Brace yourself, because I've uploaded my first-run demos, totalling over two-and-a-half hours of gameplay, here. All demos are on Hard skill and are Protocol 666 (QuakeSpasm default).

However, before I was able to play the map, I had to work around a show-stopping issue which I haven't encountered before. When I tried to start the map with QuakeSpasm, the engine would immediately crash, without giving an error message and with nothing useful in the log file. By a process of elimination, I worked out that the crash was being caused by the skybox. In the .bsp file, the "sky" field of the worldspawn entity is as follows:

"sky" "skybox_purple_chaos/purple_chaos_"

I had a quick look at the engine source code, and long story short, it appears that a "sky" string more than 31 characters long will cause a buffer overflow (which may or may not cause the engine to crash, depending on platform). The "sky" string in this case is 33 characters.

I haven't 100% confirmed this because I'm not set up to build QuakeSpasm from source right now, but it looks to me like that's what's going on.

To work around the issue, I moved the "purple_chaos_*.tga" files up a level (out of "env/skybox_purple_chaos" into "env") and updated the "sky" string to just "purple_chaos_". That made it short enough to avoid the crash, and I could play the map!

## locbeta_iw1.dem

This was my first attempt. I finished after about five minutes by accidentally going into the exit portal early. I guess this is the same thing damage_inc was getting at above.

## locbeta_iw2.dem

This was my second attempt. I died after about five minutes.

## locbeta_iw3.dem

This was my third attempt. This time I finished the map by collecting the rune and unlocking the exit, ending with 315/342 kills and 5/7 secrets in 94:51 (!!!) minutes. However, this still wasn't a "proper" run because I failed to find (I think) two of the Chaos Lords.

This run went off the rails somewhere in the middle. It seems like I did an accidental sequence-break by jumping through a window and falling down into an area I wasn't supposed to be able to reach at that time, skipping the fifth Chaos Lord. I guessed what I'd done, and after a while I backtracked so I could attempt to play the level "properly".

However, after I went back, I couldn't find the fifth Chaos Lord, so I couldn't kill him to remove the bars protecting one of the silver keys. I haven't re-watched this demo in full, but in retrospect, what I guess happened is that I failed to find the button which I now know "summons" the fifth Lord. However, during the run, I didn't understand that there was a button that I was supposed to find. What I thought had happened was that I'd somehow broken the map by doing that sequence-break! In the end, I salvaged the situation by grenade-jumping to the gold key (it sounds like damage_inc had the same idea) and then played "properly" from there.

I'm sure you'll be able to tell from the demo that I struggled massively with progression in this map; it might even be that I struggled more with progression in this map than any other Q1SP I've played. Even after I pushed a button or killed a Chaos Lord, I often felt like I didn't know where I was supposed to go next. I ended up wandering around a lot. I tried to include comments in the demo as I went along: hopefully that'll give you an idea what was going through my head.

## locbeta_iw4.dem

This was my fourth attempt, and the first time I managed to complete the map "properly", ending with 340/342 kills and 5/7 secrets in 67:03 minutes.

TBH, it was an *enormous* map: I've typed a lot, but there's a lot more that could be said in terms of feedback. While hunting out the last two secrets, I also found more bugs which aren't in the demos. I could do with going over the map again and putting together a list. I'll aim to do that sometime in the next few days when I have time.

In the meantime, hope the above comments and the demos are helpful!