Q2 reads to me like a direct response to the complaints some people made about Q1
They forgot to have a positive vision for what Q2’s experience is supposed to add up to
you know speaking of idtech2 whatever happened to that nightdive remaster of sin where they made the main character white for some reason that was supposed to come out in 2021
quake 2 is a good game. no one has been able to make a game that looks so soft and so hard at the same time, many have tried, all have failed
my friend have you seen “kingpin: life of crime”
will confess i like q2dm1/2 and rocket arena + other mods fixed one of the most egregious changes (non-instant weapon switching)
the first game has aged beautifully and the third just makes me think “fuck… shit… wish we could go back…”
there gotta be 800 remakes of dm1 for q3, cuz there’s one in quake live, and the tokays tourney remake of dm2 for q3 also owns. q2 really has been relegated to the trash heap of history with time, along with using trackball to play and 60% accuracy with railgun being pro level
i’ve never played Quake II and i think it’s because i just thought it looked boring and brown and the same thing over again from everything i could see of it in PC Gamer at the time. i was already bummed about Quake being a more monochromatic version of Doom so i think i had pretty much lost interest in iD at that point - after them being my favorite game company growing up. a year or two later is when i learned about Romero and ION Storm and got more interested in following him and Tom Hall post-iD, which offered an explanation to me why i didn’t like what iD was putting out currently.
it’s actually one of my issues with the whole retro fps game revival that how short a period of time those sorts of games actually existed back in the day bc of how quickly they were dwarfed by other stuff. by the end of 1998 we had Half-Life and Thief which just completely blow those games out of the water in terms of what they’re trying to do. even Unreal is a huge step up from what the Quake games are. it felt like an untenable thing to make that sort of game after a certain point - they just started to feel real formulaic and juvenile. i feel like some “boomer shooter” people wanna lump those games together in with the Build engine type games even when they’re obviously not doing the same thing, and obviously trying to break with the formula Doom had established for good. and ofc in hindsight Quake 1 is pretty cool and all that, but that kind of game had to die sooner or later.
ofc the moment i heard of it as a 10 or 11 year old i had my wagon hitched to thinking SiN (a game that could only exist in its exact time and place) was going to be the next big game, so obviously i was off there.
I’m glad this doesn’t exist because I would be first in line to buy it and then yell about how bad it is (the game, not the remaster)
its been fun watching my friends boomer shooter phase crumble as she realizes these guys are literally working from a pool of like 12 games for inspiration now that shes actually going back and playing them. and it is really weird how now they’ve mined doom, then apogee/3d realms era so now late 90s fps/early 2000s are getting the treatment like theres a clear unbroken line between all these games where they didn’t radically differ from each other at all, and i think that kinda gets back to my initial point: unreal and hl1 are games that the developers intentionally tried to move past quake with, whereas quake 2 is more of the same - if you’ve played any of the hub based idtech1 games you already have played this game. theres a breaking with established design in those other two games
Agree with everyone saying Q2 is mid. It does have a pretty fun DM tho, even if it was mostly supplanted by Q3. Q2DM1 lives in my brain forever, as well as the railgun sound. I have a lot of nostalgia for gibbing my friends and family in multiplayer.
My favorite part about Quake II is the Sonic Mayhem soundtrack. I’ll probably pick this up just because I never played Q2 64. I played PS1 Q2 which was kind of different from the base game though if the 64 was where it’s at then that’s where I want to be too.
yea for all my negativity about the pc version quake 2 64 has one of the hardest main menu themes of all time
https://www.axios.com/2023/08/07/fortnite-holocaust-museum
specifying an “unofficial” holocaust museum is really something
yeah i do wonder what the biggest audience for a lot of those games is - like if it is younger people people who have never played those older games. like the current commercial retro fps game boom had to be created for it to exist but it really feels like a lot of that stuff is burning itself out really fast cuz it also turned out that those kind of games that are being mercilessly lifted from by current boomer shooters were untenable in the long run and maybe a lot of them were kind of too dumb to take tons from to begin with.
i still think about how DUSK especially had occasional moments where it got weirder and was experimenting more with the design (like that one gravity flipping level) and it really bums me out that it seems like that path has not been taken by those games as a whole. just feels indicative of a lot of indie games feeling more formulaic and less adventurous in terms of the design. i def think there’s way more room for something in that territory of like a half Doom, half Mario 64 style game but it’s just not the direction that 95% of things have gone in.
There’s Overkill, which just went completely bonkers with the idea of what shooter gameplay even means. Although it does really lack the rich level design of something like Doom and Quake and replaces it with just encounters.
It’s also kind of beyond my ability to play it because it’s a mouse based game that needs like six buttons you can press as quickly as a controller input which is weird. But it’s definitely doing something new and swept in with younger folks right after the first big boomer shooter wave.
I mean that game is basically just much less cringe bulletstorm conceptually right, were combining FPS and character action! And much like something like strafe, which is also trying to fuse genres, they forgot level design was important as you pointed out because ???
thinking about how they took the same type of thing out of the serious sam hd remakes for no good reason and how even the cool ideas these games have are still just regurgitations of something Dave oshry played once. Its so fucking bizarre to me there’s a subset of guys running around acting like people need to be remembering Lo Wang. Where’s my redneck rampage spiritual successor where the enemies threaten to mouth fuck me while my character farts
it really is so bizarre. honestly even more bizarre to me bc i’m someone who grew up around that stuff. in general the attempts to revive the 3DRealms/Apogee brand when so much of that stuff had and still has an unmistakable stink of skeeviness and exploitation on it (both of their developers and of their audiences) is really weird. taking ideas from games that were already stretching themselves too thin and were taking ideas from other games released around the same time - a copy of a copy. the whole thing feels a bit like the vanity project of a handful of guys who are around the same age and temperament as Oshry.
i 100% could believe he’s the kind of guy who thinks george broussard is a genius
also like yeah it’s really obnoxious that nobody has the context for these games anymore. like it’s a newer example than apogee which is more understandable but my friend played through wolfenstein 2009 and was surprised I had little to say about it and it’s like what do you want from me dude people only played this slop because we had less games then. Its not even a fucking footnote in the consoles library
There are good dungeon sprinters that have been forgotten about or were relegated to footnote status despite their quality. The Wheel of Time, despite the shit license, is legit really cool and its only gotten a rerelease last year after twenty years of total obscurity. They’re generally not going to be the games with major cultural cachet like wolfenstein 09 tho
