Twilight Manor

Description
As suggested by the name, this map is a sort of manor house, although that isn\'t all it is. Being in my view more of an RPG map, I don\'t think that gameplay wise it\'s really up there, however it seems most of the community now tend to RPG more than actually play the game, which is a little frustrating, but there it is nevertheless. So no deductions for you Jenova. :)

I spawned into the entry hall, and whilst, the brick texture used seemed overly-large and somewhat cartoonish, the rest of the area was very \'pretty\' and the lighting was especially atmospheric. The entire map, for that matter had a nice soothing ambiance, which I believe was 50% due to the nature of the map, and 50% due to the music. I tried playing without the music and it just wasn\'t the same, so my advice is to play this map with the music on, or you\'ll miss out. There\'s a great variance of areas to try out, including a few duelling rooms, some dungeons, a swimming pool, a dojo, a boxing ring, a bouncy castle..... and so on and so forth. It\'s not all that original, and to my horror, It had a bar. People need to stop putting bars in their maps. Seriously, it\'s getting tiring.

The two best areas were definitely the outside ones, which looked very inspired by Arevass and FarCry, with the little guard towers and the circular pillars. They\'re a little small, and I actually found one of only a few unsourced lights there, but they\'re just nice to look at, especially the waterfall, although don\'t get too close if you want your framerate to live. Speaking of framerates, this map is probably the first large one I\'ve seen by Jenova which has got a fairly decent framerate, so well done there. It could be better - there\'s still portions of the map drawn to the player which needn\'t be, but it\'s not so bad that it causes severe lag.

Architecturally, the map is also above average, and although draws on themes from a lot of other people\'s work, somehow this map manages to combine them well. The swimming pool especially reminded me of the one from Tomb Raiders manor house, mainly due to the textures used in there, and for the most part, I\'m pleased to say that the map is well built. Of course, there\'s always a few buts. First-off, the bouncy castle just looks plain ugly as it is, super-lit. Secondly, you can jump on the walls and see area\'s you\'re not supposed to see. Finally the mushroom section. Not only is it utterly pointless, but if you look down you see a square block of water, and if you look up you can see other areas of the map from the outside. :( In the camera room, there\'s also a ton of HOM errors when you stand too far back from them.

On a positive note though, there is bot support, which whilst not brilliantly done, works well enough - and anything is better than crazed jumping bots. As I\'ve mentioned before, the best part of this map is the ambiance brought about by the music, lighting and kind of fairly-tale theme in some areas. Kinda reminded me a bit of the Mario castle at first, with the painting room and stuff. But I digress. Whilst the map isn\'t the best map ever conceived, I admit, this is one of the few maps recently which I have truly enjoyed exploring, and I\'m sure many of you out there will too.

New Sounds: Yes
New Textures: Yes
Bot Support: Yes

~Szico VII~