We used to LAN a lot, like once a month. Now it’s once per year only BUT there are some advantages in comparison:
There is more alcohol than everyone can consume during the weekend
Food is in abundance beyond imagining
Instead of a flop house style weekend with everyone sleeping on the floor under their computers, it’s in a real house with actual real rooms.
Weed items are effectively legal and plentiful, but no one smokes
It’s fucking great to play with EVERYTHING painted for once. GODDAMIT!
We started out with some various board games, but when everyone was in attendance we threw down the 2nd annual 7-man Talisman game which was, again, EPIC. Last year I had taken tooooo many mg in gummies so I was fucked up and just wanted to lie on the couch hence was quite glad when my character was killed off. This year I was BEER fueled and tried to go for the win, but my only claim to fame was killing off the hated PROPHETESS before she could bust out onto the scene and become unstoppable.
In the end, the Vampiress racked up the kills and destroyed everyone. I’m not sure anyone even went to the middle region, let alone the center. This is a very fun way to play with lots of players who don’t mind getting eliminated (to go play other stuff together after). It is very random though, but buy the Talisman ticket, take the fucnk ride.
We didn’t get many other board games except a good round of Dungeon Degenerates which degenerated into a TOTAL PARTY KILL about half way through the adventure. We were up against 6 monsters and didn’t use some of the items that could have put us in the W column, totally underestimating the enemies and getting destroyed. Great game and one that should get some more plays. The psychedelic board is a world of wonders.
The LAN type games were again dominated by Counter Strike and CSGO as it should be. We had old ass laptops and that’s about all they could run, so we took advantage of having 7 of them and had a blast co-op vs the bots with bots added (manually) every time we won a round until it was a proverbial SWARM. I preferred the CSGo with the more refined weapons and physics (let alone the graphics). Even on these old laptops, that ran just fine.
We did play QUAKE which was eye-bleedingly awesome but my skills at least were real rusty compared to other people (if they had skills in the first place that is). My loss at Q3A though was real bad. The verdict was that I had played too much Virtua Fighter and not enough Quake over the last year. My issue is I have to keep my skills up for VF because I have punk kids that I play in that, not so much with Quake.
For console stuff, we got in some great sessions of Tobal 2, always an amazing game to play and re-learn. It still holds up after all these years and for me at least, blows Tekken away. In Virtua Fighter 5 though, as noted above, I ran the jewels on the other players just from often playing and having timing down. It’s the anti-button masher, so you have to know when it’s your turn and not your turn or you get transanaled. I’m not sure the other players had all that much fun getting beatdowns when I chose random characters… We did get some DOA for the fanservice boob bounces and while DOA 6 is fun, it’s just so much slop compared to VF. Next year I want to have some type of fighting game tournament with something just stupid nuts like My Hero One Justice or Brawlhalla.
Keneda brought some chicken fight game that could handle 4 players + but I think I was drunk when we started and just threw the controller down and yelled at the TV and left to go play Donkey Kong in the basement region. I got some folks to play Dragon’s Crown and you just really cannot appreciate the largest breasts in a video game without actually seeing them in motion. It’s a great game, but I’m not sure even those sweet lovin thighs or sorceress’s breasts could hold people’s attention away from Counterstrike.
Despite the fact that after a series of 60-70 degree days there was a massive snowstorm and only Matt and I got out of there in time, I believe in my heart it was a successful OLD PERSON LAN.
With the multiplatform release of Quake (Switch, PS, Xbox), now is the time to get in some Quake. It feels like 1996/97 again with some incredible players and then many… scuttling blood bags that have no idea what they just walked into with the run and gun style of play. Highly recommend jumping onto the multiplayer, which is now nicely set up with a server browser and a ‘join a game’ mode. GET SOME.
And for those wanting more single player, there is a lot of new content (and collated content) for that as well.
Well holy crap, Quake 3 is officially 20 years old today.
And… it’s still the best DM shooter out there! But it was a long time to fall in love for us, like that funny looking girl on the bus that is into motorhead and jigsaw puzzles. While I had a kick ass time making levels for the game (I think I made a whopping 3 until my HD died and I couldn’t get my source files back and sorta gave up level making) other than to practice for LAN’s I didn’t play a ton the first 6 months or so it was out. I think it hit me when I was stuck in the house for a weekend with shitload of snow (big ass blizzards in ’99 I tell you what) and played vs the bots to 999 frags on a single map. That’s right, 999 frags. No one was around and when I told people they didn’t believe me. After this, I loved the game forever.
