Happy new year to everyone reading my journal! I have a really good feeling about 2025. Like, really good. There was a lot to be proud of last year, but just as often, I learned I was just as sick if not a little more as the people around me, and, at my worst, I feel like I neglected my friends and my girlfriend. I forgot that, if you want good times, you have to make them. No one can do that for you or to you. It wasn't on purpose or anything, but that doesn't mean it's right.
Thankfully, things have been healing. I recently got back in touch with one of my high school friends, who dropped by the area, took me to lunch, we caught up and then we bought a ton of CDs together (Logan's trying to get me into Deftones, and he might just succeed). The last couple streams I've done, especially last night's demoing marfGH features and charts with Caby as cohost, were a blast. Seriously, even my mom told me how loud I was and how much fun I seemed to be having last night. Gonna say that's a pretty damn good way to spend New Year's Eve, online with a bunch of people watching you drunkenly play your custom Guitar Hero songs and chatting together.
I feel like, in a lot of ways, creatively and personally and emotionally, I'm starting over from scratch, but that's exciting and relieving, honestly. I want to heal things. I know I gotta take care of myself and the people around me better. I'm ready to get back to having fun and doing the things that made people like me in the first place. I really have thrown the rulebook out for 2025. I have no requirements and no idea what all I'll get up to, and I'm very happy about that. No doubt it'll be something good.
On that note, have that Quake II ramble I've been trying to write for weeks now!
So slowly but surely, I have been doing a thing I've been calling "gaming through time". It's no big secret my favorite eras for games are the late 90s and early 2000s, and thanks to the trips and CEX, I've started amassing a nice collection of PC games, complete in box (albeit not big box, which doesn't really break my heart to be honest with you) from that time period. With the revival of the eMachines Box thanks to my new desk and the new hard drive I put in it in 2023, I've got a surprisingly really satisfying setup for playing them on. All the individual components are pretty low end, but next-gen low end, meaning they run last-gen games silky smooth.
Given that I do still want to upgrade it eventually to run mid-decade XP games, I've been starting with my older games, many of which I've never beaten, and finally beating them in chronological order and seeing the improvements in graphics, worldbuilding, and gameplay as I get to each next one. You might remember when I beat Quake and all of its expansions back in October or so, and obviously, Quake II was to follow. Here's a belated ramble about it.
Summing up Quake II
Let's address the name before we continue. This is not a sequel to Quake. This is, at best, a spiritual successor. The story goes that id, newly without its star game designer John Romero, wanted to take a less fantastical, more science fiction direction for their next game, couldn't come up with a suitable name, and Quake II it became. Quake II also makes sense in that John Carmack, who had recently taken operative dictatorship over id in the split of The Two Johns, believed more in iterating on what was known to work, the linear key-and-gun arena shooter formula, rather than coming up with new big ideas for id's next game. I'll come back to that thought throughout this post.
Carmack was known for his disappointment with Quake's development. He believed he took on too much at once, with Quake featuring a fully 3D rendered, self-occluding world, polygonal 3D models for everything, and a TCP/IP networking model for multiplayer being a really tall ask for maybe less than two years of development time. It suits that Quake II, technologically, only makes smaller improvements to Quake's existing tech stack, like colored and texture-based lighting, full skyboxes, DLLs for modding as opposed to QuakeC, and working towards the ever-approaching 3D accelerator takeover with better OpenGL support than even GLQuake had (naturally, I played using the software renderer, because I like crunchy).
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So what all does change with Quake II? The story focuses on a race of cybernetic aliens called the Strogg (pronounce it like stroganoff), who have come to subjugate Earth, and you're the last guy who can slip inside their main bases and sabotage them from the inside. Like I said, if you're looking for anything to do with Armagon, or Shubby, or any of Quake's Lovecraftian mythos and themes, they're not here. This is about as connected to Quake as TimeSplitters is to Goldeneye on the N64—they share a similar engine, core gameplay concepts. and most of the same developers, and that's about it. Is that necessarily a bad thing? For me, Quake is definitely the moodier, more interesting game, but Quake II's setting isn't bad. If anything, its military bases are probably more visually defined than Quake's bases, and definitely neater built.
That said, the lack of visual variety very much doesn't help the game, since it's now about three times the length of Quake with about the same depth. Each of the eight Strogg bases in the game give you a major objective that amounts to "find the button and press it", whether that's to disable a satellite array, render a Big Gun inoperable, things that feel less substantial than they should, even with the satisfyingly gooey polygonal explosion you get each time. Even the pickups, data CDs and commander's heads, are just renamed and reskinned keys like we've been picking up since Doom. Even some of the textures, especially the liquid textures, are literally reused from Quake, as are some of your player sounds.
