Latest reviews

Excellent, structured big map.
Not enough dynamics during playthrough.
Thank you for your time and labor.

scj_zigi
Bit of a masterpiece. Awesome design and such a complex level. You do need a bit of patience and good navigation to get around it though, it's very non-linear. The best in the pack overall. I also would love to see it retextured too - honestly to me solid colour or prototypes maps kind of feel like missed ultimate potential because they'd even better with real textures.

scj_wons
Great fun map, awesome design in that main section. You should do a remix of this in ikblue or something.

scj_fhk
One of the best of the pack, beautifully design main atrium. Simple combat and ending but still fun with some different room setups.

scj_clenow
Very beautiful map, the best attention to detail and design. I did get stuck in that pillared room though, had to noclip to continue I must have missed something. Also a bit anticlimatic it just ends but anyway very inspiration design to see.

scj_roj
Really nice. It does have simpler designs but that makes it much easier to make these nice intertwining layout ideas. Fun map.

scj_scampie
Oh man I didn't realise Scampie was doing a map, these are always gold. Although not my favourite Scampie map this time, a little corridor/assymetrical in the beginning, but the room with water and ending sections are great. Lovely lighting, colours and angles throughout.

scj_chadquad
Not enough ammo I was reduced to axe a few times, although I might have missed the NG. But I appreciated the layouts they were quite good and decent combat setups excluding having no ammo.

scj_chrisholden
Lovely lighting and detailing thoughout, it's quite linear but always good to see Chris' designs they're great. Short and sweet.

scj_ehot
Great design and ideas, and really nice use of solid coloured sections. Just very lacking with combat it felt a bit unfinished.

scj_ic
Some good designs with the main outdoor area, pretty fun.

scj_mrtaufner
I like the visuals of the void and seeing structures from a distance, but it was a little blocky and one-tone for me.

scj_rabbit
Well I had it done in 2.5mins but Rabbit you did such a huge map in qbj3 it's fine, nice little short map with some cute detailing.

scj_purplemarshmallow
I was going to say it's pretty short and simple (2mins playtime), but actually that ending got me! Nice little finish..

scj_rastrelly
Not really my style with big blocks. Gets better in the second half though.

A slight over use of the new monsters with not always enough ammo, but otherwise if you know that the pack is partly satire it's a great time, especially if you love jank and 90s stuff. Some maps definitely go overboard though like the latter half of Shades' episode (honestly felt Warpspasm-y, the tone is great but the combat is way too frenetic). Some maps are honestly gems, like ThatSpacePirate's which felt more a polished Malice map and Hole's which utilised the custom "nail" really well, and would be a good vanilla level. I also personally really love the "quake cute" in maps like Serecky's. I recommend either a really low difficulty or honestly using god mode, it's a joy just looking around and seeing how weird these are.

Just really solid Quake, but Clenow and Zigi stole the show. Zigi's map felt very Zigi, honestly quite impressive for the time given, good adventure with tense combat and pretty visuals. I'd like to see it retextured with E4 textures too. Clenow's likewise also had really good adventure elements, reminiscent of Inky maps, very clever way to make the player pay attention to the environments. The People also demand more Dog Parks.

Really good feeling and looking vanilla E3 level. Had a pretty hard time spotting the secrets but kinda rushed through it. Main criticism has to be the final fight, on nightmare it did not really feel like I was equipped for the fight and you can't really back out when you're at the "obelisk" part. It was fun to overcome but definitely a stretch.

Well done, jam.
Very sweet of Quake.
Thank you, guys, for your time, skills, and labor.

5/5 just for Serene Reflections, but there's some lovely geometry across all the maps, making real use of the constraints of the jam.

It has a few imperfections, but overall it is a pretty solid map.
Thank you for your time and labor.

This is a pretty fun (and surprisingly long, given the limits) map in a classic Quake style. I found all but 1 secret (the very secret long sequence of buttons I found after completing the map), and generally had a lot of fun,
Minor thing: to help with investigating for missed secrets post-completion, it might be nice to give a teleporter back to the start in the final room.

