Jesus' 7 years of forge

Jebus

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Jan 10, 2013
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This is my own forge portfolio post that I probably should have posted a long time ago but I'm doing this now since Halo 5's forge is here now and its the end of 2015. Properly cook your anguses ripe because this portfolio is going to be chock full of "serious" maps that I've made, both bad and successful and at the end I'll be including the number of troll maps I've made in Halo 4 and Halo 2: Anniversary. I'll be including many screenshots or even video features I've had for some of my works so I'll be putting each of those inside a spoiler box to help organize things a bit better. Now let's begin...

Halo: Custom Edition
This game is an open modding version of Halo: PC released by Gearbox Software and Bungie that was released in 2003. It allows users to make custom maps, weapons, vehicles, sounds, HUDs, player models, and just about almost anything you can think about. The only thing you really can't touch is the game's engine backbones since the source code has yet to be released.

I know, this game obviously didn't have forge mode but it was still a Halo game and had map making tools that I've used to make some very regrettable maps when I was only 10 or 11 years old and I figured it was worth mentioning because it was my very first introduction to map making as a whole. I've posted maps to a community website dedicated to Halo: Custom Edition custom maps, tags, etc. I actually used the forums there too but being the 10/11 year old that I was, I was a laughingstock and made some cringe-worthy posts and I deserved it all. Anyway, here are the maps that I've made in this game (there could very well be more that I'm forgetting), and I'm just going to link to them directly instead of posting each individual map and screenshot here.
Killter: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3030

Snow Camp: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3799

Small Giant: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3800

Flood Guardians: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3895

Rainbow Road v5: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3920 (modification of a custom map but with "Baby Got Back" playing in the background)

Summerwinder: http://hce.halomaps.org/index.cfm?fid=3979 (texture modification of Sidewinder)



Halo 3
I think its safe to say we've all had a time where we've hated our 13 year old selves, well this era of my forging "career" was a good embarrassment but hey, I guess we all had to start somewhere. I wasn't yet involved in any Halo forging communities at this point so I still had no idea ghost-merging and geo-merging was a thing. I thought the forge maps in matchmaking which incorporated this was some sort of Bungie dev wizardry. I don't have any means of extracting a Halo 3 screenshot other than taking pictures of my television with a camera so the screenshots posted for this era are the best quality I could get out of them.

"Duck Hunt"
I don't have any screenshots or videos of this map because it was either deleted or was just left on an old 360 console that died but this had to have been made sometime in late 2008 or early '09. I vaguely remember making this glorious turd of a Duck Hunt ripoff map (which I forget what I named it) that I stole off the idea when I joined a custom game after being invited by somebody I played matchmaking with presumably. Nothing really more to mention here besides the poor and sloppy forge job I did on it so I probably did delete it to spare myself the embarrassment.

Maze 'n' Escape
"Will the zombie find its way through the maze and infect you? Or will you get the upper hand? 6-14 players"

Oh boy, where to begin... So basically this was another ripoff of a "tier" styled Infection map that I made in mid-2009 but the twist was that the Infected had to make their way through a small maze at the beginning... how exciting! I only have this map still around because I uploaded it to my file share and I found it just sitting there when I checked it some time in 2013. The forge quality is pretty bad but nowhere near as bad as I remember that Duck Hunt ripoff.
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The Infected started in the bottom-right corner of the maze here and the exit was obviously at the tunnel. Oh boy!

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This was the first "tier" for the humans. Humans spawned at the flat half-box to the right and made their way towards the teleporter on the right. The only way to get to the teleporter was through a stupidly placed gravity lift at the top of three ramps that spawned after 60(?) seconds so that it seemed like the humans 'held-off' this area. Just lol.

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This was the second and last "tier" the humans had. Behind the first teleporter the humans come out of is another teleporter to an armory (as seen in the little half-box towards the mid-left of the second screenshot) with a funny little fusion coil constantly dropping on top of it to create an illusion of a risk vs. reward, I guess. The little box you see at the bottom of the screenshot here was the last stand for the humans and a cover spawned on top of the box in the last 10-30 seconds of the game so that the "winning" human can just mindlessly slaughter the Infected without risking getting killed. gg balance

High Voltage
"Although recently abandoned by crew workers after a Covenant invasion, this power plant still powers 1/4 of Voi. 4 - 10 players."

As far as I remember, this was my third and last project on Halo 3 and it was created sometime in late 2009. Its actually my first competitive map design and in comparison to the other two Halo 3 maps, this one's forge quality was actually decent. The map basically looks like Foundry but with some pieces moved around and I had no idea how map design worked so that's basically about it, not much more to say.
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i r mastur map maker

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"He got a noooscopeeeeeeee!"

