Game:

Minecraft (2011)

Duration: 3:50

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9

Map name: Chopping Mall
Map author: H2HMud Wad Team

I already demoed this back in December 2020, but I figured it's a bit old, so sub-4 shouldn't be too bad. I wasn't wrong, it was basically my first exit (3:51 IIRC), and it actually proved somewhat difficult to beat, although I put fewer than 200 attempts in. Without advanced/extended HUD, it's hard to even get a valid max here, and most of the time there's too much cleanup to do anyway to exit quickly. Still, since sub-4 was easy, I wanted to at least break another second barrier, so there you have it; 3:3x is probably doable, though, and maybe lower, it remains hard to have a confidence in the route here with how many triggers and options there are. This one is quite different from both mine and the old Lawrence Kirby route; it's a bit of a mix of both, really, with some extra additions. I delay the rocket pickup until much later since its benefit is not really there early on, but I do incorporate his lowered area cheese since it's just a really nice place to group up the enemies and safely take most of them out. There's a bit less problem with scattered enemies here than my other route, but it's still annoying.

I didn't comment much on the map back when I did it back then, but I suppose I would say it's the worst out of the bunch besides map 15 (which is just too easy and bland). Map 12 suffers from some RNG annoyance and overall balancing problems, but it's at least fairly fun and has only mild issues with map cleanup, and map 14 is actually more fun to max than it seems from the get-go once you get the handle on it. This one suffers from horrible balancing IMO because of all the shotgunners. IMO, they're one of the worst monsters in the game to use really, alongside spectres, which also feature in this map, as they more often than not cheapen the difficulty of encounters rather than make them interesting. That's not to say either can't be used creatively at all or that shotgunners don't work casually in incidental combat, but this sort of spamming does little to further my enjoyment of the gameplay. The no-armor start is horrible, even in spite of the huge amount of health, and a bit of armor, even green, would do wonders to help with the way the map plays. That said, they generally don't add much to this map in terms of enjoyment, so just revenants or maybe adding some other stuff would be much more fun.

The other problem is the general symmetry of the map; all of the other contest maps are just much more interesting in general. This one feels very copy-pastey, and even though all the sides are technically different, the worst result of this is that monsters get stuck and scatter all over the place, which makes max painful to go for. The map also takes it further by making each side have different random triggers for opening monsters, which is kinda annoying for routing and each teleporter around the center ring has each side straight up take you to a different part of the map, so monsters end up teleporting all over the place too. Overall, it's more fun than map 15 by virtue of having at least somewhat interesting gameplay, but it's too frustrating for its own good I think. :D

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