Oh how opinions change. Here is Keneda and I’s un-edited reviews of the game from the year 1999. At the bottom is the animated John Romero Gif from that day and age (sorry dude….we were kids).
Quake 3: Arena
(my new girlfriend)
littlemute
Predication is necessary as it is essential to provide my biases walking into this review. I love Quake. Not Quake 2, Not Unreal, not Doom, but Quake. I love the speed, I love the level design, I love the totally unbalanced weapon selection, I love the gibbes, I love rocket jumping over a shower of gibbes. What this means is that any later incarnation of this game will be brutally scrutinized, as Quake 2 was. Quake was made by a bunch of people that had already tasted massive financial success with Doom and slacked in production. The design of the game drastically changed in mid-development and by all rights it should have been shit. The reason it wasn’t is that the game designers means of development was to play deathmatch, constantly. I assume from rumors that they “playtested” the game instead of working for months and months. Look what happened: Dm2, Dm4, E1M2. It’s hard to compare the experience of running “The Bad Place” with 4-6 other people to any other game. Nothing comes close. So there I am, standing in the middle of Dm4 writing this review.
There are a lot of shitty things in Quake 3a:
Most of the levels are either built with only beginners in mind or are “trick” levels with a lot of jumps and silly lifts.
Prediction.
Some of the models are disappointing, and the bot’s “ai” feels like an slightly humanized omicron bot; no suprises there.
The weapon selection is also questionable. The Grenade launcher is disappointing for Quake players used to the creamy goodness of the OG GL. The plasma gun is the worst “no skill” weapon I’ve ever seen. It’s weapon effect slows everything down as well as crowding the screen so you can’t see what the hell is going on while firing it.
Some of the design choices are extremely questionable. Fat people running around? Vertically challenged levels? An Eyeball with legs? The bot chat feature is absolutely lame. The taunts, already meaningless coming from a machine, are so inane as to turn the stomach. The final boss is the best example of this. For example: Major says “just get my tombstone right” or something to that effect. Now since she’s been killed, this is ok, but instantly she respawns to be killed again. It’s just not internally consistant! If they are fragged but not killed as evident by their respawn, why then talk about themselves being dead?
The processor and video card requirements are astronomical. The box should read: “System Requirements: Computer not yet built to run this game, please wait until March of 2000.”
I completed (and I mean completed; ie never to play again) the single player in three hours. It felt like a chore. The bots, with their complete reliance on superior aim gave little satisfaction in tactical play. You can ALWAYS get the armor or RL when you need it. The bots ALWAYS run around, never camping anywhere. There really isn’t anything “new” about Q3a except the engine and art. The game-play is the same, the weapons are the same and the style of game is the same.
With all these problems it seems impossible that Q3a is worth buying. But jesus H christ it
is! What id has done with the single player is fine, but makes no difference. Some of the
models suck, but it makes no difference. Most of the levels are aesthetics over game-play, but
it makes no difference. No one I know has a system that can run it well, but it makes no difference.
In four months time there will hundreds of new models, thousands of new levels and a dozen or so
mods that ameliorate almost ALL problems. The Voodoo 5 should be out and people will have
systems that will be able to run the game. And, of course, someone will remake Quake DM4.
Playing through the single player, I constantly said: “I hate this,” but then during tier five, I
started having a bit of fun. Tier five is a stint with some rather good levels in it, like
Brimstone Alley, and it contains some of the better models. A few of the levels
in that tier are super
tight, rather than the typical Q3a flat open area with some curves spread around, so I
was in my element: fucking bot ass. It was during this tier that I was able to get the “haste”
power up and I realized that there was a ray of hope in terms of runspeed slowness.
If server admins can set run speed…. Excellent!
After I finished off Xeroe (hi, yes bot you can aim better than I can but you jump to the same places
every time) I started up a skirmish with nine or so bots on Brimstone Alley with a frag limit
of 100 and went to town. Within 10 minutes I realized I liked Q3a, within 20 I loved it.
It’s hard to describe the moment where I shifted from hating to loving Q3a, but it happened
and here I am writing this review.
Basically the Q3a you get in the box is good, but it’s what you will be able to get off
the net in four months that will make this game fantastic. Better CTF with the hook, better
levels, more models and more fun and silly mods. With time and better processors we will be
able to actually play without a ton of slowdown when someone is gibbed or uses the plasma
gun. There is a lot more to be explored in Q3 so I’m going to cut this off for now. It’s not my beloved friend Quake, no, and only time will tell if it’s a worthy
successor. It IS certainly beautiful graphically.
Binary score: 1
[Ed: a Binary score of 1 was the highest possible award for a game. Either worth playing or not worth playing– no in between]
Keneda
» Wow, ID lost its soul, quake3a is proof.
