(Not a full review, just a comment) I was able to break ctsj_greenwood by telefragging one vore in the final room.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiszkTBkwWw

Good collection of challenging maps. "Primordial" by JCR is the standout.

Might have missed a few because I'd already played a few when I decided to write it up. Sorry for the ones I missed!

Lunaran's map, can't remeber the title. Short, simple, yet clever map design with this one. The central conceit made things way more unpredictable than I'd have expected with Quake's primitive AI. I was repeatedly ambushed by monsters riding the ring up and down. Loved your stuff for years man!

Once more with feeling. Very unusual, I really loved the abstract design of this one, a distinct identity. Fun as well, very chaotic at times. I feel like the replay design could have been put to better use. Since the map layout was straightforward and mostly visible up front, you don't benefit much from foreknowledge of the terrain.

Dies Irae. Its clean, grandiose architecture reminded me of once more with feeling despite the obvious persian theme. I toggled r_fullbright on and couldn't believe how plain and flat the textures were - the lighting is doing great work here! I enjoyed it, although it was a bit on the easy side, a couple too many red armors IMO. The final arena with the quad was great fun, it amps the fight considerably, I'd love to see this unlimited quad + hordes mechanic used more often. The quad makes the vores spawning up high on the pillars fair and adds some depth to the fight in terms of target prioritisation. Great gameplay in this final area.

Sandworn Castle. Woah, this one brings the difficulty at the start. Thought it was great how you are quickly pushed out of the starting area in a search for ammo. The way I was kept moving constantly and hopping around between horizontal gaps reminded me a lot of the latest Dooms. Short and tight, fun little map. Groovy texture theme too.

Utopia. Good high-pressure start with the old monsters teleporting around trick, but the gameplay didn't do it for me in this one. The encounter spaces were flatly open and basic and some fights I imagine almost impossible without secrets (thinking of multi-shambler and vore key arena, I found invuln first). Visually not bad at all though, an interesting sci-fi theme and some cool lighting effects through grating which I didn't think was possible in Quake, new lighting compilers I guess.

Grisly Gallows. Wow, love this texture set and how well the architecture fits with it. Top notch construction as well, Nice attention to detail where the whole level is contained within a larger architectural area that is fully constructed even though you can't ordinarily play it (I rocket jumped up out of one of the arenas) - it gives an extra sense of place. Multi-quad run at the end was fucking fantastic. Quad damage is one of the all time great game power-ups and damn does this level hit that home. Also very clever doing this at the end when the player knows the layout so can really enjoy the combat flow without worrying about where next. Also, how did you do this in 15 days?!?!

The Dismal Omelette. I liked this one too. The architecture and piled-over layout were both very cool. I like this unfussy, brutalist kind of aesthetic. Just the right amount of detail. Bit on the easy side though.

Primordial. Such Tomb Raider vibes from this one! Well served by what appears to be one of the most popular modern Quake tex sets by Makkon. I always enjoy the constrained non-linearity of these-goals-but-in-any-order map structures. Fun secrets in this one with some enjoyable platforming and an interesting layout. Unfortunately the combat isn't much to write about, and far on the easy side for me. But with such good atmosphere and enjoyable exploration to be done, who cares?

The Great Sea Wept. Man, the quality of Quake mapping is so high these days. One stonker after another. Another nice multi-layered map flow with many new areas above old ones although the textures and lighting are a bit drab and monotone. The combat is excellent though - ammo was tight throughout and I really loved the dual stairway encounter near the start, multidirectional and challenging. No cheaparse vore swarms either, good fun.

Veiled Basin. A small map, got some fun and unusual secrets. It's stingy with weapons which I liked, even with mostly mid-tier monsters in reasonably low numbers you feel the threat. Nice touch with the acknowledgement when you've grenade jumped to RL too. I like the economical way that the main area is re-used for a final run to the exit.

