For those who don’t know, I got into the Quake Live closed beta just this month after they decided to expand the player base. Unfortunately, there currently aren’t any Asian servers for Quake Live, and while that’s bound to change by the time Quake Live goes live (no pun intended), little ol’ me is stuck with 300ms ping in every single server thus far. It’s a pain I tell you, to have shotgun pellets take like forever to hit the wall and to watch your lightning gun beam bend and turn really slowly as you turn your mouse. It’s practically impossible to kill anyone, save for the random kills I get whilst spamming rockets away. Really, spamming rockets at every single thing you see (including walls and floors even if there’s no one there) is the only way to kill anybody with such great lag.
Thus, I’m relegated to playing with bots all the time, and guess what: it’s still loads of fun.
Fast Paced Action… Period.
Before I go any further, I’d better explain that Quake Live is a reboot of the game Quake 3 Arena which was released back in 1999. To me, Quake 3 (and now Quake Live) will always be my favourite game of all time. The numerous yet manageable number of weapons, great level design, infinite level of customisation for players with different wants and needs, etc. Everything in this game helped contribute to its unparalleled fast paced gameplay.
For some reason, games don’t do this any more, developers seemed to have stop bothering about fast paced FPSes for a looooooooong time. The two greatest FPSes to me? Quake 3, and the original Unreal Tournament, which was also released in 1999. For a decade, not a single other game has come close to offering the same level of excitement and tension these 2 games offered. Quake 4 was a complete failure in my opinion and it lost a lot of what made Quake 3 so much fun. Sure the single player campaign was fun, but the multiplayer aspect was a huge step backward. As for Unreal Tournament? They decided to ditch the fast paced, small scale gameplay and instead opted for a more Battlefield-esque shooter, having large fields of play and vehicles to boot.
Strategising!!!
What made Quake 3 so great? It has everything a video game needs. Most people might simply think it’s just a matter of how good you are at aiming in a video game, and that’s true for most FPSes nowadays, but Quake 3 was so much more. Strategising (a concept that FPSes of today seem to be completely unaware of) is so important in this game that it’s probably as important, if not more, than the player’s skill.
- First you got to know the map like the back of your hand. Which doorway leads to where, which teleporter goes where.
- That means you’ll have to keep track of where your opponent is, for example if you see him in one part of the map you’ll have to immediately infer where he’s able to go to next or what items he has in his vicinity to pick up.
- Then you have to remember where all the weapons are around the map so that you know which one to go to for a particular situation
- Then you gotta remember where all the health is scattered around the map so you know where to quickly retreat to if you’re under attack. No, you don’t have magical health-regenerating abilities like what every single FPS seems to be going for nowadays.
- Then there’s the mega-health, which basically gives you a ton of health when picked up (as the name obviously implies). Thing is, once it’s picked up, the mega-health will respawn every 35 seconds (in Quake Live at least), so whenever you pick it up or hear your opponent pick it up, you gotta take note of the time and subtract/add 35 seconds so that you’ll know when it’s back there for you to pick it up again, to prevent your opponent from getting it.
- Then there’s the issue of different types of armor (which protect you from too much damage, obviously) which respawn every 25 seconds and once again you got to time them to make sure you get them first instead of your opponent
- Some levels even have multiple armors around the map (some even have 3). That means that including the timing for the mega-health, veterans of the game will have 3-4 timings in their heads at all times while navigating around the map, reaching the correct spots at the correct timings, collecting weapons along the way.
- All that, on top of the fact that you’ve got to battle an opponent everytime you meet him, having to switch to the correct weapon on the fly for the correct situation. For example railguns when he’s real far away, rocket launchers for causing splash damage, shotguns for close range attacks, grenade launchers to lay traps, etc.
