Falling in Love with Quake III
Growing up, I did not played FPS games at all. I think I once played Call of Duty: Black Ops II at a friend's house but I it did not have a lasting impression on me.
On 24 November 2022, some of people over at Agora Road organized a game of QuakeJS - a browser port of Quake III Arena. I ended up playing the game with Kameraad, Shinobu, Zalaz alaza and newgrass_c.
For the first time in many years, I had fun playing a video game.
Quake III is the most "no bullshit" game I have ever seen. You are thrown in an arena and you have only one objective: shoot everyone. There are many maps and weapons which play very differently. Back in November 2022, I got my ass absolutely kicked and the game was so good that it somehow crashed my computer. Despite still, my experience with the game was not ruined and it all good fun.
On 13 December 2023, I decided to download the free demo on my computer. The thing was pretty much identical to QuakeJS and still had a blast. What suprised me the most is that the game still has working multiplayer even in 2023. Very suprising from a game released in 1999.
I ended up purchasing the full game on 15 December 2023. Turns out QuakeJS was based on the demo (for legal reasons I suposse) and the full game is slightly different. Although this game has no "compaign" you "need" to unlock maps by beating bots. I say "need" as this process is completely bypassable using the command "iamacheater", something I really appreciate.
My favorite map so far is "The Longest Yard". The main reasons is that you can see what everyone is doing and there there are trampolines. I am curently maining the rocket launcher and I am having a blast. I tend to play singleplayer on the "Bring it on!" difficulty as when I go into multiplayer, I get annihilated by boomers who play the game since 1999. Perphaps one day I will be the one in that spot.
Quake III Arena is also interesting from an archiving and interoperability perspective. The code of the game is open source, but as the game itself is still being sold. This means the devs get benefits of both worlds. Should id Software ever shut down the official servers for the game, I am pretty sure people would be able to make another one easily using the soure code. I think I read somewhere that the game allow you to host your own servers anyway.
Since this is a game from the 90s, it is devoid of the anathema found in modern gaming. No DLCs, no microtransaction, no battlepassses etc. The game has apparently a CD key DRM, but I had mine incorrectly entered and it did not block anything. I assume this only affect which multiplayer server you can join or something. Very good stuff. The game is also not very hard to run, which is a plus in my book.
This game is EXTREMELY fun. I would highly reccomend checking out the free demo if you want to try the game.
Written by manpaint on 23 December 2023.