Ah, man, I think I'm getting better. When the journal goes quiet, you know I have zero desire to write shit for it. I took a week off of some of my vices, and I'm starting to save money again after using them to finish off my student loans. It's not perfect still, still a couple things haunting me even as I write this, but I've got lots creatively that I'm feeling comfier with and work especially is very calm right now. By mid-February, I will have $10,000 banked up, and I'll be around $23k in savings or so by my one year mark here. This place is gonna make the next five years for me financially possible, and I can write journal entries on the clock!

I'll discuss all that more in time, but I figure it's time to dust off the journal proper with something more fun: I played all the Quake mission packs recently! I've only owned them for like over half a decade now (or at least, uh, had copies of them?), and I've become fuzzy for the idea of gaming through time again, beating games as they came out and seeing the rapid march of technology and design innovation, so now seemed like an ideal time to finally get through them.

I started with the base game, which I'll call id1 for my ease of typing, and then moved onto Scourge of Armagon, hipnotic for short, then Dissolution of Eternity, rogue for short, and finally I threw in the unofficial third mission pack Abyss of Pandemonium, or impel, for shits and giggles before I moved onto Quake II. (The shortnames all refer to the company that worked on each game, id Software, Hipnotic Interactive, Rogue Entertainment, or the Impel Development Team. I'm just so used to calling them by their shortnames that I regularly confuse and mix up their real names.) I intended this to only be one post, but since I wrote so much (well over 3,000 words!), I'll be splitting it into three parts.

Summing up id1

Quake as a game starts a lot better than it ends. I breeze through the shooting galleries of the first three episodes, enjoying their weird level layouts and how I have everything memorized, and then Episode 4 presents a certain roadblock, and that's because the entire episode was designed by Sandy Petersen. Sandy's work is divisive. He was originally a tabletop RPG developer with a background in games like Call of Cthulhu, and id brought him on for Doom and ultimately Quake. Some folks, like NewHouse, really like his inventiveness. His focus was on strange and unique level setups and gimmicks, not action like the rest of the team. Other folks find his levels to be the most obnoxious of all the classic id levels to play because said ideas don't usually translate to fun gameplay.

Episode 4 starts out pretty decent. I like E4M2, The Tower of Despair, with the windows that open up in chunks and the focus on miniature sections of the level that act as teleporters to bigger sections of the level. See? Good ideas, Sandy! It's really E4M6, The Pain Maze, and E4M7, Azure Agony, that live up to their names. Overly long, too many spawns (exploding, very fast moving bouncing blobs), all ambush encounters in tight quarters, thus negating the usefulness of your explosives, no thanks. I skip through most of that shit. Worse yet, the final level, Shub-Niggurath's Lair, is just a long, annoying line of shamblers up a cliff face with an admittedly fun subversion in how you actually kill Shubby: not with your firepower, but with a well-timed telefrag, just like is fun to do to people in deathmatch.

On the whole, it's a little bit of an unremarkable end to one of my favorite games. Let's see how the mission packs do at solving that.

Summing up hipnotic

Scourge of Armagon is the mission pack I have the most experience with. I've almost made it through it a few times, but this time, I really wanted to see it through to the end. I'd say it's the strongest of the three. Both of the official mission packs add onto the base game in their own way, and hipnotic adds rotating entities, gravity fields, earthquakes, and a nice variety of weapons and enemies to make base levels (which the entire first third of the mission pack consists of) more satisfying and difficult to play.

hipnotic is similar in story to Half-Life 2, where a force called Armagon takes over Shubby's existing invasion infrastructure with aims of attacking Earth, and it's up to the jannie who swept it up the first time to sweep it up again (as jannies are good at). Spoilers! But the fight against Armagon is actually pretty decent for such a simple game like Quake. It feels like a throwback to Wolfenstein 3D's bosses, where you enter an ominous, open arena as the boss makes his presence felt, and unlike Shubby, sitting there like a pulsing pustule until you pop it, he is very fucking aggressive with his rockets, so brush up on your circle-strafing. It's fun! A good boss really helps to punctuate an arena shooter, an exclamation point on the end, and Scourge is probably the best of all the official bosses in the Quake universe.

Visually, hipnotic is a nice step up from id1. I can't fault how bad the texturing in id1 is, because it had a first of its kind level editor and the game was meant to run in 320x200 anyway, but hipnotic definitely polishes up the bases some with particle force fields and big showy multi-part doors. The bases about halfway through start to take on a mining camp feel, complete with cave-ins and sudden lava pits twenty feet below you--some pretty memorable stuff. The later levels are cool too; it's pretty hard to forget Ancient Realms, HIP2M1, with its cool non-linear multi-level castle (and now I've been in some real ones!), the gigantic working clock and that Jesus mural that fires lightning at you in The Black Cathedral, HIP2M3, the elevator ride over the shores of Hell in HIP3M1, Tur Torment, or all the coffin iconography into the third episode.

For new monsters, you get the centroid, a cybernetic scorpion with a nail attack apparently also known as the Scourge (yes, the Scourge of Armagon, roll credits) and gremlins, tiny lizard fuckers that steal your active weapon (annoying) and revive dead enemies (fuck you). I didn't find any of the new weaponry or power-ups all that exciting or useful. As cute as the idea of the Horn of Conjuring is, summoning a monster to fight for you instead, usually they just get stuck on the scenery downstairs instead. I did like the rapid-fire laser cannon, with its pleasing firing rate and silly pew-pew noises. Really, none of the gameplay additions in any of the mission packs can touch the loadout and enemy variety of the base game, but a couple of those fucking weird teleporting nail scorpions definitely help to break up the monotony of 200 dudes with shotguns and laser guns.

hipnotic isn't perfect, of course. Given what I heard online, I expected rogue to have all the really annoying traps, but hipnotic's are far worse. Anyone who's played it remembers the rock tumbler bit in HIP1M3, The Lost Mine, and if you haven't played it, when you find it, save right before! You will be reloading that save over and over, as dying in it is completely random, and you need to get through it to finish the level. There's also the spike mines, which are effectively gigantic and even more dangerous vorepods. They lumber towards you through the air, and you better hope you can wipe them off like boogers on the scenery, because otherwise your limbs will be in different dimensions. I fucking hate spike mines. All my homies hate spike mines.

Scourge of Armagon is definitely worth a play and maybe a few. I had a lot of fun with it, and there's plenty of cool sights to see that elevate Quake's otherworldly feeling with more actually recognizable locales like churches and mining camps. You gotta at least sorta have the feeling these are real places, or else they just feel like game levels. hipnotic is good at that, not in a way that makes it feel realistic, but in a way that makes it feel like the real world, but desecrated, turned odd and warped. Good expansion.