Caladan

FAR: Changing Tides

Let's have a look at FAR: Changing Tides, a new game from the makers of FAR: Lone Sails (2018). It's a 3D-but-viewed-from-the-side platform puzzle game with an artistic bent. In Lone Sails you drove a train that went on the land, just like a train. In Changing Tides you drive a train that goes in the water, which is a boat.

A train that goes in the water is a boat. I enjoyed Lone Sails. It only took a few hours to finish, and I haven't played it since I wrote about it in 2019, but the soundtrack was lovely and the storyline was surprisingly affecting. It was simple but bittersweet. I admired the game's thematic consistency.

Changing Tides is similar but not as good. I didn't feel anything, and the gameplay isn't enough to fill that emptiness. It's not bad, it just feels prosaic in comparison.

In Lone Sails you controlled a little girl called Lone, who found herself lost in a frozen wilderness. Her only friend was the Okomotive, a steam-powered vehicle made by her late father:

fastened to a dying animal

The gameplay consisted of stoking the Okomotive's engine and working out how to move past the obstacles that lay in its path. There wasn't much to it, but something about the act of maintaining a steam engine in a bleak, empty landscape was appealing. It had a sense of hygge, which was one of those trendy words that was all the rage in 2018.

Changing Tides captures that feeling as well, especially given that your vehicle can go underwater! At one point I rode out a nasty storm by submerging and chugging gracefully through the ocean depths.  Periodically I pressed a button and jumped on some bellows, which wasn't difficult at all, but it was engaging because it felt cosy. Neither Lone Sails nor Changing Tides are full-on The Sims, but they do have a little world all their own.

This time you're a little boy who finds himself lost in a frozen etc. Your only friend is a big boat thing - I have no idea what it's called - that can sail or chug-chug through the water. When you want to use sail power you have to tack the sails, and when you want to chug-chug you have to pump up some steam and set the throttle. You can even combine the two power sources if you want to go really fast, but you have to take care to drop the sails when you go through tunnels, otherwise some of the gears start to throw out sparks and you have to fix them.

See the blue circle in the screenshot above? Your vehicle has a sensor of some kind, and the little dot represents fuel. Sometimes you have to venture outside to pick up bits of wood, cans of petrol, discarded suitcases etc, all of which go in the vehicle's boiler.

The game has a completely linear left-to-right path. The fuel tends to appear in places where you need it, and it respawns if you run out. You can't really explore the world, and except for one scripted sequence you can't go into or out of the background.

Visually the game is a little more inventive than the original, with automatic pans and zooms that point out significant details.

The game divides into essentially three elements. For the most part you drive, sail, motor, and swim through the world in your vehicle, but occasionally you have to hop out in order to interact with giant abandoned machines that block your path. Along the way you upgrade your vehicle and use its systems to reawaken the relics of a bygone society.

None of the puzzles are particularly difficult, and you can't die or lose. In the original there was one part where you could fail, but the game wrote it off as a dream sequence; in the sequel there's a scary bit near the beginning, but nothing especially bad comes of it. Beyond a few prompts the game has no dialogue and no instructions, but the intricacies of your vehicle are well-signposted and the puzzles are designed in such a way that you can press things at random without getting permanently stuck, just like the original.

This does however lead to one of the game's problems, which is that it feels like a retread of Lone Sails. You hook things up to your vehicle's winch and pull them out of the way, just like the original. You activate ancient power sources in order to open doors, which is nothing new, and you repair damage to your vehicle by fiddling around with what appears to be the same oil can. I managed to finish the entire game in a little over five hours, because having played Lone Sails I wasn't surprised by any of the sequel's puzzles.

In its favour the game has considerable visual spectacle, but after a while that wore out. It has a slightly more realistic look than Lone Sails, which unfortunately means that instead of being timelessly stylish it reminded me uncomfortably of Myst.

Lone Sails had an excellent soundtrack that put me in mind of early Michael Nyman, with rude saxophone parps and lovely strings. Clarinets. Oboes, I don't know. Those woodwind instruments that go parp. The soundtrack was synchronised with the action, which worked extremely well. In contrast the music of Changing Tides is deployed only intermittently, and none of the themes are as memorable. There's nothing wrong with the soundtrack, it just feels like b-roll out-takes from the original.

