Natural Selection, NS_somethingorother, by kavasa.

I did NS_SOMETHINGOROTHER. Um. It actually had a name, but I can’t remember what it was now. It’s not Tanith… blah! I can’t remember.

ANYWAY.

I played a lot of games on this map. A ton. It wasn’t real great in terms of fairness between the teams - the two hive locations branching off of Cargo were better start locations than the one off by its lonesome way on the other side of the map. A lot of the areas were very friendly to Marines, who had the advantage anyway just because of range and the fragility of skulks. Trying to attack down the latter from Cargo into the mess hall (which was very nicely done, it had a little table and a cooking area and stuff) was pretty much suicide. The big hive location in the upper left was horrible - just a big wide-open space with very little cover. If it was your starting hive and marines got into it, it was over. Or late game, if they got jetpacks? Good luck killing a marine with a jetpack in that freaking place.

The crew quarters (I think’s what they were - they had lockers and stuff) on the other hand were awesome. Dark and twisty, lots of vent entrances, little alcoves to hide in in the ceiling - it was very tough to safely pass through there in the early game as marines.

And if aliens were winning, the end-game often became torturous because of that long, narrow ramp. If allowed to, marines on a public server could just wall in up there and pour grenades and heavy machinegun fire down the tunnel. You had to resort to kamikaze skulk-bombs leaping in and blowing themselves up to at least distract the marines long enough for fades and onos to get up the ramp.

I did some competing in the CAL ns laders, and this map was never really popular there because of its imbalances. It was definitely a map that went for atmosphere, and it did that really well. The competitive maps were fun, too, but in a different way. Their layouts led to tense situations, ambushes, desperate fights for resource towers, and surprise hive-kills. This place made it feel like you’d been sent to purge a spaceship of an alien infestation, or alternatively that you were hunting the weak and easily-punctured humans.

Good times.