Shipment, aka “The lunatic flesh blender in green and gray.” It looks like this:




though you’ll more often see it as this:




The worst map since a sheet of blank white paper with the word “Antarctica” written in crayon. How this abomination has stayed on CoD4 servers is a mystery, but likely connected to people who somehow feel good about skill-free high scores. For those unfamiliar the Small Square of Screwup, we’ve made the following helpful guide.

Shipment is to Call of Duty 4 as a bar-room brawl is to ice hockey - it may use some of the skills involved, but they’re all the bad ones and it’s nothing but pain for everyone involved. It’s as if after years of crafting one of of the best FPS games ever made, it was “opposite day” at Infinity Ward and they made a map to highlight every single flaw in the experience. The crates are unquestionably placed to provide sheltered niches for spawncampers, those bottom-feeding scum that hide behind your arrival point and machine gun people as they appear. Please not that the only reason spawncampers still exist is because we haven’t worked out a way to electrocute people over the internet yet.

The Containeryard of Crap also accommodates the game-ruining sports of the Three Frag Fling (using the 3x frag perk and throwing them all as soon as you appear) and the ever-terrible Martyr (drop a grenade when you die). You might notice that both of those perks reward people who don’t bother to “aim” or “hit things they’re shooting at”, traditionally regarded as important abilities in a shooting game. Imagine a basketball court that encourages people to hit each other and kick the ball. And where every match lasts three seconds.

The lack of cover and a target density slightly higher than lead bars falling into a black hole, Shipment is also the worst offender in the “Helicopter-helicopter-helicopter” loophole. If someone can stay alive long enough to call down the Chopper of Death (through luck, pacts with the devil, or being a scummy spawncamper), the high turnover of the map ensures that they’ll die, respawn, and have enough airborne murder-machine kills to call down another - certainly no-one can risk taking their eyes off the ground long enough to bring the thing down.

Some insist that Shipment is just a different but equally valid test of ability. Their grenade-spamming-”skill” may give them more points than anyone else, but this preference for “winning” over “the entire actual spirit of the game” makes them the kind of petty failure who’d knock over a Monopoly board, storm out of the room, and then insist they didn’t lose “because we never finished.”

If you do arrive on a Call of Duty 4 server running the Green Death, your best bet is to whip out the SAW and get all those LMG achievements: bullet-unproof walls and a crosshair that changes when you’re killing someone turns this 2007 gaming masterpiece into a child’s motor skills game - keep moving the cross till it changes shape and you win!

Except you’re playing Shipment. So you, along with everyone else on the map, lose.

Goldrush is the most popular map on Team Fortress 2 servers (recent update insanity aside), even pushing the almighty Dustbowl from the top spot. What makes moving a cart along a fixed track so compelling?



It can’t be the novelty - that fades a couple of weeks after each update, along with all the horrible TF2 achievementbox servers (aka “How to turn your favorite game into work in one easy step!”). As well as being added to the main rotation, loads of custom servers have cropped up offering Goldrush 24/7 and most tellingly of all, Goldrush/Dust TF2 servers.

That’s your first hint: the dedicated attack/defense dynamic is tremendous fun. There’s no such thing as a stalemate on a one-way map: if things aren’t moving forward then RED is kicking your weak BLU ass. But with a map so well designed it never becomes an uncrackable Chokepoint Of Death: there are always alternate routes and counter-strategies to however they’re holding you back. Protip: 90% of the time the counter strategy is “You need more medics you BLU dumbasses”. Looking at the win/lose ratio, we can see that this happens a LOT.

Why does RED hold sway on this map so often? Half of any battle is intel, and a look at the valve-provided “Death Map” for the stage reveals a major hotspot:

or as you normally see it:

This one section of corridor is slightly more lethal than a Predator wearing a necklace of nuclear warheads. A great stickybomb point, open to close-range sentries (and snipers from clear across the map), a Heavy buffet of Eety-Beety-victims and so wonderfully custom made for defensive pyros it might as well come with gas nozzles in the walls.

BLU can hide behing the corner and build an uber - but they never do seem to run fast enough when the RED counter-charge comes barreling round that wooden corner. I’ve seen more medics burned up at 90% uber than I care to count - and with so many medikits so close by, there’s really no excuse. Be ready to charge, but be ready to flee with that precious percentage at the first sign of trouble. Remember: a medic life without an ubercharge is a wasted life.

There are other hot spots (the final approach in stage 2 and the terminal corner in stage 3), but none nearly so deadly as that first tunnel. A few hints to help crack any of those hotspots:

- There are other routes. Outside of relay races, spending ten times as long running as fighting is not a good contribution, so don’t just march round the Corner of Instant Explosion trying to headbutt a level 3 sentry.
- Watch your back - and more importantly, watch your medics back! Some of the alternate routes work both ways.
- Are you a spy? Are you in the bottom half of the scoreboard? Then why not try going medic and NOT being hated by the rest of your team!
- If you must spy, be aware that after the first point is capped sapping the tele entrances does nothing but tell them you’re there.
- Don’t be an offensive scout on stage 1. What the hell is wrong with you?