» Anyone have a voodoo4 or voodoo5? You’ll need one to play Quake3a
lag free on ANY system. Some people say a TNT2 or GeForce256 can
provide a lag free experience, BUT why buy that shitburger when you
can get a $600 voodoo5 6000 this spring/summer. Back to Q3A, it’s a
beast of a engine, lagg’en the fuck out of my voodoo3 2000 on a p3 549
with 128megs of pc100 memory. Damn… I hate lag. I hate Q3A cuz it
lags. Understand?
» The graphics are beautiful. MUCH better then the crap seen in
Unreal Tournament. The Lighting, Textures and Weapon effects are
bar-none perfect.
» Level design. None. Wastes of curved surfaces abound. My god
there’s TONS of useless detail… time could have been spent forging
through Fileplanet for examples of GREAT levels. Christ the could have
remade all the Quake DM levels. Of the 20+ levels I can say I enjoy 3
or so.
» Sound. Fine. Nothing to great… the music is barely present in the
game. Who the fuck listens to the in game music when they are playing
DM or CTF? Only net nebbishes. So I guess who cares about music in
FPS’ers. Not me, I just pop some Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, or John
Zorn in and I’m ready to go.
» Gameplay is fine. Two people meet, one person dies. There’s not too
much “getting away” like in Quake. Movement is faster than
Quake2 but not nearly as fast as Quake. This makes for duels in which
one person usually frags the other. The levels aren’t helping the
gameplay at this point. In two months we should see remakes of all the
gould DM levels for Quake/Quake2 so gameplay will see a improvement. I
have not tried the CTF yet… more people in the clan have to buy the
game first… and is it worth it?
» Q3A models are fine to TERRIBLE… and the animations are still
VERY limited. I’m not saying that Q3A models are any worse than
Quake’s BUT, they’re not any better…. more of the same, with little,
barely noticeable, death animation tweaks. Of course they have a higher
polygon count, but more doesn’t mean better… it just means more lag,
and for what ends do we have to suffer to see a more detailed enemy
get fragged?
» Gibbs are real nice in Q3A. They make lag for a voodoo3 like
playing over a 2800 baud modem. CHRIST!!!
» Binary score: 0 until I have a voodoo5, at which time I will review
the game a second time.
The weather this weekend was pure shit. rain, then snow, then rain, then snow, then a lot of snow and all shit until late today.
We played all day Friday and Saturday and I think my eyes bled while I slept fitfully last night with the retinal burn. Here’s what we got in on.
Zandorum Doom 2: both Free for All and vs the Monsters. If you are an FPS player and haven’t played doom multiplayer to see just how fast an FPS can (and probably should) be, play Doom 2! However, all the tricky giant maps with all the key searching was fucking annoying when playing with 5+ people. Getting lost in Doom isn’t so bad because you rocket through the level, but when there’s a hidden door that leads to the other 50% of a level where everyone else is at, and you can’t find the fucking thing even with the map, it’s real annoying.
Quake Super8. Maurice!Bastard got the multiplayer working with this excellent visual mod for Quake. This one looks THE BEST and closest to my favorite Quake renderer: Verite Quake, built specifically for the Verite video card.
Unreal Tournament 4: This was the most balanced deathmatch that we played. I had a ton of fun with this and it worked very well for the LAN, which is a rarity with new FPS games which are nearly all anti-LAN (Quake Champions for example) and take forever to get from one map to the next so players can get their ‘prizes for playing.’ This is most of a UT game, basically the team that was working on it went to go work on fortnight and it may never be worked on again. Remember what happened to UT3 after Gears of War came out…
Quake 3: While far more balanced than Quake, I still like the original Quake better. Q3 is super tight deathmatch though.
PUBG and the goddamn pubg event. There was an event this weekend where you could drop into a small area of the first pubg map with a group of 10 players and fight until a certain number of kills were scored by a team. While it gave a chance to use a bunch of weapons and constantly fight. It was pretty frustrating most of the time.
Company of Heroes. This was the only RTS we played and since people had seen me on steam playing PA:Titans, that was a no go. People were OVER concerned at my skill at COH as well and it became obvious only after I was soundly beaten in a 3 vs 1 game. This isn’t a super hardcore RTS and is pretty n00b friendly with the pacing and defensive nature of the game, so good for the LAN. I really expected to be playing Dawn of War 3 instead of this but man– what happened to that game? Aesthetically awesome, but the gameplay was trash.
There was a mess of video captured during the proceedings, so I’ll get some posted as soon as possible for your viewing pleasure. mraak.