Sunscorched. Liked this one a lot. I'm a sucker for base maps and medium-granularity but geometrically interesting detail. I loved the repeated riveted panels with accordion style joints. Sun burn mechanic was fun luring enemies to their death during combat but I felt it was a bit underused overall. The gold key room at the end gave me the most trouble of any map in this pack, nice encounter! It was the bloody garden variety knights that kept getting me as well!

Blue Brawls. I liked the theme, but I hate wading through water so that's one of the main memories, hahah. Had some good secrets though, and that was a great moment with the whole wall sliding over forcing you to dash into the bricky gap. The final encounter room was enjoyable and so well thought out with the opposite-side linked teleporters and the vores.

Pumps of Dagon. A little unpolished compared to the other maps tbh, especially the smaller areas could have done with some more detail. One gameplay choice I liked was that you're given quite a lot of rocket ammo early on, but it's balanced out by having so little space that you have to use it really carefully! Another thing was the choice of light colour for outdoors, it contrasted nicely with the indoor areas. Some cool secrets here. My favourite kind of church! I like how you threw a monster into the water at the start just to get it right out of the way at the start: don't bother trying :). Because otherwise everyone does!

Very nice set of levels. The only issue I had was with Markie's level... it kept blowing up on me, saying something about an explosion (curiously enough). But this is a great level set, not a bad one in the bunch.

Top-notch jam of at least half-a-dozen superbly designed, long-winded levels.

PoolboyQ's 'Dies Irae' is my favourite, thanks to its smoothly flowing, elegant design coupled with challenging encounters. JCR's 'Primordial', Ionous' 'The Great Sea Wept' and Markie's 'Grim Gallows' are also spot-on offerings, delivering the goods both on the visual and the gameplay departments. (5/5)

I noted DoomPope's, Greenwood's, Grome's, Juz's, Lunaran's, RadiatorYang's and Shades' maps as well - theirs too, are a notch above the rest. (4/5)

Nevertheless, this is a worthy and lengthy pack that is well worth the time.

I enjoyed Demesne of Sorrows (ctsj_shades) but without ever really feeling I was in a real place. Much too often, it arbtrarily cut off backwards progression, so that it felt more like a sequence of set-pieces. Still, it was fun quadding all those shamblers near the end — even if the actual end, after that, was rather terribly anticlimactic.

Once More, With Feeling (ctsj_radiatoryang) was interestingly different from most levels, and I enjoyed the feeling of being out in the sunshine. (Living in England, in November, in lockdown, there is precious little of that to be had in real life!) The progression is rather too reliant on mass spawns, I think, because it's always more satisfying to discover monsters than to have them just appear. But fighting hordes on those slopes is fun, so fair enough. Re-running the level after it's repopulated was nice, and justifies the title (which I assume if lifted from the stellar Buffy episode of the same name).

No New Ideas (ctsj_quasiotter) is not my cup of tea at all. I can't understand poetry at the best of times. I am glad that people are doing strange and experimental things with Quake, but that doesn't mean I have to like the individual things! :-)

Dies Irae (ctsj_poolboyq) is my favourite map of this set so far, with a good long progression through many different areas and some pleasing verticality. It loses a point or two for me, though, because it's another map that is too fond of pushing the player through it in a single direction, preventing backtracking. The bunfight at the end — two waves of monsters with a quad for each — was a satisfying conclusion.

There are some balance issues with Sandworn Fortress (ctsj_pinchy) which are first spoiled my enjoyment, but which somehow I ended up appreciating. The level starts out desperately low on ammo and health, with careful use of grenades a must, and the need to provoke infighting. I admit I gave up in disgust on my first attempt, but I am glad I persevered: coming through this ammo bottleneck was deeply satisfying.

Unfortunately, one that is done, the rest of the map is rather anticlimactic — a relatively easy over-provisioned trudge through a watery maze. Still, the first half is memorable.

Utopia (ctsj_newhouse) is another oddly unsatisfying map, being a sequence of almost entirely disconnected set-piece horde combats with no linking narrative and no sense of exploration or discovery. While I enjoyed each individual part of this map, I found the whole to be much less than the sum of the parts.

