Glad to see a retro game that doesn't imitate the pixelated look of software Quake just to show you that it is a retro game.

WannaLogAlready wrote on Jun 8, 2022, 02:49:
Quake 2 was a subpar total letdown after the Quake 1 masterpiece.
Absolutely excellent multiplayer, but the single player sucked big time.

Very few and bad repetitive animations (soldiers' inept circle dodge, two shots dying, run hither and thither before shooting you, etc).
Poorly designed linear and samey uninteresting levels, backtracking, get lost.
Blurred foes' faces.

Foes hiding in wall closets for months just waiting for you to pass: Surprise ! (yawn).

I personally loved the SP of Quake 2. Yes, the fact that they tried to make the levels fit a plot means that there was less of the "anything goes" level design from Quake 1. I agree with the criticisms about sometimes samey levels and confused backtracking (especially in the Jail and Palace levels) but there were some excellently made maps. One of my favorites is when after the hangar unit you enter a relatively open map (even if you're mostly walking around a cliffside ridge, and you have to place an airstrike marker at the end of the level).
The animations were more detailed than those in Q1, and I liked the enemies passing off a couple of shots even as they keeled over. One weakness was the duck animation, which essentially made them a "sitting duck" since they didn't fire when ducking (some mods tried to address this by having enemies fire even while ducking). But yeah, the game was a lot easier on all difficulty levels, mainly because the enemies were slower, could be easily countered by circle-strafing (and some enemies were utterly useless, like the tentacle guys with the green shields who just shambled at a slow speed while you picked them off from a distance). Of course, even the weapon change and firing speeds were slower in Quake 2, but the overall challenge was still much lower. Secrets and power-ups were also a lot easier to find.
Monsters hid in closets or behind trapdoor walls even in Quake 1. It's just that since Quake 2 and later Doom 3 tried to have a story behind the levels and progression that this aspect jarred more.

No wonder the SP mod scene dropped Q2 quickly, with very little of note produced.
But Quake 1 brilliant mods/maps continue to be made regularly to this day.

Yeah, not as many map packs for Q2 (and the official expansion packs were underwhelming 'more of the same' stuff) I remember some cool "coconut monkey" map packs made by Neil Manke for PC gamer.

SMITE wrote on Jun 5, 2022, 00:12:
Forget Quake.

Where's my fucking DAIKATANA remaster?

That's what I want to know

There's no remaster that can remove the suck from this one.

Razumen wrote on Jun 6, 2022, 02:12:
I think they should do Quake 2, that game was great and also had a lot of quality mods and maps made for it, both for SP and MP.

Unreal is fun, but I think it should really be remade, not remastered. The guns were interesting but lacked oomph, and it didn't help that many of the enemies were bullet sponges either.

Although there are already some lovely engine source ports for Quake 2 (like Quake 2 Max or the new Quake 2 RT), a unified interface for Quake 2 and all its expansion packs would be nice, and if they could create some fresh SP and MP map-packs, that would be great.

Although the flaws you mention were present in the initial release of Unreal, they did patch it and modify the weapons behavior later, so if you played with the fully patched game or Unreal Gold (which included the expansion pack RtNP), the weapons have more oomph (especially the biorifle and the shock rifle. The minigun is still a wimp). To an extent, the Unreal enemies, especially the Skaarj and Mercenaries, need to be bullet sponges or you won't see them long enough to appreciate the AI routines. I still love the processing plant level where you face up against pairs of mercs and they almost seem to work in tandem against you.

This comment was edited on Jun 6, 2022, 08:30.

"We’re proud of the work achieved by Ubisoft Pune and Ubisoft Mumbai, and Ubisoft Montreal will benefit from their learnings as the new team will continue the work to deliver a great remake."
Translation:
We're scrapping that crap and starting over afresh.

SimplyMonk wrote on May 12, 2022, 02:00:
Serious Sam is still a thing and those are pretty much just Duke Nukem Lite. Same with Shadow Warrior being Duke Nukem: Hentai Edition.