Man oh man I submitted these over 20 years ago and found them again on accident during the LAN. Reposted again with some notations and context.
– I hook far above, – Dark shaft in House of Chthon. – Ride the lift for me! —- littlemute[WM]
There is a single lift to get from the bottom level to the top level in the map the House of Cthon. If the server has the grappling hook, the level becomes a contest on who can get the rocket launcher and sit at the very top of the lift (where you cannot be hit from either level unless directly below) and just camp for frags the whole time. Great stuff.
– Server a chat-room! – My macros end the babble, – I am nuked again. —- littlemute[WM]
The thing that quake also did was have an easy way to chat with other people in real time. This was not something that was all that easy to do in 1996, so people would use the quake server as a place to chat with each other rather than play. You could bind keys to macros and spam them over and over and over (they fixed this in later versions of the game) which would lead either to a denial of service attack from someone else or getting booted from the server.
– Lava-less level, – The shame of negative frags. – Reconnect again. —- littlemute[WM]
You could reconnect to the server to instantly reset your score to zero. Pretty useless unless you are at negative frags….
Next friggin’ weekend. Likely going to be a LOT of Zandorum Doom played and best of all Maurice!Bastard got Quake Super8 working multiplayer, which just looks fantastic.
Just in case you want to take a trip down memory lane after the previous post, I can save you the search in youtube as here’s the ending of Diakatana in it’s fucking glory.
There’s a lot of nostalgia articles about id around, but for this one I mostly I want to comment on Romero because really any non-technical article or discussion of Doom development or Quake development has to include stuff about him or frankly, it’s pretty boring. At the time of Quake 2/3 there was a lot of hate on Romero about his alleged work ethic, playing games all the time, the Killcreek stuff and the general perception from the internet (mostly stuff on bluesnews) that he was fucking shit up all over the place, and then came Daikatana.
While all of these things may be true, I beg to differ that it was detrimental in terms of the final deliverable of Quake, especially Quake (and Doom’s) deathmatch. This article confirms somethings people felt a few years after it shipped (no one really knew what was going on at id a the time of development), but if you read it, once the decision was made for it to be a FPS and not and RPG game, Romero helped make Quake beyond awesome, and part of that was his addiction to his own game.
JORTS!
While I like a lot of other First Person Shooters, Quake is still one of the most enjoyable free for all mutliplayer. The engine is solid and it works extremely well with multiple players when they are all physically near each other– something that modern engines for FPS do not do. That aside for now, I feel like the fact that Romero and American McGee played Deathmatch all day long when they were supposed to be ‘working’ actually made DM in Quake, Quake 2 and Quake 3 the absolute best it could be (yes I know Romero was gone after Q2). Romero was more than a designer, he was the near ultimate consumer of his own creation, and for this, despite all the drama around him being let go from id, and the Diakatana debacle, was a critical component for the success of the game. While I had dabbled in the Quake single player game, soon I was only playing CTF and DM and didn’t finish the SP for a year or so after it’s release, even though we played DM just about every day for 2-3 hours. In fact, I cannot have imagined playing a game more fervently than we played Quake. It was pretty much the focal point to everything we did for YEARS there– a bit after Quake 2 came out is when I started to go off the constant deathmatch (only to be revived again when Q3 came out). And why was Quake’s DM so good and we still play it at every LAN? The tech of course, and american mcgee’s levels (the Bad Place for instance) but for the gameplay? I say Romero and his addiction to playing his own team’s games.
Last weekend was a LAN weekend. Man it’s been awhile, some suspect a decade or more. We did it up in the basement of scooter’s abode and it was gibbing madness. Some of these games I hadn’t played in a looooong time so here’s a run down of my feels here in 2017.
FPS
We played a mess of FPS games, originally thinking we would run the gauntlet of Doom all the way to new Doom. We almost did, but there were games we skipped (and one we shoulda skipped!).
L4D2
Always a great time, but not great when you have more than four players as the monsters aren’t fun to play as. Interesting? Yes, but you end up looking at the respawn screen a lot more than if you are one of the survivors.
Vermintide
We gave this a try at the LAN and got pretty confused by the maps and environment. This is one that is likely better not at a LAN and just in normal internet play.
The Bad Place
Quake
While unbalanced weapon-wise Quake is an amazing death match game STILL in 2017. We used the RUNE mod which has runes lying around that you can pick up that give you X2 damage, damage resistance, rapid fire (not my favorite) and regeneration. I would argue that Quake still has some of the best Death match maps ever made.
