Quake 2

 Tried some Quake 2 today. Probably my least favorite of the "retro id" (however we're defining that) set. It's even darker than Quake 1, and in way that doesn't really make sense. Q1 is doing the gothic horror thing, Quake 2 is... I dunno, aliens haven't invented the light bulb?

The enemies are all aggressively spongy. I'm never really sure if they're actually "tougher" (in terms of amount of HP), the guns just suck, or what. The nailgun<machinegun is probably the most noticable.

Other than that, it kind feels like it's stuck midway between the old Quake/Doom run n gun as fast as you can feel, and a slower, semi-tactical one. There's kind of an inventory system, but it kind of sucks. Compared with Jedi Knight 2, which came out the same year, it feels very limited. I don't think some of the original Quake design decisions (no use button) really sort the new feel, and it's held back by that.

It's probably the game that I most want to see a "we'll take the basic idea and butcher it to modernize it" remake for. That's sort of what Quake 4 was, but not exactly.

Quake Wars is definitely my favorite of the Stroggiverse games.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955)

Image
 The Crooked Man by Charles Beaumont (1955) Bonus:  No, not that one. Summary: In the future, the gays will oppress the straights! Commentary: After the hamfisted "the racial minorities will oppress the Whites!" from last night, I remember the infamous story of the Playboy story about a gay society oppressing straight people. I looked it up, and I'm going to kick off this blog with it. I feel like the fact that it exists is a classic piece of trivia, but the story itself doesn't get a ton of recognition. It's also not really that good, existing only to serve the moral, and even then not doing a great job. It opens with the "men lusting for men" verse from Romans. I wonder (not sure you could get away with it in 1955) if it would be better with a flipped version of the verse, suggesting the Bible had been altered to support the new homosexual order. I do like that "queer" is not a slur for straight people, good flup there.  The gay world is, of ...
Read more

BSD Games

Image
 Why don't operating systems come with games anymore? Windows sort of has Solitaire still, but it's a bloated mess. Chrome has the dinosaur game, I guess. MacOS has Chess, which I guess is the realest game. I think most Linux distros ship with at least a couple by virtue of their desktop environment. I think my KDE install came with Mahjong, Solitaire, Minesweeper, maybe one or two more. I don't think any of the BSDs include the old bsdgames by default anymore. The internet leads me to believe OSX used to, back when it was closer to FreeBSD. Here's the list: https://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/BSD_games Rain is obviously the coolest: I dunno. On the one hand, Windows is so bloated these days, I get trying to cut stuff. On the other, I think at least a couple of decent games is good "out of the box" as part of a complete system. If we're pretending your OS is anything other than a web browser opener.
Read more

Something Wicked This Way Comes: Chapter 31

 Was thinking about doing something vaguely Halloweeny tonight, and remembered this chapter from Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury: Nothing much else happened, all the rest of that night. That's it. That's the whole chapter! I remember thinking that was so cool the first time I read it. I should reread the whole book one of these days.
Read more