The most eagerly anticipated game of the decade has now become the most controversial game of the decade. You've seen the demo. The full registered version is out.
David McCandless delivers the final verdict.
Okay, okay. we've been down on our knees in front of this game for months now. Nary has an issue of Zone gone by in the last year without some mention of Quake, or spooge, or some hideously sticky combination of both. We wanted you to share the vice-like anticipation which clenched our testicles, our incessant reciting of Football League Tables and the Lords Prayer, that stinging feeling, watering eyes, cold showers. We just wanted you to share that with us. Now the wait is over. You've allocated a portion of your spooge reservoir for the shareware version. You've seen the bare bones of Quake - the engine, the weapons, monsters, the architecture. Now, we're here to tell you how much cooler, and better, and spankier the full version of Quake is. Capisce?
Extra! Extra!
In traditional iD fashion, the registered version of Quake features extra monsters, extra weapons and bloody loads of extra levels - 47 in total. There are the eight levels of the Dimension Of The Doomed, the shareware episode, plus another 24 architecture meisterworks forming the next three arenas - The Realm Of Black Magic, The NetherWorld, and The ElderWorld. Complete all these and you'll be granted access to the final level and a personal audience with Shub-Niggurath, the grisly gorelord of the Quake universe. And then to round everything off, there are six, monsterless deathmatch stadiums.
Each episode has its very own look and feel, each one sculpted by iD Software's in-house maestros - John Romero, American McGee, Sandy Peterson and Tim Willits. You've probably already experienced the joys of the first episode - the futuristic, grunt-packed SlipGate Complex, the malevolently convoluted Necropolis, the stunning Gloom Keep, and the twisted, nightmarish Door To Cthon. ('Aarrghh... lava!' you probably screamed as you visited the volcano god for the 700th time.) The new levels take the glorious architecture and arcane deathtraps and expand them beyond anything you'd expect. Beyond anything you'd want to expect.
Each episode starts in a futuristic space base, packed with shotgun-wielding grunts and laser-toting enforcers. Electricity hums in the background. The walls are grimy and stained with the salsa of recent bloodbaths. The fluorescent lighting flickers on and off. You think Doom, but then Doom didn't have underwater sewage systems, sons of bitches snipers on high, and the darkest scariest shadows in Christendom.
The second episode - The Realm Of Black Magic - comes from the highly warped skull of John Romero, the guy responsible for Doom's more esoteric moments. The world contains a range of castles, from the wiry, multi-layered medieval Ogre Citadel with its stained glass windows and sandstone walls to the Crypt Of Decay where you spend half the time drowning in the moat, and half the time suspended on parapets being pummelled by needle darts. And dying. The penul-timate level, Wizard's Manse, is a true work of art, a deadly spiral of walkways and bridges, gradually leading you by the spine further and further up to a massive confrontation with a bundle of fiends.
The NetherWorld has been designed by American McGee. Crazy name, crazy levels. In the Vaults Of Zinn every step is a trap. Every lift carries a hundred monsters. Every monster carries a hundred grenades. Every grenade has your name etched on its surface. In sputum. Satan's Dark Delight is another classic. Half the level is flooded. The rest is suspended above oceans of totally deadly lava. Unpredictable lifts drag you towards crushing ceilings. Doors, roof tops and floors crack open at the scariest of moments, upchucking hundreds of zombies, ogres and fiends in your direction. A lovely, juicy suit of armour beckons from a gently lit pedestal. Grab it and the lights snap out, except for a single bolt of lighting from the single shambler who's just teleported in for a chat. In the Tomb Of Terror, the secrets are hidden in the shadows, on the roof tops, or under the lava. Survive all this and you have to face the Wind Tunnels, where huge conduits suck you up and pinball around the level, like a black-ened bogey ball flicked around an office.
The final episode is a sprawling nightmare. The Tower Of Despair is a labyrinth of death, with ogres in cages, huge murals on the walls, and a massive corridor maze with collapsing floors and dark, dark shadows. To follow that is The Elder God Shrine which sports an excellent zombie grave-yard, complete with tombstones and open graves. The final two levels - The Maze Of Pain and Azure Agony - are going to have you praying for a map. Thick viscous shadows, endless overlapping hallways and balconies, armies of vores, shamblers and fiends, and nasty, nasty traps. By the end of this, you'll be on your hands and knees, weeping, snot evacuating from every orifice.
