I feel kind of bad about bringing this blog back to life after so long, but it would be wrong to leave this out.
I managed to track h0nk down.
From time to time, if I'm drunk, if it's late, and if I have nothing better to do, I'll search online to see if anyone has uncovered anything new about it. Or, if I'm honest, to see if anybody remembers us.
Usually I don't find anything. Last night there was something new.
I don't browse Reddit as a matter of habit, but /r/gaming/ had a thread about obscure video games where somebody had brought up the topic of TRAINING.bsp. And one of the voices insisting that it was a hoax seemed not only knowledgeable in the details of the game, but had a style that I couldn't help but recognise.
Like I say, in the days before profile pictures were a thing, a person's typing style was everything.
So I got in touch. I asked him if he used to go by the handle h0nk on Planet Half-Life, and if he did, whether he felt like chatting again.
It's probably easiest if I just post the transcript. Using the old screen names seemed weirdly appropriate, kind of like two old men squeezing themselves into drainpipe jeans to try and go clubbing again.
h0nk: so, i was honestly wondering if id ever be able to have this conversation
h0nk: and here i am
h0nk: so i guess that answers that
Prof.Player(1): I'm just glad you're ok.
h0nk: yeah. it was a rough couple of years but honestly i'm better off out of the leadership. too much stress
h0nk: still, thats what leadership is. you have to put yourself forward, do the dirty jobs that nobody else is willing to do. because it would tear them apart if they had to.
Prof.Player(1): Dirty jobs is right.
Prof.Player(1): I still get nightmares sometimes about staring that corpse down.
h0nk: yeah, you and divisible were the only ones who knew what it was like
h0nk: how is he btw?
Prof.Player(1): They're the only one I stay in contact with. But much happier. Less fucke dup. Probably for the best that it ended when it did.
h0nk: you think so? man, after we got that far in, you're not curious about how it ends?
h0nk: cos i still have a copy, and ive been in touch with a few of the others. i reckon we could make a pretty good go at it, if we tried
h0nk: what do you say? i could add you on fb, we could talk it over
Prof.Player(1): You want to try again? After all that?
h0nk: dude, its just a game. they're not real. nothing is.
Prof.Player(1): Maybe. I've kind of moved on from gaming now.
h0nk: lol were all kinda rusty
Prof.Player(1): The reason I got in touch was that I wanted to make sure you were safe. You sounded like you were freaking out when you quit. No contact details or anything.
h0nk: oh, that
h0nk: yeah, the game got to making all sorts of threats to me. pretending it knew where i was, threatening to kill me, kill my family. just some cold reading and lucky guesswork, looking back on it, but at that age
h0nk: well
h0nk: you have a tendency to take what people on the internet tell you for granted.
h0nk: anyway, while we were playing, my mum took a fall down the stairs. broke her hip. we had to rush her to hospital. nobodys fault. but i got the idea in my head it was me, or the game, or whatever. that it was real. freaked out for a bit, just tried to get as far away from it as i could
Prof.Player(1): Who the fuck are you
Prof.Player(1): h0nk's mum died when he was 5
h0nk has left the conversation.
Thursday, 7 December 2017
Monday, 19 October 2015
The last run
Delta Force made our last expedition into TRAINING.bsp on July 9th, 2005. h0nk took corpse-watching duty, and the rest of us made our way through the maze of traps. We'd figured it would be a run like any other: we'd gotten used to the creepy chat messages that h0nk was forced to communicate, and we were starting to get a handle on the way puzzles in the Junkyard worked. Things were going pretty smoothly when h0nk spoke up in chat with a message we hadn't seen before.
h0nk: guys, stop playing now
h0nk: this isn't a message. this is serious. this run is over.
h0nk: gotta go
h0nk disconnected.
That was all I managed to record before the game crashed catastrophically on me. The rest of the clan reported something similar.
We didn't hear from h0nk again. At the time, it was pretty easy to just vanish off the internet if you wanted. He deleted his account on our forums that night, as well as the email address that he used. If he had a real name, we didn't know it.
