The story of Quake II

Wanted to buy: One Quake II install CD-ROM. Box and manuals not required. Looks unimportant, must be functional.

I have a penchant for old video games, and Quake II is one I haven't played in awhile. I'd like to again, but for extenuating reasons, I can't. Believe me, I regret it now.

I was late getting into the FPS genre. By the time I bought Doom, it was already up to version 1.9. It was the last game I bought that came on floppies; you kids these days will have no appreciation for gaming until you sit in front of a de-icer screen for an hour feeding disks into your PC and hitting the Enter key.

By the time Doom II hit shelves, CD-ROMs were all the rage, and 650 megabytes was practically infinite. It was like magic: you put it into your machine and then it installed itself from there. No swapping floppies, no watching twin progress bars trudge across your monitor. Doom 2 was more than just a sequel. It had the same engine as the first, but the game was just so much bigger. Doom 2 had outdoor levels, something sorely underutilized in the first one, but forgiveably so: Doom took place on the inhospitable moons of Mars, Doom II took place on good old terra firma. There was a respectable number of new monsters and the ending was much more appropriate than Doom's. (Three BFG blasts for the final episode's boss? After the second episode's boss took five?)

In high school, Quake became all the rage. I bought a shareware CD with a dozen id Software titles encoded on it. The idea was that you'd play the Quake demo, then like it so much that you'd call up the company, give them your credit card number, and they'd give you a special code to unlock a software title. Needless to say, in my unscrupulous youth I had neither a credit card nor a desire to pay to unlock software I already, technically, owned. So I never paid for my full install of Quake, or Ultimate Doom, or Hexen, for that matter. (Trust me: Hexen was so bad that id should have paid me.)

Not coincidentally, it was around this time that id started making software so impossibly difficult to play that you'd have to be a masochist to try to actually beat the game without cheating. The Doom titles were pretty basic: kill the monsters, find keys, locate the exit. With Quake, id developed traps and tripwires. Now, not only was I being chased by Dobermans and dodging acid spores and running from fucking knights in suits of armor, I was also getting perforated by hidden nailgun turrets, or sliding floors built over pools of flesh-rending magma.

Traps alone are bad enough, but the traps are spread throughout vast, complicated levels that span sometimes half a dozen floors: you'd can't get the silver key on floor 4 until you've pressed the switch in the hidden cave in the moat on floor 0. I'd look at the map of certain levels, and I'd think "What kind of unbudgeted sociopathic architect built this thing?" Most Quake levels were a combination between "gothic cathedrals of Europe" and "Carlsbad Caverns". I never beat Quake, at least not without cheating. I think it had something to do with a monster called a dimensional shambler. Think of a Yeti twice your height who can summon lightning at will. Also, he's incredibly resilient to damage. Also, the game seems to drop them right on fucking top of you. Literally. In the final level, shamblers drop from the sky and toast your ass before you even know where to look.

Speaking of the final level, Quake introduced something unusual, something that Doom never had: puzzles. Finishing Quake meant solving puzzles while under fire, usually because whatever the Big Bad Thing you had to kill was, it was immune to all of your weapons. Case in point: the first episode had a boss that lived in a lake of lava. When you live in lava, you tend to find being hit with shotgun shells and high-velocity nails to be little more than a nuisance. Tragically, this guy had chosen a lava pit that is exactly beneath the largest open-air arcing electricity conduit in the world. So after busting your hump to slay a sea of zombies, dogs, and flying flukeworms, you had to run around in a circle, jumping on two setup switches, then a third one to deliver the charge and zap him. This isn't written down anywhere in the game. You don't have a chance to type "read newspaper clipping" or ask the old man in the bar about the recent disturbances in the local mines. You have to somehow figure this out, all the while dodging the lumps of hot rock that are being lobbed in your direction.

I don't think I'm ruining the ending of the game for you when I tell you that no matter how hard you try, you cannot shoot the final boss. Sure, you can fire your weapon at her, but it won't do you any good. I spent a substantial amount of time trying this, eventually getting to the point where I was hacking on her uselessly with a hatchet. To win the game, you have to notice a spiked object that flies around on a fixed path, and then carefully walk through a slipgate at just the exact moment that the object goes inside Shub Niggurath. You kill the mother of all monsters by telefragging her. If you've never played Quake in multiplayer mode, there is no impetus to try this method unless you hear about it from someone else.

So I felt kind of cheated by Quake: am I supposed to shoot these damn things or ask them what's behind the enchanted waterfall? When Quake II came out, I was in college, and the wonders of 3000 Windows machines running SMB sharing meant that I never had to buy it, either. Of course, I probably should have. I installed somebody else's copy of Quake II and I really enjoyed the superior graphics and, more than that, superior design choice to use colors other than green and brown. Quake II was a revolutionary shift in FPS: levels weren't static, and you could travel back and forth between them. So it was actually your choice if you wanted to hit that wallswitch in level four. If you didn't, you couldn't cross the bridge in level five, but then taking the sewer would get you the good suit of armor. I loved Quake II, for the reason that though it probably varied very little from Quake I in terms of monsters in rooms that need to be killed, it illuminated them much better.

Problem was, Quake II wasn't any easier than Quake I was. Instead of a few monsters sniping you while you tried to figure out what would work since your grenade launcher clearly wasn't doing the job, you were instead greeted by a small army of monsters coming right at you every time you opened a door. If Quake I's weakness was its architecture, Quake II's weakness was the clusterfuck mentality of its monsters. If you wanted to live, you had to find a hole or a corner and stay there, picking off the bad guys one by one until they were almost gone. For every room.

Now, I wouldn't mind this so much if...wait. I would mind this. Even though Quake I failed to allow me to just let go and unload round after round at the baddies, Quake II failed to allow me to survive an onslaught of monsters. So I put it down and considered id titles a lost cause. They were no longer meant for me, the fan looking to blow off some steam killing imps. Instead, they were intended for the hardcore fanatic, the man who plays for hours a day, knows all the neat little tricks for getting into corners and has perfected "jumping" by dropping grenades at your feet. To really enjoy these games anymore, you need to consider fighting a behemoth with a giant hammer for an arm as a reward and not some kind of divine retribution. You can't clear a level in four minutes anymore, because it would take you that long just to navigate through half of a typical level in Quake I, and you wouldn't live that long in an level of Quake II.

I refused to buy Quake III. More to the point, I refused to steal a copy and play it, either. I took a raincheck on Doom III for much the same reason. Still, there are some days when I want to go back and play a level or two, just to see if I still remember which end of the railgun you're supposed to point towards the bad guys. But I can't do it. Let this be a lesson to you: if you use stolen software now, you'll regret it later.