Sound effects
So far, so Doom, you may be mumbling to your mummy. True. Quake is Doom.
No doubt about it. But it's Doom pared down to the marrow, the gameplay gristle stripped to white gleaming bone, and then rebuilt, fleshed out with a new body, a new engine, new graphics, and entire limbs of atmos-phere. Turn the light off. Stick your headphones on. Disconnect the phone. And scream, and jump, and gibber, and squint, and sweat your way through the levels. You'll never get adrenaline dumps like this from any other game.
Take the sound, for example. It is incredible, and 3d spaced for extra realism. Each monster has its own gruesome intestinal howl as a call signal. Spawn make this inhuman squelching sound as they bounce like evil space hoppers around the scenery - the sound of a hundred sweaty bottoms stuck to a hundred plastic chairs. Zombies groan as they reincarnate, squelching as they pull flesh from their arse to throw at you.
Knights, waving their swords at you, make this masturbatory kind of grunt. The vores scream and shriek like the girly spiders that they are. Ogres roar and metallically ping-pong pipe bombs in your direction. A distant shambler's feet thump eerily. Explode a demon and you'll hear a sound like Homer
Simpson choking on a pork chop. Tumble into a piranha-packed pond and you'll hear their teeth clattering in expectation.
And in the background, the ambient sound beavers on. Churning and clanking of heavy gears mix with the eerie calls of distant ravens. The NIN cd tracks take the atmosphere and sharpens it to weeping point. Disturbing strings melt into the sound of a small girl, whimpering and crying in the distance. Heavily reverbed pipe bombs clang almost, but not quite, musically in the dark. A lonely saxophone plucks a few spinal cords from your back. Grunts and obscene, greasy noises churn. Grab the Ring of Shadows and you'll hear a thousand dead souls whispering and muttering in your ears.
Play a network game and the whole deathmatch level comes alive with screams, yelps, and gushy splatters as lungs and entrails splosh noisily into water. Six or seven different fire-fights can be going on simultaneously. As you home in, shotgun blasts, bouncing grenades, and roaring rockets get louder. Anticipation mounts. You lick your lips as the door groans open. The air fries as you unleash your lightning gun into the crowd. The quad power kicks in, shrieking like a fog horn. Your enemies scatter, trying to escape. You transfix one with a bolt of lightning, and then scythe another as you whip round. You open up with the double barrel shotgun, gibbing your way through the melee. Intestines and torsos slap against the cobblestone walls. A couple of players have sought refuge in a pit below. You lob a few quad-powered grenades into the hole. You hear the hollow clunks and then the gratifying concussion as the bombs go off into a confined space. A waterfall of gibs streaks into the air. As the quad power winds down, you still have time to quickly mince the poor player who's just reincarnated with a yelp next to you.
Having your Quake...
Single-player Quake is no revelation. But the fact that it has supreme graphics, atmosphere, architecture and gameplay seems to have passed many people by. The hype hasn't helped, but it's still unbelievable just how many people are underwhelmed with Quake.
When Doom came out it impressed everybody. But that was because we were different people then. On one side, we had girlfriends, a social life, chums, and a clean-living home counties infrastructure around us.
Doom soon took that away. On the other side, we had a lower threshold for amazement. Until that point, pc arcade action games had been crap. Nothing could have stunned us more than Doom's fluid 3d engine, its animated gore, its fulsome weaponry and its big juicy gameplay. Today everyone and their spider plant is doing 3d Doom clones, with polygoned this and texture-mapped that. You can miss innovation and genius, even if it's smack bang right in front of your face.
Remember when you saw Star Wars for the first time and you thought: 'Carrie Fisher can come and wash me with a sponge any day' and then you thought: 'Jeez - that film was jolly realistic, I can't imagine anything being more convincing.' Then, you saw Terminator II, and you thought: 'Christ.' And then you saw Babylon 5 on telly and thought: 'Jeezus.' And then you saw Jurassic Park and you quite frankly thought: 'Bloody hell.' Each time, your sense of wonder was dulled. Now, it's hard to imagine a special effect which will blow your mind the way each of those films did. You've become immune. And with effects becoming more and more realistic, each one is greeted with slightly less blasphemous swear words than before.
