The Re:Retro Top 100 Games Of All Time, No. 98: Eeeurrgh, Polygons
I have at least played Quake, but I didn’t enjoy it much. I suppose the most honest thing I can do here is to explain why.
There was a slightly bizarre moment in my personal history of gaming where 2D went to 3D – most noticably in fighting games, where the increasingly mangacized brawlers of Street Fighter and Marvel Vs. Capcom became the shuffling shoebox-people of Tekken The First. This was probably for the best, in that if the 2D fighting games became any more manga they would have become pulsing modern art masterpieces, but at the time this incursion of polygons seemed like a step backwards – shaky, blocky puppets delivering leaden kicks and punches that made you wince and feel embarrassed for them. Fighting games weren’t the only genre to suffer the polygon menace – Monkey Island jumped the shark with number 3, but with the terrible polygons of the fourth game they jumped a shark which was itself jumping another shark. Similarly, Sonic pretty much fell over and died when he gained a third dimension, and Sam And Max are similarly dead to me.
The extra processing power and time needed to do fancy polygon graphics at the time usually seemed to come at the expense of gameplay, although to be fair, that was probably irrational prejudice rearing its ugly head. Still, polygons did seem at the time to be a sign of sharkjumpery, and when Quake came out and even the bullets were little polygons, I couldn’t help but dismiss the notion that any of the blocky monsters you had to fight would ever be as scary or interesting as the giant Minotaur who shot rockets in Doom II. I gave it a couple of quick, desultory blasts, got bored and went away from the FPS genre for good.
Eventually, I came to love polygons, but Quake will always be the game that showed me my true path as a n00b rather than a pwning 733t specimen. I suppose its power to sort the 5h33p from the 904t5 means that it deserves its place at No. 98, despite the fact that I still think it’s dull.
Well I liked Quake. I liked the way maps could be truly 3d, instead of sort of pretend 3d where you could move up or down but never under or over anything. I liked the polygons and they way it meant you didn’t have to watch your Pentium 133 do a Three Mile Island frantically trying to swap between cardboard cutout monsters facing one way or the other but otherwise looking the same from every direction. And it was dark and lurky. Not dark and lurky “we’ve just coloured everything black” like in Doom, just dark and lurky. This was all new. Until then I was a dark and lurky virgin. So to speak.
No, it didn’t have Hell Knight Things flinging radioactive snot at you. Or CakeyDemons. But it had Fiends, which were pretty fiendish. Trouser-soilingly so, in fact. Even for me, with my impeccable sphincter control. Nothing like having a Giant Horrifying Fiendish Fiend Of Assured Fucking Catastrophe jump out of a dark corner and land on your head, I always say.
And maybe it wasn’t a -great- game. But they got that Mr T Reznor to do the music, which presumably gave him something to do other than whinging. And they got Mr Finbarr Saunders to do the comments when you got killed in multiplayer as well. See. An instant classic, I reckon.
quake was my vote, and I think 98 is as good as it deserves. Many criticised the overuse of brown in the palette. Others criticised the lack of story, and the confused themes – sort-of mediaeval/future.
but FPS games live and die by the enemies you kill, and the weapons you kill them with. The zombies ripped off their own arms with a horrible squelching sound, and threw them at you. The fiends jumped out of shadows 100 feet away, and landed on your head. But that was okay, because you had a gun called a perforator: the super nail gun. It made a collossal thundery booming noise when it fired, and minced things. That was what made quake good.
For me, quake was also the point in my gaming career that I began playing harder difficulty levels regularly. Previously, I wanted to see all the levels, all the monsters, all the guns, and if the quickest way to do that was on ‘easy’, then that was what I’d do. I don’t know why, but that changed with quake. And since then, I’ve always refused to play games on the easiest difficulty level. (Far Cry tested this resolution severely)
Yeah, lets kill things.