Imagine there was a map or level you just couldn't get away from. One that you just couldn't forget about. I'm not talking about the 'learn to play' Willow Creek Level from Soulblighter when testing a new unit nor the shareware Episodes of Doom and Quake that everyman and his dog tried. If you played Myth II co-op or Myth TFL co-op then you played this. If you haven't you will. I'd witter on further but there's a video to watch, which is also a good excuse to better show off the Myth II 1.8.0 beta.
Awesome sauce if ever there was, repelling wave after wave became easier. Eventually we all knew it like the backs of our hands and we were hardened like the soles of our feet. And so the boys over at Project Magma decided it should be harder, tougher and less forgiving. And thus they created a harder version, they called it Shadow of The Mountain 2 and released it on the Myth TFL community. It was a run away hit and became the most played Co-Op of them all! Eventually everyone got better at it and it was beaten. Did it stop us playing it? No.
Along came Soulblighter with it's map and tag editors, along came Shadow of The Mountain 3! The same hill! More enemies! Harder difficulty! The only limits hit were the limits of Fear and Loathing and of the game itself. After all, there were only so many bits on the map including arrows, enemies, scenery, gibs, satchel charges, dud dwarf grenades and more gibs that the system could handle. This was the benchmark back in it's day for amount of single map combat content, in terms of replay value it still is. Just like revisiting Phobos really.
So why no Shadow of the Mountain 4? Well...things moved on. The story had moved on. If Halo 2 had been set entirely on earth would people still be talking about the ringworld and playing on maps set there? Possibly not. As the story unfolded new maps came out, ports of the ffa map Raid on the Plains to TFL was one, with other maps being ported the other way, various versions such as Rain on the Plains and Flood on the Plains followed. As did our next PoC instalment (but that's for another news post). Sure, there were masses of AI improvements and have been since Project Magma have been updating Myth, object and item counts have been improved, ways of deleting excess 'litter' in maps means that the game doesn't stop when you fire over nine thousand arrows and your archers fire blanks. But sometimes you have to move on and progress and in this case it's down to the extended length of time it took to produce. This version works with several big tagsets. Bushido, The Seventh God, Blue & Grey v2, Lego III Solo and Special Forces. Want to face hordes of Ronin or have the Blue face off the Grey, like Margret Thatcher being taken down by back bencher John Major for Tory Party leadership? Now you can! And once you have taken a level from a simple port to a 'several' month reworking you may not want to do another version.
I'll leave you with the video below. It shows you how easy it is to lose.
Notes: Not all plugins and such are compatible with each other. For the best, most probably easy running make sure that Shadow of the Mountain 3 is the only plugin loaded. This level is based and ported from one made by Bungie for Myth: The Fallen Lords, modified and ported by Iron of Project Magma. The read me in the zip file will tell you more.
tain.totalcodex.net - projectmagma.net