Things pretty much fell apart after that. Some of us supposed that the job of corpse-watching just got to him, like it got to divisible. Others speculated that his family -- his homelife was one of the few things that he was open about with us -- came in and freaked out. And a bunch of them jumped back to the conspiracy theory about KING. A few of us posted our findings on PlanetHalfLife, but by then the community was dead, or dying.
I never really got to the bottom of TRAINING.bsp. My life got kind of complicated for a while after that, and I drifted away from FPS games. If it wasn't for the screenshots that I kept, I'd be convinced it was some weird, improbable dream.
That's really all I have to share with you. I'm sorry if it's not the ending you were hoping for. We don't always get them. But I hope that at last it's been an interesting ride through one of the truly weirder bits of early 2000s first-person shooters.
h0nk: guys, stop playing now
h0nk: this isn't a message. this is serious. this run is over.
h0nk: gotta go
h0nk disconnected.
That was all I managed to record before the game crashed catastrophically on me. The rest of the clan reported something similar.
We didn't hear from h0nk again. At the time, it was pretty easy to just vanish off the internet if you wanted. He deleted his account on our forums that night, as well as the email address that he used. If he had a real name, we didn't know it.
Things pretty much fell apart after that. Some of us supposed that the job of corpse-watching just got to him, like it got to divisible. Others speculated that his family -- his homelife was one of the few things that he was open about with us -- came in and freaked out. And a bunch of them jumped back to the conspiracy theory about KING. A few of us posted our findings on PlanetHalfLife, but by then the community was dead, or dying.
I never really got to the bottom of TRAINING.bsp. My life got kind of complicated for a while after that, and I drifted away from FPS games. If it wasn't for the screenshots that I kept, I'd be convinced it was some weird, improbable dream.
That's really all I have to share with you. I'm sorry if it's not the ending you were hoping for. We don't always get them. But I hope that at last it's been an interesting ride through one of the truly weirder bits of early 2000s first-person shooters.
h0nk in charge
Things got pretty ugly after that. Accusations started flying around that I had done it deliberately, somehow, that I'd created the map in order to fuck with them, that I was 'spying' on the clan on behalf of KING and this was part of his revenge on us. A few of them even talked about doxxing me, ostensibly to confirm that I wasn't an alt of KING's. The usual bullshit, but the fact that the clan had been banging their collective heads against this map for so long hadn't exactly been good for morale. There's something about the way it's built: something that goes beyond regular tension and jump scares and makes you feel kind of sick and dirty inside -- degraded, even -- for even coming into contact with it, and I guess we were all starting to feel it.
Even after cooler heads prevailed, nobody was happy for me to carry on with corpse-watching duty. So from there on in, with nobody else ready to step up, h0nk eventually volunteered -- with orders to the clan to ignore anything and everything that he typed -- and I got to see just how bad the rest of TRAINING got.
It got pretty bad. The rest of the clan must have gotten blase about it, but I still found something pretty fucked-up about navigating through a level that was half gauntlet of deathtraps and half museum to poorly-drawn art. Once into the junkyard (our name for the area with the rusted-metal walls) they stopped looking even remotely human: sporting the wrong number of eyes, impossible proprtions, limbs with too many bends, like some sort of bizarre sexualised Cubist painting. Whenever I tried to bring it up, the others just shrugged it off, told me to shut up and move on.
In their defence, once the players hit the Junkyard they're on the clock. The corpse will keep on asking the player watching her for a name to pick off, and the wait in between will get shorter and shorter. The messages that she forced h0nk to type got stranger and stranger, too. I was expecting it to try and fake us out with messages to abort, instructions to press Alt+F4, or graphic threats of violence, and to be fair we did get our share of those too. But there were plenty that just seemed fairly innocuous, or entirely non-sequitur.
h0nk: i guess this is how leadership works, right?
h0nk: it's weird, she sounds almost sad now.
h0nk: i don't think she actually wants to kill any of you. she just needs me to understand.