Halo: Reach
Surprisingly, I didn't have much involvement with anything during the Reach days. Only a month or two after Reach released, my brother sold the game for some reason and I moved onto PC gaming for a good time before I got my own 360 console some few months before Halo 4 came out. I don't believe I've ever even touched the forge mode before the game was sold. However, I bought a used copy of Reach somewhere in 2013 and I remade (demade?) "Ro Sham Bo" from Halo 4 in Reach when somebody asked in one the THFE Throwback lobbies for somebody to remake it and so I did. Therefore, this listing is a little out of order since I made this Reach map almost a year after Halo 4 was released (which I've already made several maps for at this point).

Reach Sham Bo Hallway
If you know what the Ro Sham Bo minigame was from Halo 4, then this is the same exact thing but in Halo: Reach. One claustrophobic, symmetrical hallway, two small red and blue bases, each player starts with a random weapon and only has one life. Its like Husky Raid in a way but actually fun and far less chaotic.
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Halo 4
Let's return back to order. While this game wasn't good, here's where things start to get good. I had some really fun times playing this game with friends and staying up all night, besides this game's major shortcomings. In the middle of this era is where I feel, as a forger, when my forging skill transformed dramatically.

Odyssey
"Six months following the disaster of New Phoenix, the UNSC deploys cargo base 'Odyssey', set on a large structure in Requiem."

Much like High Voltage from Halo 3, this map was a symmetrical competitive map that I built in the flat area on Ravine without any real competitive map design knowledge and had structural objects and *shudders* building pieces that were basically randomly placed around the map. This map was started six days after Halo 4 launched in 2012 and if I can recall, was my submission for the Infinity Slayer 4v4 Meet Your Maker contest.
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Overview of the center of the map. Just look at those skillfully placed structures!

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Building pieces are best pieces!

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Hazard Zone
"After recent attacks, this asteroid settlement was added to War Games. Epic battles for the middle. 'Danger Canyon' reimagined."

First off... why the HELL didn't I name this Danger Zone? The world may never know.
This map was a terrible, awful remake attempt of Danger Canyon from Halo: PC and now seen on MCC. I started this map at some point in what little time Halo 4 had in 2012, but that's all I can remember. This is when I first really dipped into the Halo 4's shortcomings of forge and truly experienced what it's like to hit the dreaded budget limit. This is why at the time I decided to call it a re-imagination instead of a remake (although I should have just called it crap) as it barely resembled the original map at all. I'm not even sure why I even tried to complete this map when it should have been obvious it was pretty bad. I'll let the screenshots speak for themselves.
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The Z-fighting really accents the map well.

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You can't go wrong with a bunch of HUD screen clutter!

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A map that not even a mother could love.

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Agoraphobia
Towards end of forging this map, I thought it was going to be a success. Hahaha. As like any other 17 year old wannabe forger that was amused by Impact's unique object palette, I too jumped in on the typical hamster-tube map with the airlock tube pieces some time in very late 2012 or early '13. Thinking I was being original, I even included an outdoor section with zero-G utilized by trait zones which cuts down on travel time across the map. In addition, I thought it would also be a great idea to include three pairs of teleporters all covered by a timed kill boundary but the reward was that you travel across the center of the map very fast. The map is obviously extremely linear and played like hot garbage.
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I wonder how much fun a hamster would actually have in this.

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Quality aesthetics!

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Transverse
"This UNSC nuclear-space project site was highly classified by ONI until recent events. 'Gephyrophobia' remade."

This was a somewhat interesting map, so to speak. It was supposed to be another remake, this time of Gephyrophobia from Halo: PC and now seen on MCC. According to the map file on my file share, the map was started in mid December of 2012 but I can recall not finishing it until late January of 2013. The map turned out to be a turd due to an overabundance of bumpy Coliseum, Wall pieces, a general unfinished and confusing look due to the budget/dynamic lighting limits and just generally being a bad map with DMR spawns, virtually no cover and the overpowered sniper positions to the high sides of the map. I suppose I can say I was bold to even think about making a map like this in Halo 4, let alone have it resemble the original map to a somewhat decent extent.
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I can't believe I made people play this map.

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(cont.)
 
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Jebus

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Grifbowl
Quite simply a normal Grifball court with American Football field goal posts as the goals. I think I made this map since the NFL Super Bowl was coming up soon at this time in early 2013. Oh and for some reason there's two soccer balls that randomly collide in the center which can kill players.
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The originality is strong with this one.

