Quake

The Good
Graphics. Of course I can't judge this game agains likes of Gears of War, but for that time it was something that absolutely won people's heart, from ghastly corridors to hell's front door. And monsters we're in 3D, not sprites.

Sound. From monster's snores to double-barreled shotgun's sound, it was all in place. Sound is very important in this game, because it adds a little bit to scare factor.

Music. The music fits into game very well and makes you feel the adrenaline.

Multiplayer. It doesn't have the same impact that it had 10 years ago, but MP is still rock solid. Servers are quite lonely, but community is still strong.

The Bad
Single-player and it's story. It's totally dumbed down and everything becomes so repetitive. You just have one objective, finish the level and kill the bad guys. And story is usual "evil tries to demolish mankind".

Textures. Textures are so repetitive, that I wanted to scream. Every level is so earth-like and muddy.

There aren't a lot of bad things about this game, but these few still manage to hurt this game.

The Bottom Line
Game has everything that you need. Superb graphics (at least 10 years ago), scary atmosphere and great sound & music and story (even if it is totally pointless). But SP gradually wears down. At first it's locations are mindblowing and awesome, but after that the textures start to repeat itselves. I was screaming after seeing for the millionth time those same old earth-like textures. There's no variety, almost everything is copy. And objectives are nothing but finish the level and kill baddies. Now, moving to baddies. Actually monsters are quite cool and add spice to the game, from lousy armed men to yeti-like monster. You can see absolutely immediately, that one of the monster designer is Lovecraft fan. And also, the monsters are not sprites but in 3D! That was one of the advancements that iD made.

And the Quake engine is marvellous. With Gouraud shading for moving objects and static lightmap for nonmoving objects. After the source code was released by Carmack in '99, derivative engines came out and these also improved original engine. And of course you can't deny countless maps & mods that came out after the game was released. A lot even surpass original maps and add a lot of variety and exploring. Game's biggest plus is MP. Now it's a little bit aged and servers are often deserted, but I imagine what it was about 10 years ago. It was crowded, people we're thrilled. They chatted, swapped tips and even met each other in real life. Tournaments were held, money won and MP community was growing, growing and growing. That's all thanks to MP, what was those days a big hit. And because of Quake MP's simplicity. You just joined and played, even if you got fragged like hell. Oh well, time to stop bothering you. As I said: The SP is lousy and gradually wears off, but MP is strong. I can see what historical value this game has and what milestone it was, but I still can't blindly shout: Quake owns.

The Good
Quake may be an awesome first-person shooter that received praise from the gaming public, but things were very different in 1991, when id first promoted it in the first three Commander Keen games. It was to be called The Fight For Justice, a role-playing game where the player would control someone named Quake, who was supplied with a hammer that they could use against his enemies. People could be interacted with, and there would be many puzzles to solve. He would work for Justice, a secret organization whose purpose is to vanquish all the evil from the world.

This never got off the ground due to the fact that the technology they were using was outdated and they had to wait while they developed a new engine that was capable of delivering the result they wanted. In my opinion, it wouldn't make any sense for id not to cash in on their previous successes (Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom), both of them first-person shooters.

The player's role in the game is to stop something codenamed “Quake”, an evil entity using technology created by the government (known as Slipgates) to insert their own death squads into the 'human' dimension. To do this, the player must navigate from area to area, searching for the four runes that are required to enter Quake's dimension. Having said that, Quake shares many similarities with Doom. You have to search each level for the exit (in this case, a portal), collecting keycards to unlock certain doors, more often than not spawning enemies if you collect them. These enemies are just as stupid as they were before, battling each other out if a projectile meant for the player accidentally hits them.

By watching the running demos in the game, I found out at least two things: that the enemies that composed of 3D polygons that are well animated, and that the depicted environments have that Lovecraftian feel to them. There are four episodes in the game, and each of them is consistent in terms of structure. You start off in sci-fi military installations, but then you eventually fight your way through castles and dungeons, both of them having a medieval or fantasy theme. What I like about most of the levels is looking up at the animated skybox with the moving purple clouds.

The best thing about playing first-person shooters such as Quake is the exploration, and I would rather spend at least 30 minutes exploring every inch of a level than just run through it and complete it in five minutes. Besides, you might discover a secret area you missed before if you spend a considerable amount of time in the level. Some areas are inaccessible without collecting keys or pushing/shooting a series of buttons that are sometimes hard to find. There are heaps of secrets in each level, and when I played a certain map more than once, I was able to discover the ones I missed.

Quake is more unique than any first-person shooter that I played so far. Besides using 3D polygons for the sprites and textures, you select the episode and difficulty not through menus, but by walking through portals that play a vital role in the game. Also, I like the way you have to find another way to defeat the two bosses in the game, using two different methods. Gameplay-aside, I believe that Quake was the first FPS that let you play the game at different resolutions, other than the vanilla one.

There are several enemies that you need to kill along the way. You first face human opponents equipped with shotguns and energy weapons, along with their “best friend”. But later on, you'll face tougher opponents like knights, grunts, scrags, and zombies (with those last three being my favorites). You have an arsenal of weapons you can choose from, and start with an axe and shotgun. In my opinion, nothing beats a good old axe, even if you spend a lot of time killing one of the tougher enemies.

