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.

Tags: call of duty 4, call of duty 4 servers, cod4, COD4 Servers, shipment

This entry was posted on Monday, September 29th, 2008 at 11:17 am and is filed under Team Fortress 2 News, Team Fortress News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.