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Post by anayo on Dec 21, 2019 6:52:00 GMT -5
Detailed thoughts and impressions of Quake coming soon.
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Post by Ex on Dec 21, 2019 12:31:09 GMT -5
Nice job anayo. Quake still looks really fun. I'm certainly due a replay myself. I don't think I've completely played through the whole game since 1997. It'd be interesting to see how you contrast Quake VS DOOM and Duke Nukem 3D.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 21, 2019 13:01:55 GMT -5
I'm definitely interested in your take as well. I finished it not terribly long ago myself.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 21, 2019 15:19:51 GMT -5
Crap, did you play it without the music?
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Post by anayo on Dec 21, 2019 18:17:49 GMT -5
Detailed thoughts and impressions of Quake coming soon. Quake is one of those games I am unable to look at with unclouded objectivity because whenever I play it it takes me back to being a six year old asking Dad's permission to play the shareware version on his computer. Later as a teenager I got the Sega Saturn version and played that a lot, too. This game takes me back to a very impressionable point of my life, so I'm always going to feel warmly about it despite its shortcomings. Playing this after re-playing Doom and Duke Nukem 3D is a fascinating experience. Doom and Duke 3D are amazing for the time, but they are not completely 3D. Your view is locked to the horizon, rendering it impossible pivot your neck up or down, or to cock your head side to side. This made Quake's now-mundane feat of floors stacked vertically on top of each other and fighting enemies up or downstairs seem downright next-gen. Another thing to keep in mind is that a lot of people in the 90's played Doom and Duke 3D solely on a keyboard. WASD and mouse controls were hardly a well established custom by then. This is the first time I have played Quake with a mouse. Going from just a keyboard to the fluid, razor-precision of mouse controls was a total game changer for me. I was able run circles around Quake's enemies as they fought to keep up. This was impossible when when I was playing Doom and Duke 3D. This also explains why I had so much difficulty beating the Saturn version when I bought it in the mid-2000's. I'm also astounded that this game runs more smoothly than Doom. In Doom, the frame rate would often crawl on my 200 MHz Pentium 1, especially on the really big stages in episode 4. But Quake performed smoothly all the way through. The only time the frame rate dipped was in a hallway with 4 enemies and I blew them to bloody chunks with a grenade launcher. I like Quake's visceral sound effects, the arcade-like bestiary of enemies, and the oppressive sense of danger. If you prefer video games full of world building and character exposition, then Quake's lack of story will probably feel hollow to you. But I personally like the "no-nonsense" approach. What I won't stick up for is how Quake seems to wear its welcome by the third episode. It begins to feel like they were running out of ideas, and the final boss feels suspiciously like a cop out. This might have something to do with the game's troubled development history. Apparently John Carmack and the guys at Id Software originally wanted this to be an ambitious RPG. Then it went into feature creep and finally they had to fall back on making another Doom-like shooter. But there's no denying that every first person shooter today has some of Quake's DNA in it. I didn't even get into any of the mods or multiplayer stuff, which was probably more influential than the single player campaign.
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Post by anayo on Dec 21, 2019 18:31:28 GMT -5
Crap, did you play it without the music? Uhhh yeah I think I did. Oops.
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Post by Xeogred on Dec 21, 2019 18:36:40 GMT -5
Well, it's always fun to have an excuse to replay the classics with a bit of a revamped experience.
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Post by Sarge on Dec 21, 2019 18:57:49 GMT -5
Because of the folks here, I made sure to track down the necessary stuff to play with the music.
I can't say I was a huge fan of the game, mainly because it felt a lot more like DOOM 2 than it did the original, which is the one I enjoyed the most. It's still very good, though, and I can see why it drove the 3D accelerator market pretty hard.
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Post by Ex on Dec 21, 2019 23:59:55 GMT -5
This is the first time I have played Quake with a mouse. Indeed, back in '97 the mouse look made Quake feel even more "next gen" to me, than the fully 3D graphics did. Ha ha, "gibs" used to always tank the framerates in these old FPS games based on the Quake engine. Half-Life had the same problem. I agree, and yet playing the game I always had a sense of exploring the ruins of places were very bad things had happened. Like the story had already came and went, and I was surviving among the remnants left behind, after a bad ending for some forlorn kingdom. I never checked that stuff out either. Another huge positive for me at the time, was the Trent Reznor produced OST. I was a really huge fan of NIN back then, so the OST being made by one of my music heroes meant a lot. I'm sure that was the case for plenty of angsty teenage boys back in the late '90s. I'm glad you played through Quake on a rig you rose from the grave.
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Post by anayo on Dec 22, 2019 10:19:46 GMT -5
Well, it's always fun to have an excuse to replay the classics with a bit of a revamped experience.
Was I supposed to play with the CD in the drive so it could stream the audio? Yes I recently listened to an interview with John Carmack on the Joe Rogan show and Carmack talked about how back in the day competitive Quake players would play deathmatch with the textures turned off (much to the chagrin of the artists). I don't personally like Glide or OpenGL Quake as I didn't experience it that way as a youngun' and artistically I find it somewhat like polishing a turd. The assets so chunky that playing at high resolutions and applying bilinear filtering to the textures only draws unflattering attention to how simple everything is. But if I had been into competitive gaming back then a 3D card would have been a must. I get more of a feeling like it's a nonsense dimension invented specifically to kill me. Like a malevolent deity plucked me out of the real world and dropped me the Quake world just to see how long I could survive. That makes sense. I felt like the entire game comes across like a heavy metal album brought to life.
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