I feel like, even as a teenage boy (who was squarely the target audience, ESRB ratings be damned) I thought Redneck Rampage was Too Much. And this was hot on the heels of me playing Shadow Warrior lol
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So The Reckoning turned out to be pretty decent, better than the base game even, and Ground Zero starts off really strong. Better than The Reckoning, even. I’ve only played the first few levels but they were all very interesting to navigate/solve, had some good secrets AND they waste no time throwing new stuff at you. And the new stuff is more interesting than anything else in the other two games.
Like the first time you find the grenade launcher it’s not actually the grenade launcher. It’s a palette swapped version called the prox launcher. It launches timed proximity mines that can stick to walls and ceilings and they explode after 30 seconds or so if no enemy walks in their path and sets them off that way. Right before this gun you’ll find a new weapon called the Tesla mine. This is a mine you set that zaps enemies with electricity when they get close enough. So right off the bat they give you two weapons you can use as traps in single player and multiplayer.
One of the first secrets I found gave me a new item, IR goggles. I haven’t used them yet but I’m guessing it’s a night vision item. You start out in some mines so there are dark areas but so far not any that I would feel the need to use a temporary power up to get through. Which is a good criticism of Quake 2 in general. They give you all these items but for me I never really need them so I never end up using them except on bosses or when I find another one and want to pick it up so I use the one I have to open that spot back up in my inventory.
All this “unnecessary” stuff like that I feel kind of pollutes the purity of the game on one hand but on the other hand they do serve to flesh out the world of the game more and make it feel like more a real place and not just an abstract video game level. If you played Quake 1 and wondered how adding an inventory that held all the power ups you picked up would affect the game then Quake 2 is kind of your answer. If I had an inventory in Q1 like I do here then I would never end up actually using items like the ring of invisibility or the pentagram of protection. I’d just grab them and then forget I had them. It’s perhaps more work for the level designer to make them decide the optimal place to put such power ups if you have to use them immediately versus having the option to hang on to them but I think it ultimately makes for a better designed level. As the level designer, with the inventory system, you would always be trying to be thinking about whether or not the player had this or that item by the time they reached specific set pieces. You might just end up designing your level to not need any of the items thus negating their whole purpose for being put in the game to being with. I wonder how different Quake 2 would have been if they didn’t give you the inventory to hold your power ups.
Playing these expansions and seeing how they compare to the base game has me wanting to see how the Quake 1 expansions fared compared to that game. I never played them back in the day so I’ll definitely check them out after I’m done with Quake 2.
I also played a little more of Call of the Machine. I think the level I played first was meant to be the final level. Which is funny but hey you let me play them in any order so there you go. I think the one I’m on now is the first level, if I’m understanding the sequence correctly, or one of the first levels. It’s a bit more restrained but still very much god tier Quake mapping. Really enjoying this and now I want to go back and actually finish the Machine Games episode they did for the Quake 1 remaster, Dimensions of the Past. I heard good things about that one too.
It’s really funny how playing this keeps making me want to go back and just play the original.
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It would be Quake 2 64, which did exactly this, and I think it’s better for it. I had the same problem of forgetting I had stuff until I found another one and wanted to carry it.
I’ve played through about half of Ground Zero and so far think Reckoning is more interesting. Ground Zero is better designed, I think, and more cohesive, polished, and consistent, but by golly I’m sick of all the space warehouses and space sewers. Also finding it much harder than the other games, again probably because I haven’t gotten a power shield (same thing happened with Quake 2 64).
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I was going to ask you where you would put Q2 64 next to either of these. Is it closer to The Reckoning or Ground Zero? Or enough of it’s own thing?
I would say it’s a mix between the two expansions. It has the environmental variety and more interesting set pieces of The Reckoning, and has the more cohesive, consistent design of Ground Zero, but doesn’t do either as well as the expansions on their own.
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Tonight I played some of the two Machine Games episodes from Quake 1.
Dimension of the Past is the work of J. F. Gustafsson, a Quake mapper and member of Machine Games’ internal “mapper community” (a small group of people at Machine Games who make Quake maps). He released it in 2016 for Quake’s 20th anniversary and when Night Dive remastered the game in 2021 for the 25th anniversary it was included as an official Episode 5 for Quake.
