So, the Doom series had its thing, in the early nineties... but where to go next? The plethora of clones and spin-offs -- Duke Nukem 3D, Heretic and Hexen, Dark Forces -- had pretty much pushed the Doom engine to its limit. So id Software went back to the drawing board, with the first truly 3D First Person Shooter: Quake.
A classic in its own right, the game starts off in a similar way to Doom -- it focuses on a futuristic soldier, who is tasked with stopping a Hellish invasion. You take the offensive, jumping headlong into the monsters' hometurf -- a medieval alternate world, populated with Lovecraftian monstrosities. Along the way, you collect runestones -- intended to help Shub-Niggurath send her minions to Earth, you instead will use them to crash her pad. That's pretty much it, for plot.
As with its ancestor, Quake is pretty much all about combat and horror, and Boy Howdy does it deliver on both! There may be less monsters per capita than, for instance,Doom II, but you have to beat the crap out of every living thing you come across. Adding to that, is that many levels are outright claustrophobic, the monster placement in general is almost sadistic, and while still not overly smart, the monsters are all quite able to rip the meat off of your bones if you aren't on your game.
Some of the levels tend to look the same, after a while, but they are very elaborate -- sometimes quite imaginative -- and spooky as all hell. This is especially so, going the Abandonware route, without the Trent Reznor score -- I've heard some of it on its own, and it's very gut churning, but to date I've never heard it in the context of the game. I've only heard the ambient sound and the mayhem... and frankly that can be surprisingly terrifying. Deathmatch is also a hell of a lot of fun, if you can find the servers and friends to do it with, these days.
However, I'm borderline on the sequels -- as much as its moot for a DOSBox blog -- because they have NOTHING to do with this game. At all. They are fun in their own right, but where I'm concerned, they aren't Quake.
