In order to help everyone, I will also nominate WCW vs NWO Revenge, Wrestlemania 2000 and WWF No Mercy in addition to Fire Pro Wrestling World.
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i always thought quake 1 was super cool looking because i felt like they really leaned in to the abstractness of the low poly aesthetic.
iām sure if i played it a ton more i would have been able to land on this eventually, but honestly if you asked me to describe the setting of quake off the top of my head i would probably just say something like āhorror cubesā, and thereās a kind of beauty in that
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Quake single player (on my list) is so cool (with the exception of the Spawn enemies, I hate them!) and the final boss conceit is still hilarious to me but I started playing Quake 2 for the first time a couple months ago andā¦thought it was trash? Like the weapons feel wimpy as heck and the level design was tedious and the Strogg enemies behaved like utter buffoons. I only beat the first level or two but it was really disappointing. If Iām missing something, I wanna know. Iād give it another chance if it gets good.
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I donāt think this is remotely controversial.
Most of the folks who made Quake I had moved on by then, pretty much. Id had a lot of internal turmoil and the engine for Quake II was in development right up until itās release.
And yeah, personally Iāve never liked it very much. Just feels bad all around, and the level architecture feels more like a tech demo to me than anything substantial. Iāve been meaning to like, skip to Jennell Jaquayās third of the game to see if it improves any since she literally wrote the book on good dungeon design, but the first third is so long and sloggy Iāve never gotten past it.
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Itās definitely more of a mashup than a preplanned aesthetic. The product of seat-of-your-pants creativity going a million miles an hour. I think the third episode of the game fits that description the best. The first and second episodes have a more sci-fi kind of look but the third and fourth start leaning into a more fantasy kind of look.
And the bosses, such as they were. Chthon at the end of the first episode and the Shub-Niggurath (codenamed Quake) at the very end after completing all four episodes were obvious Lovecraft inspirations.
I want to post a pic of the story page from the game manual but I canāt find any online. Iām probably going to have take one and upload it myself.
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Quake 2 was popular mostly because of multiplayer (hence quake 3 beingā¦ quake 3) and Iām pretty sure everything it did well in that regard has been done better since, but it definitely had its moment
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In Quake 2ās defense, the railgun was really sweet, especially at the time. Higher screen resolutions and mainstreamed mouse-aiming were coming together to make sniper weapons a thing for the first time, and the helix effect they went with remains uniquely cool.
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Quake IIās plot framing device (it feels weird to refer to a āstoryā in these older games that are basically just collections of levels) is based on the movie The Guns of the Navarone. The movie was about a group of commandos in WWII seeking out and destroying huge German gun encampments on the Greek island of Navarone. In the game your mission is to find and destroy the Big Gun.
And thatās pretty much it! As you can tell from the opening cinematic youāre basically separated from your squad (because AI characters that followed you around werenāt quite a thing yet) so it doesnāt really follow the movie beyond Find the Big Gun.
At the time it was impressive for its use of colored lighting and huge levels that just flowed right into each other without clear entrance and exits. Like up to that point FPS games all had single discrete levels and you were just trying to get the end of each one. But with Quake II and then Unreal there was none of that anymore. Everything was just one big ālevelā and you could go back and forth between levels youād already been to a little bit as well.
None of that stuff even registers anymore so all youāre left with some anemic shooting and a body horror cyborg aesthetic that may or not do anything for you. Unlike the first game most of the enemies are all a bit samey with not much creative differentiation. Thereās some flying enemies but there were fliers in the first game, and beyond that the monsters are either human sized soldiers or increasingly larger cyborgs.
Quake had the Fiend that would lunge at you, the Scrags who floated above and rained yellow goop on you, the iconic grenade launching ogre with his chainsaw, the Hell Knights with their fire throwing swords, regular armored knights with regular swords, zombies that threw chunks of their rotting flesh at you, the aforementioned Spawns, regular mook soldiers with their guard dogs, the spider-like Vore, and the Shamblers that were terrifying until you learned how to cheese their routine.
By contrast Quake II has those gun-arm meatheads that keep firing their gun after getting their heads shot off. And flies buzzing around their corpses if you donāt gib them. Andā¦ I think thereās big tank guys eventually and a female enemy with a big blade arm?
I think id made Quake IV a sequel to Quake II precisely because II has a much more defined setting and aesthetic and set of characters etc. than Quake I despite Quake I actually being the more interesting/weird game with much more untapped potential.
I wonāt say stick with it if itās already boring you. Either that little blaster you start with does something for you or it doesnāt.
I love the Sonic Mayhem soundtrack though! In high school we used to put the Quake II disc in our car CD players and rock out from track 2 onward (because track 1 had the game data on it). One of my friends didnāt believe it first that the music was all made on computers. He was like ābut I can hear the guitars and stuffā and we were like āyou foolā.
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Another thing about Quake 2 is that its slower-paced aim-y kind of multiplayer was very influential, but also done better by its successors. Meanwhile the ultra mobile multiplayer of Doom, Quake 1 and Quake 3 was less influential, and therefore came to be what we love about the golden age of id software.
Either way, like u_u said, Quake 2 was all about the multiplayer and thereās never been much to like about the campaign. I played it the month it came out and still remember the sinking feeling that accumulated as the impressiveness of the colored lighting wore off and the boredom became undeniable.
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- Guns of Navarone rocks (Anthony Quinn for the win (they really liked casting that Mexican-American guy as a Greek, huh))
- All those at-the-time innovations you mention make sense and yeah, donāt impress me much these days!
- The blaster was immediately off-putting and the machine gun also seemed really dinky, I thought something was wrongā¦
- Yeah, the music is pretty great!
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Quake 2 was released for Mac a few months before Quake 3, I think. Like, I think q3test was already available by the time it came out. I didnāt like it at all and I couldnāt aim for shit with the railgun but I played it a ton cuz I downloaded a Teletubbies model that played wavs of Dipsy going OH OHHH or whatever every time I got gibbed.
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Quake 2 had great sound design too. The quake games donāt get enough credit for sound design.
The quake 2 multiplayer maps were groundbreaking in terms of verticality and exploration and pacing
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The singleplayer and 90 percent of the weapons are trash though, and the visual design is generic 90s sci fi
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I had classmates in highschool that installed Quake 2 shareware on every computer on every classroom
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We had people do the same but in primary (elementary) school. I have no idea why the teachers let it slide.
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Yeah, The Edge and Factory are great.
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Feel compelled to mention that the first time I played Quake in 1996 I played it all the way through entirely on the keyboard, no mouselook, using the page up and page down keys to look up and down as needed. Quake II was when I started using the mouse. Nowadays I have no idea how I ever managed to play an FPS without the mouse.
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The age difference between us is best shown by my high school friends doing the same thing, but it was Doom 1.
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I did this with half-life
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elevator action ex
elevator action returns
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