Classically Trained

User Rating: 8 | Quake PC

When I bought my first computer (a second-hand Pentium 100 with 32MB RAM, from a school friend) it already had Quake installed. So, of course, I played that. A lot. A really, really lot. I was the first of my friends to include "+mlook" in my autoexec.cfg. I installed the Omicron bots, and trained myself up to pwn them in deathmatch. I finished the original game (did anyone else find Shub-Niggurath to be a bit of a let down? You play for hours, against harder and tougher and scarier monsters, and then you beat the final boss with a telefrag? (SPOILERS!) I was a bit "meh" when I eventually worked it out.) and both Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity. My best mate and I got our 28.8k modems talking long enough to play almost 10 minutes of DM from our own homes one time. I used to beat my friends in deathmatch using only the axe. I vividly recall one time snatching a jumping bot out of the air with the lightning gun and pinning it to the corner of the ceiling until it gibbed. I got a QuakeC compiler and created a mod, with things like laser pointers and monster-seeking missiles and teleporting rockets&grenades and AI that prefer to fight different types of monsters over the player. I lived Quake, and breathed lightning bolts, and rocket-jumped like a pro.

I recently dredged up the old CDs and scoured the idSoftware ftp server, and reinstalled Quake + GLquake, and after a bit of fiddling with config and whatever, you know what? It's as good as it ever was. Not so strong on story, and the graphics are a bit dated, but it's still one of the best twitchy railroad FPS out there.