Quake II
(Activision for the Nintendo 64)
by Eric Johnson
Long before there was an ESRB rating to warn Midwestern housewives about the violent content of their children’s video entertainment, a game called DOOM was simulating the experience of removing a man’s face by discharging a double-barreled shotgun into it. Quake II is the baby of DOOM, which was the child of a forgotten game called Wolfenstein 3D, which was originally released around ten years ago and initialized a genre known as the “first person action shooter.” First person perspective makes the player look out of the eye sockets of the character he, or she, is playing and stare down the barrel of a firearm while taking aim at human targets in a confined area. Ten years after Wolfenstein 3D, some students at a high school in Colorado lock all the school exits and start executing their classmates and it turns out that their favorite video game is none other than Quake II. Parent’s groups, as well as the news media, can’t help but notice the similarities between these games and the secret fantasies played out by six unloved outcasts and their automatic weapons. Ironically, this all takes place while Quake II is being translated from a small time PC empire to the more lucrative console market. As a result, Quake II is a rather controversial game, which means that you have to present a driver’s license to buy it at Wal-Mart. While software company public relations offices wave around the statistic that first person shooting games represent only six percent of the entertainment software market, there are actually parents out there who are terrified that this game is going to trigger some sort of psychotic fit that will make their children want to go out and kill their classmates.
Strangely enough, Quake II is no longer the cutting-edge game it once was. In fact, it’s dwarfed by the competition in the very genre that its direct ancestors created. Granted, the first person perspective does affect the emotions rather strongly. The immediate brutality of combat when you’re being closed in upon, running out of ammunition, and taking damage from angles you thought were clear just a moment ago plays on the nerves and creates a genuinely intense experience. Maintaining survival and slaughter as the main objectives, Quake has not gone down the mission-oriented path of other 64 titles like Goldeneye and Turok 2. There is little plot to speak of: a few absurd sentences in the instruction book mention playing the part of a space marine stopping an alien invasion, but it’s all just an excuse to kill things. The sequence of events needed to complete each level is simple; the real challenge lies in getting there alive. The aliens you combat are brutal and stupid, but heavily armed and extremely aggressive. If they see you, they’ll shoot, and you’re not that much tougher than they are. Ammunition must be constantly hunted for and should never be squandered; everything has a weak spot or a weapon that will take it down – so be patient.
The weapons, of which there are only around ten, range from shotguns to the BFG (big fucking gun) 9000; they’re all useful but far too few in number. The updated control is very good, taking a hand from the default Turok setup; the stick angles your vision, while the yellow buttons guide the body, thus permitting very realistic range of movement. The level design is very simple, but provides some genuinely precarious situations as the result of well-placed enemies and badly-placed corners. Graphically, this is not an exceptionally ambitious game. There is little eye candy and the blood effects are sloppy, but the lack of detail does provide a curious advantage. Where superior games within the genre will often employ a fog effect to obscure distant details, Quake never resorts to this disappointing sleight of hand. Overall, Quake II is a fine game, almost quaint in its simplicity, that provides some good old-fashioned meat ‘n’ potatoes shoot-out fun. It is by no means cutting-edge and only takes advantage of a fraction of the PC experience. If you haven’t played the other titles mentioned in this review, I highly suggest spending your money on them first. Having spent many hours with those titles, I enjoyed being able to just put my brain on hold for a while and concentrate on getting from point A to point B. Multi-player mode is unexceptional – fun, but lacking in the depth of the Quake PC experience; where on-line death matches allow you to confront opponents from all over the world. This is a decent and entertaining game, but certainly not good enough to lose sleep, or for that matter kill, over.
All too often controversy shoves the spotlight on a relatively mediocre product, distinguishing it as representative of some particularly misguided human endeavor. You’d have to be exceptionally sheltered and feeble-minded to actually believe that the brutality found in a game like this one could translate into real-life violence without any additional external factors. I find it ironic that it was Quake the “Lords of Chaos” and the “Trenchcoat Mafia” loved to play as they fantasized about putting a bullet through every kid who looked down on them as they walked through the halls of their high school. It’s an expression of impotence on their part that they probably imagined the faces of people they knew in the pixelated grimaces of their video-generated foes.
