Quake - recap (Happy birthday to bloggie)

Enter... It awaits you. The blood is a nice touch.

If I had to look back on the all games I've played, reviewed and seen over the years, the one I'd say that was the biggest influence on everything, is Quake. While I have reviewed it before, I feel that for the 1 year anniversary, I'd revisit it.

Gibs, not quite ludicrous however, that belongs to Rise of the Triad.

One word, "Quake", most of which is summarised just by that titular word. From Id software comes one of the biggest and most influential titles ever to grace the gaming world. Looking at it today, it's a brown coloured, ugly looking polygonal shooter without the need for reloading or fancy things like regenerating health. It's fast paced, it's dirty, it's brutal, it's Quake. Yes I know you shouldn't use a word to describe itself but it's still Quake and it's Quake to do so.

If the cyberdemon didn't teach you to strafe, this guy will.

At the bare bones, it's a first person shooter that went almost fully polygonal and is a massive step up from games like Doom and Duke Nukem 3D where we're using actual 3D maps and worlds to be created rather than the 5D Space of some engines of the 2D shooters. Plot wise it's about as basic as it gets, ID wasn't really known for enthralling in that regard. Mankind invents teleporters, something else hacks into teleports, monsters arrive, shit goes down, you're all that's left and now you're going to fix it. Basically it's DOOM but the monsters aren't quite demons... Even if some of them are based on the HP Lovecraft mythos.

Ogres... Why the chainsaw and grenades though?

The game is split into 4 chapters branching off from a main hub, each chapter consisting of multiple levels with a particular battle at the end. Though the game cheats out of this one, as chapter one has a boss that requires a specific puzzle to be solved to defeat them, the other levels feature no such other bosses, but rather battles against slightly tougher enemies than one would normally encounter or a run through a gauntlet of lots of enemies with little chance to recover or recuperate items and weapons.

It begins... after one enemy and a secret.

Quake runs a fairly standard affair regarding weaponry. You have an axe for when you're out of ammo or don't want to spend any ammo killing something. A shotgun that has little spread and acts more like a pistol/sniper with minor damage. Double barrel shotgun carried over from Doom2s days which stops most minor enemies but gets shrugged off by larger ones. A nail gun that acts like a projectile based machinegun, quad nail gun for even more nails being fire faster, a grenade launcher for those that like their explosives to bounce off walls and pull off trick shots with grenades that either explode when they hit an enemy or a few seconds after being fired. A rocket launcher for those that like grenades to be a lot more direct and finally the Lightning Gun that fires a short range stream of electricity and butchers most enemies in seconds. Hint: Do NOT use it underwater, or even near water, you won't survive unless invincible.... but then neither will anything else.

There's some very interesting architecture in this game. AND Low gravity.

Monsters are a varied sort of melee and projectile based enemies. Some will fly and float, others will pounce and claw, some chainsaw and lob grenades (called ogres... go figure). Later monsters are magic wielding knights, huge behemothic monsters that throw lightning bolts and spidery creatures that hurl uncannily-homing projectiles that explode. While there's also blobs that blow up on death, laser toting marines, dogs and if it's not the enemies trying to kill you, it's the levels with a multitude of traps from spikes, pits, crushers, lava, acid or just trying to drown you like a sack of kittens. Minus the sack... and kittens.

And "psych" in 3... 2... 1...

The single player only goes so far though. Quake, while having a fast paced single-player mode, was made more famous by the multiplayer and with that, some of the most frantic, almost arcade-fast, death matches, team matches and co-op play for the time. Modems, networks and the internet soon after it was released brought about Quake as THE online death match game to play and thanks to additional software like Quake Spy and Quake World, online gaming caught like wildfire and the game ascended into fame.

He never stood a chance.

