GameSpot may receive revenue from affiliate and advertising partnerships for sharing this content and from purchases through links.

Spoiler Warning

In this Freeplay column, assistant editor Avery Score discusses Quake 4, wrestlers-turned-actors, and how <i>not</i> to be scary.

Comments

From the extensive nature of this accompanying exegesis, you can probably tell that Avery Score, despite himself, enjoyed his recent sojourns into hell--at least on some level. Call his bluff at avery@gamespot.com.

Thanks in part to the unprecedented success of World of Warcraft and other successful games before it, like EverQuest, I'm certain we can expect the number of MMO games to increase in years to come. But how many of them can the world's gamers realistically sustain simultaneously? And, more importantly, what kind of an impact would 20 World of Warcraft-type games have on the success of other games? An Xbox 360 version of Blizzard's masterpiece is rumored to be in development; if the rumors are true, maybe it'll quite literally be the only game that many people buy the console for.

If I could bring myself to only play World of Warcraft, maybe I wouldn't have had cause to play Quake 4, which--while a technical masterpiece--depressed me for a number of reasons. I wasn't upset that the multiplayer experience turned out to not be the focus of Quake 4. I've got plenty of games to play online, and I really don't like other gamers to begin with. Furthermore, the single-player campaign even fixed a few of my grievances with Doom III. Plus, it features some decent friendly AI. The problem is that the action and story are so predictable that you'll be groaning your way through the game. (Please be advised that this article contains spoilers for Quake 4, and for Doom: The Movie.)

This is about as scary as Quake 4 gets. Apologies to Roman Dirge.
This is about as scary as Quake 4 gets. Apologies to Roman Dirge.

Quake 4 is being hailed by many as the true successor to Quake II, in which we bravely fought back the Strogg and defeated their all-powerful "makron." You find out early on in Quake 4 that those wily Strogg, undeterred, have built a new and more powerful makron. Who woulda thunk it?! The Strogg have always been a poor man's Borg (the technologically focused villains from Star Trek: The Next Generation), but this is supremely uninventive, even for them. Hey, at least you're playing an honest-to-goodness character this time: Corporal Matthew Kane.

Although you're sometimes working with teammates, especially in the first half of the game, this is a standard fragfest with few thrills. Those who trudged through Doom III may remember feeling almost prescient. That's because it was easy to guess just how many imps would spawn at walls or on pentagrams. In Quake 4, you're in about the same situation, quicksaving before you enter large rooms, or whenever you're in a hallway with several locked doors and no enemies. In both situations, Strogg will charge through any available thresholds and run at you mindlessly. The enemies with more health points tend to move more slowly and never dodge.

Occasionally, you'll encounter a boss battle. You can always guess when these are coming up, because your higher-ups will tell you that it's likely the area you're entering is "heavily guarded." Again, you'll experience some suspense-less silence before you're ambushed by some hulking creature that, sadly, goes down after a few hits. Quake's bosses are even more uninspired than Doom's, if that's possible.

This is probably because your arsenal (including the thinly veiled BFG, called a "dark matter gun" here,) makes you a walking tank. Nevertheless, because each gun (save your useless pistol) is upgraded one or more times throughout the game by tech officers, you'll be switching your entire arsenal throughout the game. You'll always have plenty of ammo, too, because the Strogg are really careless about where they leave it. In a concession to detractors of Doom III's flashlight contrivance, the machine gun and blaster both carry a flashlight, which is nice, I suppose. The lights go out a few times to provide cheap thrills.

Dwayne Johnson's endorsement of Bush-Cheney was the bedrock of their mandate for multiple wars.
Dwayne Johnson's endorsement of Bush-Cheney was the bedrock of their mandate for multiple wars.

