Map Review of anitalink-lobby

by dunkelschwamm | March 27, 2022 | 3395 characters

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Anitalink Lobby is a meme playground from Sven Co-op memester Keen as well as @nit@ and w00tguy123. Whenever you want to experience 2010's 4chan memes through a 2016 lens, Anitalink has you covered. The mappers comes at us hard and fast with John Cena, Carl Sagan, furry porn, people porn, MLP porn, pepe the frog porn, and a couple disposable joke memes. I don't want to say that the mappers are in it for the porn, but the supposedly safe-for-work version seems to only be able to recover from replacing all its porn by repeating a bunch of Carl Sagan images instead- and there's still MLP porn left over. I'm just saying, when they put the imposition on themselves to make a version of this that wasn't mostly porn it seems like they did not find any greater inspiration.

The map itself is a large hub which showcases many map thumbnails, a few of them have buttons which begin a mapvote for the map in question, and many of these thumbnails are replaced with memes or in one case a portal to a mystery arcade. Sometimes it's porn.

The mystery arcade is, best that I can tell, the "meat" of the map. It's a side area with multiple playable arcade machines which are very impressively scripted. There's the Tron cycle game, Pong, Snake, and PacMan. Playing these games locks you in place so you have to kill your character to become free. The arcade also features a maze which can take you to a combat cave and a tunnel of John Cena faces, at the end of which a heavily HP-boosted zombie HECU named John Cenos can be killed to end the map.

Running around the hub area gives the players weapons which they will either use to fight the shocktroopers, bullsquids, and headcrabs which pop in all over. The weapons are just kinda laying around, and don't really provide much in the way of ammo. Thankfully, combat isn't really the focus of the map, so dying or being ill equipped doesn't matter much.

Overall, I don't think this is a terribly functional lobby map. There's not many working buttons for voting to change maps, the enemies that spawn in the hub area are annoying as shit, and the focus seems to be on other things. If you want to play a meme playground from 2016, this might be your thing. However, I don't find meme humor to age very well, and find it to give me the same feeling as looking back on a cringy thing I may have done as a teenager. The map has some interesting stuff here and there, and seems to harbor some secrets beyond just what my teammate and I found. I can't say I'd necessarily recommend this experience.

Unless you're just in it for the porn. Keen, @nit@, and w00tguy123've got you covered in that aspect.

Pros:

  • A variety of images act as a time capsule of meme humor on the internet in 2016
  • The arcade machines are actually really impressive
  • I think the John Cena tunnel at the end of the maze was an example of the surrealism really working

Cons:

  • A variety of images act as a time capsule of meme humor on the internet in 2016
  • Weapons get no ammo
  • Enemies in the hub area were annoying as shit
  • Most of the hub's maps have no built-in access
Score: 4.7 / 10
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