Death match works on the principle that every player gets a shotgun and some shells and they're shoved into a map for either a set amount of time or until someone gets X number of kills. Depending upon the map would depend upon the tactics, some had all the weapons, some featured tower-like layouts, some were huge sprawling areas for open combat and others were claustrophobic nightmares with traps for the unwary. Rocket jumping, grenade hopping (though coined earlier by games like Marathon) and learning maps by sound (i.e. hearing when and where items were picked up could indicate where another player was in the game, bringing about people not picking up every item to make others THINK they were elsewhere, then ambush those planning an ambush... We got rather sneaky!) were advances made for the more tactical player. Or it's a race for the rocket launcher and quad damage.

Remember, this was groundbreaking stuff in the post-doom era.

Quake however really took off when the game began to be modded by other players. While not a unique concept, mods had been created by many other games and in multiple ways ranging from changing all the enemies to look like cocks to the more advanced things like Total Conversions where only the original game engine was the same and even then the physics and style of the game was drastically different. For an example, think Doom and Aliens TC for an idea, or go further with Action Doom and such changes. Quake had itself an army of modifications that ranged from the bonus content of add-ons like Quake mission packs, the more high brow mods like Quess (Quake done as a chess game in the style almost of battle chess), Flight Sims with players fighting it out in planes and helicopters, Rally Quake for those that liked driving with guns, bonus models and skins, playing through quake as a monster rather than the usual human and the list really does keep on going.

Say it with me now, STRAFE!

It spawned a new wave of bedroom coders and modifiers that took to it like a duck to water and later development companies took the original engine and boosted it to the point that it became Half Life. Online communities sprang up around quake and around even individual modifications took on feverous fan bases that decried others and touted their own personal favourites as the best thing since, well.. Quake.

Dark, moody and atmospheric. Also very, very, brown.

But while it spawned mods and inspired generations of engines to be developed, it also fronted the art (and it's a fine art if you can do this unassisted) of Speed Running. Quake done Quick being one of the first, biggest and best examples of taking a game and trying to find the fastest route you'll possibly imagine (and many you won't until you see these videos) in setting personal targets of fastest times, killing everything, all secrets, in hardest modes and so on until you've so many different ways of doing a game quickly that it becomes about as complicated as judging scores in the para-olympics for handicap specification and setting. Take the fastest first level done on the hardest difficulty and you're looking at less time than most people take just picking their first difficulty setting. 25 seconds and it's getting faster and more chaotic from there onwards. A combination of grenade hops, rocket jumps (and descents to fall faster), strafe jumping and using enemies as a catapult when they strike, brings a game beaten from start to finish in less time than some people take to beat the first level.

Go ahead, enter...

In closing, bow down, thank it profusely and be glad that a game like this helped catapult forward and shape the gaming world as we know it today (before bullshit like regenerating health, slow pace-controlled levels and mad things like PLOT get involved) and remember that even now.

The Dopefish still lives.

P.S: From here on, I shall be posting to the blog only once a week so that I can continue work on a rather lovely website, 30+ Gamer where I have been posting mostly about arcade games and will continue to do so. So hopefully, I'll see you there for more Bod related articles, particularly ones on being disappointed but, as already said on the front page, it's fairly expected.

Quake

If Doom is the recognised Great Granddaddy of the First Person Shooter genre, then Quake is the Grandfather of 3D First Person Shooters. Not that pseudo 3D perception we'd been given with Doom, Duke, and any BUILD game for that matter, or indeed the Marathon series of games. But a TRUE, actual 3D set of architecture, 3D models for virtually everything from weapons to pickups and so on. Quake holds the most recognised crown for it and paved the way for the games like Unreal, Half-Life and so on.

Quake still holds true to the Doom formula, as one might expect of ID software, in which players get from point a, to point b, in an as "alive" state as possible, preferably with as many guns and as much ammo as one can acquire. What functions slightly differently is that the game gives you a 3D run down of the difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard... and nightmare if you can find it) then you may select which of the 4 episodes you wish to begin, battle your way through the levels, kill the end enemies and exit with the rune. Once you've gained all 4 runes, you'll see the end level open up and from there you combat the final boss that has caused the situation in the first place resulting in one-lone-hero syndrome.

