went into this completely blind; didn't even know it wasn't a quake sequel. also tried the original version first, which definitely made for rough initial impact

quake ii kicks off in a way that i can lightly describe as "complete dog shit". for some ungodly reason, Club Carmack decided it'd be a nice idea to start players off with the worst pistol and shotgun combo known to mankind (even complete without muzzle flash if the og release is your preference). the fun doesn't stop not starting there, though, because then you pick up the grenades and boy oh boy - my personal favorite aspect about them is how they take 35 years to throw, which makes them only remotely viable either around corners or as a tool to very slowly kill yourself with

it was during the entirety of this first level that i thought to myself, "why does this suck so much fucking dick? who enjoys this? can john carmack really be trusted to call steve jobs an idiot for designing a mouse with one button when he actually thinks quake ii is fun?" then i got the one-two punch: the super shotgun and the chaingun

suddenly - enemies died from being shot. i no longer needed to constantly pop from cover to reliably fight hitscan baddies spongier than those seen in 'chasm: the rift' (which, ironically, is a quake clone). things only went up from here - especially in level 3 where the 90 or so grenades i'd been eagerly not using were finally given purpose via a launcher that didn't have 600 frames of startup. i'd say this is when the game really begins

...and barring the last stage - which definitely gets to a point of feeling sluggish due to its over-eagerness in spamming the most aggravatingly tanky two-legged enemy in the game - it doesn't let up. every later earned weapon (that isn't the rocket launcher) continues to feel pretty fantastic. the BFG in particular took me by surprise with its insane splash and chain damaging. you can fire this thing at one enemy and it'll clear out an entire fucking room. it's awesome and thanks to it using the same ammo as the standard laser rifle, there's no shortage of opportunities to let it loose

i'm not much for movement tech in my fps, but the levels here were designed in ways where i was pretty eager to push myself even on that front. lotsa opportunity to master bunnyhopping and circle jumping. i even skipped some chunks of levels with a few well-placed rocket jumps. fun stuff and it made me just a little more interested in giving quake 3 another shot

sonically and atmospherically, everything's obviously downgraded from q1 due to the lack of trent reznor (note: "HUH" is still intact (phew)) but the sonic mayhem soundtrack isn't totally unwelcome. i'll certainly take a competent albeit standard metal ost over the mick gordon-branded djent slop that this genre is so overly saturated with now

i've yet to play any expansions, but i did try a smidge of the n64 stages and found them to be really charming. kinda surreal to see a take of this game with so much color in it. definitely gonna get back to that, but for now i think i'm just gonna go straight for quake 4

...did we all play the same game?

'cause generic soundtrack aside, i don't even need to hesitate - this is superior to quake ii in just about every way. sure, there's no rocket jumping, but that hardly matters in a corridor shooter; what's important is gunplay and Q2 wishes it had weapons half as good as these. the shotgun? nailgun? the fucking bfg that shoots black holes? get the hell out of town and don't let me see you here again

...that praise being said, i'll be damned if it doesn't put its shakiest leg first

unlike quake ii, the start here isn't slow because of its shooting - that feels fantastic from the get go - instead it's the aggressively invasive 'story' that's constantly trying to pull you from the action. let me shoot. the fucking. aliens! that's all i wanna do, man!!

"nah nah - i hear you", calls tim willits, newly appointed president of the Carmack Fan Club, "here, you can shoot again - in a turret section! and after that, ohoho, mission briefing!! and then - two more vehicle segments!!!"

with one swift motion i knock that shit out of his fucking hands. then i scream, "I JUST WANT TO SHOOT THE STROGG WITH MY SHOTGUN. THAT'S LITERALLY ALL I WANT TO DO. I DON'T GIVE A SHIT ABOUT YOUR SET PIECES (besides the mech one - that was pretty cool) OR YOUR SPACE MARINE STORY - I DON'T EVEN CARE THAT I COULD PERSONALLY WALK FASTER THAN MY CHARACTER WITH WEIGHTS STRAPPED TO MY LEGS. THE GUNS FEEL GOOD, TIM. PLEASE JUST LET ME USE THE FUCKING GUNS!!!!"

i think he took that bit about space marines harshly given the events that transpired shortly after, but all of my prayers had been answered nonetheless! no longer was i walking back and forth through areas i'd already visited just to report to some dumbass military man that the elevator got unjammed or steve blum #3 successfully completed filing his tax returns; i was actually playing the game - uninterrupted

when quake 4 gets its shit fully together after the first 1/3 or so, it shifts from stop-and-go into maximum overdrive. there's zero bad weapons, enemy types continue to vary enough (not to mention there's actually a couple decent bosses - a rarity for shooters) and ironically even the mission objectives become significantly more engaging when they're things you're doing and not just details off sgt. pvt. blum's shopping list

environments start looking a lot cooler too. Q2 toyed with body horror in small doses, but ravensoft went all-in here. call me simple, edgy, whatever - i think giant entrails breaching through space corridors and limbless (but still alive and wiggling) bodies being used as power supplies are pretty fucking rad. say what you will about id tech 4 - doom 3 looks fantastic and this is no different. hands down the most underrated shooter engine

misguided start aside, this is the best fps (barring quake 1, obviously) that i've played in a considerably long time. can't wait to receive matthew kane's next orders in quake 5!