Grim Gallows (ctsj_markie) is by far my favourite of these maps so far — perhaps not so much because it's objectively the best, as because it best fits my favoured play style of careful exploration and progressive discovery. I loved the way it finished, too: the gold-key door leading not directly to the exit, but the a repopulating of the explored areas with hard monsters but also with plenty of quads — a really satisfying way to conclude.

I can't quite make sense of the title Quad is a Four-Letter Word (ctsj_lunaran), as I didn't find a single quad anywhere in the level — I have to assume there's a quad in at least one of the two secrets I missed. But that's OK: this is fine level and a brilliant example of how you can do a lot with a little. It's really four very similar circular arenas stacked on top of each other with an elevator in the middle, but carefully constructed to offer a lot of different combats and plenty of tactical options. A gem of minimalism.

I really enjoyed The Dismal Omelette (ctsj_juz) as another small, self-contained map where every area counts and each offers its own distinctive combat. Its not a long map, but if feels like there is plenty of progression. And lots of scope of combat tactics.

I was hugely enjoying the broken-down aesthetics and very open exploratory gameplay of Primordial (ctsj_jcr), and about to describe it as my favourite map in the jam so far, when unfortunately I ran into two bad bugs right at the end: first, in the area where you quad all the shamblers in the lava, it was for some reason impossible to climb out of the lava before the pentagram expired. It got out of that using the console fly command, only to find that then when I pressed the switch immediately afterwards, the whole game crashed. (I tried this several times: it was reliable). So I was left to noclip my way through the gate that the switch was meant to open, and also through the main gate that follows, and then ... that was the end.

Such a shame. This was nearly outstanding.

Just love The Great Sea Wept (ctsj_ionous) — the progression, the climbing, the sense of how far we have come from the underwater start, and a series of combats that, while hard, never feel unfair. Part of this is the generosity of ammo provision: I rarely felt stretched in that respect, and while this could be construed as a criticism of the balance I found it just made things fun. Lovely Koohoo-like atmosphere, too. If I were being picky, I think perhaps it could have used one or two claustrophobic underground sections to break things up. But I quibble.

The Veiled Basin (ctsj_h4724) is a nice example of how a small-contrained map with rather arbitrary button-based progression can still be a blast to play if the combats are set up well. Lots of fun.

Either Sunscorched (ctsj_grome_) is phenomenally well balanced or I just happened to be lucky in my playthrough, but on three separate occasions I was reduced to single-digit health on the way to victory. I can't say that the sunlight-hurts-you mechanic added a lot, but this was a very satisfying process, with several set-pieces that were tricky to work out tactically. For the first time I can remember, I found myself longing for the regular nail gun (since the nerfed SNG is no good as a long-range weapon in Copper).

Blue Brawls (ctsj_greenwood) was going well right up until the big room the ogres on platforms at either side and all the enforcers down at ground level. I killed them all, and the vored that spawn: then ... nothing. No doors opened, and I was just stuck there.

Am I missing something, or is this a bug?

I enjoyed The Pumps of Dagon (ctsj_doom_pope) despite its artificial progression, because each stage was individually fun. Not a classic, but a very enjoyable ten minutes. Some nice secrets, too.

Beneath An Ivory Facade, It Watches You Writhe (ctsj_artistical) brings the jam to an idiosyncratic close. At first, I was turned off by its vast, barren cubescapes. But as I played my way thorugh, I came to appreciate the way this kind of architecture facilitates a specific kind of combat. In the end, I found the whole thing deeply satisfying, even if I didn't quite understand what I had done in some parts of the map.

All in all, this is clearly a five-star package, with the highlights for me being Dies Irae, Grim Gallows, Primordial, and The Great Sea Wept.

Thank you, mapping community! Keep up the great work!

Copying some of my own comments from func:

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Quick comments on Grome's map. Super good little jam-style map for a couple of specific reasons:

• Not overly detailed, but a good color palette and interestingly-shaped spaces to explore and fight in. That's a time-efficient way to get a good look 'n feel.

