Wonderful maps!
Really difficult, one of my favorites!

All of the levels in this episode are great, but TOUM alone is worth the price of admission. Slightly annoying gameplay in a handful of places but an amazingly weird theme carried through to perfection from beginning to end.

Excellent pack, one of the great classics.

Hi all,

Relative newbie alert

in this episode all the text is garbled for me. I watched someone play on youtube and that text was fine. it seems there is a story that I'm missing, and it's a nuisance not being able to read important messages as it's halting my progress. Could anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong? (other than the text everything else seems to work). cheers

What engine are you using? My random guess is that you installed some fan-made graphics. Try without them (it even looks better then)! ;)

Was using dark places but after reading your recommended engines I tried Fitzquake. It works perfectly now! Love the new enemies and overall feel and design. Some elements remind me of Half Life. By the way, thanks for the quick response I never knew about all these wonderful maps. Great site.

Thanks! Spread the word. ;)

Though i´m not a big fan of those textures, this pack still gets a 5 out of 5. Released in 2001, this one stands up against all that was following, even today. Absolutely worth checking out, play it now, if you haven´t yet!

Highly enjoyable Quake mission pack, even now. When you shut down a power generator and the lights in the whole level go half-dark, you know that it's going to be bad. Nice usage of some Zerstörer enemies and weapons, too. I also liked that there is a bit of story after every level you complete. Looks even better with colored lighting (if you know how to create .lit files, e.g. with MHColour). 5 stars, easily!

NightFright, did you create lit files for OUM? If so, can you upload them to quaketastic?

Nevermind, found the color lighting tool.

Excellent! Just replayed this, great from start to finish.

Nice. I like how this has story part just right. Enough to explain what the hell is going on and not too much of it to make you want to skip or disable narration.

Replayed this. I'd forgotten how satisfyingly chunky the earlier, base levels are. There's an interestingly unique atmosphere to the later more medieval levels, with the continuing presence of the base monsters making a certain amount of sense in light of the story. I found myself feeling sorry for these poor bewlidered humans, sucked out of their bases and drawn into a netherworld. (But not too sorry to riot-controller them into kibble.)

I would say that by modern standards it falls just a little short of the full five stars, because of some primitive brushwork and a sense of arbitratiness in places (though even that is ameliorated by the comments of the Big Bad as you make your way through its sanctum.) But it's still a very solid four at the very least.

Few maps but great and enjoyable, this deserve 5 stars absolutely. Loved the atmosphere, it resembles a "Zerstorer little brother" mixed with some Half Life.

OUM's a better take on the nihilist mini-episode concept than Zerstorer, if only because the latter three maps are more consistent and ambitious than expected. The elements cribbed from Half-Life never get in the way, thankfully, and I love the Egyptian theme shift right at the end since it justifies adding in new, crazier rooms and enemy waves to deal with. Sense of humor's strong here, too.

Fun episode with a cool grab-bag of weapon/monster modifications—I don't think I've seen bouncing nails before—though I don't prefer it to Zerstorer or Travail.

The jittery, unskippable cutscenes are a pain nowadays and the new railgun enemy kind of sucks (only because of its shield, really) but OUM holds up pretty well.

Unlike Zerstorer, edgelord storyline doesn't really work here.

Also, the riot controller coding is mangled somehow - only one shot actually does something, but it still consumes 2 shells.

Great mission pack! Obviously, lot of work were put into it...... and for some reason, just like Zerstorer, it all was f**ed up in the ending. What, the villain/final boss wins? It's anticlimactic, it's not "Quake/Id" enough.... C'mon!

"Operation: Urth Majik", gives me a good "Rubicon" vibe - which is in favour. This also means, there is a 'Quake 2' theme woven into it, in own way.

I applaud for a very good difficulty balance on "Normal" level, at least in terms of combat. The progress trajectory throughout the game, is mostly clear - albeit interrupted sparsely with some bad cases of "dead-end-puzzle"; which could possibly turn some players away. Fortunately, such roadblocks, are few.

Size of the stages, is not too much, but just proper, to give a decent example - a well adjusted bite-size.

The narrative at the end of each stage, is a nice touch, definitely for the benefit in terms of general reception. It bestowes a sense of achievement and meaningful progress.

What is bad, is the placement of progress-buttons in terms of visual design; in the early stages, these are obscure in outlook, making them prone to being overlooked - suggesting the possibility of another "dead-end-puzzle" in confusion.

The customary elements - including opponents, weapons and certain treats, such as ladders - feel great and solid as an addon to the 'Quake' universe - they are impressive even beyond just the historical perspective, minding the day of release, which dates back to the year 2001.

What in particular stood out as innovative to myself, are the "stations" with health, ammo and armor patches; it felt quite like a next-step for the common 'Quake' standards.

I think the campaign, would benefit from a remaster to the "Quoth" foundation, unless the "Arcane Dimensions", proved to be a better set of solutions.

"Operation: Urth Majik", deserves recognition.

The ending, though, yes, but no.

Nice touch on resupply stations, reminds you of half-life, however, playing with armour-health damage ratio was never a good thing especially when reducing the same pick-ups throughout the maps.

Player's health quickly drops to '0' while armour still above '90'. The armour in this mod is useless. It only protect itself but not the player, I had to repeat otherwise simple shootouts because it seems the shotgun grunt can penetrate your armour as the nail gun grunt. Parameters like these should be left alone.

For that I'll give only 2/5.

What a piece of manure of a mod, why replace the rocket launcher with that dumb weapon?

The game is unplayable without the original RL. It seems the author never played his tweaked mod before releasing it. The star goes for the maps only.

