Quake

I'm a big fan of several 90's FPS games, especially Doom 2, Duke Nukem 3D, Shadow Warrior and Rise of the Triad. Quake was a game I also liked a lot way back when it first came out, but I kinda got tired of it way faster than the other games mentioned above. The endlessly murky, dour surroundings, repetitive music and overall one-note atmosphere really grinds on my nerves after a while. It also doesn't help that the gameplay just isn't all that much fun after a while. The weapons mostly just copy-paste the Doom lineup, but with a downgrade or two. The lightning gun that replaces the BFG is really unimaginative and boring. There's essentially 3 machine gun like weapons in the game. The enemies also get kinda boring after a while. The fat ogre dudes that lob grenades at you are the most fun to fight in the long term, but most other enemies get stale - unlike the incredibly clever lineup of enemies in ID's older game, Doom 2. The blue, bouncing exploding goo blobs that you start encountering later in the game are super tedious and never fail to elicit a groan from me. Two mission packs are included as well, but they're mixed at best. MP1 is pretty bland and only manages to add poorly designed levels, lame weapons and rather annoying new enemies. MP2 is more fun, but kinda lazy, with new weapons just being re-skins with beefier firepower. At least the level designs are ok, but sometimes they really manage to pull off some spectacularly annoying level segments. Overall, I'd say Quake hasn't aged well. It sure was neat seeing "real" 3D after the pseudo-3d of Duke and Doom, but I'd much rather go back and play those technologically inferior games instead. They had actual fun gameplay in spades. Not to mention how the embarassingly outdate Rise of the Triad was more fun than a stack of 1.000 Quakes. I bought Quake on GOG recently and wrote all of this because I was reminded why I hadn't touched it in years...

This game does not run in its current state. I'm not going to use third party apps to make it playable, or change the source of the files myself.

Unfortunately the .bin/cue images included with this purchase are not even of the dos version of the game, but instead the windows 95 installer. So if you plan on using IPX emulation through Dosbox (which they include), and wanted to do a fresh DOS install, you're out of luck. Which is very disappointing as I purchased this solely for the "Original" Images advertised. Of course you could still mount the .cue in Dosbox and then find your .exe and go from there. But personally I prefer something a little more clean than that.

Its good to see the Quake series being introduced to GOG as a simple package that you can install with ease. Though one thing that could be added to this game is the DirectQ or quakespasm engine. One problem I did see in this game is the missing sound track, but regardless the game is still great.

Okay. First of all, I'm reviewing the remastered edition which I got for less than a Bigmac costs. The remaster has really high system requirements considering what we see on the screen. It's a game from 1996 with a little better lighting and models. Nothing fancy really. The Kex engine is unacceptable. Bethesda account to download additional content - bad. The main campaign is like it was. Chapter 1-3 are awesome and enjoyable. Chapter 4 is still mindnumbingly stupid. It should not be included in the game at all. Just do yourself a favour and skip it. Just cheat your way through it and kill the boss at the end normally. What I loved is the campaign made by Machine Games. It's enough reason to buy this game. Seriously, it's that good. If you ever completed the original quake start with the "Dimension of the machine" expansion.