Unregistered user “Adrian” posted:
Mentions copper but doesn’t include copper. Can’t open main menu using Esc or Start button on controller. Am using Quake Remastered.
afdd6d54821214c3cf7e8178793c21c3c37afe19c349f3dab9f1f7347e6a1449
overall_rating
4.393939393939394
34
[User added a rating.]
[User added a rating.]
man… I haven’t even finished all the maps on the first floor and this is awesome. thanks to all who made this jam this is bada$$… 5/5
[User added a rating.]
Er … am I missing something in Peculiar Investigation (qbj_hrnekbezucha) or is that it? Walk down a gangway, across an atrium and up a spiral staircase, pick up a piece of paper, retrace your steps?
Hmm, no. I can see from noclipping that there is more — a lot more — but I have no idea how to access the bits behind the gold- and silver-key doors. The keys don’t seem to be in the director’s office. What am I missing?
MikeTaylor, rot13 spoilers: Qba’g gbhpu gur ercbeg ba gur qrfx – gung jvyy or vagrecergrq nf “fvtavat bss” ba gur fgngr bs gur snpvyvgl naq abg orvat phevbhf. V guvax lbh pna ybbx sbe gur xrl lbh arrq nf ybat nf lbh unira’g gbhpurq gur ercbeg.
Scoured Revelations (qbj_qalten) is a series of set-pieces in a rather bland concrete complex, each of them fairly satisfying, complemented by a couple of timing puzzles where the allowed time is tight but not unreasonable. I enjoyed each part of this, but without ever feeling anything especially memorable was happening.
@Johnny Law, thank you!
Well, Peculiar Investigation is certainly interesting — a welcome change of pace from other Quake maps — but unless I am still missing something important, having explored both silver-key areas has still left me unsure of exactly what’s happened, and whether I’m missed something. At any rate, the promised monster count of 0 seems to be adhered to.
I also enjoyed the atmosphere of Qonqrete (qbj_strideh), which mostly takes place in a housing complex under bright skies. Plenty of different routes to take in part 1, then a quite separate arena battle for part 2 — which I found disappointingly easy by means of a rather obvious strategy. I was disappointed when it ended, which I guess is a good thing. Nice use of the brutalist theme.
soul-art inc. (qbj_bonn) is a concrete base without too many surprises, but where I found the difficulty perfectly balanced — by accident. Somehow I missed the lightning gun right at the start, so I was running very very low on ammo — down to four shells when I reached the silver-key door. Happily, I was also down to a single health-point, so I backtracked to the start in search of health, and stumbled on the missing gun. From there on, it was easy. Not bad, but nothing special to my eyes. I’m not sure it gains anything from the concrete textures.
Entombed in Concrete (qbj_stickflip) is a great exercise in nostalgia. It took a moment to realise I was revisiting The Tomb of Terror (e3m3), and then I really enjoyed the sense that I was seeing it after a century of decay. I almost wish that the new map had followed the old one a little more strictly. (It’s a similar feeling to the early parts of Portal 2, where you revisit some of the locations from Portal after a decades of plant growth has wrecked them.)
I’d love to see more classic maps redone in “100 years later” style.
Weighted Authority (qbj_chrisholden) and the same mapper’s Aerowalk Rebound (qbj_chrisholden2) make a nice, complementary pair: while the former is thoughtful, and rewards careful exploration, the latter is essentially a deathmatch area populated with (mostly high-level) monsters. I don’t usually like the second kind of map much, being by nature a slow, methodical player. But on this occasion, the map felt great, perhaps because it was so generously provisioned with powerful weapons, ammo and health that sheer momentum kept me going.
Both maps are excellent achievements: Weighted Authority could perhaps have done with a bit more combat to fill all that wide-open space, but Aerowalk Rebound was about as much fun as a map of that kind can be.
Set in Stone (qbj_wiedo) is fascinatingly unique, offering many difficult sequences that can only really be completed successfully after multiple failed attempts. At times I found it frustrating, but in the end it was deeply satisfying to have completed it. The shambler puzzle really is like nothing else I’ve ever played in Quake. Very memorable.
Pharmakon (qbj_naitelveni) is a strange level with some very sudden changes of pace. It starts out as careful exploration of a concrete base with wide open spaces and passages, shifts gear with a challenge whether you have shotgun a roomful of zombies before your quad runs out, reverts to slow exploration, then throws you into a grinder where you’re supplied two quads and two pents to get through a crazy onslaught of enforcers, shamblers, fiends vores and knights. Then the final stretch is once more relatively sedate, with nothing more challenging than enforcers to deal with after the slaughter-room is cleared. All in all, I’m not sure what to make of it all. It’s certainly competently put together, and each stage is enjoyable, but somehow it all feels like less than the sum of its parts.
There’s a Certain Slant of Light (qbj_radiatoryang) is another of those maps where I really don’t quite know what I think of it. Architecturally, it’s a hopeless higgledy-piggledy mess of random halls, walkways, doors, pools and pillars — none of it making much sense, and with different bits connecting up in ways that seem to have no underlying pattern. And yet there is no denying that it keeps throwing fun challenges at you, requiring both careful tactical combat and some jump-in-get-your-hands-dirty horde set-pieces. I guess in the end I can’t much admire this map, but I sure as heck do like it!
I liked the first three of the four towers that make up Fourth Vertex of Trapezoid (qbj_bmfbr), but was less enamoured of the bunfight that makes up the entirety of the fourth and last. There’s a nice desolate atmosphere to the whole thing, with the bases of the towers disappearing into fog far below, lending a real gut-level sense of vertigo. I like that kind of emotionally resonant mapping. But the sudden shift from exploration model to horde-in-a-constricted-area model meant I didn’t leave the level as happily as I had spent most of it.
Cured Core (qbj_rabbit7250) is just an astonishing debut map. It offers 253 kills (I got 244) across three quite distinct areas, and offers a quite unnecessary apology for the absence of a fourth. All the areas are hanging in the sky, to good atmospheric effect.
The first section is a wide open indoor area with a moving platform, much of which has to be negotiated with no ranged weapon: in fact, obtaining the shotgun is the goal of this subquest, because only once it’s been found is it possible to shoot the distant button the opens the way to the second section. More than any other map I can think of, this one makes the acquisition of weapons into a real event, and while I wouldn’t want every map to be this way it works really well as an occasional variation.
The second section takes place in and around a brutalist housing estate, with plenty of careful tactical combat — much of it having to be achieved with only the single shotgun. The grenade launcher is found here, and the nail gun can also be found: my only real criticism of the map is that I missed it through no fault of my own: it’s in a small area behind a silver-key door, but because I had both keys I randomly chose to take the gold-key door first, and I soon found that I had taken a one-way trip that cut off access to the silver-key door. So I ended up doing a lot of the map without nails, unnecessarily. But I can’t criticize this too harshly, as the SSG-only gameplay was an enjoyable challenge in its own right.
This takes us to the third section — a single wide open-air arena with six subquests required to lower six pillars enough that the player can climb to the exit. These subquests take place around the edges of the area, and offer plenty of variety. When I completed the one that finally got me the nail gun it was a truly joyous moment. The last subquest that I took on (the one where you drop into a pit) was properly hard, and left me with 9 health.
Any one of these sections would have made a good map. The three of them together, especially given the pleasantly organic transitions, make it an instant classic. What a debut!
More, please, rabbit7250!