I played through the first three levels and part of the first hidden level accessed from the third level. The maps are vanilla, meaning they’re made with the same assets as the original game and within more or less the same limitations as the idtech1 engine. So they’re often claustrophobic by design and you’re usually not fighting more than at most 5-6 monsters at a time. The levels I’ve played have had a good flow to them and have been pretty creative in the kinds of situations it puts you in.
These maps are very hard even in the normal difficulty settings because they’re stingy with health and ammo pickups. The first level isn’t so bad but by the second, and especially the third, level I was scraping through from one encounter to the next by the skin of my teeth. I couldn’t even finish off all the monsters on the third level because I just didn’t have the ammo. The current level I’m on I’m wondering if I’ll actually be able to get through it or quick save myself into a corner I can’t get out of.
The difficulty is not totally unfair but it’s definitely not for the weak of heart either. It’s just that here JFG is so particular about what he lets you have on a moment to moment basis in terms of weapons and ammo that it’s like he’s leading you from one devious trap and torment to the next. On the current level I’m at he trapped me in a room with a shambler and a double barrel shotgun. I could have maybe saved my nails from the previous levels and used the perforator on him but by this point I’m running on fumes just slumping from one room to the next. The double barrel shotgun is really all you need on the shambler but to give you an idea of how these levels go as I fought him the room we were in lowered like a giant elevator, he was dead before it reached the bottom so I had a moment to breathe but as the elevator came to a rest four other doors opened up dumping three knights and a hell knight in there with me forcing me to deal with them before opening the door again to let me back out.
Or, as another example, in the third level I hit a spot where I had to traverse an underwater area to reach the rest of the level. It was slightly maze-like and had zombies down there. At the start it provided me an environment suit and a pack of 5 rockets for my grenade launcher, of which I was tapped out by this point. I could use the grenades to clear the zombies underwater but this meant I likely wouldn’t have any to help deal with the two ogres and four hell knights in the next area after coming up out of the water. The spot where you come out was at the end of a narrow hallway and had a bit of a lip so you could hang back at the end and put the water hole you just came out of between you and the hell knights, usually one or two by this point, who notice you when you come up and rush in to attack you. It’s just enough space, with your back against the wall, that they can’t reach you with their swords so my strategy, upon repeated attempts at this area, was the come up, rush down the hall to grab their attention, immediately back up to the very back over the water hole, then hang out and take shots at them while jumping to avoid their ranged attack and hoping I’d attracted one of the ogres as well to help hit them with their grenades that were meant for me. All of this with no armor and health low enough for me to die in one hit. It took some doing but I managed to get through it though on my successful run I was not able to kill all the zombies. The second to final room on this level pitted me against two fiends and just enough ammo in my nail gun to finish them. Upon opening the door to the final room with the exit I was faced with two more fiends and not enough ammo in my shotgun to get them both.
I really love it but your mileage may vary.
The first two levels use the idBase aesthetic and would feel right at home in Episode 2. Lots of grunts, enforcers and rottweilers in these two maps. The third level and the first secret level take us back to the medieval theme with grunts, knights, hell knights and shamblers. I think there are 11 or 12 levels so I’m about a quarter of the way through. We’ll see what the rest of the maps look like on balance, if it skews more medieval or more sci-fi, or maybe gets a bit weirder. I always played the first two episodes more than the latter two when playing the original game so in my mind Quake 1 is a weird mishmash of sci-fi and medieval levels.
Even though the difficulty is quite brutal on nightmare due to the max health being halved the secrets often as not provide you with useful power ups like quad damage, invisibility, mega health and good armor. So it pays off to poke around and pay attention here. I’m looking forward to going the distance here and earning that trophy for completing this episode.
The other episode, Dimension of the Machine, came out as part of the 2021 remaster. These maps aren’t the work of one individual but instead the product of Machine Games’ Quake mapping group. These are not vanilla maps so the levels are huge and they throw dozens of monsters at you at a time in some spots.