Boom Smash
"Launch the bomb into the enemy."

This was finally the first successful map that I made. Boom Smash was a King of the Hill based minigame where each team took turns launching fusion coils with Gravity Hammers at the enemy team to prevent them from getting more points in the hill. The more players alive in the hill, the faster the points that they get. This idea came from one of petetheduck's Forge Quacks videos in Reach where he shows that you can launch a mine using a Gravity Hammer while your damage modifier is set to 0% (unfortunately I can't find the video).

This map got attention with a few features, including with one here on HaloCustoms but the excitement generally died down within a month after it released and unfortunately the map suffered from physics glitches with the fusion coils due to the horrible lag Halo 4 ran into all the time.
THFE feature:

"Halo 4 Forges" feature:

oomishday3's feature

Coastal Escape
"This gated community was cut off from the outside world when an Earthquake rumbled the area."

Coastal Escape was my next successful map. This map was designed for a fun honor-rule gametype called Clue and was made for the HaloCustoms' and THFE's Get A Clue forge contest back in March 2013. This map won second place in the contest and became one of the go-to maps for many Clue lobbies to come.

This map went through many changes before the final version. When the contest was first announced, the free forge canvas 'Forge Island' was not even released yet. This map was originally started on the Impact canvas named "The Avenue" before a last minute decision to move it all to Forge Island when it released on April 11, 2013, not even a month before the contest ended but in the end, it all worked out beautifully.

I'm sure by now you've noticed a trend in my past maps in that basically some are ripoffs or just not original. I'll admit it, I'm not that that creative when it comes to completely original ideas. This map is not much exception, however the areas you see in the map such as the Fight Club arena, the strip club bar (reference to an old aesthetic map featuring Shmeefs called "The Peppermint Rhino") alonside some other aesthetic additons to the map that I've forgot are instead added in a way to pay tribute, rather than to completely rip them off.

Myself and friends had some enjoyable times on this map and I can especially remember whenever ou7c45t is in the lobby, I always rushed to beat him to the Concussion Rifle location as he found an interesting way to exploit a secret I placed on the map using the weapon (which was discovered long after the map was finalized). Certain aesthetics on map such as the tent & campfire, the dumpster behind the bar and a small garage along the street became a fan-favorite and go-to spot for many players. There are still many things that I would have liked to change with this map, especially concerning how open and mostly flat it is but in conclusion I must say that this was still one of my works that I was defintely proud of.
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A prototype of the map on the Impact cavas named "The Avenue" at the time.

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A perfect welcome center for every Call of Duty player.

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RIP Shmeef.

#Dumpster

"Antenna Base" (Shmeef Slayer)
"A fight has broken out in this once peaceful base..."

And then came the glorious Halo 4 mods that kept the customs and forging communities alive for a few more months. This map was released somewhere in the early Summer of 2013 not too long after the merging mod became public. This map was basically a small modification of my Odyssey map (why didn't I use another map for this?) but instead had the Dominion antenna pieces (these pieces made up a Shmeef's "body") in an odd rotation merged with armor abilities utilizing the mod to give the illusion that the player looks like a Shmeef. The idea originally came from Stupid who jokingly thought of somehow using the new mod's merging capability to create playable Shmeefs. In a way this was sort of a joke map but I can't quite say it was on the same caliber as a troll map, especially one that's named "xxx420kushdawgs quikscope1v1xxx" which I'll get to later on.

This map was featured by THFE which also at the time was SOLIDSNAKEee's very first map commentary for the original channel and he's come a long way since with his commentaries.
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Eroded Memories
"An earthquake devastates the residential district of Springwind. Looting is their only hope to survive."

We're finally here... my last "serious" map made in Halo 4's forge. This map is another Clue map and was sort of my response to the success of Coastal Escape. I started this map in May 2013 sometime after the submissions for the Clue contest ended but I didn't get around to finishing it until September of that year due to procrastination. This map was intended to be part II (the first being Coastal Escape) in a three-part story series of Clue maps, with the third intended to be on the Erosion canvas to be sort of the "bowels" deep below both maps. Canonically, the blocked off tunnel on this map was the other side of the blocked off tunnel as seen on the Coastal Escape map. My main goal with this map was to resemble the atmosphere of Coastal Escape while being a new experience and to have a lot more cover. However, some of my friends said they preferred Coastal Escape a bit more over Eroded Memories despite myself having enjoying this map more. Now that I look back on it, the "destroyed" aesthetics don't look that great but the map was still a decently solid Clue map.
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THESE FOUR TURRETS ARE IN MEMORY OF WHAT WAS ONCE LONGBOW.

