Nice! Good present for New Year!

Beautiful maps!

Mostly 4/5 maps, few 3s. Last map very sweet :3 good job!

I only played Bal's map so far and it was great.

A Warm Welcome Home (xmasjam_bal) is a really lovely base map, beautifully constructed, and with perfectly escalating difficulty, culminating in an extremely epic battle on top of the base. I got all 135 kills (on hard) but only one of the nine(!) secrets -- and even that one was under an elevator! Like my all-time favourite map, Telefragged, this one does a really nice job of partially destroying the environment, and it's great to see. Really, this is about as good as a base map this size can be, and worth five stars right out o the gate.

Astonishingly, this seems to be Bal's first published map -- unless he's the same Bal that contributed one of the nine unthemed deathmatch maps to 2001's sm7_pack, which seems pretty unlikely. What a debut!

Remains in a Manger (xmasjam_dumptruck) is really, nice, too: a bijou dungeonette that really makes you work for the 50 kills. I particularly enjoyed the way the medieval and modern worlds are brought together near the end. Not quite substantial enough to score the full five stars, but worth four.

_For Absent Fiends (xmasjam_5th) is nicely constructed but really over very quickly. The highlight was probably facing a bunch of assorted zombies before getting any explosives, the triple shotgun or the sharp axe. Blow 'em up with vore balls! Anyway, a good solid three stars.

In the beginning (xmasjam_breezeep) is another that's small but perfectly formed. A beautiful, airy temple with a lot of ominous-looking statues that wake at suitable moments. A lot of fun to blast through, though I think it might have been even more fun with the widowmaker. It seems you're supposed to shoot four hidden buttons (I only found one of them) to release the gold key that gives access to it -- but I found out after killing everything that you can just jump across to the gold-key cage and grab it through the bars! All in all, lots of fun so it just scrapes four stars.

I really liked Winter of the Ice Queen (xmasjam_icequeen) -- which by the way is by Redfield, not Icequeen, despite the naming of the map. It's a lovely attempt to do something different with Quake, and the modified visuals work superbly. Yes, the level is disappointingly short, but it's still a unique experience, well worth four stars. (Also: thank you for the secrets guide in the documentation!)

(Erratum: Breezeep's map is called Pale Signs of Doom, not In The Beginning as stated above. Sorry.)

Etemenanki (xmasjam_ionous) is just magnificent: a genuinely creepy story expounded through books in the secrets, and a sequence of properly tough combats in distinctive surroundings. Fine, fine work and easily worth five stars.

I got 128 of the 130 kills; given how the other secrets have panned out, I'm guessing the last two kills are in the two (of ten) secrets that I missed. I may go back and hunt for them -- I really want to see how the story ends!

If only Ionous's text-file included a secrets guide!

I had high hopes of The Drowning a City Fell Victim To (xmasjam_mukor) because it was obvious from the start that it was very beautiful: the status in the centre of the map is marvellous. Unfortunately, I didn't much enjoy actually playing it, because the difficulty arises from two sources that I never like: insufficient ammunition, and difficulty on manoeuvring. Again and again I ran out of shells and nails, and I never found a weapon that let me use my explosives; again and again, as I strategically retreated from a combat, I got stuck in a too-narrow doorway, or on a plinth, and got killed. Sadly, it means that I have to score the best looking map in the pack so far with a meagre two stars. Sorry, Mukor!

"status"? Silly me. No, the statue in the centre of the map is marvellous.

Naitelveni's untitled map (xmasjam_naitelveni) didn't really work for me. I am basically all about exploring, whereas this map was just a sequence of frenzied combats in the same arena. It's well executed, but I just didn't have any fun playing it. I finished only out of pure bloody-mindedness. So, sorry, Nait, but two stars.

And name your maps, people!