I had actually forgotten that this episode had come out. I think I made a mental note to check it out at some point when the remaster first came out and then never got around to it. So I played a bit of the first level tonight (what I’m assuming is the first level, as here you select which level you start from a hub map like in Arcane Dimension or Call of the Machine). It’s pretty good. Not medieval themed but uses ogres and fiends, vores and scrags in addition to the grunts, enforcers and rottweilers. All within the first ten minutes of it.
I didn’t play very far, just far enough to notice a theme of entering a room or general area and having to find two switches to hit to open the next room/area. I really love the bigger scale of these kinds of maps because the designer can go wild building cool architecture and give you enough space to properly appreciate it. Also the more space you have to move around in the easier the combat is lol. That’s my take away for Quake difficulty from the evening. More room to maneuver = easier combat. You want make your map harder just decrease the ammo pickups and box the player in more. As long as you’re creative with it then it will never feel unfair.
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Meanwhile, I hated Dimension of the Past lol. The lack of health and ammo felt far too restrictive to me, and I found the design of the levels very bland. They felt so basic in architecture and boring to explore… very corridor driven. Loved Dimension of the Machine, though I wish it got more weird.
I finished GROUND ZERO last night. It is perfectly competent! Good flow, good sense of place, good encounters, good secrets. Still too many space sewers and warehouses, but also a few fun set pieces. I would put it above the original Quake 2, but still think Reckoning is the one more worth playing since it’s more interesting. Ground Zero is just like… if Quake 2 was more refined. It lacks the horror levels, I miss them… I guess both expansions avoided them because they were kinda silly and janky, but at least it’s a break from running around space warehouses.
My favourite part is actually a secret (it counts as one), so spoilers:
at one point you can get into a machine that gives you a strogg “uniform” and you can just wander around freely. All the enemies ignore you and just go about their business. Eventually you go through a human detector and lose the disguise… I loved this because it very much felt like a throwback to Strife, a game I loved and I wish the company did more stuff like that. Ground Zero and their Quake 1 expansion felt so unimaginative and by the numbers by comparison.
Anyway, after I set off the alarm, I went back and got the uniform again and kept going… but then I got to an elevator with a rail gun guy on it, and there wasn’t room for both of us. the devs knew i would go back for the uniform! BUT… by jumping on boxes, and by jumping on ANOTHER rail guy, I was able to get on top of the elevator dude… and every time it tried to go up, it would slightly damage him. so i went to make a sandwich and when i came back he was dead, so i go to skip this big battle because everyone was ignoring me lol. unfortunately the uniform resets when you move to a new area.
oh and as mr mech said, the new weapons are not only fun, but also SUPER USEFUL. it likes that enemy that brings dudes back to life too much, and there is a variation of that monster that SPAWNS new enemies, but they tended to be used in ways that weren’t frustrating so i didn’t mind. they also have these new security turret things that are fun at first, but then they’re around every damn corner and it gets tiresome, but at least they are easy to take care of. so, very solid expansion, but could have been better.
I started the new episode, and LOVED the first level I tried. It threw more enemies at me than Quake 2 did all together (slight exaggeration), with all these hordes that I just gleefully mowed through. I’m pretty sure they made enemies weaker for this one, or your weapons stronger, because everything went down way quicker. The design of the level itself was great… fantastic sense of place and progression, though backtracking got annoying (as with anything Quake 2 related, it seems). It really feels like they understand how Quake 2 works… I mean, it’s still held back by being Quake 2, but it’s probably as best as it could be.
The second level was only okay, mainly because most of it takes place in a fucking space sewer again. Do the strogg even shit?? Anyway, I liked how this level used things from both of the expansions, but that’s about it. Here’s hoping the others are better!
also SPOILERS, the only secret level i found in the new episode so far appears to be a homage to doom 3?? also named after american mcgee which is odd since he didnt do anything for doom 3
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one thing i always quite appreciated about q2 skins was the really strong brown underlighting/dull chrome thing baked into them
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Alright, what was everyone’s favorite Q2 plug-in player models?