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When your budget limit gets low, these are the kind of aesthetics you're left with.

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This subway area below the map was personally my favorite part of the map.

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I think maybe only two or three people know there's a secret Incineration Cannon under that poor, impaled Shmeef.

(cont. -again-)
 
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Jebus

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Halo 2: Anniversary
I honestly wish I can say great things about H2A's forge and MCC as a whole but I just can't. Myself and many others where overhyped and blown away when we saw what we thought forge could do when they previewed it a few weeks before MCC launched. However due to MCC's uncountable number of issues, bugs, glitches, crashes, etc. not a single community nor forger prospered. I even went as far as to create a small movement to push 343 to fix the issues with MCC's custom games but to little avail. Due to everything wrong with MCC I was never motivated to "officially" release and finish a single serious map for this game but I will go over the few projects that I did during that time.

Tropical Escape
Remake of Coastal Escape? You thought right. Am I unoriginal? You thought right again. I started this remake late in December 2014 as a quick way to test the waters of Clue with Halo 2: Anniversary's sandbox. I also changed around some secrets and added some simple scripts to interact with the map and new secrets. However, due to the issues with MCC, this map failed to load at the beginning of each game when playing with more than 4 players and therefore Clue in H2A was immediately abandoned because of this.
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The bar was transformed into a karaoke bar from a strip bar to be a bit more work-safe.

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I added in this little easter egg behind one of the secrets but since this map never had any real games on it, it was never seen.

Department
This map was supposed to be a submission for ForgeHub's 1v1 map competition in February 2015 but was ultimately abandoned due to me being completely demotivated to continue forging for MCC. The current state of the map was a bit too simple and was going to get a more complex overhaul to the design but that never happened. The map's theme was based off a mall or department store with one side being the entrance to the store with a little courtyard on the outside of the map. I slightly regret not finishing this map because of a few more ideas I had in mind for the aesthetics.
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This bottom-mid area was originally going to house a power weapon or power-up of some sort.

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View of the courtyard area outside the map.

Halo 5: Guardians
I can't believe we as a community and even myself have made it this far after Halo 4 and MCC. I may have been very cynical of Halo 5 after playing the beta but the little improvements between the beta and the official launch have made it that much better. To me, its the best game in the series since Halo 3, though still not as great (but that doesn't mean its bad by any means). The forge for once, didn't disappoint and it lived up to its hype. Although the forge was delayed and suffers from some bugs, the tools, the freedom and the pieces we're given pretty much make up for it. Outside of my usual procrastination while forging, its been a fun time to work on my current project so far adding in the little details I've always wanted to add in my forge maps and brainstorming in my head all the cool ideas I can do with scripting now.

WIP: "Prison" (Name TBD)
This is my current project right now and was my first real test of creating a map after learning the controls by messing with the other maps. This map is intended to be a Clue map (even though we don't have the supporting gametype for Clue nor do we have any reason to believe Clue can work in Halo 5 in the future). Should Clue not be possible in Halo 5, I still fully intend to keep this map going as an interactive aesthetic map or maybe even some sort of puzzle map.
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I figured out I can use 4' beams to make little rails for the prison minecarts.

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(cont. -yet again-)
 
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Jebus

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This part below is just more of an extras and a little treat for making it that far through my walls of text above... Hopefully you'll entertained in some way!

Halo 4 TROLL MAPS
I couldn't just not make troll maps. I mean I can't be serious all the time especially in a game like Halo 4.

The Magic School Bus
"Take a tour of the islands in the Magic School Bus...

This map wasn't quite as much of a troll map than the others. It's more of a fun little joke map that I made that only works in forge from a little trick that Tomtris discovered one day back in mid-2013. Basically in forge you enter the inside of the cargo box via teleporter, delete the teleporter inside the box then interact with the gravity lift inside the box but you must immediately enter player mode after doing so or it will not work.
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"I believe I can fly...

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"I believe I can touch the sky...

Meet Me At McDonald's
You read that right. Meet me at McDonald's bro I'll 1v1 you.

This map was basically a modification of Coastal Escape but with a McDonald's and a parking lot replacing the entire urban side of the street. I made this somewhere near the Autumn of 2013 when the "Meet me at McDonald's" joke was always being used in and around the HaloCustoms community. Inside the McDonald's full of fat, hungry and excited Shmeefs featured a working Fight Club setup so you can find somebody on Rumblr to fight with here.
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I swear this isn't product placement.

