Five stars for Coffee Achiever's maps.

Extremely inconsistent. Some maps are awesome gorgeously pretty crazy cool while others are... hm, well not bad but mediocre. Very strange pack. I mean usualy packs tend to be somewhat of unified style & quality but not this one. As for maps my absolute favourite is "Escape from the Miasma District". One of the best maps available on QD ever made to date. Very impressive & inspiring map. THANKS to all authors anyway

For me, this is 'only' a 4.

As above stated; extremely inconsistent. There is some truly beautiful mapping here, as well as some...not. Some maps are inventive, all of them have good, some times brilliant ideas. And some crap. This is pretty much the standard for community packs.

But somehow, this pack manages to annoy the sit out of me. There is somehow... too much. They have tried to include just about everything that ID ever made, plus the community conversions. The results are - in some cases - maps that try to do *everything and just end up as gimmick-filled messes.

I'll replay this, but not all the maps.

It is very pleasing to see a number of mappers that we don't usually see here; i hope to see more from you. And i thank you all for your efforts! Happy New Year!

Two things.

1 The mod itself is absolutely FANTASTIC. -Doom shotgun modifier is so awesome I won't be able to use the old versions anymore (and yay hitscan! unlike AD) -Great new monsters like cyber-shambler, upgunned grunts and grey nail ogres are crazy fun. -My favourite old monsters- Multi-grenade ogres, beam Nightgaunts and those Axe-throwers from Unforgiven- are BACK! -Best part is, the modifier that allows enemies to fire volleys or rapid-fire; especially sweet for Death Knights and Ogres, making them a far greater threat.

2 I do however agree about the level design; mostly basic geometry; they don't give much direction to what you're supposed to do or where to go; andthey aren't really optimized for combat, enemy types, weapon discovery or ammo provisions (usually just big arenas with teleporting enemies)- as if these were more of an afterthought, expecting randomizer modifiers anyway. I real pity.

Update, I suggest for the most fun, 1- toggle on the Doom Shotgun + enemy volley modifiers (probably also the enemy randomizer). Put on a hard difficulty level. 2- get behind the start slipgate in the hub map and jump into the test map. Grab the OG + Armagon guns, the Grappling Hook and the 2nd most powerful jump boots. 3- Jump into the original Quake maps, with new enemies and powerups incorporated (just avoid touching any jump boots as they will permanently remove your double jumps)!

Played on skill 3. I have more chance of living by throwing myself off a 500ft cliff with a rocky bottom. Maps are to insane. Just gave up on some of them. I Know others will say drop the skill number, but im to dumb to do that lol.

Beho's map has areas with no lighting, how can I pass them withot cheating like 'gl_fullbroght 1'?

So, recently finish this with all runes and both secret levels. Very hard to be honest, I can't remember when was the last time I saved so many times in a row. Some maps are good, others throw you directly into the fight with only a shotgun. Some toughts about everything I saw in this mod:

· Axeman is extremely powerful. I like it, but sometimes I hate it.

· Some maps have extremely unfair fights. Mostly of them I ran in circles to engage in-fights.

· I use to jump with Mouse2. This mod uses Mouse2 to other weapon functions so kept me re-binding every time I opened the game. Never used them anyway, but cool idea. You should be able to bind those new features to other buttons.

Vasya shkolnik - On that map you are meant to use the light from the Mjolnir to get through a section. If it does not emit light, then you either have it powered down (press switch ammo button, default Q) or are out of cells. I suppose it isn't ideal, regardless.

Shikadi - The new keys can be rebound in the quake.rc file. That's where most mods bind new keys.

Clocktower is consistently challenging, but not always in an enjoyable way. Things like being trapped in a largely fulldark room with six teleporting fields don't feel like an invitation to combat, but to finding a legitimate way to cheat. (In this case, by rocket-jumping up onto a ledge they couldn't reach, then just shotgunning into the total darkness until they were all dead.) Some lovely ideas here, especially the gigantic machinery. But I would so much more have enjoyed exploring all the way up to the top in a progressive, organic way.

I enjoyed Escape from the Miasma District rather more, and especially appreciated the centrepiece four-way bridge that you progressively raise. My only real disappointment was that the ending felt a bit abrupt, perhaps because I had missed so many monsters (43 of them!) that were presumably hiding inside secrets.

