Quake

id Software

1st-Person Action

• a single speed CD-ROM drive (if installing from CD)
• a Pentium Processor
• MS DOS 5.0 or higher
• 8 megabytes of RAM, 16 megabytes to run in a DOS Box under Windows 95
• a VGA video card
• and 40 megabytes of free hard drive space for the shareware version or 80 megabytes for the full version

Bad Mojo

Those zany guys at Id have done it again. Wow, what a game. And what a bunch of controversy. First the game. You're a marine with a mission (again). An evil enemy is using transporters to attack the good guys bases with horrid creatures from a darker realm. You've got the ability to track back the origination of the transports and it's up to you to take death on a stick to the bad guys. More blood and guts than a first year intern on ER. Woo hoo!

The 3D world of Quake is great! Life is no longer a bunch of badly clipped sprites and flat levels. And qith QuakeC, the levels and engine is amazingly configurable and customizable. I can't wait for AlienQuake. The bad guys are actually have volume and are a bit more spooky and deffinatly evil and totally demented. The head to head play is GREAT and fun. Quake is just one more good stride in the first person game genre and it does a good job of setting the standard.

Now, I want to say a bit about Duke Nukem 3D. In one word, it SUCKS! Alot of people want to say DN3D is better than Quake, and they are wrong. Duke Nukem is nothing but a silly 2D game with some `neat' little one shot special effects. People have allready done more with Quake and QuakeC than anyone at 3D Realms did with DN3D. DN3D may be fun to play and it makes you laugh, but in the long run Quake provides more options, better play, and better technology. No doubt about it.

Quintin Stone

It took a little while, but id has finally got out a full-completely-entirely-I-shit-you-not 3 dimensional first-person-shooter engine, following Parallax's game Descent. Like Descent, Quake has fully texture-mapped polygon graphics, but like Doom, you walk, run, hop, or swim to get to where you're going. Lighting is done realistically, everything in the game (monsters, objects, etc.) has a much broader range of motion, due to their polygon nature. The sounds, of course, are just as good as they've ever been in Doom.

You've got a few new weapons to play with (nail guns are like the original chain-gun, but the grenade launcher and thundergun are new) as well. My only complaint was that the thundergun could be too hard to hit with. It would have been very cool if it forked like a lightning bolt.

The monsters and computer Artificial Intelligence were both well-done. Scrags and Shamblers inspired that terror and rush of adrenaline as much as any monster in Doom or Doom II. The scary parts were how much better they were at finding you, or hiding, than monsters in id's previous games.

The rendered, texture-mapped graphics made for realistic lighting and behavior, but in some cases, the detail was less impressive than that in Doom. Mostly, this applied to your weapons and explosions. It's hard to do a polygon based explosion, and your guns look like polygon surfaces, instead of the digitized tools of death in Doom and Doom II.

But, for the most-part, Quake is just another evolution in Doom. The only thing it brings new to the genre is QuakeC, which allows you to write modules in which you can change the very behavior of the Quake universe. This is a very nice touch, and even though I haven't had the chance to write anything (I have played a few), it appears to be nearly limitless in potential.