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Ronald McFuckin' Donald.

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A Big Mac and a fight... what more could you possibly want in life?

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I left the good ol' tent alone but this time I put a sniper in here as small tribute to DirtyyJuicebox who always camped in this tent with a sniper when playing Clue on Coastal Escape.

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"Here's your Happy Cone Meal sir, have a good day!"

XxX M3G4 V0RT3X MLG 9000 XxX
One day in 2013 I remember browsing the file share of all of my friends in my friendslist and found a file that stood out to me made by a friend named Alzarahn. "XxX SUP3R S3TTL3R PR0 XxX" was the name. The map was a hilarious mocking of the map Settler, which was a on-disc map made by 343 based on the Ravine canvas. This totally legit version of the map was a totally more tactical map that was more flat and had sweet and better base designs which featured about 20 Sniper Infinity Drops on a remake of the ridge from the original map. To continue this beautiful idea, I set off to mock some maps that I personally hated. My first choice was Vortex (though it should have been Complex, come to think of it) and thus this glorious map was born.
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1:1 scale remake bro

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There were more tactically placed Infinity Sniper drops on the other side of the building.

XxX OSS1M AB4ND0N 69 9000 XxX
I'll be blunt: Fuck Abandon. Stupid and I one day started to co-forge this amazing remake of such an amazing map not too long after the Vortex one. It actually plays similar to Abandon and I'll be honest, could actually play better than Abandon if the spawns were actually placed in non-trolling positions.
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Have you ever thought Abandon had a severe lack of Mongooses? Worry no more on XxX OSS1M AB4ND0N 69 9000 XxX!

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Gotta get them Binary Rifle commendations, bro.

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We thought the purple forest wasn't purple enough so we took matters into our own hands.

xxx420kushdawgs quikscope1v1xxx
Yup. A totally legit 1v1 map I made to face any kids that called me a BK in matchmaking. Some say the noobs that have been rekt on this map are still in limbo here.
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You can reach the top of that amazingly designed pelican just by making your way up the spire.

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Um, uhhhhh... Yeah... Apparently this was somebody giving a Shmeef a good time while quickscoping what appears to be a certain somebody with a bionic leg.

Halo 2: Anniversary TROLL MAPS
These maps were a response to a Polished Turd event because let's face it, MCC was a polished turd.

Fecal Factory
This map was made for the HaloCustoms 1th Annual Polished Turd Forge-A-Thon event and also a mockery of (at the time) 343's list full of potential forge maps featuring two-base, two-tower designs they were going to include in the HCS Season 2 event. This was by far the best map I ever made... ever. This map was so legit that it was inspired by 7 total maps! Midship, Tesla, Sanctuary, Simplex, Foundation, Warlord and Fecal Frontier!

"10/10 Just enough water." - IGN
"9.5/10 Highly tacticool map that's even better than Tesla!" - Kotaku
"5/5 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" - PewDiePie

Apparently this map was actually too good of a map to win the Polished Turd event and therefore the next map was made to quell such a terrible issue.
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Tacticool as fuck overview of the map!

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Thanks to adderrson for this pro map feature.
"I'm going to call this area of the map the D-hole."
- Flying Shoe ILR at 5:22

Tinkywinky
LOOKING FOR A OVERLY SIMPLISTIC AS FUCK 2 BASE, 2 TOWER MAP?? LOOK NO FUCKING FURTHER!!!
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"Look, its totally Midship!"

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I put extra time and care into the careful power weapon placements on this map.

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I'm glad you've been able to make your way here and suffer through the beginning of this post with the bad maps but I suppose I was saving the best for last, in a way. With Halo 5's forge being such a great evolution of forge, I can't wait to see what you guys and myself can make out of it... so long as we get the gametypes for it and soon! And that concludes my 7 years of forge as of 2016!

Happy Holidays and have a Happy New Year!
 
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Jebus

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"I can't believe I made people play this map." I relate to this so much when I think about my old maps. Overall, this was a fun read man. I think this is the first forge history thread with a whole section dedicated to troll maps :p
Thanks for reading it all. Honestly I can't believe I made people play any of the maps I made prior to Boom Smash and I feel kind of bad. :rofl:

I felt almost obligated to include the troll maps because of the abundance of and popularity of some. That and I wanted to end it all with a bit of comedy for shits and gigs.
 

Madirate

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I chuckled when I read over the Halo 4 troll maps, Overall good read, also I used to make people play my maps when I was a reach kid. *Shudders*