One of the people who worked on the game was Trent Raznor, who happened to be the front-runner of Nine Inch Nails. id originally wanted no music in the game, but Raznor was unhappy with this. Later, he was granted permission to let the band write the music for the game. NIN's soundtrack gives the game atmosphere. Like a lot of games released at the time, the music is laid out on CD audio tracks, meaning that you must leave the CD in the drive in order to hear them.

The Bad
In Doom and its sequel, you can open doors and push switches by walking up to them an hitting a key, adding a touch of realism to the game. But in Quake, this feature does not exist, nor in any other first-person shooter that follows it.

As much as I like the idea of running the game at different resolutions, some of them make the game look distorted if you use odd resolutions such as 320x400 and 848x480. There are even more ones a lot higher up, but I found the performance to degrade quite badly, even if you run the game on a Pentium.

The Bottom Line
In conclusion, Quake is an excellent game from id Software, the creators of Doom and Wolfenstein 3-D. The game was innovative for its time, in the way the characters consist of 3-D polygons that are animated nicely. It also is unique in the way it is structured different to id's previous successes where the difficulty/episode is not selected within a menu, as well as the way the levels are structured. The music for the game is composed by Nice Inch Nails, and they have slapped their logo onto certain ammo crates to make sure you don't forget. Each of the soundtracks in the game is disturbingly good, consisting of ambient noises to heighten the atmosphere of each level. The bottom line: I would recommend Quake to anyone who enjoys playing first-person shooters, especially for the exploration.

The Good
Quake was a technological wonder, after Doom id really had a hard act to follow technology-wise, yet they once again proved their programming prowess with Quake = the first fps with a true 3D engine.

And what an engine it was! After years of being stuck on the world of 2.5D games, Quake finally delivered true polygonal bliss. The end result was pretty much obvious: better sense of space and depth, smoother animation, use of effects like the portal or the cool underwater-distortion one, etc. etc. Quake also applied it's 3D-ness to such things as the player's Pov, which swayed and leaned around quite realistically. A feat that really made the game feel a lot different from the now static-looking 2.5D fpss; ditto the character models, which moved way smoother than sprites, and also came with the added bonus of being able to explode in little chunks of red meat, yes boys and girls, "gibs" were born with Quake.

The multiplayer area is also the other point were Quake broke the mold. As everyone knows by now, the game replaced all the hassle of multiplayer net-play with the now common server-client architecture, which was not only much more intuituive, but also much more reliable and fast, especially when you consider the setup prep-work that was usually involved with multiplayer gaming.

Also, being a metal fan I really enjoyed NIN's contribution to the game's soundtrack, tough it seems to be too depressing/experimental to most players for some reason. Still, if you don't like it, you can always pop in your own audio cd and let 'er rip while you get it on.

The Bad
What "didn't" I like about the game?? Well, there's no game to speak of!! :)). Seriously, Quake would begin id's trend of just forgetting about game design and instead providing the best technological wonders they could come up with. This is especially evidenced by the open architecture of Quake. It's set-up so you can customize it to your liking, ad mods to it, ad skins, textures, levels, sounds, etc etc. Heck, they even released the source code!

Id just figured "Why the hell bother designing the game when we just can release the technology?" It may be a reprehensible idea, but it's smart! Think about it, Quake off the box was a piece of shit. The game itself has even less story than Doom (and you thought that wasn't possible!!), the weapons are copies of Doom's (save for the Axe and the Lightning-throwing thingie) with new yet crappy 3D models (the rocket launcher is just a brown rod!!), the level of interaction was toned down to near-retarded levels with the removal of the use key in favor of a jump key, essentially trading off the ability to use things for the world's crappiest jump (primary reason for the discovery of the rocket-jump) result? You activate gigantic buttons by bumping into them... groan....

But wait! That's not all! The levels are dull techo-goth places with a heavy dose of the brown color (hmmm, crap comes to mind in more ways than one!!), populated by stupid traps (??WTF??) and seemingly randomly-placed enemies, which to be fair are the only cool things that come with the game. The single player campaign is a joke, with the only good moment being the fight against Chthon at the end of episode 1 and the initial joy of watching everything in 3D and all the Lovecraftian imagery. The multiplayer part saves the game, but then again the maps that came with the game were sorely lacking in just about every level.

...yet...

The Bottom Line
Quake sold Gazillions of copies!!! Why? Because it didn't matter whether it was good or not off the box!! You bought the game, and then turned it into whatever you wanted! And I'm not just talking about the level add-ons and stuff like that, I'm talking about serious reworkings, like Quake Rally and the like.

Quake is sort of like a piece of real estate, get it? It's what you put in there that eventually turns the game a worthy experience. It's a piece of remarkably well made technology, with enough of an open architecture to satisfy most pseudo-designers (though it would still require a high level of proficiency to do stuff like "real" level editing). That's what you pay, and that's what you get. Not a game, but a 3D-enginered, multiplayer-capable, piece of clay. This is good, REAL good. On the other hand it's pretty shameless in the sense that the developers simply washed their hands of most, if not all, creative content... hmm. That's bad, real bad...

In the end you'll have to ask yourself what do you really want. Back on those days Quake meant 3D and multiplayer. If you wanted that, you went for that. If you wanted say... good fps gameplay, you went for Duke3D (or even Quake add-ons like Scourge of Armaggon) and the like. You had to think before you bought. Of course, nowadays it's just completely stupid to play Quake. No reason to bother with old technology when you can have the new and upgraded version: Quake 3 Arena, even less of a game than this one, and destined to the same oblivion as soon as Quake 4, 5, 6, etc. get released.