• The "burny sunlight" is a neat gimmick that immediately stamps some memorable character on the map. And it's not overused, in fact I think it could have been used a bit more. I loved that it also affected the monsters!

Also thumbs up for not over-relying on the thing where a bunch of monsters spawn in around the player when they touch something or reach a certain spot. When that's overused it can give the combat gameplay in a map a really annoying rhythm.

The map did use some spawn-in surprises in a couple of spots, particularly in the last big fight, but I think they were handled well in that they appeared in certain interesting spots around the arena a good distance from the player.

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h4724's map is a cool close-quarters puzzle box thing. I really like this particular style (especially in this texture theme) and it feels quite old-school in a good way,

The final fight was fun -- figuring out how to tackle that, working around in the spaces I'd already been over and through a few times. And never quite safe from pressure. It seemed quite well-tuned on skill 2. The mid-fight "gift" was pretty neat too; obviously I'd been wondering what was going to happen with that thing. :-)

FYI I did get the end gate open at 44/45 kills, and as I was about to leave I heard the shambler lightning sound. Dunno if one of the shams fell out of the map somewhere, or if there was one in a secret that I didn't find.

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I just now was watching JCR's playthrough of his own (awesome) map, and he showed off a secret that -- let's say -- gives you a different view and ambience. I missed that on my play. Love it! It is a very cool break and also helps re-sell the mood of the main map when you go back in.

Interesting point about Copper allowing you to change the fog color to set different moods in different areas. More maps should experiment with brief "breakouts", and maybe not so well-hidden. :-)

@MikeTaylor

Odd. I watched quite a few playthroughs of my map and nobody seemed to have an issue. Did you somehow telefrag a vore and accidentally screw up a sequence at the end?

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entertaining map set. having a variety of style to mess with can be enjoyable once in a while. warning tip for Primordial, if you grab multiple keys of the same color they will count as one once you use them to unlock a door. therefore the player must grab each key individually and use it before proceeding to the next one of the same color. if you grab two or more gold keys before going back to the gold door you've screwed your way out of the map.

Sounds like you aren't running this using Copper. What you described shouldn't happen if you are.

Overall, another set of fantastic maps! You guys are just great for keeping Quake alive. I really enjoyed playing this set. Thank you all!

I was blown away by how good this was. WHO are you guys?, making such treasures. This is art!

A warm hug and a big "thank you".

I think No New Ideas is actually a pretty good "experimental" map - especially if you read the readme and so know what to do in the second room. (I'm not sure if a prompt to shoot things would be a tiny improvement in map itself.)

Sunscorched, as others have said, also has a unique new environmental mechanic - which affects enemies, unlike the usual in Quake (which I've always felt was a missing tactical element, and something this map uses well). Also, the map design itself is lovely!

Quad is a Four Letter Word is a really tightly designed map around a central concept (although I also either missed the Quad secret or the name implies that you don't need one). The central moving rings work surprisingly well to mix things up between levels.

Primordial is the most interesting, in terms of being packed full of secrets and deliberate design touches, of the maps in the pack I have played. The non-linear design doesn't always work 100%, and I'm 100% sure that I wouldn't be able to 100% the level without having seen JCR's playthrough, however much he says he lit secrets consistently... but it's really good.

Utopia meanwhile.... I didn't get off of the first "room" of. I get the idea. It isn't my idea of fun. Sorry, Newhouse.

One of the best jams I ever player - I played a lot. Insomnia, Noir, JJJ, Hallo, Xmas... etc. A lot of fascinating jams with fascinating maps - but those two "Copper Summer" and "Fire & Brimstone" are my favourite ever jams. I do can choose my fav maps out of it, but I won't. All maps are good and jam in whole is heavily recommended to play

ctsj_artistical map is broken, after getting silver key it is unable to continue without rocket jump

Oh, sorry, I tried to play withou Copper