Quake II

I played this game and Unreal at the same time as a kid and they're permanently linked in my brain, so forgive the constant comparisons between the two. Though I played through far more of Quake II and only got to the water temple levels in Unreal, the latter game had a much greater impact on me.

People have said so much about What Quake II Is In The History Of Gaming so here's just a bunch of kinda-disparate notes I made during/after playing through the game recently.

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In a word, flat.

They don't know when to hold off on the soundtrack. It's just pounding music on a loop, with the occasional awkward silence between tracks. Even the most basic dynamic audio would've gone a long way to texturing the game.

The weapons are okay, but I feel like Unreal permanently spoiled me on old-school shooter armouries. Its complexity and strangeness are almost unmatched in any big FPS of the time, and meanwhile Quake II, cursed by tired space marine bullshit, gives you a pistol, two shotguns, three machine guns, a grenade launcher, a rocket launcher… only the railgun and BFG stand out from the crowd and beyond that only the super shotgun and maybe grenade launcher have a decent feeling. It's a shame the body horror of the Strogg doesn't extend to fucked-up biomech weapons you can rip from defeated cyborgs to turn on the enemies still left to kill. Oh, and the hand-thrown grenades are absolute dogshit.

There are pretty much three level styles (military base, factory, mine) whose Venn diagram is near-circular. Most levels bleed into one other, a melange of murk and rust; the few standouts (Processing Plant, Power Plant, Research Lab, maybe a couple others) come later in the game. Credit where it's due, in a purely mechanical way they do still work well and have a lot of the trickery and verticality of the first game.

They do something cool and genuinely kinda unsettling for the era with the Research Lab. By this point you know anything on all fours is almost certainly a Parasite, a fast, tough enemy with an annoying health-drain ability. Then Research Lab introduces these dingy corridors with flickering lights—slide open the door to reveal something shuffling on the ground—BLAM!—advance… it's a tortured marine prisoner who was crawling around in a fugue state, literally begging for a death you just doled out in an act of unintentional charity. There's no mechanical benefit to keeping the marines alive, nor is there a morality system. It's just a point where model and level and lighting come together with finger-twitch decision-making to create a messed-up little detail that's still one of my most memorable moments in this game.

The non-linear aspect of the game, where you can go back and forth between levels in the same chapter, often goes unused. Either you're sent on a linear path criss-crossing multiple levels or you come to a junction and take each path one after another; repeat visits to the same level never yield surprises beyond a few new enemy spawns. They only start to experiment in the last chapter, the Palace, where you have to navigate three levels deactivating layers of force-fields to infiltrate deeper into the complex. I wish I could say this was finally interesting, but it only shows how thin DOOM's keycard formalities can be. The last few full levels in Unreal re-use space much better, as you go forwards through the Skaarj mothership with the lights on and back through darkness after destroying the generator (freeing all the deadly enemies in their prisons and laboratories in the process).

Enemies come in two forms: fast and weak, or slow and tough, aside from the Mutant and Parasite, both relatively rare. Most enemies you beat just by standing and shooting or ducking in and out of cover once or twice; Tank enemies are meant to be minibosses (or even bosses) but lose all menace once you realise you can output damage far faster than they can stomp into a better firing position. The saving grace is the sometimes-inventive designs, though you only meet the best ones later in the game. Contrast the electric terror of facing the original Quake's Fiends and Shamblers, or Unreal's admittedly narrower range of enemies whose more dynamic AI (dodgeroll, advance, retreat, leading fire) has the power to turn any fight into a hectic deathmatch. (There's also Half-Life and its marines, but their intelligence is more smoke-and-mirrors.)

Top three Quake II sound effects!!:
1) The electromechanical chirping and shuffling of a cyborg stuck behind a corridor wall, who's not due to ambush you until the fifth or sixth time you pass by and is hoping you haven't noticed them sneeze yet.
2) Pure cacophony as half a dozen tortured marines bleat the same one-second “MAKE IT STOP” clip on loop forever.
3) “TRESPASSER!”

The security cam-like footage at the end of Quake's levels was a quiet breather while you checked out how many kills you scored and secrets you found. At the same time, between the ambience and the cruel designs, these end-of-level scenes have an atmosphere of dread. It's like the levels themselves are vast evil beings who remain undefeated and all your struggles against the in-game enemies amount to is brushing irrelevant insects off their bodies. Anyway they try the same thing in this game, but they show the scores elsewhere, so instead you just get plain footage and all it did was remind me how static and empty the levels are by the time I was done with them… and unlike, say, Unreal, there's rarely anything in a Quake II level compelling enough to frame as a single static shot.