A Jazztronomical Score: Part Four
By Mento 0 Comments
Greetings! I am your host, Hugh Jazztronauts, and welcome to a blog. Now that I've demonstrated every facet of this wonderful game-slash-guided tour of half-baked Gmod maps in my previous updates, I've decided to truncate the heist journalizing process down to a handy set of bulletpoints. While I'm still aiming to complete a few fetch quests that my kitty hosts have provided me - namely: cars, dolls, headcrabs, or the eminent theoretical physicist Dr. Isaac Kleiner - I'm going to be bouncing from world to world with only the briefest pauses to smell the roses (and steal them), marvelling at the ingenuity or lack thereof of their construction.
Be sure to revisit some of the greatest crimes in my past (unless you're a cop): Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.
Heist the Twelfth
- Map Name: "Valve Museum"
- Purpose for Visiting: Curiosity, mostly. I also figured that I needed some very "Valve game specific" resources, in particular Dr. Kleiner and the Headcrabs (my favorite '00s alt-rock band), and a museum was likely to have "exhibits" of Half-Life props among others.
- Shards Available: 7
- Shards Acquired: 1
- Red Cube: Unactivated.
- Desired Props: Cars! We got the final two cars required for Bartender.
- Haul: $4,085.
- Post-Heist Report: As you can see from the accompanying screenshot, there were a few issues with the map. It was a nightmare to navigate with purple walls and no floor, so I bailed pretty quick. I still consider it a success though, given that I grabbed those cars from the parking lot outside the main building before leaving.
Interlude: Bartender
Heist the Thirteenth (really should've picked a horror map for this one)
- Map Name: "Shrek Swamp Murder Map"
- Purpose for Visiting: Definitely curiosity. Nobody had requested the butchered corpse of DONKAY but I still wanted to know what the deal was with this map. Shrek memes are a dime a dozen (they have layers, I'm told) but sometimes a master thief just has to know.
- Shards Available: 3.
- Shards Acquired: 3.
- Red Cube: Activated. Shrek's gonna have to live somewhere else now.
- Desired Props: None.
- Haul: $29,940.
- Post-Heist Report: Somebody once told me that Gmod was going to roll me, but I didn't expect to be rolled this hard. This map was a complete bust: about 20' square all told in size and no fairytale murders or anything of the sort to witness. Just a tree trunk with some furniture and foliage. At least the benefit of a tiny map is that all the props are worth more, since they calculate their value based on rarity (or they spread out a specific total across all of a map's props, which makes those with small prop numbers worth more apiece. Ah, the enigmata of prop hunting).
Heist the Fourteenth
- Map Name: "ph_VillaHouse_2017"
- Purpose for Visiting: It's a prop hunt map! I don't think it was intended to be used with this game, probably more likely a standalone thing, but I figured if you can count on a prop hunt map for anything it's a large number and variance of props. Stands to reason, right?
- Shards Available: 5.
- Shards Acquired: 5.
- Red Cube: Activated.
- Desired Props: None.
- Haul: $21,629.
- Post-Heist Report: Well, there certainly were a lot of props. Nothing I needed, but I had a grand old time burglarising this million-dollar villa all the same. There wasn't quite the prop variance I expected though; I might have got the wrong impression as to what a prop hunt map actually is. Sounds like the idea is that you either hide a prop, or disguise yourself as one, and have the opposite team try to find it/you. I wonder if scavenger hunt maps are a different thing?
Heist the Fifteenth
- Map Name: "slender_infirmary"
- Purpose for Visiting: I still maintain an ever-diminishing belief that my best hope for creepy dolls are on horror maps. A spooky hospital might have spooky kids' wards, maybe with sinister nursery rhymes being piped in over the tannoy. Besides, I heard Slenderman likes children, though he couldn't eat a whole one.
- Shards Available: 4.
- Shards Acquired: 4.
- Red Cube: Activated. There are fates worse than Slenderman out there.
- Desired Props: None.
- Haul: $15,086.
- Post-Heist Report: Well, so much for my hoping to capture a Slenderman (he's my generation's Bigfoot!) or much of anything else. Like a few other horror maps I've visited in Jazztronauts, some of the map's flags were still intact: in particular, there was one that caused all the lights to go off with a creepy laugh, which I didn't enjoy a whole lot. Good thing a flashlight comes standard as part of the Jazztronauts Thievery Kit. I did find some bloody corpses (one-upping that Shrek map), but Pianist hasn't asked me for any of those yet.
Heist the Sixteenth
- Map Name: "gm_abandonment"
- Purpose for Visiting: OK, this might be a stretch of logic, but when I saw this map and determined some idea of its theme from the screenshot on the right, I had in mind a "baby's shoes; never worn" sentiment, except maybe with worn dolls? Kind of a long shot, I realize, but my urban explorer senses were tingling (though if you "urban explore" a lot that tingling sensation is probably tetanus).
- Shards Available: 0.
- Shards Acquired: 0.
- Red Cube: Nonexistent.
- Desired Props: None.
- Haul: $26,858.
- Post-Heist Report: This one was just depressing. Though it wasn't the smallest map I'd visited, it had zero shards and no red cube. What props it had were garbage (literally garbage strewn about the floors of its abandoned tenement building) and the only sound effects were the buzzing of cheap lights and a distant cough of an old hobo. Curious thing was, all those rundown lamps and empty cans were worth a mint: maybe the sheer bleak sadness associated with them generated some kind of value-add in the weird metaphysical rules that govern the Jazztronauts universe.
Heist the Seventeenth
- Map Name: "Kakariko Prop Hunt Map"
- Purpose for Visiting: Sometimes I just pick out a place because it looks cool as hell. A fully 3D A Link to the Past Kakariko Village to explore? Sign me up. Doesn't even matter that no-one back at Bar Samsara will ever ask me for rupees or SNES-era shrubbery.
- Shards Available: 0.
- Shards Acquired: 0.
- Red Cube: Activated. If anyone asks, Ganon came by.
- Desired Props: None.
- Haul: $21,791.
- Post-Heist Report: Again, little surprised at the lack of shards. It wasn't a tiny map - the original Kakariko was like nine screens taped together - but I still couldn't find anything. Oddly, it does say there were shards to be found, but not in Jazztronauts's usual font. It looked like something built into the area itself, presumably because it's also a prop hunt map. The "shard" vanished as soon as I hit the red cube though, so that mystery died with everything else on the map once the cube performed its evil work. Even if I didn't get a whole lot out of it, it was worth checking this map out for the incredible work involved in its creation.
I'd better call it here for now. My vast swag income this time allowed me to purchase the Gmod Item Spawner, though as might be expected the game doesn't count props generated with this tool towards the side-quest totals. I mean, that would be cheating. Maybe I'll figure out some other use for creating random trash later on, but for the time being I'm going to keep trying to find these props legit. I might have to give up on the horror maps for a while though (that hospital jumpscare did me a frighten) and just see if anyone on Gmod has made a Half-Life level in the last 10 years for all my headcrab/Kleiner needs. See you when I see you, cats and kittens.