The essence of old school (Quake (PC))

Member Name: Sober

Product:	Quake (PC)
Date:	23/03/01 (104 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Its brilliant fun

Disadvantages: None as far as I can see

I am shocked to find that I am the first person to write a review of this game since it was a trend setting game, the king of 1st person shooters in my opinion.
I have played this games for about 4 years now and I still rather a good game of Quake than half-life, unreal, Quake III.
I was the Northern Ireland champion at quake deathmatch and no. 2 in all of Ireland. I've also played in top english clans and gaming leagues, so I do have quite a considerable knowledge of the game and this may help you to trust my opinion.

The games story is of a guy who seems to have got lost and ends up in a world of big nasty demons who don't really like him very much. The game levels are spilt into episodes and you select these by entering portals from a start level. there is also a secret nightnamre mode of hardness.
I'll be quite frank about this, the single player game sucks, and you get bored of it very quickly, but quake fans love the game for its multiplayer facilities.

*Multiplayer*
Nearly every part of the game can be modified. To do this you use the 'console'.
You type in commands and give them values (its easier than it sounds). For instance you can take the smoke trail off a rocket, or change the field of view to allow more of the environment to be seen at one time, or make the water translucent.
The game is made of a map, and models within the map. You can use an editor (e.g. adqedit) to change and customise the models used in the game. For instance you can change the colour of your rocket, or use the grenade model as your rocket and so forth. You can change the way the writing looks, and enter colours and symbols into your writing to use as instructions for team games. Generally speaking you dont change the actual player model, but you do change the way it looks. These are called 'skins'. I've made a few in my day, but I left it to the professionals. You can use any graphics package to
make a skin. For example, you just take the basic skin (that comes with Quake) and draw on it, save it, and put it back into your dir, voila, you have yourself a customised skin. These skins need to be uploaded to the server for other people to see them, but on a LAN, just copy them to your mates skin folders in their quake directory.
The games are played on 'maps'. You can use the single player maps (from the episodes) or one of the 6 deathmatch maps made for multiplayer. With an editor you can create your own maps, to your own design.
Many of the hardcore quakers customised the keyboard layout to maximise the amount of keys they could use. Actions are 'bound' to keys and if you have more keys at your fingertips, then you can obviosuly do more. For example, I didnt use the arrow keys, I used the 'r,f,d,g' configuration, which gave me more bindable keys which are quickly accessable from my direction keys.
You can also create scripts for example, I bound my right hand mouse click to do the following:
1 - change my weapon to the lightning gun
2 - fire the lightning gun
3 - when I release the button, to change my weapon back to the rocket launcher.
These kind of scripts are very useful when gaming at a high level.

-Powerups-
There are powerups in the game:
Quad damage - This makes every weapon extremly deadly for a short period of time, you try to keep this from the opposition.
Pentagram - This makes you invincible for a short period of time, and occurs less frequently than Quad damage.
Invisibilty - Makes you almost completely invisible (only your eyes can be seen) for a short period of time.

-Weapons-
Different maps have different selections of weapons on them, for instance not all maps have all the weapons. Your standard weapons are the axe and the single barrel shotgun. After than the others have to be collected:
Double Barrel Shotgun - Great for close quarter gun
fights
Nailgun - Not really used very often
Super Nailgun - Great when you dont have a rocket launcher, or under water fights
Grenade launcher - Good for lobbing shots into windows, or laying traps for people to walk into
Rocket Launcher - The best and most powerful weapon. In multiplayer you try to keep the opposition from getting it.
Lightning Gun/Tazer - A very powerful weapon, especially with 'Quad damage'. You shaft your enemies, and if you are good, its hard to get away. If you use it in the water, you 'discharge' killing yourself and everyone else in the water.

-Armour-
There are three types of armour, again not all armour is in each map:
Green armour - gives you 100 armour points
Yellow armour - gives you 150 armour points
Red armour - gives you 200 armour points

However each type of armour is not only based on points, for example the red armour can take more punishment, and if you have 149 points of red armour left you will still not be able to collect yellow armour, as it is still worth more than 150 yellow.

-Runes-
These are very rarely used, but I'll tell you about them anyway:
Strength - Makes your weapons more powerful
Haste - Makes you run and shoot faster
Regeneration - Your health and armour regenerate
Defense - Makes you take less damage when hit

-Graphics-
Ok using software mode, the graphics may not be as good as say your Half-life, but it is a classic game. Quake will run happily on low spec machines. I remember the days of playing online on a 486!
I used to run the game in 320x200 with d_mipcap and d_mipscale values customised. This made the pixels a lot larger and so the map became hardly detailed at all but the players were still detailed which made them stand out more. I wasn't interested in how good the map looked, I was interested in blowing people up!
However if you are really into how the game looks then
you can use GL mode, with the aid of a 3D accelerator card. It looks very lovely indeed with this and does look similar to your Half-life etc, but I found that I had better performance with the lower detail. But then again I am on a pII 266, so on new computers, GL mode will be like lightning.

-Sound-
The sound in the game is very atmospheric and the sounds of the people and weapons are nice also. There are sounds for everything as you would expect, for example you get grenade bounces, rocket explosions, when you fall from a height you get this crunch sonud which makes you cringe everytime you hear it and the sounds get louder the closer you are to the action.
You can customise the sounds that are played for each event using the same editor for the models or else just choosing a wav file, renaming it and replacing it in the quake sound directory.

-Game modifications-
There are quite a few game modifications out there to choose from, not to mention official mission discs like 'Hypnotica'.
Heres a list:
Team fortress - Where you choose a class of character e.g. sniper or medic, then you have bases at oposite ends of the map, and you try to steal the other teams flag and bring it back to base.
Capture the flag - Like TF, but without the character classes. You simply try to get the other teams flag and bring it back to your base. Runes are commonly used in this mod.
Rocket Arena - This is my favorite. With rocket arena, you are put into a very small map with nowhere to hide. You are given set weapons and you have to kill the other person before he/she kills you. Its as simple as that and its great! You can also have team games where its two against two etc

This game is a true classic, and I think its sad that people don't play it as often nowadays which means I dont get to play it as much, but I just thought that it would be good for other people who maby havent played it to really know about Qu
ake. Its great fun for LAN parties. There is just so much to do with it and it has brought me so many good times.

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