"The Half-Life games are the ultimate examples of this, and still by far the best shooters ever made."

I puked a little reading this.

Half-life was pretty cool when it was originally released and still a nice game, but to me it didn't age as good as a doom or quake or other classic style (I call them "good style") fpses. If you are a modern gamer, hl1 - 2 are not going to provide you with something that different from your average fps, while doom and quake have a fresher gameplay.

Hl2 is just pointless and boring in my opinion. You just know the developers thought the focus was the inane plot and the inane dialogue cutscenes (oh they are not cutscenes because you can pointlessly move gordon around), I think rage is funnier to play than hl2 and obviously cooler to look at. The gameplay in hl2 in particular is so unfun and boring and unchallenging that you feel they actually worked overtime to make it so dull. Also all of the weapon seem so damped in power (with ridicolously low ammo clips, hours to reload, low ammo capacity) to make you use the gravity gun (a pointless gimmick, in hindsight) as much as possible. It's like they actually feared the player would have too much fun using guns to just pick up crates and toilets and toss them at the few, unharmful monsters 

HL1 was cheesy and overrated.

HL2 was everything the first game should have been, slick, stylish and atmospheric. The gameplay wasn't as visceral as other shooters but it was certainly enough to make a great game. 

kind of was like the old horror films back in the early days. It was pretty unique at the time. It was definitely the right game at the right time, I fully recommend anyone play Black Mesa (it's free!).

Yeah it was kinda cheesy but this is part of the charm 

That's what I didn't find it. The vibe and atmosphere were straight out of X-Files / any other government paranoia production, the interaction was a small evolution from stuff like Unreal that had already taken some fine steps in that direction. It was well-executed and a good game but underwhelming compared to the hype. Xen was cool though. That was fresh. 

When I said unique I meant amongst videogames. It definitely drew a lot of inspiration from films and TV 

"That's what I didn't find it. The vibe and atmosphere were straight out of X-Files / any other government paranoia production, the interaction was a small evolution from stuff like Unreal that had already taken some fine steps in that direction. It was well-executed and a good game but underwhelming compared to the hype. Xen was cool though. That was fresh."

That was fantastic. THAT is how you bald faced troll with a straight face. Masterful, sir. 

I feel like an idiot now!

http://archive.4chon.net/edu/11467/src_1346802035875.png 

Straight up truth and you know it.

Conversely, something like Deus Ex totally lived up to the hype and did exactly what it promised. Quite a rare thing in games in general. Well apart from these days where many of the big name FPS shooters promise to be vacuous shite, and indeed are. 

came completely out of nowhere. I saw a preview that was fairly low-key and I bought the game because the box looked cool and it had some interesting elements. I actually played the game for an hour and I disliked it. I then went back to it after a week and decided to play it for a few more hours and ended up loving the hell out of it, it became one of my alltime favourite games. 

Hugs and peace allround. I don't think it was massively hyped....but it really did what it promised to. 

half-life1 is an overrated game actually. it was popular for doing more of a real life setting with a story, compared to other games of the time. ignoring duke nukem and sin that were also in modern city settings.

in hindsight the story wasn't actually that great though.

the design certainly wasn't that great, unreal and quake2 looked miles better.

it hasn't aged well because so many other games have gone down the same route of realism instead of fantasy for shooters, so it's all been done and done better since then.

but a game like quake has aged well because almost 20 years later there's still not really another game like it (not that i've played yet, or can remember). which pisses me off. 

Actually, what would you guys consider to be the closest game to Quake post 1996? Unreal is the obvious choice, but apart from that, I can't think of anything.

Definitely not the bright and zany Serious Sam or Painkiller with it's completely random levels and amateur enemies.

Nothing else has combined the hellish monsters, fast gameplay, and mix of fantasy/alien/horror/hell themes. 

Are close to Doom.

Everyone looks at Quake differently though, and it's become, with all the content we've helped make, a different game.

The original was basically get from a to b, killing everything you can without being killed or getting caught in a trap. No fluff.

Games since that era have more fluff than a mattress factory.

I can't think of a game with such a clean concept that is so open and yet suggestive to user content creation. Probably why I'm here, still working on it. 

That describes Wolf3D, Doom, ROTT, and everything else. Quake is much more specific about this.

So you're still gonna kill things in Quake, but not like in Doom II. In Doom II, you mow down things by the dozen. In Quake you'll fight, say, three monsters at the max. Probably you'll fight three guys, but it's going to be like a virtual fighter. There will be more skill involved in the fighting.

(...)

All you had to do was press the button - you move the mouse and press the button - and it's as easy as that. In Quake, you'll have to really kill things. You won't just press the trigger and hit it, you'll have to really beat the living shit out of the thing until it's dead. 

