de_dust and de_dust2.  Without question the most popular maps of all time, of all kind, anywhere.  Fewer people know their own homes as intimately as many do these middle-east-istan villages.  Oh, sure, they know how to get to the bathroom from the kitchen - but do they know all the blind corners?  Do they know how long it takes to run from one to the other, in microseconds, and the optimum point to toss a flashbang on the way?


Over one hundred and fifty thousand players log onto Counter Strike servers every day, and most of them are playing something dusty.  Five percent of ALL gamers at any given time are rushing A or defending the middle section.  For many, if you aren’t playing dust you aren’t playing Counter-Strike, viewing other locations like cs_italy and de_nuke the same way you’d view someone putting ketchup in their coffee.

De_Dust2 on a COD4 Server?

But the opposite is no longer true: playing de_dust2 doesn’t mean you must be playing Counter-Strike.  Dedicated modders have come up with a dust map for Call of Duty 4 servers, and it’s a work to bring joy to the heart of the most jaded gamer.  You might know those archways like the back of your hand, but you’ve never seen that hand in such gloriously high resolution and with such modern graphical effects.

Of course, logging on to a Modern Warfare server running mp_dust2_classic is a completely different game.  It’s like meeting an old friend who’s changed since you last met, possibly by exchanging brains with an adrenaline junkie mercenary.  While it is possible to run dust-new-and-improved in Search and Destroy, effectively recreating the old days, you’re bound to come across it in Team Deathmatch.  Or, heaven help you, free-for-all.  And it’s brilliantly, utterly, incredibly insane.

The keys to CS strategy are simultaneous spawning and one-life per round.  Both teams start together, fan out, there’s some second-guessing and reaction regarding where the terrorists are going, then there’s the clash and mop up.  Add people constantly reappearing all around the place and the almost utter lack of cover across most of the map becomes a big deal.

The underpass (aka the counter-terrorist spawn) goes from being “highly dodgy” to “instant death”.  In a round with multiple martyrs and frag grenades flung left right and center, that low down pit is death in architectural form.  Even if you survive explosive destruction, as you come through there’ll be someone outside with better elevation.  And a gun.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. For about seven seconds until respawn.

You know your customized sniper class?  Well you can forget it.  While the all-dominating AWP might straddle the lands of dust like an eagle-eyed god, there simply aren’t any places for a CoD sniper to perch without being murdered.  The only remotely reasonable place is the blind-alley ramp facing Bomb Site A, but while there’s a little bit of grass along that no-mans-land of a wide alley now you’ll still stick out like the Elephant Man’s sore thumb.

It’s completely different, and after almost a decade that’s no bad thing.  It’s fun, which is kind of the point.  And it’s very nice to play a version of dust where an overpowered pistol isn’t king.

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.