The biggest problem is the storyline. Or rather than lack of a theme. Lone Sails was a meditation on the strength of the soul versus the frailty of the human body. During the first half of the game Lone patches up the Okomotive, and for a brief shining moment she is top of the world - such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make of hammered gold - but it starts to break down, and by the end of the game the broken wreckage of the machine crawls to its death on the shores of Byzantium.

In contrast Changing Tides has none of this. There's a contextual story of a race of ancients who seemed to meet their end by tampering with power they could not control, but it's slight. Beyond that there's no theme, no emotional core. It's just a cute little puzzle platform game that takes only a few hours to finish. If Lone Sails had been 2001: A Space Odyssey, Changing Tides is 2010: The Year We Make Contact. Decent in its own right, very plain.

The ending made me smile, though, particularly one of the ending slides.

One thing puzzled me. The game has a massive, massive credits list. It seems to have more developers than Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice. There are two separate localisation teams based in Japan and Montreal, despite the fact that the game has no written language or any dialogue, plus an "influencer manager". Perhaps they wanted to make sure that arrows were not offensive in Japan, who knows. Given that the game only costs £14.99 I wonder how much money will be left in the pot once their wages are paid.

Changing Tides is available for the PC, the XBox, and the PlayStation (4 and 5). On a technical level it feels slightly odd as a PC game, because it's keyboard-only - the mouse does nothing, not even in the menus - and you can't redefine the keys. I don't have a problem with that, but perhaps you might.

Quake: The Animal in the Water

It took humanity thousands of years to write Quake. For legal reasons the game is credited to John Carmack, John Romero - no relation - and Sandy Petersen, Mike Abrash, Adrian Carmack, American McGee, Trent Reznor etc, but it was also written by Florentine architect Filippo Brunelleschi, who developed the rules of perspective in the 1400s, and by Greek physicist Aristotle, who formulated the laws of physics in the fourth century BC, and by [insert lady mathematician here], and [something about the Arabs who invented zero], the list goes on.

We all wrote Quake. Each and every one of us. Except for people born after 1996, which is when Quake was released. They didn't write Quake. But everybody else. Everybody else wrote Quake. Everybody is partially responsible for Quake.

Humanity can trace its fossil record back over three hundred thousand years. It took at least that long for us to develop Quake, but it took only two more years for us to develop Unreal and Half-Life, which were considerably more advanced than Quake, and within a few years Quake was an antique, and at this point I have written the word Quake so often that it no longer has meaning.

Why do I say all this? One of the philosophical ideas floating around during Quake's time was the notion of an inevitable technological singularity. A singularity driven by the internet, which was wicked cool in 1996 and did much to keep Quake relevant after everybody had finished the single-player levels.

Fans of the singularity argued that human knowledge increases at an ever-faster rate, because each new discovery improves our ability to discover new things. In antiquity scholars had limited access to the sum total of human knowledge, but eighteen hundred years after Plato opined that the physical world is less real than the mental world Johannes Gutenberg came up with an economical way to print books rapidly and cheaply, after which it took just four hundred years before Marconi came up with radio communications.

Marconi had access to books, see, all kinds of books from all over the world, carried to his door by ocean liners, whereas Plato only had access to whatever he could get his hands on in ancient Greece, and I mean obviously the books weren't literally carried to Marconi's door by ocean liners. They were  carried by people, little links in the chain.

Forty years after radio we invented television, and twenty more years after that the first wide-area computer networks came into being. A decade later we invented mobile phones and Pong, and it stands to reason therefore that humanity reached its mental apotheosis some time in 1978, back when the world was grooving to Father Abraham and the Smurfs. The key thing is that humanity's access to knowledge allows us to spread knowledge more rapidly, and as they used to say in the 1990s that kind of thing makes the pie higher. The rising tide lifts all boats etc. It was easier to talk about rising tides in a positive way in the 1990s.

Eighteen hundred years separated Plato's The Republic from Gutenberg's printed Bible, but only six hundred years separate Gutenberg's Bible from the first episode of Rick and Morty, an animated cartoon broadcast across the entire world, instantly, via a mixture of digital broadcasting and the internet. And only one year separated Rick and Morty from Bojack Horseman. When humanity realises it can do something, it does the hell out of it.

Proponents of the singularity believe that we will reach a point when human progress implodes into a singularity of knowledge; a point at which we develop The Ultimate Machine, beyond which there will be no more to discover. The obvious counterargument is that humanity obviously did not reach its apotheosis in 1978, and that all of the aforementioned inventions - the printing press, radio, holograms - rely on a mixture of fundamentally different technologies, each of which is only tangentially linked to the other, and that even with total knowledge there are still physical limits. What if we determine that the processing power required to understand the universe requires more computational capacity than there are atoms?

