling through a logjam of the rest of the clan as they all got into the room and voiced their horror at whatever it was divisible had found. A few of them had even spontaneously logged out, but I still had to push my way through a crowd of allied characters in HEV suits to get there.
In a chest at the back of the closet, the builder had rendered from polygons, in a painstaking 3D reproduction of the anime style, the dismembered corpse of a teenaged girl.