Sort of...

Let's start with the positives. Bearing in mind I'm taking a look at the original Quake with no additions, mods, enhancements or other such little situational changes (like using OpenGL etc.).

The game is fast, even on low end machines for the time, the optimisation of the code is impressive nonetheless for the game and even while showing levels in some of the most outstanding shades of brown imaginable, (seriously... almost everything is brown, perhaps something to be not-so-proud of for the future of gaming, turning everything "realistic" brown) the character's movement in and around the game is often very fluid and rather quick, which is taken to extremes in the speed runs of the game.

Enemy AI is little more than the doom system with opponents often taking the most direct route to you and moving back and forth a little if they cannot, animations are clunky but we're talking of a game that would have hand-designed these animations and models rather than using 3D scanners or body mapping for motion. There's no ragdoll but that never came into the fore until after Quake 3, so there's no point slagging off the game on that regard. However it would be nice to have enemies that weren't outfoxed by a brick wall and a corner.

Enemy variation is the usual mixed bag we've come to expect from ID software, though less varied as in Doom 2. There's your zombie marines with shotguns, zombie doggies, zombie heavy marines with lasers (a weapon you never get by the way) for the modern levels before you hit the time portals in each episode and then the game shows its roots as having started as a Dungeons and Dragons design. You'll be warped to castles and such where knights with swords, bigger knights with fire launching swords, magical worms that spit acid (I've not a clue what it's supposed to look like), zombies that can't be killed and need to be blown up, Fiends which resemble manic dogs with scythe arms and severe blood-mouth, tar-babies that blow up, ogres with chainsaws and grenades (the fuck???) and later Vores and Shamblers that are the more monstrous creatures that fire homing explosives and lightning respectively, often taking position in levels as a sort of boss creature.

This is where the game falls a little flat. The demo/shareware version is the first episode alone, sporting a good number of levels, multiple distinct enemies including even the shamblers (giant white yeti looking things that shoot lightning) and a boss creature that is part puzzle, part battle which rises out of lava, throws lava at you, and then is destroyed in lava.

You encounter nothing like that boss ever again; even the last boss is just a large BLOB with tentacles suspended above it that does NOTHING. Seriously, I've seen dead people offer more of a threat than this creature. While yes, it does have an army of the more nasty enemies to battle while you get to it, the actual fight with it is a cut scene if you time your jump through the teleporter at the right moment. After seeing the first boss of the first episode you cannot help but wonder did ID run out of time while making this and as such had to fudge the last boss? And lose making any other bosses too? It's rather inconsistent within the games (especially as there's videos of people beating the game in 100% kills, on the hardest mode, within 20minutes) you won't get to see anything like it again and it sticks out as such a variation from the norm, you can't help but wonder why it's not repeated or other such creatures had not been implemented.

Perhaps more a case of "Our demo is excellent, the rest we threw together"

Weaponry within the game is a fairly standard set up. Axes for the melee, shotguns of both single and double barrel flavours, nail guns of the dual and quad variety take place for the machinegun class. Grenade launchers for that dynamic angle of attacking, rocket launchers for the direct method and the lightning gun that sprays bolts in a constant, high-damage, stream. (Do NOT use it underwater, unless invincible). 8 weapons all in all and fairly consistent with ID for the variety. So nothing really adventurous there and nothing that packs the "wow" factor of a BFG (later Quake games however.... mmm 10k).

Various power ups will augment damage, boost health/armour or turn one invisible or even make one anti-god like (666 health, ho ho ho such humour), though usually found in places that they HAVE to be used or hidden so well nobody will find them.

Quake also brings to the fore, underwater swimming! This really gives you freedom of movement, screws up your resolution and makes it hard to see what you’re doing and lets you sink slowly if you just “remain” there. Drowning takes place shortly after and all guns work underwater, especially the lightning gun.