Of course, there's still the SHOCKING PLOT TWIST that id Software leaked to everyone in a lengthy video months before the game's release. If you're not already hip to this jive, you might want to skip this paragraph and the next one, and not listen to any of your friends for the next couple of months. Early on in Quake 4, Corporal Matthew Kane is captured by the new makron, who is stupid enough to attempt to Stroggify him. The Stroggification process is much like Sonic the Hedgehog's Roboticization, and it involves the use of many bizarre pizza cutters and needles which--like the neoclassical architectural elements in Mannerist paintings--make no cohesive sense and aren't the least bit scary. Each of these machines looks like something Roman Dirge would put on a T-shirt. Throughout the game, you'll encounter similar pieces of biomachinery, like the old human torso batteries, and a corpulent flesh-beast who apparently sorts all the enzymes necessary to fuel the Strogg nexus. You'll be able to use the Strogg technology against your enemies at all times, as if it were designed specifically to thwart its makers. Despite being developed by some of the greatest technologists in game development today, Quake 4 wields the imaginative power of an employee at your local Hot Topic store.

The implementation of robotic parts at every level of your body, miraculously, has no effect on gameplay. You gain 25 percent more health and are able to interact with more Strogg terminals. And that's the total fallout from your Stroggification. A few of the Strogg have special abilities, like shocking the floor, using energy shields, and so on. Couldn't Raven Software have seen fit to add one or two of these powers to Matthew Kane's repertoire? Supposedly, Kane's cerebral implants allow him to understand spoken Strogg, but the player still hears the same unintelligible squeals emitted by attacking squibs. The gameplay is completely unaffected by this dramatic change in your appearance, and it might as well not have happened in the first place. Playing as a Strogg amounts to a selling point and it won't enhance your shooting experience at all.

There are also several vehicular sequences, in which you're either on rails or you're stuck piloting a slow mech or tank. In all of these situations, rechargeable shields make it almost impossible for you to die, except maybe during a boss fight while in your outfit that recalls Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. These sequences don't break up the monotony at all; they just impose a new and equally tedious form of drudgery upon you.

Yes, the procedure was painful, but I got 25 extra health points and the ability to use touch screens!
Yes, the procedure was painful, but I got 25 extra health points and the ability to use touch screens!

Then again, all this nonsense looks just phenomenal. My home PC is pretty sweet these days, with an Athlon 64 3400+ CPU, 2GB of DDR 400 RAM, an X800 XL AGP video card, and an Audigy 2 sound card. I can say with confidence that my bodacious rig was tapped to its fullest potential by Quake 4, whose enhanced Doom III engine consistently dishes out several shades of brown and red, displayed simultaneously. Finally, my hardware extravagances have been justified!

Quake 4's multiplayer is a step up from Doom's, which is to say it's about what you experienced back in 1999. It's amazing how well Unreal Tournament 2004 continues to hold up. Assault and Domination are nowhere to be seen; you'll have to content yourself with deathmatching and capture the flag. Next-gen graphics aren't always coupled with next-gen gameplay.

In short, you've played games like Quake 4 before, and you've played better games with the same mechanics. You may never have seen an ugly world so beautifully realized. But that's of dubious merit when you're moving down hallway after hallway of yet another space dungeon, mechanically wasting enemies as quickly as they appear.

Playing Quake 4 coincided with my viewing of the film adaptation of Doom, which was pretty much insufferable. I'm unapologetic in my love for professional-wrestler-turned-screen-actor Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, but even his charm couldn't save what is one of the most idiotic action films I've seen in years. Wraiths were nowhere to be found in this film, probably because they were busy banging away at flaming typewriters, concocting this intolerable bunk. The film couldn't decide whether to depart from its game franchise or pay homage to it, and it ended up succeeding in neither regard.

The movie's story most closely corresponds to that of Doom 3, in which surly space marines are called in to deal with an unknown threat within the Mars UAC facility. The nature of UAC's Mars research is initially mysterious, but ostensibly it involves the creation of cheap fuel sources and other environmental and humanitarian initiatives--or so the unsuspecting people of Earth believe. In fact, the doctors and researchers, in their heedless pursuit of scientific progress, have been tainted by the demonic aura of the red planet and subsequently transmogrified into ash-eating hellspawn. That's the extent of the game's exposition. The nameless marine you play as has no real personality, and neither do the other hapless marines with whom he interacts in Doom 3. The Doom movie's first mistake was trying to fill in the gaps in the story and characterization left by the game.

Is he leaning in for the smoocherillo?.
Is he leaning in for the smoocherillo?.