I'm getting close to the end now, and I ought to admit here and now that I don't have a way to close this. I can tell you everything that happened, and why we never got to see the end of TRAINING, but if you want to know what happens at the end of the map, then your only option is to somehow hunt it down yourself.
For obvious reasons, I can't recommend it, though.
Even after cooler heads prevailed, nobody was happy for me to carry on with corpse-watching duty. So from there on in, with nobody else ready to step up, h0nk eventually volunteered -- with orders to the clan to ignore anything and everything that he typed -- and I got to see just how bad the rest of TRAINING got.
It got pretty bad. The rest of the clan must have gotten blase about it, but I still found something pretty fucked-up about navigating through a level that was half gauntlet of deathtraps and half museum to poorly-drawn art. Once into the junkyard (our name for the area with the rusted-metal walls) they stopped looking even remotely human: sporting the wrong number of eyes, impossible proprtions, limbs with too many bends, like some sort of bizarre sexualised Cubist painting. Whenever I tried to bring it up, the others just shrugged it off, told me to shut up and move on.
In their defence, once the players hit the Junkyard they're on the clock. The corpse will keep on asking the player watching her for a name to pick off, and the wait in between will get shorter and shorter. The messages that she forced h0nk to type got stranger and stranger, too. I was expecting it to try and fake us out with messages to abort, instructions to press Alt+F4, or graphic threats of violence, and to be fair we did get our share of those too. But there were plenty that just seemed fairly innocuous, or entirely non-sequitur.
h0nk: i guess this is how leadership works, right?
h0nk: it's weird, she sounds almost sad now.
h0nk: i don't think she actually wants to kill any of you. she just needs me to understand.
I'm getting close to the end now, and I ought to admit here and now that I don't have a way to close this. I can tell you everything that happened, and why we never got to see the end of TRAINING, but if you want to know what happens at the end of the map, then your only option is to somehow hunt it down yourself.
For obvious reasons, I can't recommend it, though.
Nodding with the dead
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.
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.
Corpse-watching duty
The clan were pretty pissed at divisible right then, but h0nk heard him out. Divisible told us that the game had spawned a headcrab in the hotel room, and they'd broken eye contact with the corpse in the attempt to take it out. They also said, in no uncertain terms, that they wasn't going to spend a minute longer staring at a dismembered cartoon corpse so that some people on the internet could run around a maze of deathtraps.
This was a fair call, and divisible ended up leaving with our best wishes. Divisible got into WoW instead and picked up some new pronouns somewhere along the path. (Sorry about the older posts, by the way, I will go back and fix them when I can.) We still speak from time to time.
Our next plan was to have one of us watching the corpse and one of us protecting them from divisible's headcrab, while the rest of the clan tackled the labyrinth.
All of a sudden, though, it turned out that remarkably few members of the clan were willing to volunteer. In the end, I stepped forward, and Jersey99 stayed to take out the headcrab when it showed up.
Keeping your screen focused on a scene of gore, even cartoon gore, is harder than it looks. I didn't want to miss what the rest of the clan were up to, but there was something about that terrifying wide-eyed grin that kept drawing my eye away from the blow-by-blow report in chat. Still, I knew at this point that it was this or disappoint a group of people who made up, at that point, almost my entire circle of friends.
Jersey99 and I were ready for the headcrab, but it never came. It was just a sound effect, designed to panic whoever was watching the corpse into breaking eye-contact and killing their teammates. I found this reassuring, at first. It meant that we didn't need to waste an extra body on keeping the room safe, and that I didn't need to rely on anybody else watching my back. Then I realised that it would mean I was alone in the room with this thing, listening to the battle report coming in like the helpless general in some bad sci-fi movie.
And things did get bad. Outside of the hotel corridors, the map really stops pulling its punches. The pure puzzles stop, and the players have to jump from moving platform to moving platform, often while their teammates defend them from attack by multiple enemies. Whoever the designer was, they must have been years ahead of their time: you can encounter gameplay tricks in TRAINING.bsp that it would take Blizzard some time to develop and polish to a shine for the elaborate raid bosses of WoW.
