» Corporal Punishment

Corporal Punishment

Author: Gyro Gearloose | Rating: 8.75 | Download: corporal.zip

I’m taking a look at a Q1 map that was released back in Quake’s heyday, spring of 1997. Even though it’s archived as a DM level and is certainly playable as such, it’s best played in SP mode. I’ll be reviewing not only the level, but some very interesting custom .qc as well. The author went on to do work on The Wheel of Time (1999), GT Interactive. His skill as a programmer is evident in this work as well as in some of his other works such as the Indecisive and Gyro Bots, for Quake, and a plethora of fascinating things on his page.

Corporal Punishment consists of two maps built into a pak0.pak along with a custom progs.dat. It includes a small start map (gstart.bsp) with portals for setting skill levels. All four skill settings are supported, with the nightmare portal carefully hidden away. After selecting a skill in gstart, you can then choose to exit the map through a portal that takes you to the standard Quake start map, or a portal that starts corporal.bsp. In addition to single player, both maps support cooperative (4 starts) and deathmatch (10 starts) modes. It is highly recommended not to play these maps without the custom progs since the skill settings don’t so much modify the amount/placement of ammo, health, weapons and monsters (58 monsters on easy, 62 = normal and 64 = hard/nightmare) as they change the skill of the enemy. The one bug I found is a ‘GL cache texture mismatch’ which causes GLQuake to crash if corporal.bsp is loaded after any normal Quake levels. This is because several of Gyro’s custom textures have the same name as textures in Quake and this is A Very Bad Thing. Fortunately, it’s an easy fix. Since you need to start with -game corporal in your command line anyway, just add +map gstart at the end, and the Quake textures never get loaded into memory. Or you can unpack the .pak file and load the .bsp files up in TexMex, rename the textures to something that id didn’t use in Quake, then save the info back to the .bsp and repack the .pak (WHEW!)

Corporal Punishment is a treat to play in SP mode. The Corporals are the main reason that this level/mod combination is still one of my favorites five years after it’s release. For this review, I started out by running through the map on ‘easy’. At this setting, the Corporals were sluggish, almost lazy in their effort to track me and were dispatched easily. On ‘normal’, it seemed like they’d had their morning coffee, and on ‘hard’, get tied on! I also played a few minutes on nightmare just to get in touch with my masochistic side. The Corporals use the model and skin of the Grunt. You know, the easy-to-kill army dude with the shotgun? Get used to seeing him strafe and jump. You’ll rarely see him moving toward you in a straight line, and as for what weapon he’ll be wielding, it could be anything! There’s nothing more disconcerting than having a Grunt hammer you with a rocket.

Corporal.bsp is an above average level. The gameplay is straightforward with plenty of room to navigate halls and doorways. Objectives are clearly laid out and not difficult to follow. The map is not particularly complex from an architectural viewpoint, but at the same time it’s anything but boring and has it’s share of interesting structures. Especially cool is an ‘oven’ in one area where you can press a switch to ‘cook’ the contents! There’s a sound room in another section with a gigantic stereo system and speakers. Near the water area is another very interesting feature that relies on Gyro’s custom Quake C code. All I’ll tell you about it is that it involves grenades! The level has four secrets, none of which are needed to finish the map. Two are easy to find, one takes a bit more effort and the fourth can only be found after a determined search. Lighting is used properly and to good effect, with light sourcing lending ambiance to the surroundings and raising the tension as the Corporals hunt you…

If the level has a weak point, it’s in the graphics department. Most of the textures appear pixelated and blocky when viewed in GLQuake. Of course, the release of this level predates the popular use of Open GL and as such can hardly be expected to live up to the standards we apply to texturing today. Also, remember that way back in ‘97, not many PC’s had the kind of hardware that could handle running the build tools on the complex levels seen today. Still, the application of the textures could have been better with the use of lintels, beams and such to transition the junction of different textures.

I enjoyed playing Corporal Punishment and highly recommend it to die-hard Quakers who love a good SP challenge.

-The Mechanic