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.

Shaq Fu (Megadrive)

Umm... Ego much?

Shaq Fu, it's been said that this game is monumentally bad. I however had never played the game until recently and decided that maybe it'd be worth taking a look and seeing what redeemable features (if any) this game has. Ever one to support an underdog and play Devil's Advocate in such circumstances, I picked up a copy for the Megadrive (....Genesis.¬.¬).

My brain hurt itself with the level of sophistication shown

30 seconds in and I'm ready to shut this off and throw it out the fucking window into a wood chipper with acid-coated blades. The music is like listening to something I'd expect a 5 year old to generate on a synth when they're doing it just to be annoying. The tones and shift of the music are painful and I'm still yet to press the Start button on this bastard. Not really setting itself up well at the moment.

I envy Shaq, I wish I was knocked out for this game.

Oddly, it proudly touts Delphi Software as a developer, the same group that brought us Another World, Flashback, Operation Stealth... Future Wars... Fade to Black... Ok, starting to see a trend now. Though games were made after Shaq Fu, it certainly helped hammer a few nails into the coffin it would seem.

The setting, detail and backgrounds look stunning, but then so did Rise of the Robots

Shat Fuqup however is a beat-em-up for those who don't know. Featuring Shaquille O'Neal, though barely recognisable when in game, the game focuses on Shaq decided to pop into a shop while sight-seeing, get accosted into the back room and ends up in a world where some mummy has kidnapped a kid. A mix of The Mummy and The Golden Child if we're taking film references for inspiration.

I won't be back, Mummy Boy, and return the Legion of Doom's shoulder pads.

The story mode has Shaq running around a central hub/map and going to locations and fighting someone there. There's no build up in story other than "Here's Shaq, arse will be kicked" or at the very least, something might happen. There's no real reason for the fights from what I can see other than "Shaq turned up, now we must kung-fu fight" which makes far less sense than say, Street Fighter which is about a tournament and justifies why people are fighting. Here it's Shaq running up to someone's home, knocking on the door and then punching them in the mouth and running off until he finds the right door with the kidnapped kid behind it and punch the kidnapper in the mouth before running off.

Fight and already taken damage, seems fair to me...

However, the fighting... Well... Where do I begin? The AI tends to start the fight before you even do, "Begin" you're told and already you've gotten a boot to the face. Combat is a series of single attacks from kicks and punches with the directional control modifying the attack slightly. I.e. Towards and Kick is a lunging kick, while Kick on its own is a standard straight kick and back with kick is a round house. Each character has 2-3 moves that barely can be said to be moves for some characters, while other characters have such overpowered attacks with little cool-down after that makes them effectively death-on-legs, assuming you can time the move well enough to pull it off.

No life... Ironic really...

The responsiveness of the controls is shit-and-miss at best. Jumping and attacking is... A lottery at best of who wins which attack and how. The special moves are almost impossible to pull off without inadvertently doing another move instead or just standing there and back flipping into an oncoming attack. 2 player duelling is just a hammer fest of buttons and good luck trying to counter any attacks or time it well enough to hit someone after they've been blocked before they hit you again.

Shaq ignores the metallic body gear however.

Graphically speaking it's a mixed back. The background and setting look impressive as one might come to expect from Delphine Software, but the characters in fighting are tiny by comparison to games like Mortal Kombat and it's as if they reused their own Point and Click engine to make this game, where in each command is just another command you'd find in something like Flash Back or Future Wars. It just doesn't work and makes the game unbearable to view, even less so with that annoying music in the background that doesn't fit but seems more at home in a hospital on a life-support machine while I'm reaching for the plug!

Thank God, it's nearly over. Yes that few pixels on the bridge is YOU.

It still seems to me that this was originally going to be something else and the fighting was thrown in at the last minute, then someone up top decided that the fighting was going to be the ONLY thing. Before this pile of abuse was hurled to players around the planet. Avoid it, steer clear as I wish I had.

Rage

Now for a more modern, more recent, First Person Shooter. ID software seems to fall into a trap of their own making in which each game they make looks nice, looks lovely in fact, is developed on a very impressive engine (aesthetically impressive at least) and falls down with the game in so far as plot/story and the delivery of which. Doom was a wonderful little game with atmospheric delivery, doom 2 was very similar and became and much more action orientated game with cut scenes/text plots. Quake was more of the same but in full 3D mapping and modelling. Quake 2 had the same with more detail and animations in models; Quake 3 was a fast and fluid multiplayer experience of dropping the single-player mode in favour of bots in multiplayer. Doom 3 was a wonderful experience in a technical engine but still falling flat with the delivery of storyline and plot development. Quake 4 was a more open Doom 3. I'm Not going to touch Daikatana, for now... I'll suffer that one another time.

So what's RAGE got to offer? More of the same. But at least there's an attempt at doing something with some plot beyond "Turn up and shoot stuff until everything's dead". Doesn't sound like fun but works well in Doom and Quake, in this case there's more than that available to everyone playing.

The game kicks off with you, Captain Anonymous, unrecognised regenerating hit-point wonder with an affinity for carrying lots of weapons and ammo types, making things from scrap (if you've the blueprints) and mad driver extraordinaire from buggies to quad bikes, cars and more, including able to operate guns, rockets/missiles and weapons from the future (by your perspective). The Buck Rogers of this game, waking up in the future and being attacked by assholes and then in turned saved by John Goodman. (Genuine Celebrity Voice).