That pretty much is quake. Save for one final aspect of the game, the multiplayer.

There's the co-operative model for people that like to run through the game with infinite respawns while they and their barely-recognisably-human models attack all manner of enemies and even each other if they put the wrong friendly-fire setting on, with sometimes more enemies in places and the usual situation we've come to expect in Doom. And then there's the death match option, which is one of the most engrossing and fast paced action fests I've seen in a death match game in a very long time.

Every level can be used as a death match while also there are 6 specifically designed levels just for the death match experience ranging from the claustrophobic first level with a few key weapons and really for 2-4 players to the bigger and more deadly trap filled levels, one level that is more a tower of combat with height and floors playing more of a key role. The crown goes to level 5 and to a lesser extent, level 6 as the epitome of death match experience, particularly for groups of 4-16. The shotgun fires rapidly enough to cause a threat but the bigger weapons will slaughter people left and right.

This does however lead to an imbalance of a situation where someone gets the rocket launcher and goes ape-shit mental. It's hard to take someone down with one of those unless you have one of those or gang up on them. When a player is killed, they drop a pack holding ALL their ammo and the weapon they had selected, so it's possible to get their guns off them. This does however mean that someone will be running around with full ammo most of the time as the cumulative effect of picking up ammo drops means they'll hold all the ammo for all the weapons bar the one they were using at the time.

This however, is entirely negated if their ammo pack falls into lava or into a place nobody can get to. Leaving everyone to start their ammo collection over once again. There is a high level of thrill to running a corner, ending up behind someone and giving them both barrels in the back to launch them off the edge, dead, into some lava before running off to find your next victim. Sadly, spawning in front of someone who has a rocket launcher will leave you looking like a shower of blood pissing from every fissure and crack an explosion can give you. But we're still talking in an age of teething and few games had that mercy invincibility for freshly-spawned players.

The game is certainly worth looking into for those that want to relive the older, simpler, more FUN and faster paced games, or those that want to know where the lofty heights of Battlefield 53, Crysis 12 and even Quake 12 and Doom 72: Even more demons, came from and you can't do much better than Quake in that regard.

Incidentally, the Dope Fish lives!

Battlefield 3

It's difficult to review a game that is as segmented as this, namely because you have effectively 2 games in one here. The first being the actual single player mode which I'll be breaking down, and the multiplayer mode which I'll also be breaking down. Then after, have a breakdown and go on a 2 week bender of drugs, drink, hookers and games, without the drugs, drink or whores. Well... maybe the hookers. The old motto, Live Fast, Die Young, Leave a good looking corpse. Those that said that, never saw a kid die in an industrial blender. Or an acid bath.

But still.

The Battlefield series has long been known and popular for its almost unrivalled online gaming functions, 64 player battles fought on huge maps, with respawning and regenerating lives until either time runs out or until all lives have been sufficiently expended for one side to cry home to mummy. With each increment of the series, the games have taken place in wars across the ages, even in the future, with this instalment being set in the "Tomorrow" war of near future-land and featuring long term hot-cold, on-off again bed buddies, the Americans and the Russians.

Never quite sure why the world seems so focused on having the Yanks and Ruskies going toe to toe for so many games, they do it in the whole of the Modern Warfare series, in various Battlefield games etc. Why not don't armies take on the Japanese? Because they'd be stormed by giant robots and ninjas that blast nukes from their hands. Nobody takes on the British because nobody can be bothered with the small island of tough bastards that wouldn't shoot people but rather punch bullets into their enemies before giving them a dry slap and telling them to 'man the fuck up.' Or is that just Manchester?

Battlefield 3 takes the side of some guys in the American forces and occasionally some guy in the Russian forces, trying to work out through a series of flashbacks, what has happened, where some guy is and what happened to a bunch of nukes that might be around. The plot follows main-generic-white-guy being interrogated about missions that fucked up, things they were told and found out while skipping out to other people doing other missions in that fun, non-cohesive plot way that people seem to enjoy (read: have forced upon them) that allows a player to enjoy tanks, planes and other such vehicles when the real forces have specialisms that wouldn't involve them doing such things in the real world.

