Review: Jailbreak Beta

Mod for Quake III Arena by Team Reaction

April 11, 2000 -- Review by A.T. Hun

Jailbreak is a teamplay mod. When a person is fragged he goes to jail. Once everyone on a team is in jail, they are executed (that's the goal of the mod). You can free your captured teammates by hitting a switch in the other team's base. Captured players can also work together so that one of them can escape and free the rest.

Sound simple? It is. And that's the beauty of it. As much as I'd really like to try Counter-Strike, Team Fortress, and other mods like that, I really don't feel like binding a zillion keys and learning a bunch of new weapons just to play a mod. Jailbreak gives you teamplay where you can jump in and start playing with a minimum of fuss.

Bots aren't particularly good at Jailbreak. They know how to frag, but they won't work with you to escape, nor will they find the switch to free their teammates. As a matter of fact, some of the levels don't have .AAS files so the bots won't even be able to navigate the level at all.

Because of its special needs, new maps will need to be made for this mod. The quality of the maps will determine if this mod succeeds or fails. The beta version comes with ten different maps. A nice selection, but does quantity equal quality? We'll see! Here's a brief review of each map with a score on a scale of 10.

Cathedral Jailbreak! (q3jbcath)

This level is by far the most visually stunning of the ten. The cathedrals are absolutely gorgeous and painstakingly designed. But that visual quality comes at the cost of precious frames-per-second. I found my framerate dropping below 20 in the cathedrals when the only one there was me! The other problem is that the cathedrals are a LONG ways apart. To sum up: looks beautiful, plays slow (7/10).

Binary Voids (q3jbsul1)

This one is a small map floating in space. It would be good for 2v2 or 3v3 matches. The red armor seems a bit too hard to get. When you fall off, you only fall a little ways before you splat (unlike, say, Q3DM17). To sum up: small but nice map (8/10).

Crunchy Forts (q3jbsul2)

This one is by far my favorite Jailbreak map. It is set up like a classic CTF two-fort map. As a matter of fact, I'd like to see the author covert it to a CTF map too. To sum up: very nice, the best of the pack (9/10).

Neighbourhate (q3jbsul3)

This map "features" two tall towers that abuse the shiny metal shader/texture to kill your framerate and drive you mad. Some of the doors really aren't doors, the are teleporters that take you a up or down a story, which is extremely confusing at first. The plasma and BFG turrets are neat, but easily abused. It's another map that you'd need a zillion people on or you'd run around for days without finding anyone. To sum up: too big, too slow (2/10).

Cave Riot (q3jbsul4)

Another dueling castles motif. The problem with this one is that in both bases you can easily fall into the jail. It is much harder to the blue team because they have farther to go to get to the switch in the red base. Plus once the red team jumps over they are basically in the base already. To sum up: once again, it looks cool, but the layout leaves a lot to be desired (5/10).

Hell's Prison (q3jbvan1)

This is another map I'd like to see converted for CTF. My only gripe with this level is that the courtyard area suffers from the "big, square walls with the same texture repeating forever" syndrome. To sum up: simple and straightforward--I like that (8/10).

Aftermath of Democracy (q3jbjex1)

This map suffers from being overly complex with very "busy" texturing (when you see the map, you'll immediately understand). The many twists and turns makes it very easy to get lost. Once you figure it out, it could be fun. To sum up: a bit too overwhelming (5/10).

Cosmic Conflict (q3jbjex3)

This map, ahem, borrows liberally from Q3DM16. There are some texturing problems on the inside of the arches. There is only one release button for both teams. I'd really like to play this one with human opponents to see if that would make for an interested variation or a PITA. 3v3 would probably be the max on this map. To sum up: Q3DM16 for Jailbreak (7/10).

A River Runs Through It * (q3jbeven1)

I like the basic layout of this map, but it REALLY suffers from the "big, square walls with the same texture repeating forever" syndrome (far worse than q3jbvan1). With a bit of creative texturing, this could be a winner. To sum up: my kingdom for a retexturing (7/10)!

Armed Forces * (q3jbphr1)

This one is probably my second favorite map. The main bases are reminiscent of the red armor rooms in Zoid's q3wctf2. There is apparently a trap you can spring to keep people from camping in the armory room (if you don't get in there, you don't have access to an awful lot of weapons), but I haven't figured out how to do it. There are some minor texture alignment problems on the base of the jump pads on the floor of the central courtyard and on the upper wall in the blue base. To sum up: this one's a keeper (9/10).

* User-made maps, not made by Team Reaction

Some of the maps, most notably Neighbourhate (q3jbsul3), have security cameras you can look through to see other parts of the map. I really haven't played the mod enough to figure out how useful they are.

Each map has it's own unique method of execution. Some dump huge number of grenades into the cell, some drop you into the void or hellfog, some dip you in lava. My personal favorite is Cathedral Jailbreak! (q3jbcath) in which the floor opens up to drop you into hellfog with diabolical laughter. The map designers obviously spent a good bit of time on these methods of execution.

The maps are a mixed bag. A couple are very nice. Most are decent, but nothing spectacular. One is functionally worthless. A basic mod like this really needs excellent maps to stand out. With a little reworking, some of these maps can be improved dramatically. Neighbourhate and Cathedral Jailbreak (as beautiful as it is) need some serious reworking to be playable. Even at that, with their sheer size you'd need at least a 10v10 battle for them to be worth playing.

I kept getting the error BotEntityToActivate: unknown activator with class name "target_relay" when a bot team would be executed. I have no idea what that means. The coders are trying to find a way to speed up the weapon respawning, since Q3A defaults to a 30 second respawn in teamplay games.

The setup program installs everything just fine, but it does not create the shortcuts on the start menu properly for Quake3 Jailbreak or Q3JB Readme. A couple of strategically-placed quotation marks takes care of the problem. If all else fails, you can choose jailbreak from the "mod" menu in Q3A. Of course, why in the world Win9x needs those quotation marks in the shortcuts is completely beyond me.

To sum up: I think there's a lot of potential with this mod. But until there are more high-quality maps it will just be potential. I know this is a beta release and I'm sure this is the kind of input they are looking for. This is the kind of teamplay mod I could see myself playing a lot. Let's hope some of the map issues are resolved by time it is officially released.

Should you download the beta version or wait for the full version? If you are eager to try this mod out, go ahead and download it. If you only have passing interest, you might want to hold off for the next release.

You can visit the Q3A Jailbreak site at http://q3jb.teamreaction.com/.

Screenshots