Resubmitted review because spoiler tags didn't work.

I really want to rate this a 4.0 alone for how much detail went into creating a believable space ship. It's insane. But this feels like a first draft of a better idea. The first 1/3rd turning point (you'll know it when you see it) was really cool, though I wish that a certain texture was used more liberally to better show how much the situation had changed. Also more use of a certain enemy. Also also you can't throw those giant silver mechs in the player's face and not do something with them that's just silly. A decent map, would love to see it honed. Maybe the AD version by ORL is what I want, and I say that with nothing but love for Keep / Mjolnir.

Notes:
-Plasma enemies and gaunts that fire projectiles (instead of using lightning) have flat plasma projectiles. Looks jarring. I imagine this is a bug with Keep.
-I ran into a very peculiar situation where when I had a shotgun, a double shotgun, a super nailgun, grenade launcher, and hyperblaster, when I ran out of shotgun shells, I was able to throw the Mjolnir hammer infinitely. I didn't have the Mjolnir, the game just gave it to me on my last shotgun shell and clicking again, and so long as I didn't switch weapons or lose the hammer on a toss (it getting stuck on geometry for instance) I had an infinitely throwable Mjolnir. Can provide a save if asked.

I have not made it very far in yet but so far I am loving it! Been a long time since I have played anything Quake 2. So long I didn't even realize that it received the remaster treatment. I do have a question however. Is there any way to improve performance? Looking in certain directions in the first map causes the frame rate to tank into the teens. My computer was once quite the powerhouse but it is 10 years old at this point. The old Skylake i7 and GTX 970 are getting quite tired. The base game runs silky smooth so I'm guessing the size and scope of the map are what's causing it. Just wondering if there were any commands that might help that out. I will report back when I have finished the game with an actual review. Keep up the good work!

Nightmare 100% kills

Music really is something special. Trent Reznor's soundtrack completely elevated Quake and forever colored it for many people as this really dark and ambient shooter where the player is traversing unknown dimensions while gunning down hordes of the forces of Quake. It's oppressive, it's metal, it's completely welcoming for people who gravitate towards these things. Mapper spootnick did not use any of Quake's music, but would he have chosen "Only Child" by Julia Kent (from her album "Character") had it not been for Trent Reznor's influence on the perception of Quake? Very likely not. spootnick chose phenomenally, and like Trent's soundtrack for Quake, Julia Kent's song here elevates The Warden infinitely. Whenever I hear this song, I'll think about that tower.


From the outset I really fell for this. With the music in your ears, you see the tower above you, the pool of muck all around, the texture work, the dark and dank atmosphere, and the way Arcane Dimensions monsters fit into the gloom of it all. I was pulled right in to this map. Fell in love with the setup, and fell in love further still with the texts revealing that souls are trapped here, that a Warden haunts the place, and in order to free those souls the player needs to cut their way through with the Shadow Axe, all while ascending a beautiful tower of fights. What a premise, really.


I'm getting all that niceness out of the way because I have less nice things to say now. The map doesn't follow through in three major places, not enough to fall apart, but enough to let down those incredible opening few minutes.


1. Summoning the Warden.

For the Warden to appear, there's a map-long puzzle involving using the Shadow Axe on fiend corpses to free their souls. The last corpse is tied to what amounts to a mapper's trick instead of solving some sort of greater mystery to the Warden, or its prisoners' circumstances. Now, the map didn't promise anything like that, so if that doesn't do it for you, then the chief complaint here can be boiled down to "summoning the final boss who is haunting this prison and trapping souls amounts to firing a grenade launcher at a button". It's incongruous with the stellar atmosphere set up. In fact I even completed the map proper before I had to go back and find that grenade launcher bit, which made it doubly disappointing. Thanks to alexUnder for providing a playthrough on youtube.