This being the 1990s, fans of the singularity had no time for nay-sayers. They were hopeful that the singularity would happen during their lifetimes, preferably before the year 2000, because life was sweet in the 1990s and it should last forever. That was why Quake was so brown and drab. Life was so great in the 1990s that people craved sadness. We They wanted to be immortal millionaires right now, and the internet was going to make it happen.

Now, this was just one strand of philosophical thought. There were other voices. A handful of angry teenagers were convinced that our economic partnerships with third world nations were exploitative, which is of course nonsense. Nigeria will be perfectly free to sell its oil to the highest bidder when the 999-year lease with British Petroleum runs out in just 812 years. Nigeria will still be around in 812 years. It's not all that long.

Furthermore a few lunatics believed that our dependence on fossil fuels might be harmful, and that the same society that had invented credit default swaps and the Mercedes W140 would be unable to deal with a few minor upward fluctuations in the world's climate. We laugh about these people now, but at the time their views were perilously close to mainstream acceptance. Some malcontents in the media even believed that the poor still existed, despite the total absence of poor people on the internet. I don't remember seeing any in the 1990s. Where were they? Hiding? In a cardboard box? There was absolutely nothing stopping them from connecting to the internet with their PowerBook G3.

And the elderly, and unattractive people. Where were they? If they had existed, advertisers would have targeted them. And yet despite all this I had doubts about the singularity. It's not that I'm a luddite, or that I'm worried about a plague of grey goo or an AI revolution. It's just that the universe is a physical process, bound by the laws of physics, and it has limits. The history of the universe is one of irreversible dissolution and decay, and in the long run the universe of matter - the stars, the planets, us - it is just a small blip in a story that begins with a vast explosion of energy and ends with dust and darkness.

And what if our exploration of the human brain reveals that we are just animals, and that consciousness is an illusion? Anyway, Quake popularised mouselook but it didn't become the default control scheme until Quake II, in 1998, which makes me appreciate Quake's level design all the more. Despite exploiting verticality the maps can still be enjoyed by players who remain planted on the ground. It has a degree of vertical autoaim, which is cheating, but the point of a video game is to have fun, not to be frustrated and annoyed. Even Dark Souls isn't non-stop crushing failure, it has moments of joy.

I'm old enough to remember Quake when it was new. I remember playing the demo, which was called QTest or something like that. Quake was the follow-up to Id Software's groundbreaking and extremely popular first person shooter Doom (1993), which made the formerly staid PC into the hippest gaming platform around.

Until that point the PC was not a natural fit for action games. The PC had plenty of processing power, but its graphics hardware didn't have native support for hardware sprites, so conversions of console titles generally ran poorly on the PC. Street Fighter II ran far, far better on the SNES than it did on the PC, despite the fact that the PC cost more than five times as much and was in theory more powerful. The PC's processing power was good for flight simulators and number-heavy role-playing games, but its graphics hardware was poor.

PC's didn't even come as standard with a sound card until the 1990s. You had to buy one separately because it was expected that you would use your PC to run Lotus 123 in silence. Doom even has support for the PC beeper, because in 1993 not everybody had sound:

As a consequence the PC majored in flight simulators, point-and-click adventures, role-playing games, SimCity and Civilization, all of which were aimed at nerds and could be played with a Frank Zappa CD doodling away in the background. PCs were aimed at nerds and their dads.

Doom changed all that. It was a straightforward action game built on a fast, smooth 3D engine that made two-dimensional games look quaint in comparison. Id originally wanted to make a complicated, story-driven action-adventure with multiple characters and a role-playing element, but during the development process all of that was pared away until the end result was non-stop cartoon violence. There were demons from hell - monarchs of the kingdom of the dead - and you had to shoot them, punch them, cut them up with a chainsaw. It was fun.

At the time Doom was refreshing. It was less monotonous than the mazy Wolfenstein 3D, and the emphasis on shooting and chainsawing was a breath of fresh air after years of games in which you had to explore a maze in order to find the Amulet of Protection so that you could cross the Bridge of Pain in order to enter the Dungeon of Azmanoth where you would find the first of four runes that would unlock the Grimoire of Etc and then you had to find the other three runes. Doom's only concession to adventure was the need to pick up keys to open doors, but the levels were designed in such a way that finding the keys was fun, and pressing the switches unleashed yet more monsters.

