Pak Attack: The Sock Drawer [BQTN E69 | PC w/ Quakespasm]
0(This was originally livestreamed. Breaks have been cut for easier viewing.)
00:00 - In The Shadows (2012)
This is, as far as I can tell, Sock's earliest release on Quaddicted, but it certainly doesn't feel like a first release, and I have to wonder how long he'd been working with Quake tools beforehand. There's already clear signs of the origins of AD's standards for aesthetic and lore, and in addition this includes an entire extra game mode involving stealth. This was only a demo but it was clearly pretty groundbreaking... and while this never saw a full release, Sock didn't stop there; he sure got busy in the subsequent year.
2:38:13 - The Horde of Zendar (2013)
I remember liking the aesthetic and layout of this map in Arcane Dimensions, and I was curious to see how much it evolved from its original version. The answer was... not much. There are of course still differences in terms of weapons and enemies (and key items, i.e. tome vs. rune) that are only present in AD, the healing pool doesn't heal in the original version, and I'm pretty sure one door that required a silver key in the original did not require one in AD... It's possible some of the secrets also changed - I didn't exhaustively hunt down all of them.
Given how drastic the changes were to Adamantine Cruelty (not originally a sock map) when it was adopted into AD, I had honestly hoped to observe a similar amount of effort taken to sock's own maps in the process (it'd only be fair, right?). I suppose it's possible this map was destined for AD from the start though, whereas Arcane Adamantine was almost a remix by comparison (and maybe that was the point).
Putting this map in perspective of when it was released, over a year before AD as a whole, few things come close to this map in terms of how polished it is. Paks like Honey and Something Wicked were a big deal to the community in 2012, and this (along with some of the others below) easily contends with them as far as I'm concerned.
4:26:24 - Midnight Stalker v2 (2013)
Given what the README said, I came into this expecting a remix of e3m6, but this is actually far more interesting - it's a remix of e3m6's _concepts_ moreso than its layout, so it's quite a different experience. It's a relatively short map, but it's got a few neat features here and there (I thought the shambler elevator was clever, although the shambler fights themselves weren't particularly engaging, at least the way I played them).
5:13:06 - Backsteingotik (2013)
This is another pre-AD version of a map that later made it into AD, and again it only has minimal differences. Even the stuff you can scrounge up in the starting room is similar, even though that room serves as the difficulty select in the original version. There's also interestingly an optional "hard+" route if you choose hard difficulty.
As with Zendar, this version has a rune in the place where the AD version has a tome... but the AD version additionally has its own rune on top of that which requires finding more secrets - which I must've managed to do during my AD playthrough in February, but I failed to do in my playthrough of the original version here (I only found my way into one of the two vaults).
6:53:38 - The Ivory Tower (2013)
I spent a lot more time with this map than I originally expected to, as I unwittingly signed myself up for finding all of its secrets (well, along with my chat, who sometimes spotted hidden switches before I did).
I dig this map's aesthetic and storytelling, but this was one of those maps that I lost my way in more than I probably should have, as there were some bits that just didn't distinctively stick in my mind well enough. There was also one thing that absolutely looked like a lift to me but as far as I could tell it wasn't one, which nagged at me repeatedly. And good lord why is the step up to the rocket launcher ledge so easy to miss? It's not technically a secret but it's practically disguised as one.
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For more details on BQTN (Better Quake Than Never), see details and the full playlist here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfGxDQwmTH6y1mhQzUaCZ6XxXxspG7Z19
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