I always had a soft spot for ratamahatta. Here’s an overly bright screenshot from Google that doesn’t do him justice
Bummer that we’ll never see any of these available in the new version.
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i totally remember this one
fuck!
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https://www.quaddicted.com/files/idgames2/planetquake/q2pmp/
There was a really good one of Technoman/Tekkaman Blade that was a bit taller than the bounding box for the player.
Which ever bot mod came with that Quad Damage set with all the mission packs plus the best of the internet disc had a front end that let you set up models for each bot. That was a fun touch.
I’m a few hours into this and it’s making me eat my words more than I expected.
random observations:
- man, I always felt like having smeary openGL bilinear filtered textures was the definitive look for games like this, but turning texture filtering off is such a more flattering look for this game. especially with the CRT filter.
- the CRT filter looks so much better than past nightdive games, especially when you turn bloom off. it’s perfectly transparent, I forget it’s there when I’m playing but does exactly what it needs to to flatter the simple geometry and lighting effects.
- I honestly can’t believe they just deadass removed weapon recoil. the game feels like 150% better to play for this reason alone. it feels like they tweaked how the spin-up of the chaingun works too – I’m pretty sure in the original there was a delay before it started firing, where in this game it fires immediately but at a slower rate, and still has a brief cooldown period. using it still feels the same, but it’s also much more usable now.
- the revised/restored enemy AI makes a huge difference. berserkers are fucking terrifying now, where in the original game they were just annoying early-game damage sponges. it’s weird because I now see how setpiecey the game actually is, and how compromised that vision was by the simplified AI. it’s kind of a miracle how well it all works.
- I really like the level design concepts, though my god there’s a lot of running around empty, monsterless maps trying to figure out where to use whatever stupid maguffin key item you picked up half an hour ago.
weirdly with all these changes the game feels less like a dramatic departure from quake 1 (which to me is absolutely how it felt when it released) and more like… a sort of interesting quake 1 expansion lol. like it still isn’t nearly as good as quake 1, but I’m honestly kind of shocked at how transformative this remake is over the original. grateful, but still shocked.
I get the argument that quake 2 was massively influential for the story-driven fps genre, but I still think that despite all the above listed improvements, it’s not a very good story-driven fps. the confusing level design doesn’t help, but it’s also the fact that the actual structure plays it so safe to make it boring. it feels like ocarina of time in that regard, like it really wants to make you feel like you’re doing more than running around shooting dudes and collecting key items, but it just doesn’t have tools to get there, even if you squint. it’s all just find key then find lock and then (sometimes) watch a crude animation play out as a reward. this was satisfying when I was an idiot baby; now that I’m an idiot adult it’s patronizing. I’m not really convinced that we wouldn’t have half-life without this game, but half life actually figured out how to make all those things work coherently. quake 2 just kind of throws them up as set dressing over an otherwise kind of middling 90’s fps framework.
the enemies are still too spongey and on average aren’t as fun to fight as they are in quake 1 (and this is particularly evident when fighting them one-on-one, especially the bigger, tankier enemies). maybe I should play on normal difficulty instead.
also it’s a crime how much shittier the grenade launcher in the game is compared to quake 1. unforgivable imo.
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So when are we doing a multiplayer night?
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what I want is the capture the flag mod with the grappling hooks. is that still a thing? because that’s what I want.
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oh, look
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Yeah, they’re in there!
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Rundown of the new episode. As Mr Mech mentioned, it’s made up of six different units, which you can select in any order from a hub. The concept is that you’re sending marines on different missions to gather data that will direct you to the source of the strogg to put a final stop to them. It uses weapons and enemies from the expansions, but mostly focuses on the original content. Oh, there are also loads of new textures which give the units much more aesthetical variety than the original game.
LASER EYES
The standout episode in my opinion. It feels like what Quake 2 should have been, running around an alien base with a great sense of place, completing objectives. The levels have a great sense of flow and some really fun enemy encounters, including some horde battles which were really satisfying. This one really makes the most out of the mechanics and design philosophies of the original game and pushes them really far. Does suffer from some of the problems of the original game though, like backtracking, but nothing too egregious.