In fact, this isn’t even a complete list of strategies one goes through when playing a game of Quake, each weapon has its own strategy and way to use it, each map has sweet spots and strategies you can use to your advantage. For example the railgun hits the enemy instantly but has a really long cool down time of around half a second to one second (yes that’s considered long in Quake) which will leave you vulnerable. The rocket launcher can help you reach higher places using a rocket jump, but you lose a substantial amount of health in the process. The plasma gun is pretty strong, but takes time to hit the enemy who can easily dodge the incoming bullets, etc.
There’s just so many things that a player has to keep track of, consider and evaluate within literally split seconds. Hanging in the air for less than half a second while in clear sight of your enemy usually means instant death from the railgun. It’s really hard to put in words how insanely difficult, and thus rewarding, this game is. On top of all the strategising, you still have to hone your accuracy at aiming and shooting, which require flicks of the wrist and finger-twitching mouse clicks.
The Revival
If Quake 3 was so great, why’d I stop playing it? Easy, because there weren’t enough people left (in my region especially) still playing that game. With Quake Live however, which is going to be a completely free, easy to install game, that looks set to change. It doesn’t hurt that Quake Live makes several improvements upon the old Quake 3 engine, for example having faster movement which only serves to make the game all the more fast-paced and thus all the more fun. Gamers who are used to FPSes like Counter Strike, Call of Duty, Battlefield, Team Fortress, etc will be in for a big shock if they ever try out this game. None of that camping, magical regenerating health, reloading crap here. Just an old-school fast paced frag fest unlike any other game has or will ever offer.
Here’s hoping to an imminent release date for Quake Live.
UPDATE: Quake Live is going open beta on the 24th of February! Without ANY Asian servers whatsoever! WTF! For information about it, read on here.
(Leave a comment about your opinion on Quake Live and FPSes nowadays as a whole)
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t exactly despise reporters for asking pointless questions all the time (after all most of them make a living out of asking pointless questions), but couldn’t they have the courtesy of asking their stupid questions AFTER the survivor has settled down, recovered from the shock, gotten extra layers of clothing on (seeing as how it was freezing cold), etc. Oh and while you’re at it, wouldn’t it be nice if you didn’t bombard the single survivor with like 10 questions at a time, let him actually finish his answers and sentences, and possibly not ask stupid questions (like if you got out of the plane through its middle).
I’ve given up on many books halfway through in the past. Books like the Lord of the Rings series and Les Miserables. They often delve too deep into describing the surrounding environment and each individual character to such detail that you’d know the exact shade of his/her clothing at times. While these books definitely allow the reader to completely immerse him or herself into the world the book is creating, it doesn’t stop them from being boring. I really can’t stand books like that.
So despite not having installed Windows 7 beta the day it got leaked onto the Internet (I was too lazy to partition my iMac hard drive), I finally got around to installing it and finally running it, with much difficulty. I’m typing this now in Firefox on Windows 7 beta build 7000, and thus far it’s more or less a love/hate relationship with this OS. I’ve heard so much good stuff about this beta that I expected it to do wonders, unfortunately it seems my expectations might have been a tad bit too high.
First, the way so many other reviewers described the OS it seemed like Windows 7 finally stopped being the naggy OS that Windows Vista was, for example allowing users to toggle how stringent they wanted the naggy UAC to be. That sounds like a brilliant feature obviously, but in reality, the ability to toggle that setting isn’t really that useful at all. There are only 4 different levels available to choose from, and the system defaults to the second highest setting. However, the only difference between the default setting and the third highest setting is that the background applications no longer dim out, allowing you to interact with them. However, the naggy UAC screen still pops up at exactly the same frequency as the default setting, which makes this feature quite useless. The lowest security setting completely disables the naggy screen (which is what I’ve chosen) and I don’t even want to find out how naggy UAC becomes on the highest setting.
If I’m not wrong, Vista did this as well, but I’m not a hundred percent certain seeing as how I’m coming from XP (I never bothered with Vista, and that’s a story for another time). In Windows 7, the traditional menu bar (no idea what it’s “officially” called) isn’t there on most Window applications. I’m referring to the one with the “File”, “Edit”, Tools”, “Help”, etc menu buttons. Windows XP had these permenantly visible no matter what application you’re using, however with Windows 7 it’s only permenantly visible in third party applications like Firefox. Stuff like Windows Live messenger and even Internet Explorer have the menu bar permenantly hidden. The only way to reveal it is to hit the Alt key or F10, which is pretty stupid.
