[User added a rating.]
49acbbd406d62768b8f5ef961ec8a713604260805f9257239c1f7aaf9a5c6900
overall_rating
4.257142857142857
35
Helldrome (dtintin_shades) has a lot of really nice combat set-pieces, not least the assault on the giant tank near the end. I enjoyed each individual part of the map, while feeling that the whole was less than the sum of the parts, perhaps largely because there were so many places where you would pass a certain point and then have no way to backtrack. (That’s particularly infuriating if, like me, you play in a way where you deliberately leave ammo and armour with the intention of coming back for them when you need them more.)
Aw Hell (dtintin_chrisholden) is five-star map for atmosphere — maybe the best Quake map I have ever seen for atmosphere. But it’s let down in play because it’s woefully underpopulated. It needs about twice as many monsters (and rather less ammo) to make it a reasonable challenge. It’s still very satisfying to smash your way through this level, but it feels like the foundations are here for it to be something much much more.
I have mixed feelings about Forgotten (`dtintin_rooster1). The map works, but pacing is very strange. It starts out very difficult, with lots of zombies needing to be axed before you find explosives, lots of vorelings appearing suddenly from darkness, and quite a few hard monsters like droles and fiends when all you have is the single shotgun. Ammo is very very tight. So is health. Then you reach a certain point and suddenly those things are abundant: a single room contains at least a hundred health, and an infinite respawning supply of shells, nails and rockets. That moment is a game-changer, and the middle section of the game is very easy. Then it’s hard again at the end when you have to track down and kill four(!) scragmothers.
Somehow, it works anyway, and the initial difficulty falls just the right side of being a satisfying challenge rather than a painful chore. Lots of atmosphere, especially early on before you activate the lights, and a reasonably interesting layout.
I couldn’t make head or tail of Cheat 4 Dolphin Facts (dtintin_quasiotter). There’s experimental, and then there’s just weird.
Brightfolds (dtintin_pinchy) is a nice example of a map that prioritises setting up a sequence of interesting combat over other priorities. The result is a map with very little sense of place and little or no logic to the progression, but which is fun to play through. The biggest flaw may be that the whole area beneath the walkway that leads to the gold key area is skippable: if you don’t happen to falls off the walkway, you might never know it’s there.
It’s interesting to play something as different as Edge of Serration (dtintin_nyo). Running into the shambler and fiends so early, when I had nothing but a single shotgun, was horrifying: watching the giant buzzsaw destroy them all was delicious. It’s a pretty tough fight through an economically designed multi-level map that makes good use of vertical space, and I enjoyed spending so much time very low on health. The ending was a little anticlimactic, though.
(Note that chrisholden’s Aw Hell is called Righteous into Eternal Life on the level-select map.)
Smell it in the Street (dtintin_radiatoryang) starts promisingly, with some satisfying horde combats. But then … it just carries on with more and more horde combats. Finally, there comes the point when you press the button that releases the gold key, and the place fills with shamblers, giant robots, minotaurs, vores … it’s just ridiculous. And there’s nowhere to run, so as to take the combat tactically. In the end, I shamelessly went into god mode and let infighting take 'em all out, then cruised relatively easily to the end of the map. A frustratingly missed opportunity, this. Could have been really good.
I really liked Fort Vikerkaar (dtintin_greenwood). It’s a base penetration map, and invites the kind of slow, careful sniping-based exploration that I enjoy. It’s arguably a bit underpopulated, and therefore a bit too easy, but that’s easy to forgive.
[User added a rating.]
That concludes my walk through the eight maps in this pack. There’s lots of good stuff here, but by modern (very high) standards, I’m not sure any of them quite tip over into greatness. That makes it a four-star package for me.
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
Rooster’s ‘Forgotten’. Awaken from stasis as the last man alive in an overrun spaceship, scavenge, survive, overcome. Unique in its premise and highly enjoyable. Reminded me of Manke’s early HLSP classic ‘USS Darkstar’.
[User added a rating.]
Perhaps I was wrong with my expectations of this map jam.
I had expected a ‘Doom 3’ style jam, to have been enlightened to the reality that this is a map jam only employing of certain ‘Doom 3’ visual assets, leaving the rest of the themes, of open case to the mappers.
While majority of the mappers, do take the ‘Doom’ theme further and work with it - focusing mostly, as it comes out, on the classic ‘Doom’ style, instead of the distinct ‘Doom 3’ one - some mappers do genuinely explore the ‘Doom 3’ concepts or use this map jam to introduce their own, unique blends of ideas.
My choice is for the “Edge of Serration”. I did not understand the “Cheat 4 Dolphin Facts”.
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
Unregistered user “aoanla” posted:
I liked Cheat 4 Dolphin Facts, but then I used all those cheat codes when I played Quake back in the day, so the idea of using them in an actual map designed for them was interesting.
Fort Vikerkaar was good as far as I got, but either there’s a bug when playing it on Easy (skill 0) that stops the blue keycard spawning in the right room (I know where it should be from JCR’s playthrough video), or it doesn’t spawn in AD 1.8 ? In any case, that renders the map impossible to complete without cheats - in this case, unintentionally 