I had a lot of trouble getting started with Wat mutt, dat mutt (xmasjam_negke), not least because I didn't like being constantly tracked by a zombie knight who I had no way to kill: no magic axe, no widowmaker, no explosives. On top of this, having to fight a shambler at close quarters while various knights piled in a vore peppered me with missiles felt more like work than play. But once I stumbled on the solution -- leave the zombie knight behind, then get the shamler and vore into a long fight, then pick off the knights while that's going on -- the rest of it was more fun. Never super-fun, though, and the sequence of ascending lifts and platforms always felt like something laid out for a game. I'll be generous and award three stars, largely because it was so satisfying to solve the shambler/vore problem.

I can't run Pritchard's map: $ quake -heapsize 128000 -game ad +skill 2 +map xmasjam_pritchard Host_Error: Mod_LoadModel: progs\xmasjam\pritchard_chair.mdl not found $ ls -l progs/xmasjam/pritchard_chair.mdl -rw-r--r--@ 1 mike staff 81316 7 Dec 14:32 progs/xmasjam/pritchard_chair.mdl

Any idea what's going on here? Is it possible that the use of backslash as the path-separator is a Windows-specific thing?

Yep, looks like my guess was right. Here is a hideous hack that makes the map work on MacOS (and I assume Linux): ``` ln -s progs/xmasjam/pritchardchair.mdl 'progs\xmasjam\pritchardchair.mdl'

``` It creates a file in the working directory whose name has the backslashes embedded in it, which is linked to the actual file down in the progs/xmasjam directory.

Formatting foul-up in previous comment. Lemme try again:

--

Yep, looks like my guess was right. Here is a hideous hack that makes the map work on MacOS (and I assume Linux): ln -s progs/xmasjam/pritchardchair.mdl 'progs\xmasjam\pritchardchair.mdl' It creates a file in the working directory whose name has the backslashes embedded in it, which is linked to the actual file down in the progs/xmasjam directory.

@Mike Taylor: I believe this is an issue that can affect linux/mac users. The pathname to the chair model has a backslash issue. Hopefully you have gotten the map to run by doing this. I think Pritchard may release a fixed version later, hopefully.

Thanks, @Redfield. My hack is horrible, but works for now. It's something for map authors to be aware of.

Meanwhile, having played most of The Pillar (xmasjam_pritchard), I've reached the book that says Withdraw your stake / stained black with the blood / of an elder god, and I've pressed the button near that book. But nothing obvious has happened. Can anyone give me a hint about what I'm missing?

Note that there's a hotfix (.ent) available for Pritchard's map under "Additional links". It addresses the backslash issue and enables the GL enemies to spawn as they're supposed to.

Finally (for now, until I get Pritchard's map to work) there's Mae'hu Maechrimma (xmasjam_tens). This was rather beautiful, but tiny --just 13 kills -- and over very quickly. Some tiny maps work well because they feel like they're perfect little jewels; but unfortunately this one just feels like an unfinished part of a much bigger map. As it stands, I can only award two stars, but I feel bad about it. I hope my intuiting is right, and ItEndsWithTens eventually releases the complete map that this is part of.

@negke Thanks for the pointer, but having downloaded the .ent file, I don't know what to do with it. Please advise!

Simply placing it in the ad, ad/progs or ad/progs/xmasjam directory doesn't work.

If you are still having trouble, I think that you need to place the .ent inside the maps folder right where xmasjam_pritchard.bsp is. Hopefully you can get it to work, it is a wonderful map.

Thanks, Redfield, that did it!

So I finished The Pillar (xmasjam_pritchard) with all kills but only three of the five secrets. I was nicely down below full health by the end, which to me means that difficulty has been well judged. A really neat little self-contained map, with the distinctive atmosphere, which I gauge is worth four stars.

All of which of course means a very well-deserved five stars for the pack as a whole -- and my gratitude to everyone who contributes for a very welcome Christmas gift!

Some of the maps are real 5/5 maps so the pack should get this rating also.

Bal's "A Warm Welcome Home" won the "Best Map Visuals" category at the Quake Awards 2018.

Bal's "A Warm Welcome Home" has more secrets than expected --- first for a map this size, then for the final surprise, and finally for the mailbox :)

Playthrough of Absent Fiends by FifthElephant - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhKef7h4oqg

Playthrough by GGRC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVpqZUCREOU

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This download is missing Sock's map.