The Rock commands a motley crew of soldiers, each with a distinctively one-dimensional personality. Far from complex character studies, each of these jerks has one particular trait that defines him. One marine, "Portman," seems to be based on The Warriors' Ajax, and he generally lets his loins lead him and his fellow soldiers to danger and embarrassment. He constantly accuses his comrades of resorting to homosexual activity, which would explain their lack of interest in his libidinous pursuits. Another guy is a religious fanatic who carves crosses into the underside of his forearm whenever he blasphemes. There's also a greenhorn with a drug addiction who never actually manages to shoot anything. It's ridiculous that this elite squad should consist of ill-prepared morons with psychological problems that render them unfit for duty of any kind. Only the two black soldiers escape this heavy-handed characterization; but they do this by adhering to tired racial stereotypes.

Here comes another potential spoiler... The Rock's character would not even succeed as a "heel" (a professional wrestling term for a villainous character) in the WWE. He's a dyed-in-the-wool proponent of Kant's utilitarian ethics, and he subscribes to the Machiavellian assertion that positive ends can justify very bloody and unpleasant means. As The Rock announced on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, this callous attitude ultimately damns him to demonhood. Of course, The Rock is the raddest and baddest of devil kin, and he dukes it out with Reaper, the sleeper hero who, with his goatee and manic eyes, looks a lot more like the nameless space marine we don't know, but love anyway.

Sadly, Agent John "Reaper" Grimm (har, har) takes a long time to find his proper role as a killing machine and never manages to apply his plasma rifle to his real enemies--Doom's wraithlike writers. His story involves the tragic death of his scientist parents and suggests an incestuous relationship with his blonde and busty sister, Dr. Samantha Grimm. He reunites with his sister after a separation of 10 years, after which he is reminded by his fellow gun-toters that his closest kin looks hot and willing. Indeed she does, especially when her brother is holding her in intimate embraces that don't really suit their relationship. Just think--doctor and killer, life and death, passion and temperance...maybe all that will be "fleshed out" in the sequel.

It comes to light that Dr. Grimm's colleagues have been injecting prisoners sentenced to death with C24--apparently a 24th chromosome that makes "good" people into angels and "bad" people into demons. Wow, that explains everything. Except that I can think of another primate with two pairs of 24 chromosomes: a chimpanzee. Whatever, I guess this chromosome is...better.

Dr. Grimm is obsessed with this substance, because Mars' extinct humanoid race used this to become all-powerful, although it ultimately fueled their destruction. Incredibly, she has an intact skeleton of a humanoid named Lucy and her child. Lucy is shielding her infant in a defensive pose. How they reconstructed this position after billions of years of decay, one can't be sure. Fossils are usually dug up piece by piece, not intact, and in a montage. At one point, the doctor screams at her brother, "No! Lucy was good! She died protecting her child!" So it's pretty clear how she passed away, and how C24 affected her.

Even if you suspend your disbelief and accept that maybe technological advances facilitate these lines of scientific inquiry, this new explanation for the events of Doom doesn't add anything to the experience. The final 10 minutes of the movie are entertaining, because they're mostly shot in a first-person view. Of course, this would be totally meaningless to anyone who hasn't played the games, and it doesn't include the all-important descent into hell. Still, this pays better fan service than just having characters named Carmack and Willits (Carmack is the major villain, if there is one).

Not since The Saint has such a horrific screenplay been coupled with such universally bad acting. What little talent The Rock wields is underused, as he transitions from lawful type to a slaughterer of the innocent with no apparent inner turmoil. When queried as to what he did with dozens of innocent survivors, he responds, "Oh...I took care of that little problem," with all the fluency of the deposed Iraqi Information Minister (who, admittedly, "speak[s] better English than that villain, Bush"). Rock's performance in The Scorpion King is Oscar-worthy by comparison.

I'm none too pleased with the recent uses of id Software's major properties. In fact, many recent sequels and spin-offs have been huge disappointments. This industry is more reliant on franchises than any other form of media, and I'd like to find a way to buck the trend. Sequels--spiritual and literal--aren't always safe, and they tend to be accompanied by horrible terms like "reimagining." Imagining things for the first time is almost invariably more fruitful.

Next Up: Soul Searching by Greg Kasavin

Got a news tip or want to contact us directly? Email news@gamespot.com

Join the conversation
There are no comments about this story