Well, a year later, we upgraded, and I downloaded the Half-Life demo and then immediately went to buy the game. After that, we bought Quake 2 again for about $20, instead of the $60 we originally paid. And after Half-Life, Quake 2 really just seemed like a joke--a dinosaur from the "idiot era" of action PC games. Stupid backstory, stupid gameplay, and using stupid looking weapons to fight stupid looking stupid enemies. Of course, I was EXTREMELY biased, after playing Half-Life. I did know that the Half-Life engine was really a heavily modified Quake 2 engine, after reading several reviews and stories on the making of Half-Life.

Personally, I like to think of myself as being able to see through the bias, and think about what other people thought of. Like what all those people thought of while playing Quake 2 for the first time, being blown away by the clear framerates with shiny new graphics and big bad weaponry. Running through the sewers and ducking under crawlspaces, finding a nice set of armor, blowing away baddies with the weak little blaster, and seeing the cool light effect as the blaster shot sails down a hallway (which I admit still impresses me). I like to think that, instead of my personal opinion, what really matters is what other people will think of the game, because if someone can draw enjoyment from the game, then it must at least have some redeeming qualities that I must be able to find and enjoy for myself.

But I have to admit that, when I played Quake 2, I felt like I was playing a child's game. A boring one. If maps the quality of the normal maps in Quake 2 were to be used in Half-Life, they would be insulted to no end, and the author made fun of. So why should we still look at Quake 2 as some glorious landmark, when a year later it looks not just dated, but idiotic? Half-Life may look dated in the near future, but you'll still have to look back and admit that the design and execution were very well done. Quake 2 has almost no execution, just large rooms of crates, a train or two, two panes of glass to break throughout the entire game, and a bunch of random enemy and ammo placement. Quake 2 plays like a comic book. And haven't we grown out of that? Watching the products that have come out of the people who left id after making Quake 2, I don't see how any of us can say that Quake 2 is even a good game (the guy who made Daikatana, the guy working on "American McGee's Alice" which looks like the Kiss game except you use a jack-in-the-box as a grenade which is supposed to pass as originality, some guy who complained that Quake 3 just didn't get good enough reviews, and whoever made the gun look like it's wiggling Jell-O style whenever the arm moves in its idle animation--these are the people who made such a classic groundbreaking game?). Or at least we can't say it's a great game. Quake 2 definitely had moments, and back then it did indeed add some new features that all the other games merely shadowed, and very poorly. But if every other first person shooter was shit, that doesn't exactly mean that Quake 2 had to be God-like in order to succeed, it just had to be better than shit. In fact, it just had to be better than shit in order to be the best first person shooter ever, back then.

Playing Quake 2 today, the game appears to just fall flat, and be pointless other than clearing enemies out, or running face first into a button so you can watch a couple things explode and "clear an objective." And then move on to the next map, where it tells you that in the last one you found 5% of the "secrets," which mainly consist of a wall that slides away to reveal more ammo and armor than you could possibly need.

The mod community is mostly no better, since all the Quake 2 mods you can find are either deathmatch, or teamplay deathmatch, where you can sometimes capture or defend some object. Some add weapons, maps, or models, but other than that they add absolutely nothing new and original to the multiplayer experience. The creative mods--Jailbreak, mods where you can play as a jet or as a car, or where actual PLAY is involved (as opposed to constant mindless jumping into the air for a half hour while firing your gun, which is what deathmatch is)--are either impossible to find or no servers running the mods exist.

I believe that the first person shooter genre actually didn't HAVE standards until Half-Life came along. There were no standards to raise at all until Half-Life.

Actually, I'd have to say that the Doom games were better than Quake. Just some shooting monsters, with some puzzles and running around. Basic fun, the perfect little run around game for your PC, allegedly including a useful grid that comes down over your eyes in case Doom actually makes you want to get away from your computer and go get a gun and start killing people FOR REAL. Of course, Doom did create that "hit the switch and then run really fast in the opposite direction to the door before it closes" puzzle, which was a terrible addition to the FPS genre of games. If there's anything that would make you want to kill someone, it's that.

I do have to thank Quake for Team Fortress, though.

Review by:
John Cable

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