Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Quake has seen plenty of mods adding oodles of wacky weapons but the one that most caught my eye was Chaos Deathmatch [official site] for Quake II. If you weren’t poisoned and being chased by smiley-faced homing proximity mines while juggling another player with an air blaster, you were missing out.

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‘Played’ isn’t quite the right word for Hardly Workin’ [archived official site]. You may need Quake II for it but Hardly Workin’ is machinima – a movie made in a video game, before that term was yoinked by a site which became a #contentnetwork. What made Hardly Workin’ stand out to me was that you could hardly see it was Quake II. While most early machinima drafted existing in-game characters and assets for action figure pantomimes (and heck, Red vs. Blue still does this – no disrespect), Hardly Workin’ is built from scratch for a silly cartoon tale about two lumberjacks getting jobs in a diner.

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Not that I’m saying Quake is not suitable for 21st century play – quite the opposite. It’s just that enormous and beautiful mod campaign Arcane Dimensions applies some of the design values we are accustomed to from later, flashier games to the ancient Quake structure. From flow to geometry to sheer size, it’s taking Quake to places id possibly could not have imagined when they first made it, and wrestling the engine into brand new shapes without actually losing its essential Quakeiness.

Because that’s the thing: playing Arcane Dimensions makes Quake once again feel like it felt when I first played it.

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Depending on to what extent you accept ‘Bethesda’ as official, of course. This isn’t id’s work, and it’s definitely not Quake-era id’s work, but it is the work of neo-id’s stablemates Machine Games – they of the improbably good Wolfenstein: The New Order. (And who, according to its credits, pitched in to some extent with this year’s even more improbably good DOOM). They’ve just unexpectedly release a new Quake episode in honour of the dear old man’n’monster-shooter’s 20th birthday. It’s pretty good, too. … [visit site to read more]

Resolution. Anti-aliasing. Crisp text. “Image quality.” The bugbears of virtual reality in 2016.

All of this matters not in Quake. Perfect square pixels, no shading or soft shadows. Almost wordless. It is ideally-suited to VR, in theory. In practice? Best VR time ever, so far.

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Twenty years ago today, id Software released Quake. Following a multiplayer test that gave the world a first glimpse of the studio s new, cutting edge 3d engine, the full game arrived on June 22, 1996. Its bizarre mash-up of medieval architecture and crunchy, industrial weaponry didn t run through the sequels, which have focused on both singleplayer and multiplayer combat, and there hasn’t been anything else quite like it in the two decades since release.

Arena-based Quake is set for a revival with the recently announced Quake Champions, but here, we remember the original. Happy twentieth, Quake.>

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Of all the genres I would choose if someone held a gun to my head and forced me to make a Seinfeld video game, I can’t say a first person shooter would be high on my list. But hey, that didn’t stop Doug Keener from trying that very thing using Doom II, and dammit he has done a fine job.

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I realise the new hotness in demonic dismemberment is Doom Notfour but this weekend I popped back to Doom II to check out a new(ish) player-made level. One of you lovely readers recommended dead.wire by ‘Xaser’ to Adam because our lad’s into spooky stuff, then he shared it with me because I like fraggy stuff. Sure enough, dead.wire is both spooky and fraggy, travelling inside a strange facility where the sky burns with white noise, bits of the level appear from nowhere, and… oh no, where are the monsters?

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

I do wonder what Rage could have been without the ultimately empty open-world bits you drive around. Oh, I know automotive combat was a cornerstone of id Software’s vision but it ended up a distraction on the side, creating expectations of an open world that it didn’t deliver on. Aside from that, see, Rage is a fun bang-bang quest-y FPS.

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Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.>

Specifically, Quake III DM17: The Longest Yard, which is what I think of whenever I think of Quake III. Every Q3A player has their favourite map, and I’m not even making a claim to DM17 being the ‘best’ map, but it’s my map. It’s the one which encapsulates what Quake III is about, to my mind. … [visit site to read more]