The real battle is in the hotel room, though, and it is purely psychological. It turns out that the headcrab screech is the first, and crudest, of a number of tricks that the hotel room will play in order to get you to break eye-contact. I think the mapmaker tried it out first as a test, and when he realised how well it worked, let loose every cruel trick that he could imagine. The first thing to happen after the screech is that the lights in the room will dim, and go out, leaving you alone in the dark with a disembodied corpse.
The first instinct in this situation is to turn on your flashlight, at which point you discover that it has moved. Only slightly, and it's still in pieces, but by this point you've been staring at it for a good ten minutes. You know that thing like the back of your hand, which is a disturbing realisation in and of itself.
But you know that it is just a character model, of course, so you continue to watch it. Just you, the corpse, and a flashlight, alone in a darkened room, as your friends are picked off one by one somewhere else.
Sooner or later, though, your flashlight is going to run out of battery: a feature carried over from Half-life, and one which the designer seems to have anticipated.
Because just as your flashlight gives up for good, plunging you into darkness, you see it starting to get to its feet.
This was a fair call, and divisible ended up leaving with our best wishes. Divisible got into WoW instead and picked up some new pronouns somewhere along the path. (Sorry about the older posts, by the way, I will go back and fix them when I can.) We still speak from time to time.
Our next plan was to have one of us watching the corpse and one of us protecting them from divisible's headcrab, while the rest of the clan tackled the labyrinth.
All of a sudden, though, it turned out that remarkably few members of the clan were willing to volunteer. In the end, I stepped forward, and Jersey99 stayed to take out the headcrab when it showed up.
Keeping your screen focused on a scene of gore, even cartoon gore, is harder than it looks. I didn't want to miss what the rest of the clan were up to, but there was something about that terrifying wide-eyed grin that kept drawing my eye away from the blow-by-blow report in chat. Still, I knew at this point that it was this or disappoint a group of people who made up, at that point, almost my entire circle of friends.
Jersey99 and I were ready for the headcrab, but it never came. It was just a sound effect, designed to panic whoever was watching the corpse into breaking eye-contact and killing their teammates. I found this reassuring, at first. It meant that we didn't need to waste an extra body on keeping the room safe, and that I didn't need to rely on anybody else watching my back. Then I realised that it would mean I was alone in the room with this thing, listening to the battle report coming in like the helpless general in some bad sci-fi movie.
And things did get bad. Outside of the hotel corridors, the map really stops pulling its punches. The pure puzzles stop, and the players have to jump from moving platform to moving platform, often while their teammates defend them from attack by multiple enemies. Whoever the designer was, they must have been years ahead of their time: you can encounter gameplay tricks in TRAINING.bsp that it would take Blizzard some time to develop and polish to a shine for the elaborate raid bosses of WoW.
The real battle is in the hotel room, though, and it is purely psychological. It turns out that the headcrab screech is the first, and crudest, of a number of tricks that the hotel room will play in order to get you to break eye-contact. I think the mapmaker tried it out first as a test, and when he realised how well it worked, let loose every cruel trick that he could imagine. The first thing to happen after the screech is that the lights in the room will dim, and go out, leaving you alone in the dark with a disembodied corpse.
The first instinct in this situation is to turn on your flashlight, at which point you discover that it has moved. Only slightly, and it's still in pieces, but by this point you've been staring at it for a good ten minutes. You know that thing like the back of your hand, which is a disturbing realisation in and of itself.
But you know that it is just a character model, of course, so you continue to watch it. Just you, the corpse, and a flashlight, alone in a darkened room, as your friends are picked off one by one somewhere else.
Sooner or later, though, your flashlight is going to run out of battery: a feature carried over from Half-life, and one which the designer seems to have anticipated.
Because just as your flashlight gives up for good, plunging you into darkness, you see it starting to get to its feet.
divisible fucke dup
I should say right now that the clan weren't the type to be easily shocked. One of the things I respected h0nk the most for was drawing a line on the kind of 'edgy' humour that a lot of online communities at that time indulged in. That said, we had all fallen for links to goatse, and worse, at some point or another.
