I loved the stark, grey atmosphere. It heightened the sense that you were in an alien world and were far from home. The soundtrack (or lack thereof) really added to the tension. When you were alone, walking around, the silence seemed appropriate, and the contrast with the sudden music when you entered combat was great.

I haven’t played Quake in years and have no idea how it would play today, but I thought it was an excellent successor to the Doom crown.

It seems like a major oversight, but at the time of its release there simply weren’t many true 3D first-person games that required the POV to be controlled with the mouse. The likes of Heretic and Duke Nukem 3D had a crude look up/down implementation, which gamers were happy to manipulate via the trusted keyboard, but it never really effected the gameplay mechanics.

Still, I seem to remember that within minutes of the shareware version of Quake going online (I was in a very excitable IRC gaming channel at the time), most gamers had discovered the +mouselook console command. It was pretty much common knowledge, even if id never added it to the game’s menus.

It’s worth grabbing hold of the Tenebrae Quake source port if you want Quake to take advantage of contemporary PC hardware. Adds lots of great shadow, particle and bloom effects, amongst other things.

I can understand why you might consider this piece to be something of a game review with various sub-headings and so forth. But I disagree since I am in no way evaluating the game on purchasing merits.

Hmm…I am not familiar with the mouse look option in Quake, I did spent some significant time before playing trying to activate such an option, maybe I didn’t come across it. Not sure, in anycase I played and wrote about the game with the default configuration which I feel is fairly justified.

Yes, you are correct, this article is analyzing Quake from a more modern perspective. This is intentional and not intented to be derogatory of the game itself. Rather taking it from an ‘actual’ perspective. I can’t help but feel guilty that some of the words I used to express Quake’s “crudeness” can be interpreted as such. I guess you can’t fight connotation.

Also why haven’t we heard about the Starcraft, Warcraft, Age of Empires, Monkey Island, Grim Fandango games that your were going to play.