Quake 2 Test

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I also played this sucker on my Ppro 200 under NT on an AccelEclipse OpenGL accelerator. It's nice! It looks FINE at 640x480, but is pretty choppy at 1280x1024, oh well. Still some serious glitches in the drivers I guess cuz it screws up pretty badly on my card in places (screen goes white). I wonder if this is id'd fault or AccelGraphics. Also id said they only sample user input at 10hz in the demo, so it was a little sluggish. Damn straight. And when a big boss is on the screen in 1280x1024, good night Irene, you get 1hz if you're lucky.

As for the difficulty level, Chris, they don't work in the demo release. Read the README. No wonder you found it easy. Also, I think in general those levels mostly affect the amount of ammo and health you get anyway, plus the amount of creatures. I agree that the monsters still suck though. I read a review in CGW from E3 and they're like "Smart monsters that duck!" My god, is THAT smart? Not really. They just sit still and are easy to peg. Lay down some fire and they don't move.

I also found it annoying that it is so hard to hit things. Even with the crosshair on, everything fires slowly. Shots take so long to get there, you miss. The only time you don't miss is super shotgun to the face. The machinegun's recoil is very annoying. The nice thing (I mean, Virtua Cop did this years ago, but...) is that they get hurt depending on where the bullets hit. So you can peg them in the leg and they trip and fall, in the shoulder and they spin the right way. And the changing textures that show blood and bulletholes was nice, but I don't WANT to be that close to the machinegun sergeant or whatever he is. These effects are mostly noticeable with the machinegun. Doesn't work for the rocket. I do so enjoy running up to corpses and giving them a shotgun blast into giblets, then the giblets into giblets. Very satisfying.

In theory some of the Quake licensees have better AI. Unreal, I think (what's the other licensed one coming out soon?), is supposed to have very smart opponents. For instance, groups of 5 that move like Marine strike teams to surround you. id really is in the business of making a simple showpiece for their licensable technology, not into making good single player games. Arguably, the multi-player is good, but then again a lot of that is in the customizability of the world. It's nice of them to know they suck as for making games and allow it to be so extendable.

Upshot, I probably won't shell out $50 or whatever for this one. It's not that much better graphically than GLQuake and the rest just isn't worth the $50.

-- Michael Johnson (aries@media.mit.edu), November 13, 1997


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