Even so, there was something about the way the body was rendered that just made you want to look away. Perhaps it was the way that the primitive engine made it seem to still be grinning excitedly, or perhaps it was just the level of effort that the maker had clearly put into modelling this thing and the world around it.
h0nk thought we were fucking with him at first when we explained what it was, and I had to crawl back through the vent and take a turn kneeling so that he could climb through himself. He wasn't impressed either, and he was trying to suggest we should move on when someone else -- I can't remember who it was -- realised that the door was now unlocked.
Outside TRAINING's bedroom is a long hall, wood-panelled with purple carpeting. The whole map from this point onwards seems to use entirely custom-built textures for its geometry, which would explain the large filesize.
I distinctly remember that I was one of the first ones through the door, and we had just started to check to see if any of the other doors were locked when a slamming behind us informed us that it had closed again.
The thing about the era before voice chat became commonplace is that panic makes a bad situation that much more of a clusterfuck, as people sacrifice the ability to move in order to hurriedly type "wtf". Personally I ran back towards the room, and got to watch the rest of my clan burst one by one into gibs before my character popped too.
It was on.
We went back to playing TRAINING on loop, on our clan's private server. It didn't take us long to work out what we'd done wrong: to keep the door to the rest of the map open, somebody had to keep their character facing the dismembered body. If they looked away, even for a moment, the door would slam shut again and everybody inside the new secret area would burst into gibs, one at a time.
Initially divisible_by_zero volunteered for corpse-watching duty, and the rest of us headed through to map the branching maze of hotel corridors beyond. 'Map' is the right word; the place was enormous, empty, and would take any opportunity to kill you without warning. h0nk was still not happy about this: he kept saying that he didn't want to legitimize whatever point the maker was trying to make. The more we explored, the more I started to agree with him: whoever built TRAINING clearly had a teenaged sense of humour that a lot of us had started to move on from, making players flip switches to kill the helpless 'scientist' NPCs before doors would open and they could progress. Thinking about it now, this was around about the time that the Saw films started making their way into the mainstream, so it could well have been he'd taken influence from them.
By now, though, we'd gotten ourselves invested. When we posted about TRAINING.bsp on the forums, we talked about the mapmaker's plans as if we knew him, personally, as if this had been a challenge that he'd set us to complete. Some of us were even starting to speculate that we did: that it had been designed by KING in an attempt to break our spirit.
Whoever it was, it certainly became clear that he had a penchant for tricking players into murdering one another with rooms like the Double Cell (as we came to call it). Here, two players would have to enter two prison cells simeltaneously to hold down levers and allow the rest of the group to progress. The kicker came when either of them tried to leave: the first player to let go of their lever would be able to escape, but the other would be crushed messily. The whole experience seemed to be designed to set us at each others' throats, and for a while it almost succeeded, but h0nk's patience, in the end, kept us together.
That was one of the puzzles that we had to navigate. There were others, far too many to describe here. I remember having to navigate through a maze of invisible barriers, while the walls of the room flashed in vivid, ugly, red-and-green zigzags. It wasn't until somebody posted in chat "Oh shit, guys, look away from the screen for a moment" that we realised that staring at the strobing walls had messed with our vision somehow, and we couldn't see colour correctly for a few minutes. The train from before made a few guest reappearances, now retextured so that its frontpiece was now smeared with blood and gore, with its trademark "WOO WOO" whistle as it flattened us. The mapmaker's gusto for anime girls continued unabated through the rest of the map, with the art style becoming more amateurish and crudely-scanned as the level went on. We started speculating that we were looking at the designer's hand-drawn art.
The first problem came when we finally figured out a path through the wood-panelled corridors and into a darker area with walls of rusty, corrugated metal. Almost straight away we heard it over chat: two lines that would replace "WOO WOO" in our shared patois as the byline for failure:
divisible_by_zero: Shit
divisible_by_zero: I fucke dup
and, just like our first foray into the hotel corridors, the chat filling with screams of frustration at divisible, players started popping like meaty balloons.
