The best singleplayer levels in first-person PC games
Let me level with you
Last week we confronted Jank readers with the 17 best multiplayer FPS maps in living and possibly unliving memory. Did you think we were finished? You imbecile. You clown. Now it's time for all the brilliant singleplayer levels. And some of them aren't even about shooting.
We had originally sat down to hash out all the finest levels in first-person games without caring how many players were enjoying the view or dying from a ruptured skull. But after compiling that megalist we realised: my god, if we split this monster into multiplayer and singleplayer maps... we will have TWO articles. It was a revolutionary idea, and one that has made Jank approximately 0.05% more efficient this week. We provide stupid jokes and shareholder value.
Fort Frolic - BioShock
Graham: Someone, somewhere is going to say: what about The Cradle, the most beloved level from Thief: Deadly Shadows? To them we say: sorry, we haven't played it. But we have played Fort Frolic, the BioShock level from the same level designer, Jordan Thomas, in which the player is trapped in a district by Sander Cohen, an artist who works across mediums, from "creepy living statues" to "classically scored murder ballet"
The Lie-In
Our weekly roundup of links worth reading
Good morning, videogames. The Brighton marathon is taking place today. I'm not running in it, but I will be doing something much harder: crossing the road while it takes place. Before I'm trampled to death by thousands of angry people in shorts, let's consider some of the best writing about games from across the week.
For Kotaku, Zack Zwiezen asked a flock of developers how pausing works in their games.
“In most of the Vlambeer games and Minit / Disc Room,” said developer Jan Willem Nijman, “I take a screenshot (with the UI disabled), then either jump to a completely different empty room or deactivate everything... with that screenshot as the background, [and] on unpause jump back [to the game]. Sometimes there’s a 1-frame delay because that screenshot needs the UI disabled.”
Ashley Day wrote about the experience of going back to Super Mario 64, 30 years later, to finally get those 50 bonus stars.
I’ve known for years that your reward for doing so is to meet Yoshi on the roof of the castle and receive 100 extra lives from him, but I always thought that was a bit pointless. After all, why would you need all those
Jank Mail: Triple highs
This week in PC gaming
Another week has passed, which was good in parts, and one of the good things was a new Jank list. Brendy and Graham put their heads together to work out their favourite multiplayer maps, which is a pretty extensive rundown considering it should only be Q3DM17, and there are some good additional proposals in the comments.
I reached back into Total Playtime’s Text Adventure archive to reveal that the Mass Effect Andromeda novel doesn’t have the narrative restrictions of so many other gaming books but still found its own way to be not very good. Total Playtime itself turned one-ish and celebrated by answering listener questions. Aged veteran Jim Rossignol explained why the slightly less aged Hunt Showdown is still the extraction shooter to beat and Brendy’s inaugural Living in Sim turned into a bad time driving a truck in South America.
The gaming world had large had a fairly quiet week. There was a decent news dump from the reliably good Triple-I showcase: it introduced an extremely messed-up farming sim and told us that Warren Spector’s new thieving game is out next month, the developer of 1000xRESIST is making a game about
What you should play this weekend
Tell us what you are playing in the comments
Maybe you shouldn't play anything this weekend. Maybe you should step away from your computer, stretch your body, and grab some vitamin D before the sun disappears. Maybe your aches and pains would diminish and your spirits would rise.
Not me, though. I'll be hunched over my computer like a goblin as always. If you're similarly cursed, read on - and let us know what you're playing in the comments below.
KuloNiku: Bowl Up!
My kid used to play the Toca Boca games on iPad - which means, of course, that I'd play them, too. The best of the bunch was Toca Sushi Kitchen, which had you chopping items in a seaside restaurant to produce California rolls, et al. KuloNiku seems to be in the same vein: soothing, simple, tactile actions to prepare food for cartoon customers, with perhaps a bit more story owing to its presumably older target audience.
All Will Fall
What if Frostpunk but also Jenga? All Will Fall is about constructing a city at sea and making the kinds of political decisions that will lead
Truck Mechanic is the sim you abandon by the side of the road
Let me give you the breakdown
Living In Sim is our monthly column about simulation games, and the frequently stupid misadventures they inspire.