DOOM
We tried to get BRUTAL DOOM up and running and it desynched constantly. While we didn’t deathmatch this, it was fun for the hour or so we were able to actually play. Brutal DOOM is something to check out for sure.
Quake 3
The penultimate death-match FPS. While many have tried, nothing has come close to how good this game is for straight up death match. With the weapon balance that Quake lacks and some really awesome DM levels, I think we played this the most out of any of the FPS games over the weekend. It just shows that it’s not the graphics that make a good DM game at all.
Insurgency
I didn’t get on this, but people said it was a good time. We played this because we could not get Battlefield Bad Company 2 working for everyone, which was too bad.
this is the screen you LOVE to see in newDoom because it’s over and you can go on to any other FPS!
New DOOM
Playing Quake, Quake 3, UT3 and OG Doom just before trying newDoom showed how awful the death match for the New Doom really is. Great single player, amazing graphics still makes newDoom a fantastic game, but don’t bother at all with the death match. It feels like you are inside a robot suit slowly moving and turning around. It’s not even worth trying out to see how bad it is.
UT3
I got a single round of Vehicle CTF with maurice!Bastard and it was great. While UT3 is not a very good Death match game compared to nearly all other games (it’s still better than NewDoom), I’ve always found it’s Vehicle CTF to be absolutely superb. Totally insane vehicles, very fast movement speed across large maps and the whole bevy of weapons that UT brings to the table makes me wish I had the chance to play this more.
RTS
We played three RTS games and all three were enjoyed, though one for very different reasons for the other two.
Planetary Annihilation
This is on the cusp of being a good game, and certainly it’s fun for a bit. However there is just so much going on and you are spread out over so many areas (planets and strategic layers) with your units and buildings that it makes it an unmanageable mess. We got in a few games of this vs the bots and after winning easily on normal, we tried it on hard and it was comedy. The bots ended up nuking our commanders on a planet we had total control over. Overall, fun but the game devolves into ALL orbital combat after awhile. There’s minutia and counters here, but it is all just a unit-flood steamroll of some sort in the end.
Warcraft 3
The best RTS had to get busted out. We played coop again vs the bots and I forget that this has a very steep learning curve to it with the heroes and creeping and total disregard for the base-defense that other RTS games rely on. I also forgot nearly everything I had known about the game and played terribly, but still, really fun game– especially the battles.
Total Annihilation
People begged to bust this out and..was a total joke. We jumped into the game with 5 players and two of the commanders were D-cannon’ed within the first minute. RTS games have come a long, long way. While Starcraft, due to updates, stands the test of time with it’s controls and UI, Total Annihilation does not at all. As compelling as it was in the 90’s it just is not any more. Frankly if you want the TA feels, Supreme Commander is the way to go these days.
CRPG
We got in some Torchlight 2 both Hardcore Elite and non-Hardcore Veteran. While the chance of permadeath is fun, the MASS hitpoints the enemies have in Elite multiplayer makes it slower than I really like in my TL2 madness.
So yes, we should do it again but bring some candles or votives or something for the rump gasping. There’s only so much bad air a basement can hold before spontaneous human combustion sets in.
Holy shit. I was about a year out of college and ‘adjusting’ crappily to a sorta new city and a bunch of shitty jobs. I remember one job where I finished ALL of my work by 9:30 AM. I walked around and asked for work. There wasn’t any. I had to sit and wait for calls and had nothing to do from about 10AM until 5 most days. So I played single player Quake shareware (and jagged alliance) and would tab out of it whenever someone would come around. I had pretty good hearing…
I supposed I got caught a few times (once by the drunk guy with the grey scales on his back(!?)) but then I would start bothering, bothering, bothering people for work which they didn’t have for me and they didn’t care any more since they just wanted to be left alone and everything I needed to do was always done, checked and double checked every day by mid-morning. I got about half way through the game sp at that time, but then started playing Multiplayer due to Keneda– so much multiplayer.
Without Quake I wouldn’t have taught myself web development or .asp and sql. So that sorta means without Quake, I probably wouldn’t have the job I do which– it’s insane to me to say this— but I actually like 90% of the time.
My favorite version was the Verite quake (built for a single video card). It just was sooo smooth and awesome looking, even better than the OpenGL stuff that came later.
Now though, I am enjoying (for single player only) the SUPER8 Mod. Get it here.
Here is a good homage article on SHACKnews, which IIRC along with Blues News wouldn’t exist without Quake either!
So what I need to do is get some of the Video tapes we took of Quake rendered into mp4’s and post them on Youtube. You will see how SHITTY we were in 1996 compared to about a year later.
