Quake

The Good
Quake was a marvelous tech demo. The graphics were true 3D, and the multiplayer component was (apparently, I really don't know firsthand) revolutionary in its day, as one could easily hop on and find opponents through that direct TCP/IP thingie everyone was ooohhing and ahhhing over.

The Bad
The single player game just wasn't all that compelling after the intense, Mars-meets-Hell action of Doom and Doom II. Plus, Quake set a new low bar for storytelling--there is no story, period. I haven't really played multiplayer Quake, and the idea of trigger-happy FPS fragging online just hasn't ever appealled to me, so I can't bury or praise Quake on that score.

The graphics are not now, nor were they ever, as impressive as they were alleged to be. YES, it was true 3D and used polygons instead of sprites, but that doesn't mean it was pretty to look at. The bad guys tend to look polygonal, which just doesn't cut it for me; I'll take good-looking sprites over jagged blobs any day. Not to mention how utterly BROWN the whole thing is…ick!

Quake's claim to greatness has to be that it paved the way for later games that were both technically brilliant AND aesthetically pleasing. Sorry Mr. Romero, but I just don't think design was law in this case.

The Bottom Line
Quake was a fabulous tech demo, but only a decent game. A "classic" in its brief heyday, it's just "ok" now.

The Good
This game has about the greatest 3D graphics you can get without 3D acceleration, on a 486. On modern computers you can set the resolution quite high and enjoy the edgy monsters running smoothly in the atmospheric interiors.

This game also has one of the best soundtracks I've seen in a PC game. I'm not talking about that boring Nince-Inch Nails stuff, I'm talking about the fact that you can play this with any music CD in the drive (my personal favorite for this game is Larry & the Lefthanded's Quantum Rider, but playing Quake with Mike Flowers Pops playing in the background can give you a novel perspective on things!), which is nothing remarkable today, but this was the first game I played that had a CD soundtrack, and didn't need the game CD in the drive in order to run.

The Bad
While, technically, Quake is far better than Doom, I never could get into it in the same way. The levels are well designed, the monsters are multitudinous, and the guns kill, but the feeling just isn't there. Now if they had opted for a more original approach, as in Duke Nukem 3D, they might have made a classic, but Quake is too obviously just "Doom 3D", and I'd rather play Doom than Quake nowadays.

Oh, yeah, Quake was (and still seems to be) a very popular multiplayer game on the internet. I don't like that. I tried playing over the 'net and these kids who couldn't even spell their names right kept beating the pants off me. I hate death-matches! Put a tax on internet gaming, that's what I always say... <grumble, grumble> and give me my pants back!

The Bottom Line
Play this before you play Doom, if possible. Once you have completed Doom, you have no reason whatsoever to play this on your own. If you like death-matches and you have a dated machine, Quake is as good as the next FP3DSEU, I suppose. Buy Duke3D instead, if you can find it!

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.