War is fun, fighting is awesome and people need their shit fucked up. Hoo-hah.

The levels involved are a rather straight forward affair, giving a mix of large open areas of combat, close area combat with an obligatory level involving stealth, flying a plane (painfully badly made), driving tanks, barricading against army onslaughts and breaking through large buildings and skyscrapers. Most of the levels offer nothing more than a flavour of the online mode except for the airplane level. This has to be a contender for “Poorly made, poorly executed” level of the decade.

Being dragged through a long scene with nothing going on, the flight warm up, then having the plane take off by the pilot which is NOT you while you occasionally look around and fire a few missiles and flares at attacking planes before doing what seems to be a compulsory element of warfare gaming, Infra Red bombardments. It's painfully slow, removes almost all interactivity and becomes a stop-go snore-a-thon just to painstakingly do something that either could have been done in a few seconds of cut scene or could have had the player started already by being in the damn air while under attack.

There are, elements that could be boss battles in the game, which are just Quick Time Events and depending upon where you are when they happen, might be fatal or just need repeating. It's another break from the norm of game play that you'd usually not expect but save for the idea behind boss battles supposedly being of something difficult, you can't really have that in a "realistic" shooter game. A realistic shooter can't suddenly have a cyber demon pop up and take 50 rockets to down while you yourself limp like a kid with skinned knees at the merest graze of a bullet. The balance is gone and though it might be amusing for a few seconds, you're changing the game again just to balance and quantify doing something unrealistic. So QTE's are a possible way to go though to make a "boss"/"final boss" in such games without going the scripted "keep doing x until you meet y" route.

Possible idea for future games, any time the final boss turns up early and can be shot, the rest of the game should be playable with huge story changes. Just a thought.

Control wise, it's the fairly usual affair of run, move, look, shoot etc, learning the grenade buttons; crouch/prone buttons might be a little awkward at first if you've been playing other games of a similar nature. Driving tanks and jeeps is fairly straight forward except the trigger becomes accelerate and flying helicopters is like rubbing your stomach with one hand, patting your head at the same time with the other hand, then changing over every few seconds, while on a unicycle. It takes an effort to master and thankfully it's only in a co-op level.

For all intents and purposes, the single player mode really does gear the player up for the online multiplayer mode and the non-stop chaos those online modes entail. While there is a story, it's nothing we've not seen before and has the same usual predictable twists and faults one would expect, there's nothing really new here or shocking, and that includes the supposed shocks that are meant to make us go "oh wow no really?" when the story line copies other shocks from other games that were done far better than this is executed.

Each level gives you a load out of weapons and equipment and forces you to utilise them, a main weapon, a pistol, grenades and usually some specialist equipment to help achieve the objective. It gives players the chance and opportunity to test out and use various equipments and weapons, such as RPGs, while stealing enemies’ weapons will also give you the chance to experience those too. Making you a war-fare time Robin Hood in stealing from the rich to give to the poor, and by rich I mean dead, and by give I mean shoot in the face.

Co-operative mode within the game allows for 2 players to work together (assumption) to try and overcome 6 different missions ranging from large open areas, to different aspects of the single player missions, to flying a helicopter and being a gunner for it. If the other player dies, they can be picked up like a healthy handshake and ass-slap will repair their fatal wounds, like a gaping head wound would be fixed in that fashion.

IF (big if there) you can find and use someone that knows how to play or can be relied upon to not bollocks up the entire mission, you can get into a circumstance where people can actually flank, pincer and cover each other without feeling silly about it. Some events and missions require very specific timing and the margin for error down to the time it takes most people to realise light has gone round the planet. Thankfully the stealth mission isn't failed if you're revealed and you can just brute force it afterwards.

