people on cohost are saying, wo!w!! QUAKE 2 IS GOOD… and i don’t want to passive aggressively make tagged posts at no one in particular about how I think it isn’t. so I’m getting ahead of things and making the thread. i’m gonna play through this port.
wonder if the new episode designed by machine games will actually be good, since they have decades of hindsight to actually make something decent with the gameplay conditions. though the remaster does seem to have a few maybe significant changes to AI and other gameplay elements so, who knows if QUAKE 2 SUCKS… or not???
Quake 2 was on our primary school computer back when having a PC was a real novelty. This and Sonic 3 were the only things we somehow got on there. I’m looking at Quake 2 today and I have no feelings of nostalgia for it. I think it was likely helped a lot by having no other video games for comparison in that environment. When Gameboys hit the playground it was over.
Quake 2 has plenty of redeeming qualities but it’s absolutely the least id-like of the early id games and commits the cardinal sin of being kind of dull
I am somewhat impressed that my snap judgement of Quake II based on screenshots I saw in magazines 25 years ago turned out to be exactly what the game really was.
Was the grenade in the original version of Quake II, or was that an expansion pack feature that Nightdive added back into the base game? Going from Quake’s grenade launcher, an artist’s paintbrush made from the hair of an angel, to that Bic pen that dries out so quickly you choose to memorize the phone number rather than try to write with it, was where this game lost me permanently.
A lot of people are being fooled because they replaced the much shittier original AI with new AI that’s designed for multiplayer bots so they’re way more aggressive and evasive than vanilla quake 2. They do their special behaviors more and don’t come across as being as braindead anymore. Unfortunately this papers over the games other flaws and makes it look a lot better than it is.
The doom 3 shotgun is fine. Despite being a survival horror game it maintains the aggressive play style of the original doom. Counter intuitively, the best strategies are to charge into the dark and get up close. The shotgun mulches fuckers if you consider its spread when you use i, its a point blank defense weapon. Part of the reason why it feels bad is because the NPC shotgunners have very small spread and do high damage to compensate for their inability to think as tactically as Doom Marine, but you just have to take it as videogame abstraction. Because you’re playing doom.
One of my friends in high school tried to build a prototype rail gun. He got as far as spooling a bunch of copper wire around a tube but could not figure out how to give it enough juice to shoot a projectile.
Anyway Quake 2 is fine. I like it but not as much as the first one. I like the setting and the idea of the game more than the game itself. Alien cyborg is a cool aesthetic if you can pull it off, which I don’t think Quake 2 quite does but comes close at times. As a story it was literally id’s first attempt at doing a game where you actually had a motivation beyond killing stuff. In this case it was “Get to the Big Gun and destroy it” which they said was based on the WWII movie Guns of the Navarone, a movie about allied soldiers on a mission to take out German anti aircraft artillery or something like that.
It was something of a big step for them but by that point all the real creative talent had left the company and all they had was the impressive tech factor. Which back then at the turn of the century was still enough for most people. That was a time in which personal home computer technology was advancing so rapidly you as a consumer could watch it happening in real time. Every few years computer hardware leapfrogged older tech and allowed computer graphics to inch tantalizingly closer to photorealistic representation and, with it, the promise of new possibilities for creative expression.
Well, we all saw how that played out I guess. We have photorealistic games now but the upgrade in creative expression is still lagging. Probably because being creative and making something new and exciting is a lot harder than just making better tools that can do more stuff than the old versions of those tools. I think as the tools advance and it gets easier to rapidly prototype and iterate on a design then maybe you’ll see more creative expression in the space. We’re kind of starting to see it with all the boomer shooter clones like everyone was talking about in the old news thread but again the common refrain there was that most of them aren’t that creative or new feeling.
Which is a totally fair point to make and hopefully inspires more of us to learn these tools and start putting our own ideas out there. That’s really the legacy of games like Quake 2. That anyone with the ideas, the means and the will to see them implemented can just make their own version of their favorite game and maybe even make it better.
I kind of want to play Quake 4 again now. When will they remaster that. (“Hopefully never!” I can hear you thinking lol)
I played a bit of Quake 2 64 last night. It’s fine. Maybe they’ll add the PS1 Quake 2 as an add on eventually. They ended up releasing the N64 version of Quake 1 in the add on menu for Quake 1 (along with some other community map packs like Underbright Overdark running on copper) so that’s neat. I never played much community stuff from Quake 2 so maybe I will now.
I’m playing Quake 1 and 2 on my PS4 right now on nightmare and it might be killing my wrist. I keep having to remind myself to hold the controller in a more relaxed manner. I end up getting caught up in the action of the game and then notice I’m clenching the controller for dear life. Should probably see if I can use a mouse and keyboard.
