I come across a blue-lit room furnished bizarrely with two office desks at odd angles, a large electrical generator, a globe and stacks of metal barrels. Outside, an iron staircase leads to a dead-end room where an ornate Baroque dinning chair faces another electrical generator. Nearby I find a missile warhead housed in a residential garage. Further along, a streetlamp in an alleyway flickers onto a giant cement crucifix. Ominous. By themselves these kinds of props would typically go some way to increase the realism of the space, but here their juxtaposition just seems ridiculous. In terms of the standards of professional level design, the map ranks pretty low. One of the buildings, an empty art gallery, is signposted with caution tape reading: "Abandoned Buliding [sic]." In one sense it's just badly made, but treated as a mood piece, I find it utterly masterful.

As I'm snooping around it strikes me that the setting of the map - an abandoned city - forms the perfect metaphor for the silent desertion of the server itself. The figurative and the literal precisely overlap, and it's wonderfully unsettling.
Wandering around this badly-made empty old map feels like one of the most atmospheric gaming experiences I've had in a very long while. Things appear more or less normal on the surface but upon closer inspection, everything seems subtly out of place and oddly malevolent.

As I'm indulging in these particularly lofty ruminations, another player logs on.

Roused into action, I do my best to defend myself from volleys of rockets as my superior (invisible) opponent dances around me, switching through the appropriate augmentations with ease. Several respawns later - perhaps noting my reluctance (or total inability) to fight back - the action eventually subsides. Positioned on opposite ends of the map, I use the lull as an opportunity to ask what's on my mind: "Hey, how come you're playing this old game?"

Autor: Anji Meiyuan Furniture Factory
Website: http://www.meiyuanfurniture.com/
Main Product: dinning chair