I'm new here. Thanks for having me aboard.It only took me 14 years, but I finally played Quake. It comes to some surprise to me that I had never played the original Quake before, which makes it all the more interesting that Quake II was and still is one of my favorite games. I wasted hundreds of hours of my life playing this game. Did I say wasted? No. Enhanced. Bettered. Some out there may not like the painfully simple first-person shooter video games – the kind where you hit some buttons, switches or levers spread around a map and kill a bunch of bad guys, but hey - they're my action film in video game form.
Taking Wikipedia's word for granted, Quake first reared its head with the first Commander Keen game in 1990. Originally titled The Fight for Justice, it would follow a character named Quake, "the strongest, most dangerous person on the continent." Quake in its final form is an odd mix of fantasy addled middle-ages to futuristic space-age building. It is literally Heretic meets Doom. The clash apparently comes from John Romero wanting to make a fantasy hand-to-hand combat game, while level designers Tim Willits and American McGee wanted a Doom-like game. Or so the story supposedly goes. That would make a lot of sense since the designs seem to really clash that way.
Quake's story, if you can even call it that, is as straightforward as you can get it. You, the player, has gone though some sort of teleportation device, and now must battle your way through 4 “worlds,” capturing a rune at the end of each. That's about it, but hey we're not playing this one for the story. I was slightly shocked at how short the game actually was. Each episode ranged between 6 and 7 maps, not including the secret levels. After each episode has been completed, and the player has all the runes, the final level, "Shub-Niggurath's Pit" opens.
Levels are diverse, but not particularly hard. The longest I spent on a map was roughly 10 and a half minutes, and part of that was because I was disoriented because I didn't bother noticing that the one door I continued to pass was the one that got me out of the level. My favorite maps in the entire game are E3M5 “Wind Tunnels,” a level where the player has to travel through a series of tubes, being being lifted by air or dropped into pools of water and E2M4 “The Ebon Fortress,” which I thought had the best composition of push-button puzzles and a fantastic spread of enemies in the entire game. I'm kind of miffed that I didn't play the secret map for Episode 1, Ziggurat Vertigo, which has low gravity and looked pretty awesome based on the walkthroughs I found. What can I say, I'm a sucker for crazy game physics like that.
After getting the basic hang of the gaming, I played the game on medium. I don't particularly like playing any game on the hardest difficulty possible, mostly because of bad memories of trying to play Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on “I Am Death Incarnate” and generally dying in under a minute into the first level. Not only that, but the simple fact that they even had to hide the most difficult setting from the user is enough for me to avoid it like a Shambler on my last remaining hitpoints.
If you've got an nostalgic itch you need to scratch and have four hours to kill you can probably get through the entire game between lunch and dinner on a given weekend. Does anyone else have memories of playing this game?
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