2. The identity of the Warden

The Scragmother is awesome, but she doesn't feel right for the role. She feels more like one of the Warden's beasts, or the final beast before tackling the Warden directly. She doesn't seem sapient enough or authoritative enough to embody the figure who's turned this sanctuary into a prison of poisoned flesh and souls. In fact, I really thought the Warden would have been the Drake derived Baron replacement, the Justice knight or the Judicator. I was so certain he was going to be the Warden. One of the texts in the map reads "Once a sacred refuge / For holy breath of life / Now the Warden drains it / In a prison of flesh and poison". Would it not be suitable, then, that the Warden take the form of the Justice knight? Or the Judicator boss? Someone so knightly and poised, failing in their task as Warden due to some malevolent misguidance by the forces of Quake along the way? This all leaves the Scragmother feeling miscast.

Similarly, I don't agree with the Bog Lord guarding the super nailgun. The Bog Lord feels more like the Warden than the Scragmother. It felt immediately strange to see this hulking beast with such presence guarding a weapon instead of in some ceremonial chamber or in a prison of its own at the heart of the tower.


3. The freeing of the souls.

This gimmick raises questions that the map doesn't answer. This is a prison, right? The Warden was keeping everybody in this limbo, trapped in this poisoned prison of a tower; souls trapped in their corpses, trapped by the Warden's curse, and we use the Shadow Axe to free them by destroying their flesh. I love that. But why are the key souls tied specifically to fiend corpses? There are human bodies impaled on pikes for quite a bit of the map. Why aren't those the souls I'm freeing? Why are the fiends the ones whose bodies matter? Did the Warden favor fiends? Were they prisoners too? Bear in mind, I'm not going out of my way to lay this out, these questions came up very naturally after seeing that summoning the Warden really does involve freeing the souls of fiends. The setup is evocative, but the payoff doesn't quite clarify what the fiends mean to this prison.


It falls short in these major ways, and I have to highlight this because this is a special map. A must-play in the realm of Quake 1 content, make no mistake. The atmosphere, architecture, the premise, the music, oh man the music; the Shadow Axe gimmick, and the central idea of a haunted prison tower make this a gold bar of Quake goodness that will be among the first maps I recommend to prospective Quake custom content explorers. I leave The Warden with immense, immense admiration. But I also leave it thinking about how those first few minutes tantalize with something transcendent, and it's blissful, and I think about how those first few minutes could have been matched by the end of the map.

MAH BRAIN HURTS!!!

A few bugs and gameplay issues but I think overall a very good mod (recommend play with librequake for the total conversion feel)
...I have a more extensive review on moddb

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However I gotta say many "modern" quake mods don't understand that quake is a dungeon crawler not a battle arena shooter. Many maps in BJ3 the player is simply locked in a large room with a horde of guys... it's not good gameplay and it gets old/annoying....

Maps Remind me of Joke Jam , and a bit of Shrak lol. This jam finally pushed me over the edge to give QZone a try. Oh and Nothing about QZone makes sense lol, it's like Shrak but worse(in a good way)


There are some very amusing gems. I recommend
qzj_atom1k
qzj_auh
qzj_hole
qzj_jm
qzj_megalomaniac2009
qzj_serecky
qzj_shlako
qzj_wons

only cuz im in it

This is really neat. I didn't think something like this would be made for Quake. Reminds me of co-op mods for various other FPS like Unreal. It's quite a bit jank, but for someone like me who grew up on stuff like that, it's completely charming. Lots of weapons, lots of enemy types, lots of fun. It also has the best regular Quake shotgun sound I've ever heard. It's a subtle alteration, but it truly does it for me.