Even so, there was something about the way the body was rendered that just made you want to look away. Perhaps it was the way that the primitive engine made it seem to still be grinning excitedly, or perhaps it was just the level of effort that the maker had clearly put into modelling this thing and the world around it.
h0nk thought we were fucking with him at first when we explained what it was, and I had to crawl back through the vent and take a turn kneeling so that he could climb through himself. He wasn't impressed either, and he was trying to suggest we should move on when someone else -- I can't remember who it was -- realised that the door was now unlocked.
Outside TRAINING's bedroom is a long hall, wood-panelled with purple carpeting. The whole map from this point onwards seems to use entirely custom-built textures for its geometry, which would explain the large filesize.
I distinctly remember that I was one of the first ones through the door, and we had just started to check to see if any of the other doors were locked when a slamming behind us informed us that it had closed again.
The thing about the era before voice chat became commonplace is that panic makes a bad situation that much more of a clusterfuck, as people sacrifice the ability to move in order to hurriedly type "wtf". Personally I ran back towards the room, and got to watch the rest of my clan burst one by one into gibs before my character popped too.
It was on.
We went back to playing TRAINING on loop, on our clan's private server. It didn't take us long to work out what we'd done wrong: to keep the door to the rest of the map open, somebody had to keep their character facing the dismembered body. If they looked away, even for a moment, the door would slam shut again and everybody inside the new secret area would burst into gibs, one at a time.
Initially divisible_by_zero volunteered for corpse-watching duty, and the rest of us headed through to map the branching maze of hotel corridors beyond. 'Map' is the right word; the place was enormous, empty, and would take any opportunity to kill you without warning. h0nk was still not happy about this: he kept saying that he didn't want to legitimize whatever point the maker was trying to make. The more we explored, the more I started to agree with him: whoever built TRAINING clearly had a teenaged sense of humour that a lot of us had started to move on from, making players flip switches to kill the helpless 'scientist' NPCs before doors would open and they could progress. Thinking about it now, this was around about the time that the Saw films started making their way into the mainstream, so it could well have been he'd taken influence from them.
By now, though, we'd gotten ourselves invested. When we posted about TRAINING.bsp on the forums, we talked about the mapmaker's plans as if we knew him, personally, as if this had been a challenge that he'd set us to complete. Some of us were even starting to speculate that we did: that it had been designed by KING in an attempt to break our spirit.
Whoever it was, it certainly became clear that he had a penchant for tricking players into murdering one another with rooms like the Double Cell (as we came to call it). Here, two players would have to enter two prison cells simeltaneously to hold down levers and allow the rest of the group to progress. The kicker came when either of them tried to leave: the first player to let go of their lever would be able to escape, but the other would be crushed messily. The whole experience seemed to be designed to set us at each others' throats, and for a while it almost succeeded, but h0nk's patience, in the end, kept us together.
That was one of the puzzles that we had to navigate. There were others, far too many to describe here. I remember having to navigate through a maze of invisible barriers, while the walls of the room flashed in vivid, ugly, red-and-green zigzags. It wasn't until somebody posted in chat "Oh shit, guys, look away from the screen for a moment" that we realised that staring at the strobing walls had messed with our vision somehow, and we couldn't see colour correctly for a few minutes. The train from before made a few guest reappearances, now retextured so that its frontpiece was now smeared with blood and gore, with its trademark "WOO WOO" whistle as it flattened us. The mapmaker's gusto for anime girls continued unabated through the rest of the map, with the art style becoming more amateurish and crudely-scanned as the level went on. We started speculating that we were looking at the designer's hand-drawn art.
The first problem came when we finally figured out a path through the wood-panelled corridors and into a darker area with walls of rusty, corrugated metal. Almost straight away we heard it over chat: two lines that would replace "WOO WOO" in our shared patois as the byline for failure:
divisible_by_zero: Shit
divisible_by_zero: I fucke dup
and, just like our first foray into the hotel corridors, the chat filling with screams of frustration at divisible, players started popping like meaty balloons.
The Whistle of Shame
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.
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.
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