All Kinda Classics

I'm going to work with the theory that Quake 2  is that last game in the "classic id" lineage. I'm not entirely sure how I'm defining that (and I usually whine when people clump  Doom  and  Quake  together as "boomer shooters" or whatever), but I think you can trace a line backwards from Q2 , through Quake 1 , and at least back to Doom  (but probably not Wolf 3d) in a lot of ways. Today, I'm going to look at the guns. Back in the 90s, your guns were a big way you differntiated your FPS from others. Look at something like Duke 3D with it's goofy shrink rays and stuff, vs Outlaws  with more grounded "wild west" weapons. I'd argue, if anything, Quake 2  is a return to form, with a more evolved version of the Doom  weapons, after the weirdness of Quake 1.  Regardless, the relatively large and varied arsenal, is a key tenant of this era of id shooters, and of any modern game trying to ape them. (And you have to be able to carry them al...

 Something I've really appreciated about Quake 2 and Unreal  is the inclusion of the (once standard) Quicksave and Noclip options. Quicksave is a one button save hotkey, usually paired with a one button Quickload. It usually overwrites each time (though a few games will buffer 3 or 4). Makes it easy to keep your progress saved without clicking through menus, or cluttering things with a million save files. It's also a designated, "let me try something stupid" button. Is there a secret in that lava cave? Quicksave and find out! If not, you only wasted about 12 seconds. While I get the appeal of a checkpoint system, allowing the designers to define a narrative beat or whatever, the flexibility, convenience, and accessibility of quicksave is so nice. Honestly, I'm kind of surprised (in the modern age of accessibility features) it's not considered at least "poor taste" to not include one. Great for people with kids, Crohn's disease, or anything else t...

 I've been pretty down on Quake 2  the couple times I mentioned it here. But I wasn't in the mood to slog through a million bot matches for Q3 and UT back to back to back, so I wanted something with a regular single player campaign to break it up. Since Q2 was the closest thing, chronologically, I figured I'd grab it and work on the campaign. It took me three days. It was really good. My memories (and, admittedly, I don't think I've sat down to play Quake 2 in over a decade) were of it just being clunky and frustrating. I'm not going to sit here and pretend I'm so super pro-FPS player, but I can clear most of the iD games on the highest "fair" difficulty reasonably well. I remember Quake 2 being a lot harder, and just generally annoying to play. Enemies were too spongy, levels were too confusing, weapons were awkward. I don't think it stacks up to Quake 1 (maybe Doom 1 ),  but it's still better than 90% of shooters made by companies th...

 I think I posted about wanting to learn this. I think this is technically just "mending" since I didn't make a full loom. Whatever, still cool. Also fixed a bag. 

As I continue my meander through retro-FPS land, I've reached Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament. One of the best "dueling games" scenarios of all time. They're both awesome, and they're different enough that (at the time) they could coexist. But only one of them is still decently active today, and I have a theory on that. Quake 3 was open sourced about 5 years after release. Unreal finally got sort-of released for free (still not OS) in 2024. And today, I can go find a server with real people (not just bots) playing real Quake 3 pretty much any time of day. Unreal Tournament, I've made it into exactly one "normal" match in a weekish of looking. There are plenty of weird servers. People still play instagib for some reason (HAAAATE), made even worse by these assinine "bowling alley" looking maps where you can't really dodge or aim. There was a cool one where the nuke launcher was modded into a jet you could fly. But, basically, it's dead....

 I had Rise  (the middle of the "modern" Tomb Raider trilogy) in my Steam account, so I installed it today. The series seems to be the defacto benchmark games (along with  Cyberpunk , which I don't have). It booted, and gave me a bunch of errors about how I didn't meet requirements, but it ran. I cranked all the graphics settings up and ran the benchmark. It did alright on the first section, but quickly tanked into the high teens/low twenties. I went back and removed all the ugly filters (depth of field, BLOOMFLARE, etc.) and adjusted the anti-aliasing, and was able to get to 29.something average. I didn't tweak the game much. I didn't install a "gaming kernel" just fired it up and clicked most of the boxes. Seems kind of pointless to worry about a top of the line card if a 5 year old laptop (decent spec, but again, not a GAMING LAPTOP!) with integrated graphics can chug through the default benchmark passably. What could I do with even a mid grade ca...