Even in the hardest mode, the game is fairly forgiving if one person plays keep away from the bullets and just revives the person who is out in the open whenever they drop the floor, but given that, guns and weapons feel accurate and not as spray and pray as have been seen in other games. The iron sights in weapons seem to hit opponents with regular consistency rather than missing outright and stands as a feature passing over to the online multiplayer too.

All in all, the single player mode feels very tacked on and with a predictable story, only serves to cement itself as nothing more than a training session for the online game which the series is more famous for.

Having said that, the online mode is double-edged sword.

The premise is simple; you start at rank 1 and can be one of 4 types of specialist from the first aid guy that never picks up his downed colleagues, engineer guy that is the only real defence against tanks, except for, another tank. Support guy with the big machineguns and toys and Sniper guy who smells really bad and sits away from everyone else, like most gamers do at an outdoor family event.

Each class has its own weapon sets and inventory to be chosen and more is unlocked as the levels progress. The more someone uses a specific weapon, the more items they unlock for that weapon such as new scopes, handles, undertow launchers, stands, silencers, or bigger equipment like first-aid paddles, mines and explosives, rocket launchers and remote control robots. The game has these classifications set up to ensure that nobody is able to do everything and the emphasis is on team play. A sniper with a lock-on guide will be great use to an engineer with the right rocket launcher for massively long range attacks doing more damage. But otherwise just paints up a bright dot on the screen that might as well say "it's a fucking tank".

Likewise first aiders require dead people to help or can drop health packs, support people can drop ammo for others and engineers can (if equipped) repair tanks and vehicles. Teamwork is the name of the game and unless you're on the rather pointless "Close Quarters" maps, you're not likely to be able to Rambo the game for your team (unless you're really agile in a tank and a damn good shot) it's unlikely you'll survive unscathed for a whole round and not need to respawn.

There's a lot of variation in maps, some will have players taking and holding an objective, some will have the defend/attack system of playing with HQs, others are of the "get a flag and hold it as long as you can" type, some levels are straight kill fests of one team slaughtering another, other levels are vast open, sprawling areas populated with tanks, planes and god knows what else to give the impression of a full scale (poorly organised) battleground.

Once into a game, you can either solo it within your team, or be put into squads, randomly being put into squads is a veritable lottery of whether it benefits you or not. Some of the perks for players can be attributed to the others in the same group, from more ammo, to being unshakeable in combat, to running faster and longer than others. If they leave mid game or switch teams, your bonus that they provide for you, drops immediately. Rather reminiscent of the old "It's my ball and I'm going home". Though some of the perks are rarely felt significantly within the game.

Following suit with the Battlefield games is the highly destructible arenas, most buildings can be blown through and holes punched into walls with grenades, walls shredded and used as sniping points, areas of cover blown apart and removed from play. Need to get on the other side of a wall, hit it with a tank, C64 or grenades and you'll likely get through.

Vehicles are an odd mix-up, of players either working well together to get lots of kills with drivers and gunners working well in tandem, or someone jumps out and buggers off to enjoy something else, there's almost a feeling of being forced to remain in a vehicle with someone while you're flooring it around the map up until the point of the enemy blowing you up, almost like a very dysfunctional marriage.

There is a lot of fun to be had by the game and the game plays out very well with large scale battles, though there's always the issue of respawn and dying straight off if you start with squad mates rather than the HQ, but the HQ spawning tends to leave you miles away from the action. At times though you'll hit highs of flanking squads of people and slaughtering them all before they realise you're there and then to be spun around and throat slashed by someone who steals your dog tags and runs off, likely to be gunned down by someone coming to your aid.

As with anything that relies with online play, there will be griefers, there will be those exploiting things, there will be those taking the piss, trolling and making life shitty for others. But a balanced team set up with equal skilled players, will make for a very thrilling game.

It all depends on if you can tolerate being so dependent on others for a good game, while lacking the ability to reach through their TV, grab them by the headset and garrotte them with the damn cables.