MoshTMA
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Twisted Metal
Best - Tough call, because River Park Rumble, Suburbia, and Rooftops are equally great to me. I guess I will go with River Park Rumble. The Christmas theme is present in this map so it fits the story and its fun running over fake for-hire Santas. The inclusion of the small ice rink is cool, and the map is sort of a precursor to Downtown in Twisted Metal Black, as well as one of the inspirations for Metro Square in TM PS3.
Worst - Got to agree with Adonael with Freeway. The full Freeway map seems like a precursor to Highway Loop of TMB in retrospect, as they share a loopy map design with narrow paths. A challenging map, but not as fun as the others, as you end up feeling a bit lost with the unchanging look of the map. Almost gives the illusion of a never ending freeway, sort of like the endless staircase from Super Mario 64. The mini version of Freeway does lack the loop however, and is littered with car corpses, including a bus, which is notable as subsequent attempts to include a playable bus in TM games have been scrapped (although one does appear in Rogue Trip Vacation 2012).
TM 2 World Tour
Best - It's between Paris and Hong Kong Krunch. The image of Eiffel Tower exploding in the Twisted Metal 2 trailer was one of those trailer moments that got me to get the game back in 1996 or 1997 and Paris did not disappoint as a map. When the tower falls it modifies the map in a cool way, making the small building rooftops more accessible. I also like how interactive the map is, with the exploding cars and trees and monuments, the paintings that could be burned, the mimes you could run over. Hong Kong Krunch, is also very innovative of a map. The center building with the lightning tower feels like a small map within a large map, the subway train path feels like another section that could be its own map, and the port side as well. It is like the Suburbia of the game in how it feels like 3 maps in 1. The inclusion of moving subway trains was really cool, being the first instance of NPC vehicles that moved & weren't contestants, something that eventually became common in the series - and Hong Kong is also the first map where you can die by drowning.
Worst - Probably Moscow. This bowl shaped map design isn't my favorite although that concept worked very well with Minion's Stadium in TMB. Although I like the epic explosion that occurs if you plant a remote bomb at the center of the map the location feels kind of empty and lazy in the way it represented Moscow. Also, the lightning ENV attack is useless on this map as very little action occurs on the map's narrow bridges/ramps.
TM III
Best - Not sure. I almost kind of appreciate how simple Washington DC is, despite not my favorite, because the harder 989 tried on maps in TMIII the worse the matches were at times. The extra maps in the game were similarly lazily-constructed (Warehouse, Club Kid's House). I thought the best map was probably North Pole though. It's a circular, between medium-large map with a trench that rings around the centerpiece which is Santa's easily destructible home as well as the lightning env attack area. This map sort of takes the TM2 Moscow map but puts a new spin on it.
Worst - The Egypt map is the worst in TMIII. It's too bumpy with the sand hills, too ugly with the map colors, and poorly thought out with the weapon distribution, and the lightning area location (being at a dead end).
TM 4
Best - Neon City is probably the best map in the game. 989's finest work, and thus the TM4 demo featured this map as a ruse to get people to buy the game. It has a subway path & train similar to Hong Kong from tm2, it is a multi leveled battleground (like past rooftop maps, paris), but unlike the past city maps Neon City goes for a futuristic look, like something out Joel Schumacher's Batman movies. There is also a way to catch a ride from a flying vehicle to get from one building to another, an early instance of flying in a TM game.
Worst - Minion's Maze. To me it is a horrible map. Like the name implies, the map is a maze. Probably the worst conceivable map type for a Twisted Metal game and thankfully the only one of its kind. There is an underground cave in this game that isn't any fun to fight in, and the little hills of the maze are not so convenient to fight in, and then you have the teleportation orbs that bring you to a similar looking corner of the map. There is nothing good about Minion's Maze, and Minion was so pathetic in this title that we never saw him in tank form again.
TM Black
Best - My favorite single player map is either Minion's Stadium or Snowy Roads. I like the intense small map matches and these battlegrounds feel like the most intense to me, plus Snowy Roads is the one map location that looks like it may not take place in Midtown, and the snowy setting and music make it such an eerie level. In multiplayer/online I have a fondness for small maps too, like Elevators and Sewers. My favorite big map is Suburbs though. A dark take on TM1s suburbs that unlike the original map features big open spaces to fight in. Despite its big size the map is still fun even in a head to head 2 player fight, something many other extra large maps in the TM series struggled to achieve.
Worst - Yeah, probably Warhawk. It's a map that lacks strong points, but I don't particularly hate it either. I am glad it wasn't locked out and kept exclusive to the story as TMX did with some boss map locations.
TM Small Brawl
Best - Favorite TMSB story map was Tree House Rumble. It was a lot of fun using the trampoline. This game had some fantastic hidden maps too; Buster's Lane bowling alley, Holiday Havoc, and Shock Therapy.
Worst - Probably Now Slaying, the movie theater map. It's not that I dislike the final boss Piecemeal, but this map has a very sloped design (like movie theaters do with their seating areas) where about half the time you feel like you are driving up a hill and the other half down a hill.
TM Head-On
Best - Egypt. Just a cool map, the internal pyramid sections are cool to drive through. Proved that Incognito could take any 989 map concept and improve it easily. I also like the baseball field map that starts the campaign. Mostly just the concept itself since a baseball field would be a cool place to hold a TM match. And blowing up the performing band was funny and appropriate to the dark humor of the game. and Russia is another I'd consider for best map, because it did a better job than TM2s Moscow in its thematic representation of the country it was blowing up.
Worst - The Tokyo maps didn't do a thing for me. That sequence of maps & Tower Tooth sort of ruin an otherwise fun story campaign for me. Also, the Transylvania map, added to PS2s version of Head-On, was disappointing. It was much too large for the game and provided no real challenge even on the highest difficulty with the max amount of enemies.
TM Lost
Best - Death Port was interesting. Kind of like a new take on Prison Ship from TMB.
Worst - Stadium Slaughter didn't really do much for me. Might have been the inspiration for Blackrock Stadium in TMX, which is a futuristic take on the large arena map concept that Stadium Slaughter was going for.
TM PS3
Best - Thrills and Kills park was pretty interesting. The larger variation Thrills and Spills unfortunately wasn't as good because it was unnecessarily large, even in a full match. Thrills and Kills had the idea of putting a big roller coaster themed mountain in the middle of the map that you could traverse through that had a pirate themed cave in it. Difficult to navigate through at first, though, but I remember having some of my most fun matches in T&K park.
Runner-up map would be the Old School mini-map of Sunsprings, CA, which is like a new take on Minion's Stadium, or at least the center of the map, with the high school football stadium, comes across that way to me.
Worst - Worst TMX map... pretty much a tie between Diablo Pass and Diesel City. Diablo Pass is far too big and linear a map with a long bridge at the center. Its just not that well designed a map and it takes too long to get from point A to point B on the map. There was often an entire portion of the map completely ignored during battles. The mini variations of Diablo were better but not by much, with Dead Man's Crossing a mini variation of the map & Ghost Town a mixture of the small ghost town & the outskirts of that town, with some hills that people annoyingly camped up on. Diesel City was another unnecessarily large TMX map, with large hills, slums, a parking lot, a red light district, skid row area, junkyard, and freeway areas. I found the color palette this map used to be unattractive visually as well. The small variation of the map, Skid Row, appealed to some but wasn't my thing.
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