Again, it all goes back to Carmack's desire for iteration than innovation. It's not that that's bad, but so much feels like its predecessor, the sounds, the gunplay, the fact that it retains secrets and a kill count per level, that it's impossible not to compare the two, and Quake pretty much always comes out the more satisfying game. For its design and feel, Quake was the ideal length. It was really difficult to get lost in its levels, and the variety in texture themes, from idbase to terracotta, swampy wizard to runic, gave you a nice sense of progression that Quake II really doesn't. Worse yet, the increased size means I had to consult StrategyWiki twice to discover the single passageway forwards I happened to miss, which never happened with the original.
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That's not to say there weren't some genuinely memorable and chilling moments while I was playing, though. Quake II has sections featuring your fellow soldiers as they get tortured and medically experimented on by the Strogg, and yes, these sections are all interactive! Even with the game's 1997 graphics, seeing a soldier get dangled above lava in a cage, with an option for you to dip him yourself provided you can kill the aliens first (and you get rewarded with a spare gun, even), is seriously disturbing and quite effective. Other times, you'll pass through a holding area of delirious soldiers all mumbling to themselves or getting sliced up on tables, and it's freaky. Quake II definitely does its setpieces well, even if the level design is on the whole only alright.
How about the gunplay? It's not bad. The game starts you off with an infinite ammo peashooter laser gun and slowly introduces two flavors of automatic, a machine gun and a chaingun, two shotguns, a grenade and rocket launcher, and a few energy weapons up to the BFG 10K (obviously an upgraded version of Doom's BFG 9000). Like in Doom II and Quake, the double-barreled shotgun really steals the show for daily use, with the Hyperblaster not far behind, and the Railgun being a satisfyingly piercing supersonic cannon that always leaves body parts flying on the business end of the weapon. Seriously, if you remember how overpowered the rocket launcher was in Quake, the Railgun is that for this game, and it is very nice to have in the toolbox when the big guys on robot legs start to rain shit on you.
A lot of the other guns, though, really don't feel like they do enough damage, especially next to Quake's excellent balance where you could basically count how many shots you had left before an enemy dropped. I hate to keep going back to the original for comparison, but even when the guns are directly comparable, like the grenade launcher, I just felt like I had more power and better aim with the Quake version. Seriously, not to give you spoilers, but the final boss of the game went down way easier than the enemies that preceded him.
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It sounds like I didn't like Quake II, and that's really not the impression that I want to give, because while it was on, it was decently fun. Each of the sections, preceded by an FMV cutscene giving you a briefing on your mission objective, I pretty much breezed through, and the soundtrack is a shift from the creepy ambience of the first game to some pretty gnarly (if only sporadically memorable) industrial metal tracks. Like I said, I do really like how it looks! There's plenty of atmosphere between the rusty pipes, rock walls, crushers, drilling machines, sawblades, and cybernetic jail cells as you monkey around the decaying infrastructure of the Strogg, clearing out mooks and reducing everyone after death to meaty chunks (which I recommend doing, the bodies draw flies and it makes my skin crawl).
But, that said, I'm probably good on playing it for a long, long time.
Really, where Quake II is most interesting is in comparing it to Daikatana, the high-profile failure John Romero oversaw at Ion Storm after his departure. Quake II has all of the technological solidness and none of the imagination. Muscly dudes and big robots with bigger guns is what ya get, and as I've been saying, if you've played Quake, you know the exact gameplay of Quake II as well. Daikatana on the other hand, comes from the opposite end of the spectrum, a place where "design is key" was practically an unofficial slogan of Ion Storm. Daikatana had a lot of cool ideas, a main character with a gigantic sword and two AI sidekicks traveling through time, and was notoriously buggy, choppy, and badly put together, stemming from it switching to, funnily enough, the Quake II engine from the Quake engine halfway through its long development.
Carmack was Romero's rock. Romero was Carmack's flights of fancy. Carmack would develop a crazy engine feature, and Romero would make sure it was front and center in his levels. They were young, and hubris split them apart. Each subsequent id game would be less and less noteworthy, save Quake III: Arena and Doom 3, and Ion Storm's more successful games like Deus Ex and Anachronox largely had nothing to do with Romero. Quake II and Daikatana are the perfect examples of why they needed each other, and how they helped each other excel in the end.
Anyway! Onto Half-Life—which I've since discovered I cannot play seriously whatsoever anymore, as I try to bhop across Black Mesa, usespam and sequence break all the NPCs, and generally act like a crackhead. That's all part of the fun though.