I went back to Escape to hunt the rune, immediately guessed where it was, and had an enjoyable time blasting another 36 of them to smithereens. That brings me up to 177/184, and the only secret I'm missing is the one that (I assume) is triggered by the button at the bottom of the sequence of stairways that leads to the silver-key door. Any hints?

Necrobestial Analbuttsex was yet another map in which I finished well short of all kills -- just 252 of 281. Where are they all?! Anyway, this is a strange map, combining some of my favourite parts of the pack so far with some of my least favourite. The long, intricate climb up and around the big Science Machine was rewarding and fascinating -- and brutal in places -- but the trudge through sewers near the end was merely an exercise in tedious caution, and the final battle was not even that. With far too much going on to have a chance of fighting properly, I resorted to running round the outside of the room, taking occasional damage and replenishing from the respawining health, waiting for infighting to reduce to monsters to a handful that I could kill. This is one map that would be much, much better if it finished part way through.

Well, whatever reservations I may have had about earlier maps in this pack has been blown away by Recreational Astrocide, which ticks every possible box. Beautiful, and I do mean beautiful, architecture; fascinating exploration; intriguing and sometimes highly brutal combats; superb new equipment. It does basically everything right. Magnificent, and catapults straight into the all-time top half dozen Quake maps for me.

@MikeTaylor: the remaining 7 enemies in miasma are in a secret that involves windows in the checkered tiles area. it's a weird one because in earlier versions it was more of a navigation challenge, but now it's pure observation/luck.

notable optional encounters in nbabs: in a slime pit; in the scrag maze; on the way to the under-lift secret. rastr also has optional encounters, but they don't count towards the kill total.

Thanks, anon. With your help, I found the last secret, though I'm not sure my solution is the intended one: shoot the stack of explosives at long range through the window, then go back round to the hole that they blew in the wall. I'm also not sure what to do with the slime suit, given that I've already found all secrets, but ... Oh, wait, I get it, you're supposed to use that to (rot13) qvir qbja orybj gur zrpunavpny oevqtr gb svaq gur gryrcbegre gb gur nern jvgu gur ehar.

I found three optional encounters in Recreational Astrocide: two on rooftops, and the one where the rune is found.

Meanwhile, Under Construction: there's some OK stuff in here, but I mostly didn't enjoy it because I was chronically undersupplied with ammo, and fighting damage-sponge enemies. At the end, I was reduced to killing two of those fast-moving axe-knights with nails (which move too slowly to hit reliably) and the incredibly annoying laser rifle (which ditto, plus it only seems to do one billionth of a point of damage). In the end I was left with only the laser rifle to kill the one, having run out of nails as well as shells and grenades, and instead just went toe-to-toe, axing him to death just before he axed me to death. More like work than fun.

Rusty Bucket Bay is as ugly as anything -- blocky, overlit -- yet strangely satisfying to play, once you get past the initial ammo famine. Suffers from a bug that you can exit early by nuzzling up to the control panel before you've removed the anchor and gates that are supposed to prevent you from leaving. Jump-boots make everything better.

Below-Earth Holocaust is another of the many maps in this pack that just don't give you enough ammo to kill the bad guys. What makes it worse is that give s and its friends are disabled, so the option of fixing that bug is removed. In the end, I god-moded and killed the vile phasing green things with about ten solid minutes of axing. You can imagine that this did little to make me feel good about the map as a whole, which felt more like a punishment than a game. Which is a shame, as there is nice stuff in it. Fix the ammo levels, and it would be worlds better.

And then Shub's Wager. Interestingly and weirdly different from most maps, but the final section, with the vores and two vermes was just ridiculous. Again, I god-moded to get past it, and did so with no guilt. Come on, people.

I have absolutely no idea what Imperfect Courage is trying to achieve.

The secret level begin with fighting a shambler in near-total darkness armed only with an axe? Seriously? What's wrong with you people?

I mean, I respect the craftsmanship that's gone into this pack tremendously, but somehow in among all that a lot of the mappers seem to have forgotten that Quake is supposed to be fun. When I come to replay this pack, I will only pick out a few maps, Recreational Astrocide very much the first among them. Given how great that is, and how good several of the other maps are, and how superb some parts of yet more maps are, it would be mean to award less than five stars; but I have never done so more reluctantly.