[User added a rating.]
848b3d9f71de828890839ced4c5c2799ec25a07e111b61c5787b9a401740b95c
overall_rating
4.605937921727396
39
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
I guess I am doing a dumb here, but I can’t figure out how to open the door into the base in Rifts to Abhorrence (ctsj2_hrnekbezucha). What am I missing? And oddly-textured button?
Pac (ctsj2_riktoi) is clever — I won’t say how, because I don’t want to spoil the surprise. But is it actually fun? Not really, not for me. Sorry. I’ll award a generous two stars because the moment of realisation is nice.
I like Sun King’s Passage (ctsj2_mfk) much more: a pleasant palace with sufficiently interesting combat and an easy-to-grasp structure. Nothing especially unusual, but fun. A award a rather mean three stars. (This is nearly stars better than Pac, but I rounded that one up from about 1.6 and this one down from about 3.4)
Lethe’s temple is a nice experience of well-judged combats in a bland but beautiful temple with mostly pleasant and clear progression. It falls down a little right at the end, in a few ways:
- The silver-key door isn’t marked, and I spent a while looking for it — partly my fault as I took a break at a crucial moment and lost my context.
- The ending is anticlimactic, which nothing behind the final door.
- The only secret can only be found at the very end, and it doesn’t contain anything.
But I like this a lot, nevertheless. Four stars in the context of a jam.
TIL that Quaddicted’s Markdown renderer doesn’t support bullet lists. Oh well.
It should!
With
- stars
- and
- with
- lines
but the parser might require a leading and/or trailing empty line, like many. I hope soon we will have a different commenting setup.
Ah, I’d not come across that convention — I’m used to GitHub-flavoured Markdown. Thanks for the tip!
- This is
- A test of
- A leading blank line before the whole list
- But no blanks between entries.
And this is what comes after the list.
Meanwhile, I really enjoyed Greenwood’s Seti in Stone, a egyptian/alien temple with enjoyable progression and a good blend of tactical and hectic combats. Pleasant to look at, too. A very solid four stars.
A quarter of the way through A Blaze in the Northern Sky (ctsj2_stickflip) I was worried that I was going to get lost, as all the areas look much the same, constructed from the same grey rock walls. But I needn’t have worried. The map is so carefully constructed that the right path is always apparent despite the visual homogeneity.
The choice of which silver-key door to take first adds a nice element of replayability, and combat balance is pretty good. Early in the first sub-quest (the silver door on the right) I just ran out of ammo, and had to run past an ogre ledge to reach resupplies. That was a satisfying moment.
Apart from the unexciting (but effective) visuals, I have two other quibbles. First, the lack of secrets; and second, the lack of points where we re-emerge above an area visited earlier. This kind of verticality always helps to establish the geometry of the space the player is exploring, as well giving the inherently satisfying feeling of looking down on a familiar area from an unfamiliar perspective.
Despite these imperfections, I rate this map a solid four stars.
The Satisfyer 2 : Holiday in Finland (ctsj2_zigi) is not really my cup of tea: I like to play Quake slowly and thoughtfully on the whole, with occasional frantic interludes; a map that is frantic from start to finish might be brilliant, but just won’t work for me.
So I won’t award a score for this one at all.
I will say this, though: I turned on notarget and lawnmowered may through the hordes of unresponding enemies in a way that required absolutely no skill at all … and I really enjoyed it. It’s not what the the map was intended for, but I guess if it’s fun then that’s success.
I like Inner Sea Ruins (ctsj_pinchy) for its self-contained quality. I found it difficult early on, with ammo running out. But while sometimes that can be frustrating, I felt it was well judged in this map, so I was able to rescue myself by causing enough infighting to rush inside and grab some more ammo. My only real criticism is that the ending is anticlimactic: having taken out the monsters that appear on the top of the temple when you pick up the gold key, I was surprised to find nothing more than a few regular knights up there waiting for me when I took the teleporter. I think a shambler surprise would have been warranted. Anyway, this is nice. Four stars.
Rotten Rivet (ctsj2_sze) is nice, linear progression through a slimy base with an aesthetic somewhere between Insomnia and Rubicon (without being as atmospheric as either). It could be argued that the repeating pattern of enter-a-room, pick-off-the-enemies, press-the-button is unimaginative, but in fact I found it pleasantly soothing. And the different layouts of those rooms meant that each stage was a distinct challenge. Very nice. Four stars.
Well, I reluctantly gave up on Scvmfvck II: Fvcked Harder (ctsj2_fairweather).
It started out feeling like it was going to by my favourite map of this jam, with its lovely architecture and novel qud-based progression mechanic, and I did really enjoy the first 100 or so kills.
But then I came to the room where after you grab the quad you’re dropped into a tiny circular room surrounded by insta-death lava, and get spammed by dozens of ogres, death knights and vores with no room to manoeuvre. I died over and over and over. Could I have beaten it? Maaaybe, but I wasn’t having fun trying. So I god-moded through and moved on to the next section.
Where I was almost immediately confronted by a choice of two teleporters, both of which took me to equally impossible constrained combats. At that point I had to ask myself why I was putting myself through this. I considered god-moding those two sections, too, but really, what would be the point?
Worse, I realised that having been stuck in this map for so long had meant I wasn’t playing any of the other CTJS2 maps, which was silly. In fact I wasn’t playing any Quake, because I had somehow got it into my head that I needed to beat this one first.
I know, I know. It’s my own fault. But I concluded that the best thing to do was put myself out of my own misery, and declare this map a WONTCOMPLETE. Which is a real shame, as it felt like it was going to be a five-star map.
Unregistered user “Adrian” posted:
Tried two maps running in Quake Remastered and both crashed.
[User added a rating.]
OK, obviously I am a complete idiot, but I cannot figure out how the heck to craft anything in Mazu’s map, which everyone loves. As a result, I am chronically short of ammo, and on the verge of giving up. Can anyone guide me? Thanks!
Unregistered user “Vasya shkolnik” posted:
Mike, you need to enter special room, where you can craft weapon or some another stuff. You need to pass about half of the map to reach this room.