Serious Sam is probably the closest thing to Duke now. Shadow Warrior reboot was a fun game in itself, but didn't really hark back to the original game, dropping most of the exaggerated chauvinistic stereotype. But Serious Sam is also getting a little long in the tooth, the USP of having lots of enemies reducing it into a slog rather than a joy to play (and that new engine from what I heard needs some SERIOUS optimization).

I'd say many gamers in the below 40 age group probably don't have much love for this character. And it's not like the movie industry where you do a new scan and HD/UHD release every 5 years for a reasonable cost and get good returns on it - Even a straight remake of Duke 3D in a modern engine would cost hugely in terms of new art assets.

Not judging what the entire game would have been, but this wasn't too interesting. The electricity mechanic looked tacked on and nowhere as flexible as the grav-gun was. The locale was kinda boring and the atmosphere was nowhere as well-realized as the original Ravenholm level (as done by Neil Manke) was.

Tipsy McStagger wrote on Apr 4, 2022, 14:01:
The original postal game back in the 90s was really cheap and crappy.. nothing changes with these style of games.

I would disagree there. The original 2D postal had some excellent hand drawn locations and environments. It wasn't a graphics engine powerhouse like the id games, but it had its distinct style that worked well for the game, I thought.

Is it still using Unreal Engine 2.0?

"I feel sorry for you unworthy lusars" Suck it down

https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/08/health/longer-life-diet-wellness/index.html
Didn't they get the memo about "It's not length but how you use it that matters"? Sure, you can live to be a 100 years or more eating steamed vegetables and drinking matcha tea, but what is the point? Not advocating throwing medical and environmental caution to the winds and eating steak every day, but there's no point to a long life if you're not (in a moderate way) enjoying yourself.

phinn wrote on Feb 5, 2022, 18:30:
Never once had a Windows Update issue on Windows 10 or Windows 11. Must be on your end. Anyway, using 16GB DDR4-3600 and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM here. For me that's all I need for a combination of productivity and gaming for the past 10 years on 2-3 PC builds. Can't even come close to maxing that out most of the time.

Me too. I know people like to joke about how bloated the Windows OS is, but yeah, even 4 years after I got my system (and no formats / OS reinstalls in between) I don't have any notable performance issues, and the time between turning on the PC and being able to use it is less than a minute (and that includes the time for entering the user password). I was once thinking of going to 32GB RAM while it was still cheap, but then I felt that I can't think of a single occasion where something was stuttering, and apart from maybe my DaVinci video-editing software, nothing takes more than a few seconds to load. Also, with older games, I'm even sure if they will take advantage of increased RAM for it to make a big difference in terms of game and level load-times.

VaranDragon wrote on Feb 1, 2022, 03:46:
Will it feature really over the top, politically incorrect humor?

While I haven't played SW2, I don't recall the rebooted SW featuring any of the politically incorrect humor the 1997 3DRealms game had, so unlikely. In the reboot even Lo Wang sounded more Asian-American than the stereotype Mickey Rooney caricature manner of the original game.

If they eschew the story and NPC team-mates of SS4, it'll already be a better game.

Sounds a lot like Ion Storm's Daikatana development. Remember that?

Pre F&F-era NFS?

I downloaded the Enhanced Quake version. While it's neat to have all the add-ons in a single convenient menu and the Reznor score without the CD, there appear to be some curious lapses:
- No hotkeys for save/load, quicksave etc - at least I didn't see them in the bindings menu. After being used for so many years to just hitting a key to save, it feels cumbersome to go through menus.
- The up/down keys work very erratically on the menus, possibly because it's more designed for mouse use now.
- Even the default "Zero" brightness is too bright for Quake. They definitely need to readjust the scales.

Do you think this game will be any good?
Baa!

Can I drop the Dark Places source port into this and expect to conveniently play all the add-on packs without fiddling with command lines?

Mike Verdu was a founder of Legend Entertainment and producer of several PC games including Return to Na Pali, Unreal II, Battle for ME 1&2, and C&C 3. So he is a video game vet.