Goes to show that limitation provides creativity, really punchy almost survival-y nature to a lot of these maps. It was very pleasing to find some were even quite open ended despite some even "just" being arenas and some are quite pretty. I agree a lot with scampie's sentiment of a feeling of good, especially because it doesn't feel that the maps are following a "solved formula" and while that generally goes for any jam it's especially noticeable here, it really is quite varied as far as bitesized Quake can allow and the only thing uniting the maps is a technical limitation as opposed to an artistic or gameplay one.

aesopolis - Really pretty swampy & brtualist and despite the scale still fun
agcs - A fun small romp, paced nicely.
atom1k - A lot of moving bits to this, really nice vanilla vibe with good ambushes.
auh - Very cute quad run, I thought there'd be less of them placed around but the cake celebration demanded it.
cc - Kind of a sucker for this simple and semi dark vibe, proper 90s and kind E4 vibe.
chadquad - I like the return of the snow from qbj3, fun action.
chrisholden - Really impressive organic ground, a slightly confusing layout that I welcome, Some things I didn't think would be secrets ended up being secrets which made me look even harder for potentially unmarked things lol. Really good.
clenow - Very good bitesized timed wave horde (what a mouthful), great use of ramps. Once you know how much ammo you have and when your weapons arrive it's really not so bad but the learning aspect is great.
ehot - Similar to cc's but with a way darker / edgier vibe and atmosphere. Very off but at the same time I like it. Combat was neat.
fw - 30 monster scumfucked vibes, quite replayable I would say as I feel most on a first play would play it more safe and miss the really quite big secrets. Also very pretty.
h4 - Amazing artistically with really nice verticality. Feel this one is also replayable due to some possible skips in routing. As mentioned by scampie also very than-y.
hcm - Real standout for me because I love open ended maps, quite a lot of ways to go about it but I do think infighting from ogres and enforcers is incentivised. Resource management / survival is really good and tense, secrets are fun and it looks like a nice runic arena. Curious in others' routing.
ic - After you figure out one of the early buttons is unpressed this is really quite neat. Good use of space to jump around in.
lob - Another personal fav simply because of the bridge having 2 functions, nice small adventure.
magnebox - First map I tried in the pack and it was good impression, quite tricksy, bitesized nature is great.
moko - Love this vertical maze, didn't quite find everything as it's very dense and open ended. Would love to see this get retouched or extended with maybe some landmarks but as it is it's still really fun.
nickster - Really good texture set use, felt more industrial than a lot of stuff in Quake in general so it's particularly impressive with the brush limit. Feels like a lost entry to the Factory Jam.
rastrelly - Old school vibe but potentially a bit too much at the end lol. Still neat.
rj - I love the repopulation done in the map, seriously pretty and cosy.
roj - Nice E3 vibe, felt comfortable to move in with nice fights.
scampie - Love this, the coloured fog for some reason made me think of dimension of the machine lol. The route is nice, geometry is pretty, would love an extended cut of this too.
spoot - Felt very classic spoot and I was somehow not ready for the ending lol. It was very fun to figure out, as tough as it was. Curious to see how others tackle it. Great bitesized action.
trashmeister - Another very classic vibe, wish it was slightly more clear which liquids hurt you, can be cheesed but if played earnestly it's a neat route.
voila - I was not able to reduce the contract . Honestly quite impressive how a lot of knave details were crammed into 96 brushes just in the first room.
wons - A little cramped but neat, enjoyed the combat.
zg3n - Even with the repetetive nature it was neat, I liked the underground.
zigi - Swampy castle goodness with some e4 sprinkled in, very nice.

This is a really good map, a clear step up from the old map (which was still really good) though some of the combat encounters are still quite wild and there can be some ammo woes, with now some additional really quite tricky jumps to execute. It has some adventure / imsim / Tomb Raider-Half-Lifey elements for some of the secrets and a bit even for the progression, think "Telefragged" but on a different scale and more focused, even though this map also took me literal hours on nightmare as well. It was satisfying to find 14/23 secrets, maybe if I didn't try to beat the map in one sitting I would have found even more.

No skill setting, no secrets, no way of getting the weapons you really need. Low on ammo and health, trapped in claustrophobic corridors, not even any 'real' textures.

I absolutely loved it. Favorite map for a while. First class.