It's the same with games. By today's standards, Doom has Sesame Street graphics, but if Quake had come out two years ago, civilisation would have ended. Those who complain that Quake is 'too dark', or 'Doom III', or 'lacking in humour', or 'not as good as Duke Nukem 3D' are missing the point. 'Owww mummy,' they bleat. 'Quake doesn't run on my dx2/66 - it's pants.' Christ, when Doom first appeared, we were running it on steam-powered sx/25s and barely getting 15 frames per second out of it. Now my entry-level Pentium bounces it around my monitor at 45fps. Quake is looking towards the future. It's the next generation. It's advancement beyond advancement. You're just too - how can I put this politely - brain-dead? Blinkered? Cynical? Idiotic? Retarded? Immune. Yeah, that's it. You're just too immune to notice.
Get with it.
But we're talking aesthetics here. Everyone but everyone surely knows that graphics and 3d engines are but icing on the cake, dressing on the wound, a tautly stretched condom over the genitals of gameplay - what's beneath is what matters. The taste, the feel, the excitement, the atmosphere, the longevity, the intuitiveness. Quake has all this. And we haven't even touched on death-match play yet. Or Quake C. Or level design.
Conclusion
Yeah, yeah, you argue, but you've been head and shoulders up Quake's colon for the last year. Maybe. But there are things I hate about it. You can't duck, for example. iD's official line on this is that it 'stops lurking'. That just doesn't wash. The game caters perfectly for snipers. Those thick expanses of shadows to find in most locations and at most junctions on the levels are perfect hidey-holes for non-talented players. And you will find, in most multi-player games, people lurking in shadow or near start points, or on roof tops, their rocket launchers humming gently in their cowardly yellow hands. Not being able to duck is frustrating.
In an environment as realistic as this, you want to be able to crouch behind boxes and scenery, popping up to exchange fire, hitting the floor to avoid rockets. I hate some of the monsters. The scrag and its manky green phlegm trails is shite.
The knight is badly animated. The zombies are great, but the rottweilers suck. The lava demon boss at the end of the first episode is stunning - but where are the others? Each episode ends with a whimper. The final confrontation is a dire disappointment.
The deathmatch game has also been hard to appreciate. Armour and health reappears too frequently. The quad power materialises every minute, giving even Helen Keller a chance of scoring a few frags just by waiting for it. The mighty shotgun - so long the weapon of choice for professional deathmatchers - is relegated to bottom place in the weapon's league. The rocket launcher and ThunderBolt are just too all-seeing and all-killing to fight against.
But Quake is not a two-player deathmatch game. The respawning items and rocket make it too easy for a good player to utterly dominate a lesser opponent.
Or for a crap player to overcome a good one.
Doom is for duellists, grudge matches, head-to-head. Quake is not. Quake is a multi-player game. Just when you hit Doom's four-player ceiling, Quake kicks in. Five-player is gory, seven-player is frantic. Ten-player becomes a massacre. Twelve-player is insane. Sixteen-player is beyond anything you'll ever play in the whole wide world. Quake is about wading in. Quake is about kicking arse, and kicking arse, over and over again until some-body blows your leg off. Quake is about dousing the level in pineapples. About farting about in low gravity, pummelling orbiting players with rockets. It's about fighting your way to the quad power, getting it, and then being immediately shot. It's about drowning in radioactive gunk while your enemy team members rain grenades on your head. It's about dialing into your local Quake server and appearing in the middle of a ten-player fire fight. And getting your head caved in. It's about installing the latest Quake C patch and fighting a bunch of new monsters with a bunch of new weapons. It's about all the things it is and all the things it can be. As we're so fond of saying, Quake pour homme, Duke pour femme. Z
Copyright 2006 - 2009 Future Publishing Limited, Beauford Court, 30 Monmouth Street, Bath, UK BA1 2BW England and Wales company registration number 2008885
Wish it could be played on my new PS3 *lol*