Doom's brutally simplistic ultraviolence made King's Quest look like a boring flow chart. It made Wing Commander look like a bunch of television actors wearing cat heads standing in front of a big sheet of green paper. It made The 7th Guest look like a pile of cack. It made X-Wing look like a potentially good game ruined by escort missions. Etc.

Doom attracted widespread coverage in the gaming magazines, and even a bit of coverage in the mainstream press. In this article the New York Times' writer ponders whether Doom is "a heart-pounding shoot-'em-up that takes computer games to a new level of technical sophistication or an orgy of graphic violence that takes computer games to a new low". Lord knows how he reacted to the Columbine Massacre. I'm going to move on to the next paragraph.

It's often said that Doom drove sales of PCs, but it's hard to prove it. There were a lot of other factors at play back then, notably the internet. The game was released a few months after Tim Berners-Lee released the first ever web browser, after which the World Wide Web really took off. Sales of PCs soared from 1994 onwards, but I suspect this was because the PC was the only practical way to surf the internet, not because of Doom. You couldn't internet on a SNES. At the very least I like to imagine that Doom finally killed off the 386 and cemented the 486 as the best balance of price and performance.

At the time a decent 486DX2/66 cost around £1,200, which was take-out-a-bank-loan money, but I remember that people were prepared to spend that much, ostensibly to learn to code, or balance the books with Quattro Pro, but secretly to play Doom. Official sales figures for Doom are hard to come by, because the game was released as a shareware product - a demo, for which you paid extra to get the rest of the game - and it was widely pirated because it fit on just five floppy discs. Nonetheless legend has it that Doom was, for a time, installed on more computers than Microsoft Windows. This prompted Microsoft to develop a method to play games seamlessly under Windows 95, which eventually became DirectX; the Windows 95 port of Doom was the first game to use this new technology and is thus indirectly responsible for DirectX and, in a roundabout way, the Xbox.

In the years that followed Commodore and Atari collapsed, Linux got a mascot, Bill Gates became the richest man in the world, Intel and AMD saw off Cyrix and WinChip, Steve Jobs returned to Apple, RISC workstations started to die off, and in general the modern age of home computing began in earnest. Doom was not solely responsible for any of that. but I like to think that if you broke each of those events into a bunch of contributing factors - time, money, will, vanity, greed, men, women, dreams - Doom would be the only video game on any of those lists. It didn't run on the Amiga and ST; it drove people onto the internet; it showed people that the PC was a viable games platform; it convinced some of the world's most influential business leaders that their computing platform needed to run Doom if it was to be a success.

Quake was also influential. Measurably moreso than Doom, although it tends to be overlooked nowadays. Id Software optimised Quake for the Intel Pentium CPU, and as a result it performed poorly when benchmarked on Cyrix systems, with the 3D accelerated GLQuake barely topping 20fps at 640x480, half that of an equivalent Pentium. This is often cited as the main reason for poor sales of Cyrix's CPUs, and for the company's eventual decision to give up on desktop computers in favour of the mobile market. By "often cited" I mean "cited twice", but humour me.

For a while the new 3D accelerator market was driven by a desire to play Quake and Quake II at 640x480 and above, with texture smoothing, at 25fps. The two games were for years afterwards standard magazine benchmark tests. Rendition got there first with VQuake, but Id decided to support the industry-wide OpenGL graphics language instead, which ran well on 3dfx's competing Voodoo cards. As a result the 3dfx Voodoo and Voodoo 2 ruled the roost for several years, until NVidia finally got its act together.

The game's sales figures are hard to pin down. It was released as both a boxed product and as a shareware demo, and as with Doom it was widely pirated, albeit on CDR rather than floppy discs. It didn't have masses of cutscenes and the music was optional. You could take out the game disc and play your own music if you wanted. The internet cites anything from one million to three million sales, which was okay but still only on a par with Command and Conquer, Diablo, StarCraft and the like. Within a few years the enormous expansion of the console market made Quake and PC games in general look like small fry.

Quake may have driven off flight simulators and point and click adventures, but the market for role-playing games and action adventures on the PC was far more robust. With the decline of traditional "boomer shooters" in the 2000s the revolution began by Doom and Duke Nukem 3D etc eventually fizzled out, replaced by the children of Rainbow Six and Operation Flashpoint, with World of Warcraft and The Sims and MineCraft gazing down from a much higher hill, and the controller-optimised action games of the console world gazing down from another, yet higher hill, high above everybody else, but that is yet another story.

