Quake 2 Extras

 Nightdive generally does a pretty nice job with their re-releases. You get the usual concept art, but they often grab stuff like deleted levels, demos, etc. and include them. Quake 2 comes with two such demos. Neither is worth a real post (they're levels from the game with less stuff, yay!) but a couple general observations:

1. The decision (or at least the work) to make every everything as dark as possible was apparently made pretty late in? A lot of these levels are actually visible, which is a cool change. It's fun to look at vintage screenshots and see how everyone yanked the brightness/contrast up (and made everything washed out) to compensate. And the visible levels were there all along. To be fair, a few are actually even darker than in release.

2. The levels work a lot better as a continuous set. There's some debate on pistol start vs full run in Doom, but Quake 2's interconnectedness is critical. These just felt like weird speed runs (some were very skippable due to glitches, which was kind of funny).

3. Some of the levels (the prison) were really weird without their gimmicks. I'm kind of surprised they didn't want to show off the prisoners, since it's both a big part of the level and the first time an id FPS had friendly/neutral NPCs. Semi-related, dumping all the power ups at the front instead of putting them throughout is less fun, as expected.

4. Quake 2's levels are pretty forgettable. When I did the Doom replays, there were some levels I only played once or twice years ago that I recognized pretty quickly. I didn't recognize a lot of the levels in Quake 2 after a couple weeks.

Surprisingly, they didn't include the manual. They include most of the content across the bonus features, but not the doc itself. It's a pretty good manual, so it seems like it'd be worth it. id's manuals had traditionally been pretty light. I think you could take the Doom, Doom 2, and Quake stories and fit them all in the space Quake 2's takes. They weren't bad. Informative, decently written, just kind of sparse. They never went for the "here, have a novel with your manual" approach that a lot of other companies were doing at the time (to say nothing of the almost literal textbooks that most flight sim manuals were.)

Here it is on replacement docs.

The short intro is solidly written. Does a lot of economical worldbuilding for the other games in the subseries. "Dallas-Metro crater" is doing some lifting.

Most of the manual kind of a weird mix of in-universe and not, but it gets the info across cleanly.