wait fuck

for being such a black sheep, you'd think it'd feel a hell of a lot less like doom!

sure, it's a more 64 oriented take than what most fans are comfortable with, but absolutely deserving of the moniker nonetheless; way more so than that qte-laden quake knockoff 2016 reboot, anyway

it's one thing not to like doom 3's pacing, corridor-driven structure and how it distributes enemies; it's another thing entirely to dismiss anything and everything designed outside shooter norms as "dated" - as if the lighting in this game isn't still impressive or completely and totally deliberate. that "duct tape" mod wasn't an ingenious feat of fan programming that fixed a broken aspect of a woefully mismanaged fps; it just went against the game's intended design

and call it a symptom of half life's popularity if you want; i feel the mars base introductory sequence is more atmospherically dense and to-the-point than black mesa could've dreamed to be. unlike quake 4, which has a lot narrative stop-and-go, the action in doom 3 is almost completely uninterrupted throughout. it's story-driven compared to its maze-y predecessors, but most of that happens via in-game radio chatter. never once did i ask myself "where's the next thing to shoot at?"

hell - if anything i'd say this may be the core doom experience to a fault. the way enemies are dispatched doesn't differ much from their DOS-based counterparts. there's a lot of strafing around projectiles and shotgun kissing. like - a lot. and that's great, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't get seriously tired of needing to back away from every door i opened to prevent getting jumped by an imp's otherwise unavoidable lunge attack. granted, this wasn't because it was cheap and unpredictable or whatever - much the opposite - all it took was running up to the guy when he stood up and blowing his ass away with a single shotgun blast

oh and since i've opened a can of controversy by even mentioning the shotgun, i'll just come out and say that it - along with pretty much every other weapon - is really good. yeah yeah, spread is bad, whatever. the maps are set up in small to medium sized corridors and arenas. so it's not hard to get up close and kill most enemies in a single shot. too far away? that's what your other weapons are for. i'm not sure where the strangely common ammo complaints come from either. i played on veteran and used most guns in equal measure (though i favored the shotgun and used the chainsaw religiously) and i often had max ammo for everything minus the bfg

my biggest problems with the game structurally, besides its oft stale monster closeting, are more retrospective than anything. the whole experience is lots of fun, but it ramps up so much more in the second half that i can't help but wonder why it doesn't get there sooner. why is so little time spent in hell and the nether regions of mars? why does the enemy variety take several hours to spontaneously expand beyond primarily shooting imps and marines?

i don't wanna mince words here: this is the best depiction of hell in the whole damn franchise. it's so grandiose, grim and genuinely fucking evil. the level design also feels much more in line with what i'd expect from a classic doom title and has brilliant lighting which forgoes any need to even use the flashlight. it's perfect but most of y'all probably didn't even see it because you dropped the game about six hours too soon

apparently resurrection of evil is a lot more akin to the second half so i'm expecting that to be great as well. whether i'll play that or prey 06 next, i'm not sure; what i am sure of is that id tech 4 goes hard and doom 3 is pretty fuckin' awesome. i'm not surprised to see that the common consensus of a post-quake id software game is wrong once again. at this point i probably wouldn't be surprised if rage was the best game ever

the epitome of every common id tech 4 complaint; a show-offy tech demo with not much to actually show

prey seems to be far more concerned with its novel-at-first gravity shifting, portal hopping and other gimmickry than it is with delivering a fun shooter. almost every weapon feels pretty weak, enemies are as generic as they come and the level design is frustratingly boring - especially when it teases its potential so irritatingly often

there's some really cool aesthetic direction here - sometimes. the sphere's strange fusions of human civilization and mechanical-organic hodgepodge future tech that's reminiscent of quake's strogg is REALLY FUCKING COOL. but it's actively sidelined and little more than something to glance at in passing during the actual levels - steel halls with constant gravity walks, enemies popping out of portals and the occasional vehicle sequence. it's lame!

tommy's kind of an annoying jackass for most of the story. he embodies "Fuck off I don't believe in that made up nonsense" and constantly whines about how his heritage is a bunch of superstitious gobbledygook... even while he's literally talking to his deceased grandfather in the afterlife. though i guess i can't really blame him for not giving a shit, because his supernatural ability amounts to little more than being able to walk through forcefields and push the buttons behind them (usually to turn said forcefields off)

oh and to never die - tommy's really good at keeping his soul alive via 10 second bursts of spiritual whack-a-mole. i guess that works out because it means none of the dull shooting ever needs to be gone through a second time, but i'd have gladly taken some guns that actually felt satisfying instead. out of his arsenal, which is primarily driven by different flavors of machine guns, the only weapon i found especially great was the leech gun. i guess the weird caustic paint-splattering shotgun is kinda neat too. the grenades look cool but are functionally reminiscent of quake 2's, which is not a compliment at all and i barely touched them because of it

narratively, things pick up substantially in the last four missions. considering there's 21 of them, that's not a fantastic ratio, but it ended on an interesting enough note for me to wish prey 2 wasn't cancelled. so that counts for something

still, i find it hard to believe that a sequel to this would've been nearly as good as arkane's 2017 release