Forum thread for explorejam3_v1.15
128f25cf48fd7ceba40440e8f2af289900836d6a7354c9d77c0601a4628a0c4d
overall_rating
4.262820512820513
13
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
This is a wonderful map pack. The fact that nobody shoots at you is completely irrelevant.
What an amazing pile of puzzles, traps, skill tests and challenges! On top of that, there is some amazing architecture - from big open areas to small and tight interiors.
…And even without shooting, some maps are pretty deadly on their own…
This is mind-bending, and i can really recommend it. The only problem i have with this pack is that it keeps overheating my graphics card! Well, we do have a heat wave right now…
All mappers; thanks for your efforts and envelope-pushing work, and thanks for sharing! I can imagine that a lot of your tricks and ideas will pop up in more conventional maps soon… 
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
After getting thoroughly lost in the start map(!), I stumbled through the gold-key door and into The Salty Hovel (ej3_sock1). What a great opener!
We don’t get new maps from Sock that often, and it’s always a delight to experience something new from this mapping master — maybe the most consistently brilliant of all Quake mappers?
This one is set in an Egyptian temple, and consists primarily of Sokoban-like push-the-block puzzles. They are perfectly contrived to be non-trivial to solve, but easy enough that you never really get stuck. So the map makes you feel clever 
As you would expect, the construction and atmosphere are spot on, too. Just lovely.
I quite enjoyed Who Ordered the Pistachio Shake? (ej3_alexunder), which is mostly a series of jumping puzzles. These are well calibrated: they’re not so easy that they’re boring, but not so hard that you just end up reloading and re-reloading and re-re-reloading. I did feel the absence of monsters in this one, but it was still fairly satisfying.
Nook of the Earth (ej3_aesop) is fascinatingly different. From its slightly bland opening area, an abaondoned grand hall, it opens up into some of the loveliest settings I have ever seen in Quake. There is very little gameplay: just exploration for same of exploring. In some ways that’s a refreshing change, but after I while I began to feel that what the map really needed was … monsters. Yes, and combat. I ended up frustrated that, having walked through all these lovely places, that had been nothing to do there. So I hope this one gets remade into a regular SP map!
I am not quite being fair here: there are a few jumping puzzles that lead to keys opening up gated parts of the map. But they don’t amount to all that much.
Still: the moment of coming out of the hall at the start, into the first garden, is really memorable.
When I start up At the Mountain of Imperturbability by Iyaga, Quake crashes, saying:
QUAKE ERROR: Texture thordetrimf is not 16 aligned
I have QuakeSpasm v0.93.2
Any advice?
Upright in Blue (ej3_recycledoj) is a nice change of pace: an escape-the-hotel map in ad admittedly blocky urban style where you spend most of your time figuring out how to get to where you want to be. The solutions are a nice mixture of key-finding, jumping, grate-smashing, vent-crawling and suchline. The execution is a bit basic, but the ideas are new, at least in the context of Quake, and enjoyed it.
I was enjoying how different Perditious (ej3_cc) was, with its depressingly empty overground city, its mysterious sewers and then its weirdly cultic alternative reality. Unfortunately, when I’d made it as far as the platform where
These beings do not speak.
They only stand near the fire,
and make guttural noises.
I couldn’t at all figure out how to progress any further.
Can anyone help?