Despite its strengths I remember being disappointed with Quake. It didn't grab me. By 1996 the competition was stronger and the game had a number of technical and artistic shortcomings. Its visuals were groundbreaking but not pretty. Not like Unreal a couple of years later. That grabbed me because it looked awesome. Quake looked ugly.

On the positive side its multiplayer aspect was universally praised, which eventually led to the rise of dedicated multiplayer arena shooters. I can't comment on this because to this day I have never played a multiplayer game of Quake. I can see why people liked it, because there's no fat, no complications, just fast-paced shooting and rocket jumps. But as a single-player experience Quake was so-so, without much replayability. The user-made level scene was much smaller than Doom, and my recollection is that by the early 2000s the original Quake had become an antique, a relic of the DOS era. If you wanted to show off your new 3D card Quake II was a much better option. The original game's longevity wasn't helped by the fact that the sequels completely abandoned the original game's storyline in favour of a continuation of Doom in all but name.

The Quake franchise itself eventually fizzled out. During the 2000s its brand of simplistic sci-fi thrills was displaced by military-themed first-person shooters, and ultimately the franchise died a sad, lonely death with Quake 4 in 2005. I remember seeing boxes for Quake 4 in the local video games shop, and wondering where it had come from. I hadn't seen any adverts for it. It was one of the launch games for the XBox 360, but in the end it sold poorly enough that one of its two expansion packs was cancelled. The PC as a games platform itself seemed to be heading in the same direction, too, but fortunately that fear was greatly exaggerated.

Quake has made a surprising comeback in recent years. In 2019 Nvidia released a version of Quake II with real-time raytracing, because the maps were simple and the source code is in the public domain. Nvidia could have chosen Klingon Honor Guard instead, but they picked Quake II because people remember it. In September 2020 the sleepy market town of Leighton Buzzard was hit by a string of miniature earthquakes, none of which hurt anybody which is why I am building this joke around that particular incident, and although there was probably no connection between those earthquakes and the Quake franchise sometimes the pattern is more obvious.

In 2020 Nine Inch Nails re-released their Quake soundtrack on vinyl, and in mid-2021 Nightdive Studios it's Nightdive not Night Dive or NightDive it's a single world in sentence case Nightdive Studios Nightdive rocco doesn't even have a mouth rocco's not alive Nightdive Studios released a remastered version of Quake to celebrate the game's 25th anniversary, and because the weather was cold in January 2022 I decided to try it out.

Is it any good? Has it aged well? Yes, and not really, but that's part of its charm. I've warmed to Quake. With the passage of time I can appreciate the team's original design decisions. The remaster comes with the two original level packs, plus two modern expansions made for the 20th and 25th anniversary of the game. The latter two in particular are very good. Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity have scripted rockfalls and pumping stations and computer centres and things you have to do, objects you have to blow up, but they just feel like generic late-1990s first person shooters, like the aforementioned Klingon Honor Guard. They take the purity of Quake and make it boring. However the two new expansions recapture Quake's blend of shooting and jumping and on top of that they look great. I'll write about them later on.

The original Quake is a jolt of adrenaline. It doesn't have a use key. The player just bumps into things. There are monsters, traps, a couple of buttons, not much else. If you know the layout and the monster spawns the game is still fun, in the same way that perfecting skateboard tricks is still fun; it's kinetic, fast-moving, streamlined. A couple of the later maps are maze-like but that's not a huge problem because the player moves so quickly. Quake adds a vertical dimension to Doom - the player can look up and down, the maps overlap each other, it has jumping jump - but it doesn't thrust its new technology in the player's face, and thankfully there are fewer platforming bits than I remember.

Quake's development process mirrored that of Doom. I wonder if that's why the developers split up; the realisation that despite trying to do things differently, things had gone wrong just as they had before, and in the same way. Did it dawn on them that the problem lay not in their stars, but within?

In any case the team began with a big pool of ideas, but the strain of making the game wore them out and, little by little, they stripped out all the complications. The engine was mostly devised by John Carmack, with help from Aristotle and Isaac Newton and Susan Sontag and pioneering arctic explorer Matthew Henson and the Arabs who invented the number zero etc. The plan was to make a proper 3D engine that had full freedom of movement, with sectors on top of sectors, and preferably some kind of environmental interaction, because Quake was going to be a complex role-playing action-adventure, with keys and a storyline and different playable characters and a dragon.