I don't consider Half-Life the least bit overrated. It was the narration and the realistic setting (the guns, the soldiers, and the fact that Black Mesa felt like an actual location) that made the game. Quake 2 & Unreal took very cautious steps toward NPCs and scripted sequences but Half-Life blew them out of the water.

I also would not describe Unreal as Quake-like. Quake was extremely generic with respect to map design (Duke3D of the time was the polar opposite) whileas Unreal went for maps that conveyed tons of awe-inspiring moments. Quake's maps were dull and uninspiring (although the first mission pack went a long way to alleviate this problem), even if they were functional (for all the action) and had a good layout. In Unreal, combat was in the background and only occasionally crept into the game. 

...boils down to one question: Do you play for the game or do you play to live an interactive movie? Recent games are pretty much that: movies. Some good, some not so much.

In that respect, SS and PK are a little more "play" oriented, but they sorely lack the beef of Quake hostility. And their gameplay is 10000 times more repetitive than Q's.

I'm currently replaying Quake 2, boy, THAT was something! 

I don't like deus ex. Interesting ideas, but it ultimately is a very boring shooter to play set in samey grey corridors.

To me the fun factor is the first and penultimate thing in a vidya or a fps.

Painkiller was really great in my opinion, and I disagree about variety, it was pretty great in that regard imho, sorry if I used great too much I'm not a native speaker and also I'm a turd idiot moron piece of shit... sigh... I can't fucking write :((((

I do agree though that painkiller is different from quake. What Serious Sam, Doom, Quake, Painkiller really have in common is that they are fun shooter 

fun shooterS, ignore my non native speaker TURD idiocy (that was more of a typo though) 

I don't think a modern "Quakelike" is necessarily hard to make, if you keep the basic premise in mind. Shades of brown and green, otherwise an absence of colours. Indoor areas of massive blockiness. Drab black-and-white lighting. Relentless combat involving crude weapons. Phlegmatic, single minded monsters that stumble into your gunfire like chainsaw-wielding lemmings, or lob projectiles at you before they switch to cannon-fodder mode and eventually explode in a fountain of "giblets". Oppressive music and sound effects. No story, no protagonist, no real attempt to communicate with the player. No interaction besides shooting and moving. No fancy particles except anemic dust and blood, no vegetation or other lifeforms unless thoroughly dead like those trees from Zerst�rer, and like the heaps of skulls adorning walls and doorways. The world is littered with pentagrams, crosses, demonic faces and unholy altars, but they all appear to be altars to nothing; since the game has no real story or setting (it cannot have those because it's not that kind of game), they cannot serve any particular purpose. The same goes for the handful of names taken from Lovecraft; they never actually matter besides sounding vaguely ominous. Like a half-assed iconoclastic statement without actual substance and without really trying to provide meaning. Thinly veiled mechanics.

It's mostly the absence of things that makes it unique. That makes Quake kind of an outstanding achievement, like a dehydrated nihilistic skeleton of a game, but it's also precisely what makes something like it unattractive to make, unless you're either a nihilist yourself or you hit the exact right balance of being talented and half-assed at the same time.

I think that's why such games aren't really made anymore. 

 

 

Why Are You Here?

Why are you asking? Did I not offer enough glowing praise for Quake? Did I allow myself too much of an opinion?

It might be hard to grasp for severely biased people, but I am not at odds with Quake's dreary, desiccated art style. I even said it was an achievement. I accept that such an art style is a valid thing to do. I respect it. You probably read it as a fundamental criticism of Quake, but that's not what it is. Read it again please.

Anyway, I'm here because I have an interest in Quake modding (I use a Quake-based engine myself) and I'm interested in games. But if my posting once in a blue moon is too much, well, you guys just tell me.

If that's what it is, then it's really kinda sad. 

It sounded more like you didn't like the game at all.

It is stripped down, in all aspects, to leave just what's necessary to make one of the highest metacritic rated games of all time.

And I'm sure you can appreciate how difficult it is to not put more features into a game than are necessary. 

I don't like deus ex. Interesting ideas, but it ultimately is a very boring shooter to play set in samey grey corridors.

Hm, I don't really think of it as a 'shooter'. If you play it in the same way you would play HL or Quake, then yes, it's very boring. What I like about it is how the game invites the player to try to exploit as much of the environment as possible, even though it's way too gray and samey :P

I don't think I played another game besides Deus Ex that closely follows a storyline and at the same time feels like infinitely replayable. To me there usually seems to be a dichotomy between story driven design and replaybility as can be found in arcade games. 

it's first person rpg. Sure, you can get guns *and* shoot people, but that's not really what the game is about.