Six maps, mostly quite good. (Lords of Chaos is quite buggy, but it seems to be alone in that.)They range from smallish (It's not a Tomber has fantastic flow for a small group) to very large (Embrace the Madness could swallow 5 or 6 without too much trouble). A good combination of styles here... almost everyone in your group should be able to find a map they're comfortable on.

A 5 map collection (well, 6, but one is not accessible, either in network or solo mode, and crashes Forge pretty hard). Mostly small, with pretty plain lighting/sounds Nice for pairs (except for Trax Re, which can fit more).

Replacements for the existing Alien landscapes (night and day) in both Infinity and M2. More realistic... and this version contains Hamish Sanderson's modifications to make the 8-bit versions look almost as good as the 16-bit versions.

An interesting demonstration of a technique that can (usually) weed out the cheaters from those that aren't using cheats in a given solo scenario. It doesn't always work, but it should work enough of the time that you (as a scenario maker) will get much less mail complaining about problems from people who only encounter those problems because they've cheated to a place they shouldn't be. (It was inspired by, to some degree, Jason Harper's Level Detector, and can be similarly used to control where a player goes based on his playing style.) Like others in this genre, most of the information ...

A mostly enclosed, tight-hallwayed map. (There's open space, too, but the dominant type is closed-in.) A few minor glitches, but mainly pretty nice mapmaking. Flow is good-there are multiple exits from most areas, and you won't get hung up on edges too much. Effort has been put into lighting, which (because of the mostly small spaces) shouldn't affect framerates. (The map could use a bit of sound, though...) Comes in two flavors-heavy on the weapons and ammo, for large groups, and lighter on both, for smaller groups.

A remake of the first outdoor area from Kill Your Television, with the addition of a pair of Juggs. Sort of weird... there's tons of SPNKR missiles here, but not one SPNKR. The physics model included, though, gives you missiles instead of grenades, and a whole boatload of 'em... so you should be okay. I suppose.

A simple concept, elaborately (and extremely well) executed. This is an arena for testing monsters. Standard monsters, custom monsters... doesn't matter. You get lots of ammo, and a safe island, and a setup that allows the release of exactly the number and kind of monster you'd like, when you want it. It's way more elaborate than you'd ever really need for this task, but hey-if you're going to do something, why not do it right? If you need a test map for your new monster, this would work quite nicely.

From the master of cool tricks comes a bizarre, but thought-provoking idea... a mechanism by which you can determine the difficulty level at which someone is playing. The included demo simply has different terminal messages for each difficulty level (kindergarten through total carnage), but you could, in theory, use the technique to decide where to send a player, depending on what level he's playing on. The possibilities are pretty far-ranging...

He's done it again... In response to Mark Levin's Coop-Only Level Bypass Demo, Jason has once again extended the scope of the marathon engine with a cool new tool. The enclosed map shows you how to set up a counter that can count events (number of players appearing, number of secret areas, you name it). The attached readme adds a few extremely innovative potential uses for the technique... if you're making a solo scenario, download this and process it. Use the technique... make Marathon better.