WASTELANDS
The biggest dud of the lot. The outdoor areas are pretty cool, since it’s a wasteland and has a mad max/tatooine kinda feel, especially the area where you fight the midboss (this expansion loves bosses btw). But the bulk of the unit takes place in a very boring sewer. combat encounters feel pretty rote, too. not terrible, but very much the weakest of the bunch.
CORPSE RUN
You know you’re in for a good time with this one because it gives you a BFG in the first 30 seconds. Very true to its name, this unit focuses on fighting hordes of enemies inside and outside a giant, brutalist structure that seems to be some kind of flesh processing plant. Very frantic and exciting battles… then about halfway we get a tiny bit of foreshadowing for later in the episode, and we get a very nice aesthetic change by ending up fighting on earth’s moon. level design of this one is very straight forward, since it’s focused on combat, but i think it does it really well. wouldnt want a whole episode of this style, but as a single unit, it’s a great time. also there is a survival horror bit that i found very tense.
also also i should mention here that most of the levels in this exp are really good at giving you cover and multiple ways to approach enemies
FIREWALL
Another “quake 2 done right” level, this starts with a big open area with lots of combat that’s really fun (though i wish they threw more enemies at you here), then has an unfortunate but at least relatively short and painless sewer detour, then its back to running around a space base. eventually you get back to the starting area which is why i tihnk they should have made the battles tougher at the start… there are stronger enemies here now, but you have so many weapons at this point that it makes it really easy to pick off everyone from a distance. would have been way more satisfying if it was a big up close and personal battle when you first went through it. anyway then you go through some cute mission impossible shit to get access to a mainframe computer that concludes in a tight, vertical battle, go and have a boss fight, then finish the unit. so, not as good as it could have been, but overall had a great time with this one.
RUINED EARTH
i thought this would be sci-fi earth but it’s more like ruined victorian earth, kinda like its taking place in the universe of certain other game HMMM. anyway this starts off pretty weak with running around boring level design killing frog men but fortunately it quickly picks up with better space design and enemy variety. some of it actually reminds me of the ps1 medal of honor games, and in a good way. there is even MORE sewer crawling (and more frogmen fights), but anyway while running around earth you see these giant drills. eventually you get up onto the strogg ship for a scifi aesthetic change, and have to run around and lift all the drills up. i enjoyed this area, it’s fairly nonlinear and has a two tier thing going on. then you go back to earth and can access the areas the drills were blocking. the unit really picks up here, lots of boss battles and intense fights. anyway then you end up back on the ship and end the unit
DARKEST DEPTHS
a climb down a VERY pretty abyss. lots of vertical combat, pretty straightforward design. I enjoyed it, though found it to be a bit too easy and (as mentioned) straighforward. solid enough! it features more foreshadowing…
TEMPLE OF THE CREATOR
it’s pretty obvious where all this was heading, but i’m going to spoil it… the final boss are SHAMBLERS! it turns out the forces of quake are behind the strogg, and these specific shamblers are behind it. i enjoyed the bleak “lol fuk u” ending, and basically how this episode ties together the two games, albeit loosely.
So, this episode isn’t as tight as the Quake 1 one they made, but really it’s probably as good as Quake 2 is going to be without basically making a brand new game
My overall rankings:
Call of the Machine
The Reckoning
Ground Zeroes (technically better designed than The Reckoning, but I found the latter much more interesting to play which goes a long way)
Quake 2 64
Quake 2
Though I want to go back and play the original Quake 2 64 again because I still think it suffers from the new AI, but maybe I’m imagining it.
But I won’t be doing that for a while because I’ve had enough Quake 2 to last me a lifetime
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Played some more Dimension of the Machine in Quake 1. I’ve played three or four maps now and they’ve all been pretty killer but my favorite so far is this one called Acid Sanctuary.
Dang just look at that. A rare day time Quake map, kind of feels like it’s either early evening or late morning. Really great sense of place. Good combination of big, grand spaces and architecture with plenty of narrow, tight corridors and indoor spaces woven throughout. You’re constantly moving between indoor and outdoor spaces. Really looking forward to playing more of this episode.
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acid sanctuary is definitely one of the best
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