PRAHBLUM PEAK 304f6855
by Jon Irons
jonirons@gmail.com

Maybe you know me through my Underworld map pack (nowadays? I doubt it).
WELL! In the process of making Underworld, I came up with some diabolically
terrible levels that stayed in until I made something better that I felt had
the JUICE to replace them. You may have even played on these, whether during
their original lifetimes, or in the earlier version of PRAHBLUM PEAK, called
"Rejects." I've added a little bonus for the poor souls who had Rejects.

THE PRAHBLUM MEAPS:
00.Goodbye, Mother Earth (v1) -- This is the *original* GME, complete with
   exhilirating cliffs and stupid teleporters. Don't ask me why people like
   this shit. I finally got this and added it in just for PRAHBLUM PEAK!

01.Goodbye, Mother Earth (v2) -- The newer GME is a little better, but not
   by much. It now has less extreme elevations and no teleporters. That did
   not stop it from being my most embarrassing map ever.

02.Mmm, Skyscraper... -- I spent so much time on this damned thing. It's the
   spiral staircase in the middle of the skyscraper. For maybe three days
   after it came out, it was a technological marvel. (A screenshot of the map
   even made it onto source.bungie.org, where it remains today). Then we 
   played some games on it and I knew deep down that it was horrible. It took
   me far too long to replace this one... I had slaved over it and what did
   it do in the end? Bite me in the ass! The funniest thing is that a guy
   named Wet Noodles ended up making a knockoff of Skyscraper for his own
   pack later that summer.

03.Sails in a Gale -- This was never meant to be a great level, and I still
   love playing on it. There are just so few maps built like this. A few
   interesting notes about this one: the number of transparent lines caused
   Forge merge to introduce a sound bug (it added the ambient water sound)
   and provided the developer of Aleph One with a testing ground for the
   optimizations he made to the engine code. He'd fire it up on his G3 and
   see how low the framerate was. Incindentally, I used the primitive merge
   capability of my of JUICE program to combine PRAHBLUM PEAK without adding
   that stupid sound bug, another reason for re-release.

04.This is Hurting No One -- Even worse than Skyscraper because RyokoTK, my
   main map tester, said it was my best level yet. Then he changed his mind.
   Man, that sucked. But he was right! I was quick to make something far
   better than this mediocre pile of crap, and it really had only a handful
   of games before I retired it.

05.Nice Bikini -- I used this level for one of Ryoko's mapping contests, and
   it got second place or something. Even at that time, I knew it was way too
   angular and confusing, but I had to do *something* for that damned contest.
   In the end, Nice Bikini didn't work out too well, and I tore it out of
   Underworld as soon as I finished Thing in a Book, which executed many of
   Bikini's concepts with greater aplomb. Sadly, Ryoko once said he liked
   this map better than Thing in a Book. If you're curious about the
   annotations throughout the level, they are silly place-names for the
   members of the original [R]elic clan (the first Marathon clan to storm the
   metaserver, and notably the first real sign of the group that woul evolve
   into the CLIQUE).

I personally dislike most of the stuff in PRAHBLUM PEACK, but my adoring fans
often have other ideas. Some of them tried hanging onto the older versions of
Underworld for a year or more before I dropped this turd-bomb on them. The
only thing lacking was the first version of GME, and now that's taken care of.
If I do say so myself, my crappy levels are probably better than quite a few
other mappers' "better" works. But what are CLIQUEs for, otherwise?