I like to test the boundaries of a world, and today I will do so by getting my truck into fifth gear and soaring off a bridge into a river. "Your truck has been destroyed," says a game over screen, bringing a sense of mild relief now that I cannot hear all the heinous gobshites on a walkie talkie who I have quickly grown to hate. I had such high hopes for my inaugural simulator in this much-hyped column, but here I am fully and apologetically sodden in the wet pits of a Latin American waterway. There are some car crashes that simply cannot be repaired. Truck Mechanic: Dangerous Paths is one of them.
It's a straightforward premise: all the simple pleasures of unscrewing wheel bolts and calipers in Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, but with the added terror of doing so on the edge of a deep ravine. Instead of working on bits of other people's cars in a garage for cash, you are now maintaining a single vehicle of your own, taking it screeching and sputtering across a South American landscape
Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag
At last, the Z list
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them and we'll be posting new episodes each week.
It has been a whole year of Total Playtime! Plus like six weeks of Text Adventure and one week where we just bailed for scheduling reasons, all of which means that the “one year anniversary” ep arrives around the sixteen-month mark. At no point did we promise to be organised or mathematically sound, and we remain very thankful to our Patreons (and the fine backers of Jank) for funding an entire year-and-a-bit of barely-focused rambling about PC games and things pertaining to them.
Total Playtime: Anniversary Sausage Mailbag
0:00
/4087.8823
With this instalment we finally hit Episode Z and with it, the final inch of runway before we have to come up with a new naming convention for the 27th Patreon episode. If you come back here in two weeks we might have done so; or we'll have just moved on to A1 or Cyrillic characters or something.
To mark this momentous occasion, we opened the sausage mailbag to answer questions from our
Here's our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels
These maps lead the way to our hearts
When Graham and I sat down to scrounge together a definitive list of our favourite multiplayer first-person shooter levels, we knew that many of them would originate in the late 1990s and early 2000s. We are children of the dial-up deathmatch, so it comes as no surprise that many of our most-loved maps are simple blocky arenas made of grubby textures and low-definition skyboxes.
But what has surprised me is how the best modern maps feel like classic favourites. Any fast-paced bloodsport today still benefits from the fundamentals of map design that were hashed out by the makers and modders of yesteryear, and some of the most interesting multiplayer maps of modern times come about when studios commit to a strong theme, just like 90s developers were fond of doing, repressing any consideration of long sightlines or cheesy camping spots in favour of a single funny idea. Okay, nobody at Blizzard is making a homage to Facing Worlds. But battle royale maps that dramatically evolve are all about flavour begetting function. And the Finals definitely owes a thing or two to Quake 3. Don't get what I mean? Read on, and find out.
Crossfire - Half-Life
Graham: It's all well
The Mass Effect Andromeda prequel has one thing to do, and does it badly
Toiling for Initiative
Total Playtime is a Patreon-supported podcast about videogames, hosted by Alice Bell, Jon Hicks, Brendan Caldwell and Nate Crowley. Jank has partnered with them to bring their premium episodes to our paying subscribers - but we’re making this episode free to all.
Text Adventure is Total Playtime’s videogame book club, in which we read a videogame novelisation and try very hard to like it. In this episode, first released to Patrons last year, we were joined by RPS’s Edwin Evans-Thirlwell to read Mass Effect Andromeda: Nexus Uprising, the first of three novels about Bioware’s ill-fated sequel and the first chronological instalment, telling as it does the story of how the wheels came off the Andromeda Initiative well before Messrs. Ryder showed up at the start of the game. That means it’s the first Text Adventure book that isn’t forced to slavishly reproduce the events of the game, an advantage it proceeds to squander at some length.
Text Adventure - Mass Effect Andromeda Nexus Uprising
0:00
/5034.631836
The end goal is right there in the title: the uprising on the Nexus space station, the aftermath of which greets you at
The homepage is over but you can signup for more
You like more, right?