Quake 3: Arena??

In complete desperation, I pulled out Q3A this weekend because I felt the need to frag something. I was amazed.

Let me give you some background first: When Q3A first came out, c. 1999, I hated it. I had a crappy computer that was good enough for Q2, but Q3A required a supercomputer to run. I played the single-player arenas, which were sort of fun, and then I tried to play multiplayer Capture The Flag with my clanmates. Sheesh was that ever a mistake. Coming out of Q2 CTF, where the pace of gameplay was fairly slow, into Q3A CTF, where the pace was ratcheted up somewhere around lightspeed, was quite a rude (and frustrating) awakening. The game was so clearly unbalanced in favor of high bandwidth connections that it was just silly. And then, rampant bot cheats plagued the game. So, I didn’t play too much Q3A.

Now, I have a computer that in 1999 would have been considered a supercomputer. So I load up Q3A and it screams. I’m playing the bots in the single-player arenas and it’s actually fun. I can’t believe I ever would have said a shooter was fun again. Now, granted, I think it would only be fun in multiplayer on a LAN, but still, just the possibility that a computer game could be fun again in this era of every-new-game-is-just-a-clone-of-the-last-game is rather startling.

So in short, I think I really shortchanged Q3A when it came out. Sorry, id Software.

So now I see that Quake 4 is due out in October. Undoubtedly, my computer won’t run it worth crap, but I still want to see it.