With Mr Goodman's guidance, he'll help you as long as you go and slaughter locations filled with fuck-heads. John kills 2 mutants and in exchange for helping you, he wants you to (as a one man army) kill an entire tower block of ass-hats with a crusty old pistol and some of those bladed boomerangs from Mad Max 2. It's in this first area that a rather interesting element of the game comes to the fore in the form of your regeneration and health. Not only do you have the red-mist of damage descending over your screen, but in being taken down, you can force your heart to restart itself with a small mini-game of push the analogues in the right place, then hitting a button. The more you get right, the higher the health regeneration will be and the more powerful the output, meaning you can electrocute people with your own personal defibrillation kit.

After a while it'll regenerate sufficiently enough to let you do it again. Though oddly, getting blown up with a rocket sometimes bypasses this. But a shotgun round to the face won't bypass the heart restart. At the risk of becoming far more cardiologically focused, I'm going to move on to the game again.

The first act of the game is John Goodman asking you for help, getting you new weapons, medical supplies and opening up routes and access points where everything is very 'by the numbers' in the form of gaming, go to point a, do mission, go to point b, do mission, go to hub b and do missions c and d, get cards, shoot guys with bad accents in the face. It's not until the big breakthrough into the 2nd area that the game opens up a little more (not entirely free range but sufficient enough a step up from Doom games) where players can visit a lot of locations and do very little until they're supposed to be there on specific missions.

Eventually you'll become saviour of a town, move on to another town, save that one too and then go fight the big bad group that has a lot of futuristic tech and beat them at their own game. In the meantime you'll get to play an odd form of cards akin to battle cards, racing cars and upgrading cars (limited options in the form of engines, wheels, armour etc, and very limited in that there's an obvious BEST to have and you'll just use that), stab your own fingers in reflex games, play duelling banjos and do a few missions consisting of turn up to a place and kill dudes. One particular mission is to turn up to a place, grab the things someone stole and kill everyone, the mission provider doesn't even want those things back and you can sell them. So basically you turn up to slaughter a load of people on the whim of some guy who could easily have said that inside location X is a Thing that was stolen.

Great. Freedom to kill based on generic bullshit. But at least it's more of a reason than some other games provide.

The driving in the game is simply a means to get from one location to another because doing it by foot will get you killed quickly when the first cars turn up and either run you over or cheese grate you out of existence quickly and regenerating will get you stomped shortly after again. Though at one point I was successful in running myself over and having to regenerate back into my own car, score 1 for Twit Of The Year. There are races against other players in the online mode or races against the AI which thankfully doesn't do the whole rubber band difficulty thing and if you're a big distance ahead, you'll STAY a big distance ahead unless you just stop still like a prick. All of which gains you tickets to buy more things so you're forced to win races if you want upgrades and forced even more to win races to progress the plot at various points too.

This is never fun. "You must do this before you can kill more dudes!" makes me wonder why there isn't a response of "....fuck off" and then smacking him over the head and stealing all the fun toys before driving off into the sunset laughing like a nutcase.

There's an odd duality in the game too, there's this fun side of the game that's rather jumpy and fun, light hearted despite being about killing things mercilessly and then there's the darker more foreboding side of having to wander through derelict cities and being attacked by the dying remnants of the world's infected/mutated individuals. Some of the settings and scenery really conveys the sense of depression and hopelessness while you're scavenging through a dead city. Given that until a few moments ago you were running around a town pissing off the Mayor and playing games of "my card kills your card", it's rather a sudden twist and the shock can come a little too suddenly, breaking you out of the atmosphere and plunging you into another one.

In fact that's this game, two halves that are one side light and peppy despite the apocalypse and the other just full of doom, gloom and depression and the switch between the two is an express elevator to hell. Almost immediate switches with little build up between and as the game goes on, becoming further and further apart from each other with the darker side of the game taking almost the forefront until you're saving the day up to the cliff-hanger that few will expect to happen.

Yes it ends on NO closure at all. Pods open, you're stood atop a light-barrier tower and ... that's it. No final boss, just a final gauntlet. I'm tired of seeing shit like this in games, where designers couldn't find a suitable ending point so they just don't use one. It's annoying. When the first few games did it, it became edgy, but when it becomes the standard it becomes fucking stupid and unfulfilling. Try cooking a meal, the best meal you'll ever taste, you get to sample the ingredients, slap it in the oven and cook it to the point you open the oven, smell the finished dish and slice it perfectly to place onto a plate and then you leave the shop after paying and not eating it. That's how these kinds of endings feel. Anticlimactic and I really shouldn't write a review just before dinner.

The game looks impressive, not great because we've gone the route of the doomed world in brown and grey, which is a great reason to NOT throw in lush green fields, flowers bursting into colour and instead pretend everything is doom and gloom and slap a few brown filters atop the lenses to make it murky and dank. Movement in the game seems to suffer the Doom experience of feeling like you're running slightly too fast but that could just be down to not having faster movement in other recent FPS games, I'm not going to criticise there on being different, it just takes a little period of adjustment.

Co-operative mode is entirely disjointed from the game, which is disappointing, it'd be nice to run through the game with a colleague/partner but instead you get a series of 'legends' about events that happened before the proper game takes place. Rather than having to bring in experience or setups from the players, the level itself determines the weapon load out, and inventory load out (and places things in different places on the quickslots... Left on D-Pad will be bandages in one level and sentry bots on another, with similar for the weapons too!). Players will have to work together to kill lots of dudes and score points and multipliers to boost themselves up onto higher echelons of video game scoring.

I'd rather have had a colleague with me in the main game, because once the levels are over, there's only the harder difficulty to try and that's it. Co-Op done, dusted, finished and completed. Thanks for playing, sod off, now drive cars at each other for hours. It's a lacklustre addition and while there is the possibility of using DLC I shouldn't have to wait for someone to add it when they feel the need to later on, just so I can get the full experience once someone gets off their fat arse and types a few keys on a keyboard.

I'm done here, now to drive off into the sunset, laughing... for some reason...