Quake II

[JaySevenZero]

Here's where you can contribute your thoughts and opinions for Quake II for potential inclusion in the forthcoming podcast.

A friendly reminder that where the feedback for the podcast is concerned, we love it - but keeping it brief is appreciated. We do want to include a breadth of opinions where appropriate, but no-one wants a discussion podcast that’s mostly reading out essays. Better to save yourself time and cut to the chase if you can.

[AndrewElmore]

Quake II is a landmark in so many ways, though it also feels a bit strange as it represents a sort of transitional period between the earliest days of 3D first person shooting in the previous game, and the more narrative-lead structure of games like Half-Life that were just around the corner. Quake II is a gigantic technical leap and an important landmark in the annals of video game history, but it's also just a fun video game, which is also important. I find the game's aesthetic in general to be a bit on the embarrassing side, but it's such an excellent experience to play that I've happily revisited it over and over on many different platforms over the years, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. The level design and layouts may be crude and awkward to navigate, but I'm happy to extend a deal of grace to games that were so early to these ideas. Building out a three dimensional space to be navigated at high speed in first person is a very difficult art, and id software of the mid-90s didn't have decades of examples to pull from and study like we do now, of course. My one bugbear with Quake II, however, is the music. I'm sorry, something about Sonic Mayhem just doesn't work for me--the very thin and digital sounding distortion on the guitars is such a specific subset of culture at the time, I'm much more partial to Reznor's ambient score from the first game. In 2018, my friend Marc Straight released an album called I Am Venom (https://marcstraight.bandcamp.com/album/i-am-venom) and immediately upon listening, I thought of Quake II. I ended up going into the game files for the RTX-enabled release of the game from a few years back, and swapped out the music files for the tracks from I Am Venom, and that is now my canonical Quake II soundtrack. Anyway! Quake II may be my least favorite entry of the Quake Quadrilogy, but that's quite a curve to grade on, and I love it a great deal. I first played it on the family Gateway machine back in the day, and I played through the excellent new Nightdive release on Switch recently just for the heck of it. Quake II has always been around, and Quake II will always be around. That's more or less the summation of my relationship with the game, I think. It's just kind of always been there, ready to go whenever I start to miss it. I also want to sing the praises of Machine Games' new episode that came with the Nightdive release, because it's nothing short of phenomenal. The things they made this engine do are just incredible, and I love their design sensibilities. There's a lot of love in that episode, and I think even on its own it makes for an exceptional work. The N64 conversion of Quake II is notable for all kinds of reasons that I'm sure you will have already gotten into, but the PS1 port rarely gets mention, and I think HammerHead made a really fascinating game there. There aren't a lot of first person shooters on the PS1, but that version of Quake II is among my favorites on the platform and I think it's at least worth checking out, if that sounds like something any listener may find themselves curious about.

[Kodama1987]

Quake II was the go to family LAN game.
Me, my older brother and dad playing deathmatch on the egde map with bots.
First to get the rocket launcher always took the lead.
I always used an Eric Cartman character skin until my dad told me he could always spot me due to the bright colours. I thought I'd would get higher up the scoreboard changing to a generic bland coloured soldier. I did not.
We even used to take a couple of PC's round to my uncles house for a six way LAN, no bots with my uncle and cousins.
It took months of playing solo against bots before i could actually top the leader board against the family every once in a while.

Turns out it had a story mode. Playing the base game on normal was childsplay compared to facing off against the family.

[moobaa]

Quake II was a real disappointment after the original Quake - I remember picking it up at lunch-time, having the big-box copy goading me all afternoon at work, and then dashing home and loading it up to find something decidedly un-Quake-like. Gone was Reznor's sound, gone were the grimy, atmospheric visuals, and... well, it just didn't feel *right*.

Weapons, in particular, felt weedy: gone was the brutal power of the super nailgun, and the new rocket launcher was utterly disappointing. Sure, rocket jumping became possible with practice, but never provided the freedom and flexibility of the original.

Still, I played it a lot (sunk cost fallacy, ahoy!). Single player only, all four difficulties, with a mild sense of achievement as a reward. Then came the first patch... and all my saves were broken. So I did it all again. Next patch, more broken saves, do it all again. I think I stopped the self-flagellation around version 3.14, but it never got crossed off the backlog in my mind.