Hello Guys,

Here is my opinion regarding Operation: Urth Majik

Creativity : 5

This MP consists of five levels. The first three levels are Base themed level, while the last two are Egyptian ones. I found all base level interesting and well-designed. Some would probably feel that the textures are repeated many times, but for me, it was perfect. Most if not all textures are new comparing to the base game + MPs. I liked how base levels resembled Quake 2, yet you don't get the feeling of using the wrong game for the map :P The addition of Health, Ammo and Armor stations is also a brilliant idea. I've never thought that I can see such things working in Quake. The latter two Egyptian levels are also nice, although it seems to have less diversity among textures.

The addition of new monsters and some weapons are nice too. Enemies have different skins and weapons. There are even space knights and drones on the third level! BTW, it seemed a bit odd to have them on the Egyptian maps. Last, but not least, the Plasma Gun from DOOM also makes a cameo ;)

Playability / Balance : 5

Monster placement is great. You start to encounter more and more monster as you progress through the levels. You don't get access to all weapons, and ammo is somewhat limited, forcing you not to waste too many. There are several places where you need to climb a ladder and when you arrive at the top there are multiple foes trying to take you down. You often get into a situation where they are shooting from 2-3-4 angles and those rottweilers are onto you too :P Not to mention "traps", when you just walk past by something and suddenly two Demons jump at you. It may sound hard, but this is what really makes this MP a great challenge for all SP fans. (I played on Nightmare difficulty)

Secrets are hard to find. I only managed to get the 40-50% of them.

Story & Instructions

There is a story built around maps, which I like. Some maps lack the story, and even if that is not really the aim of the game, still makes it more enjoyable. It's always better to have some "goal" or know why to kill the boss than bursting through and just killing anyone who gets in your way. I like that too, don't get me wrong, but still...

What drove me crazy is how minimal info or help is given to the player. Sometimes, I spent 10-20 minutes, trying to find the next move. There are no instructions, and you just have to do things which don't seem obvious.

Final Words

All in all, this is a great mission pack. I recommend it to anyone, who likes fair, but tough challenges and nicely designed maps.

Hi there! When i try to launch "Operation: Urth Majik" with the actual Version of QSS all Text is garbled and unreadable. The text is there but the letters are wrong.

Older Versions from QSS will work (Git Revision: 3c5059a, Git Date: 2021-03-06, Compile Date: Sat, Mar 6, 06:43:10 UTC 2021) and the normal actual quakespasm will work, too.

I am too newbie to fix the problem in the map, maybe a fix here or a guideline how i can correct the text for qss in Operation: Urth Majik would help!

As a hint: Everything seems to had jumped to the next letter in the alphabeth and also the next number after the correct one.

(I did already open an issue at https://github.com/Shpoike/Quakespasm/issues/82)

I have to add that QSS is mandatory in this case...

@GenericJohnDoe Just open pak0.pak of this mod and delete conchars.lmp inside gfx folder. Save pak0.pak. That's all.

@qazzaq Thank you very much! May i ask for what conchars.lmp was meant for?

Ok, i could answer my question for myselfe: It is the used textfont in this mod. I used the guide here: https://www.quakewiki.net/archives/fatty/defaulte128.html?opinion=conchars

And looked up the pak0 of oum. There is said chonchars.lmp in the gfx folder. But on top in the pak0 is the gfx.wad which contains (a correct working) conchars.lmp, too. I wonder what the deal was here... Maybe a more highres version?

The two copies of conchars.lmp (one in gfx dir and one inside gfx.wad) are bit-for-bit identical.

The weird thing is that compared to a vanilla conchars.lmp they ARE off by one. So it makes no sense to me why the one inside gfx.wad would work while the "loose" one wouldn't.

Also, if you delete the loose conchars.lmp from the gfx dir in pak0.pak and load OUM in the latest QSS, there's a warning:

Warning: Invalid size for gfx.wad conchars lump (16392, expected 16384) - attempting to ignore for compat.

Well, at least it seems to work without the loose file in compatiblity mode.

Maybe the creators of the mod had to offset the chars by one because of another clusterbug.

What would happen if someone (This is far out of reach for my skills) reedit the conchar and place one into the wad? Maybe one in the wad and one in the gfx folder for comparision?

There's a pretty good set of base enemies here, reskins or not. I would take this roster over pretty much anything else, rubicon 2+, nehahra, quoth etc (and i love quoth, just not its human enemies)

Tomb of UM is a really cool level. I got 8 out of 9 secrets (plus 1 not-secret) and somehow, 175 out of 173 enemies. If there was one thing that let me down, it was not using an actual Guardian there, but instead using it as a subpar boss the next level.

I like the gameplay changes, textures and architecture. You really have to remember the layout of the maps to progress. The combat is unfortunately pretty bland, most enemies are right in front of you and the plasma gun melts.

I can't say it aged really well. For example Rubicon aged much better. Nevertheless the amount of efforts is so high, that 5 stars is the only honest score. Recommended to play if you're interested in history of Quake customapping

No doubt the scripted stuff must have wowed people back in the day. But gaming has moved on and these days it all just looks a bit amateur. What we're left with instead is not the looks or the sugar on top, but just the core game-play. As a first-time player of Urth-Majik in 2023, I'm not prepared to take it easy on the mod on account of it not being a commercial release or some such, as people did by default back in the day. There have been a number of community releases over the years that have matched and even surpassed commercial Quake.

The core experience is this - competently designed but ugly techbase maps that go on too long, with clunky attempts at a narrative and cutscenes, with some good gun-play involved but with a lot of repetition of the same enemies; albeit the new enemies do spice things up. There are also some altogether cheap encounters that you will be forced to die in again and again and again until you finally survive them.

Sounds like your cup of tea? Go right ahead, for sure you can do worse. Not for me though. 3.2/5