(I apologize for my) Quake 2: 1997/2023 (slander)

 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 that aren't iD in the 90s. To be fair, I played the 2023 Nightdive remaster. Their Doom port was the one I blogged about on Switch last summer, and I was pretty pleased. Everything ran nicely, the expansions were well integrated. Their Quake 2 remaster goes a step further with a pile of gameplay tweaks. I'm half tempted to go shoot through the first "unit" (it's not quite an episode) to see how noticeable they are. The biggest ones, as far as I can tell are:

1. A ton of AI (and a few less general balance) adjustments. In general, the goal seems to be to make the AI more aggressive. They'll chase better, dodge around attacks, aim "towards" you if they think they know where you are, etc.

 2. FIXING THE MACHINE GUN! The default Quake 2 controls were still in the all keyboard era. Mouse-look was available, but it wouldn't become the hard default until the next year (thanks to Half-Life, which does still suck, I checked recently, fight me!) The default machine gun has one of the most obnoxious recoil behaviors in all of gameing. Besides the normal scatter you'd expect from one, it also had an obnoxious muzzle-climb mechanic. With the mouse, it wasn't that bad (kind of like how the Red 9 stock is redundant in some of the Resident Evil 4 ports with non-stick aiming), but with the default keyboard layout it's much harder to manage.

 Gotta bounce for today, so gonna make this a 2 or 3 parter. Quake 2: 8/10, which is way higher than I expected.

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