I discovered the save-stable variant Quake II (Yamagi Quake II) during COVID lockdown, but never really settled into my "final" run through the game. Then the 25th Anniversary Re-release came along, and I thought I'd bash through that. And within ten minutes I encountered the new Bezerker mechanics, and it crystalised my Quake II thoughts for me.

Quake II has always stood in the original Quake's shadow for me, and whilst I can appreciate what's there, everything just feels a little bit *off*... and the re-release only exacerbated that feeling. Weapons lack punch (with the exception of the glorious rail-gun), levels feel unnecessarily complex, and enemies feel incoherent. But I can totally understand that I might feel this way because I played the original first; maybe someone playing them in the other order might find the original to be an unplayable incoherent mess in comparison.

TWR: Inferior To Prequel.

[The_reviewist]

Quake II was always a strange beast. A fun game, but one that had a serious identity problem.
It was a Quake but with none of the eldritch gothic horror, it was Doom but with none of the demonic Martian nonsense. In fact I will never be entirely convinced that the game wouldn't have been far better received and beloved if it had been minorly tweaked and released as DooM 3D.

As it stands, it was fine. Lukewarm, basic but functional, novel at the time but about to be lost in the sweeping advances of its competitors.

[Alex79]

Need to try to have a go on this before the show as I've only ever played the PS1 version which I believe was quite different (will add some thoughts on that one when I get a sec).

[T-BirD]

Quake II was one of my biggest gaming disappointments when I tried it in early 1998. I had lived and breathed the original for well over a year at that point - almost entirely in online multiplayer - and had been quite excited for the sequel.
It arrived, I installed it, and jumped online. And everything felt wrong. The netcode being based off of Quakeworld's prediction code was to be expected, but all the guns - except the railgun, which was great at killing me, but I was terrible with - felt terribly wimpy. This was due in large part to their audio design; shotguns, rocket launchers, and numerous other weapons of Quake and Doom before it had massive "OOMPH!!" to them when fired. Quake II's rocket launcher was a whining "Tweeee! Tweeee!". What the @$*% is THAT??? The chaingun sounds like a character in a Looney Tunes cartoon spitting sunflower seeds at high speed! The lackluster sound design was also noticeable in other aspects of the game such as unmemorable ambient sounds of levels and muted explosions. Disappointing.
Deathmatch maps seemed cramped and too chaotic, the capture the flag grappling hook acted more realistically, which was far less fun to me than the "instant pull" of the 3wave CTF original, and in general it just all felt like not something I wanted to play. So I kept playing the original Quake multiplayer well into the year 2000 instead.

In terms of single player, I recognized positive aspects - the more unified theme, the attempts at being more cinematic, some interesting level design and the throwable grenades were neat. The graphics were shinier and more complex, though I preferred those of Quake I for several reasons. But while I saw potential in the campaign in 1997/98, it took me another 13 years to actually sit down and play through it. And it was ...alright! So were the expansions. I had a decent enough time, and found myself impressed by the ability to revisit levels in an episode. In fact, it was often required to accomplish certain objectives, and it made the locations feel far more real than if the levels had been self-contained experiences. As I recall, this was unusual for the time, though some earlier games such as System Shock had done it as well.

Cue 2023. Nightdive have released the Enhanced Edition, and I had suffered a family tragedy which had affected me greatly. Gaming was barely on my radar for a while, but at one point I decided I just needed some mindless action. For some reason, I picked up Nightdive's version, even though I almost never replay games I've finished before.
It turned out to be exactly the type of gaming I needed, and it was one of several things that helped me through that time.

I still consider it a disappointment compared to Quake 1, but for that for that playthrough in 2023, I unexpectedly have to say "thank you" to a game I actually had hatred for at one point.

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Also, the N64 version, which Nightdive included with the Enhanced Edition, is all sorts of impressive from a technical standpoint, and fairly enjoyable to play through as well.

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Three word review:
Prettier, but worse.

[Alex79]

My favourite memory of playing Quake II on the PS1 was sellotaping a piece of cardboard down the middle of my 14" CRT telly so my friend and I could play deathmatch. We knew the maps so well we could tell where each other was from the tiny sliver of screen you could see beneath the cardboard.

I remember enjoying the single player, but don't really remember much about it other than it being quite significantly altered to the original PC release. I remember at the time there had been take of the first game coming to PS1 for ages before it was abandoned, then we got this one instead. Playing this in the days before the standard dual analogue stick controls means it would be hard to go back to that version now, but I'm pleased the game got another excellent remake by the FPS remaster masters, Nightdive.