Blast From the Past: Quake III (1999)

Quake III Arena is the follow up to the wildly successful Quake and Quake II games.

The game makes a departure from the single-player game play of its predecessors, instead shifting gears and focusing heavily on multi-player gaming so much so that playing the single-player game is simply playing a multi-player campaign against computer controlled bots.

The technology behind the game play was a step up in PC gaming. The id Tech 3 engine was fast, and detailed. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Star Trek: Voyager Elite Force and Star Trek: Elite Force II are just a few games that used the engine.

While the single-player campaign is fun, killing a bunch of bots over and over again gives me an empty feeling inside after a while. In its heyday, the multi-player mode was a blast, full of thousands of people fragging each other over and over again. Trying your hand at multi-player is just a tinsy bit harder today, since we're 11 years out from its original release date and as you'd expect the number of people playing this in multi-player mode is considerably fewer. Not surprisingly, the default servers did not appear to work. I'm sure I could have configured the game to connect to some server that still hosts the game, but I'll just consider this one dead and let it rest in peace.

My favorite maps of the game come towards the end, with Q3DM16 being my single favorite map of the game. It even has a Facebook fanpage.



If you want to spend a few fun hours in front of the computer, this is a game you should certainly revisit.