Then there were games like Syphon Filter, Wipeout, Coded Arms, Fifa games, Grand Theft Auto, Star Wars Battlefront, etc. The more “mainstream” games if you could call them that. Games that hardcore gamers would recognise, or would be interested in, those with 3D graphics and the ones that were supposed to deliver “near PS2 quality” graphics. Unfortunately, it was about this time that the flaws in the PSP became more an more apparent. It seemed the PSP simply wasn’t designed to play certain types of games well. For example, first person shooters were out of the question with the PSP’s single analog stick; third person games seemed likely, but the level of detail in the PSP’s graphics simply made them unplayable, especially with the dim screen; sports games were simply just ports of its console brethrens except with worse graphics and lacking features; strategy games were almost non-existant. The only games it seeemd to work well with were racing games (which get boring quickly especially when there are so many different versions of racing games out there), RPGs (of which good ones were far and few in between) and puzzle games (of which good ones are possible to develop for almost any kind of platform).
I’ve stopped bothering about my PSP for a long time now, there simply isn’t much to play anymore. It seems like developers have completely given up on the console, or at least have given up trying to produce quality games for the PSP. That’s probably a wise business decision.
Sony’s answer to this problem? “Since the reason why it’s doing so badly is because of hardware sales, let’s introduce NEW hardware… AGAIN!” Hence, the birth of the PSP-3000, which besides a brighter screen and an in-built microphone, didn’t introduce much significant changes. Note, this is already the third generation PSP in just 3-4 years, in comparison, Nintendo only introduced a single reiteration of its original DS, the DS Lite, in 2006, and it’s still selling like hotcakes up till this day. Along with the new hardware, Sony introduced new features such as the PSN store which allowed users to download games off the internet onto their PSP.
The answer to the PSP’s sorry state is so painfully obvious: Sony needs to attract more quality developers to the platform instead of trying to sell as many units as possible. If they continue trying to chase after the consumer with more hardware and software improvements, the PSP is going to die out faster than you can say “PSP-4000″ or “4th generation PSP”. As long as quality games start arriving for the PSP, consumers will tag along. Maybe, just maybe, Sony can revitalise the PSP.
At roughly 4am or so in the morning (Singapore time of course), Apple held what was going to be its final Macworld keynote. After more than 2 decades of releasing its brand new products at what is arguably the world’s largest Mac convention, it has finally decided that 2009 will be the last time they’ll participate in Macworld.
Sure, after Quake 3, Raven Software released both Quake 4 and Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, and both those games Sucked with a capital S. Quake 4′s multiplayer component was so lackluster and boring as compared to Quake 3 that only its single player campaign was worth playing at all. While Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was so different from traditional games in the franchise that it didn’t feel like a Quake game at all. Rather it seemed to be trying to be a Battlefield clone, with large scale battles and such.
Anyway, back to Quake Live. It’s going to be a free game which will be released to everyone who has an internet connection when it’s done. The great thing about it is that besides being of such high quality, this game is going to be a “browser based” game to a certain extent. When I was chatting with another gamer in-game about how I wondered how they actually managed to make it fit in a browser, he remarked how every game should be like this. And rightfully so. Such a method of distributing the game removes the hassle of having to download hundreds of megabytes and then installing them, opening up a new program just to play it and all. It will definitely help introduce more casual gamers to the game of Quake with it being so easy to install and all, though I pity the new guy who comes in and starts getting owned by everyone else who’s been playing Quake 3 for almost a decade by now (literally).
I recently finished a 2000+ word post (I’m not going to reveal what it’s about for now), and was adding pictures to it to post it up on this blog when I realised it just wouldn’t do. That post was unreadable with this current blog theme.