Sewers. Cities have them. It's where the poop and food-your-mom-made-that-you-don't-want-to-eat goes.

They're tubes. In actuality, they're very tiny tubes, except for things like huge Storm Drains (which, surprisingly, are less common in games). In some cities, a grown man can barely fit into some of the larger ones without lying down on his back and scraping the ceiling with his belly. But that's lame, so in Fiction we step it up a notch, and make these super-cool cavernous blast-door laden monsterous networks with all sorts of scary monsters in them.

There is nothing wrong with this process. It turns a boring thing into a cool thing. The only problem is that this is done [b]a lot[/b].

Everyone is familiar with the atmosphere of a giant sewer. Light reflecting off of the walls, dripping water, a few pipes here and there, everything is green and grey and the lighting is bland, etc. That's not to say it can't be effective, it's just that when you see it, you usually know what sort of stuff you're in for. Or, on the other hand, a game will use the Sewers every time the player must go underground to the point where the atmosphere loses its effect entirely because it is used for anything and everything.

"Yeah, I can kinda see how that might suck," one might say, "but what other options do we have?"

It's a good question, and though I only have a single answer to this answer ready to talk about at the moment (despite there being many more; crypts, catacombs, bomb shelters, [I]sunken city portions[/I]...) I promise you that it has the potential to work some wonders.

I speak, of course, of Subway Tunnels.

Busy, abandoned, under construction, ongoing demolition, it doesn't matter. There are many ways to approach the idea of transit tunnels, each with their own possible atmospheres and feels. Each has their own set of dangers as well, from a gang headquarters at an abandoned stop, to mole-men occupying a stretch of tunnels as Part One of their invasion plan, to the 5 o' Clock to Phoenix Plaza about to nail you in the head. And unlike Sewers, there are various visual techniques you can pull off with transit tunnels that can be difficult to do with other areas.

For example, transit tunnels can be wide without having to be tall without looking strange or warped. A forest of support beams with a low-set ceiling can lead to a very claustrophobic feel, and if the tunnels are dark as well, could even be [I]scary[/I]. Whereas sewers are often built in games as having a lot of twists and turns, long branches of tunnels along with many possible paths and offshoots can lead to a very labyrinthian feel, which can get even crazier if some portions of track are higher than others while being in the same space, or with some other strange effect that dominates an area. We are also given a more industrial feeling in a tunnel rather than a sewer. Installations and mechanical parts that we would never see in a sewer are right at home in a transit tunnel, along with pipes themselves. We also have a different light effect we may not get with the standard Giant Sewer. Open service hatches or grills in the sidewalk allow natural light to slip into the tunnels from outside, creating a sort of Ray effect when coupled with dust, or just eerie splotches of broken light when viewed clearly.

And let's not forget the Stations. Those are in a league of their own when it comes to variety, from a simple boarding platform to a massive underground multi-track terminal. Abandoned train cars could sit in stations and rail-yards, or even in the tunnels themselves. The interesting thing with abandoned stations as opposed to sewers is that they're easier to relate to. There are elements of Humanity throughout, and if used correctly, these elements can generate the eerie feeling that time has stopped.

There are many more places where we could go with just stations and tunnels, not to mention othet examples of places that are underneath cities. I didn't want this post to drag on too long, so I thought I'd try and keep it as brief as I could while still getting my important points and examples in.

At the very least, I think it's something worth thinking on.