But Id struggled to pin down the story. The company had been developing a pool of ideas for the game since at least 1992, when it was envisaged as a two-dimensional fantasy role-playing action adventure. Hirsute rock-and-roll bitchmeister John Romero was keen on the role-playing aspect, but after a year spent working on the engine the rest of Id Software was exhausted, so the team collectively decided to turn the game into a fast-paced first-person shooter with rocket jumps etc. The fantasy elements of the original design were toned down in favour of a blend of sci-fi and medieval settings, although everything still looked as if it was made of wood because everything was brown. The finished Quake was almost a conceptual exercise in minimalism, less complex than for example Id's own Heretic, which had a similar fantasy milieu but had been released two years earlier.

Sadly the strain of developing an engine and a game simultaneously caused Id to fragment. John Romero and level designer American McGee left Id to concentrate on design, and almost everybody else was either fired or pushed out. I like to think that the abrupt switch from hobby-level shareware developer to major A-list rock star development team would probably have destroyed the company anyway. Robert Prince's MIDI covers of Slayer and Alice in Chains would not have cut the mustard in the HD age, but it was sad nonetheless. John Carmack stayed behind, but after the mediocre reception of Rage and Id's unwillingness to get behind VR even he left, in 2013, at which point none of the core team that worked on Doom or Quake were still with the company.

Id Software still exists, and has gone from strength to strength with a successful reboot of Doom (2016, and a sequel in 2020). It is still in theory the same Id, with a handful of the original employees, but it's really a different company at this point. More professional, slicker, anonymous. Not like the days of yore, when John Romero was a superstar. But think of all those people who lost their jobs when Ion Storm folded. Perhaps superstars are not the answer.

As of 2022 the Quake franchise remains dead, at least as a living entity, not just a repackaging of former glories. I blame this on the game's lack of distinctive character; it had none of Doom's personality. A couple of elements of Quake survive in the modern Doom, and I suppose strictly speaking the modern Doom's mixture of jumping and three-dimensional levels is closer to Quake than the original Doom. But on the whole Quake is over. I'm not sad. Even during its heyday there was something impersonal about it. The first Quake was a mixture of fantasy, horror, and sci-fi ideas smashed together to meet a deadline; the sequel was a completely different game given the Quake name purely as a marketing hook, and the third game wasn't even the same type of game as the first two. It was a franchise of convenience. I have heard rumours that there was a fourth Quake game, but I'm sure I would have been aware of it if that was true.

As far as I can tell all of the people who wrote Quake are still alive and work in the games industry, but nothing they have made individually has had the same impact as the work they did at Id. Sandy Peterson runs a fun YouTube channel, John Romero is a quote goldmine, Tom Hall likewise. John Carmack presumably arranged those earthquakes in Leighton Buzzard. The guy who did the music for the PlayStation version went on to write the music for the Madden games, did you know that? His downpitched ambient soundscapes transformed the Madden games from exciting football titles into nightmarish meditations on the futility of struggle in an entropic universe.

I'm a PC person, but I played the Quake remaster on my PlayStation 4. It was on sale, and I wanted to see what it was like with console controls. NB This is also part of a loose series of posts about PlayStation 4 games. I played it shortly after having another bash at the original System Shock, and it's interesting to compare them. Technology-wise Quake is almost entirely polygonal whereas Shock used sprites for the baddies. Quake is a lot more fluid and makes greater use of overlapping levels, and the lighting is much moodier. Could you implement System Shock in Quake? Obviously you'd need an inventory system, but I suspect that yes, Quake's simple physics and moving platforms etc are still a superset of System Shock's advanced-for-the-time engine.

I mention engines because Quake pioneered the idea of a universal 3D games engine that could be sold to other development teams. A universal 3D games engine that wasn't horribly limited. Doom started the ball rolling, but none of the games based on the Doom engine were very popular, and they all resembled Doom in one way or another. Quake on the other hand was the basis of Valve Software's GoldSrc, which powered Half-Life, one of the most influential PC games of all time. The very first Team Fortress was also built on Quake, before Valve bought it up and turned it into a commercial product. Id had greater success in the engine market with Quake II and III, but they were still essentially developments of the original Quake engine.

This also leads to the issue of user-made maps. I'm out of my depth at this point. It was easy to make maps for Doom, because the architecture was simple and the game had a limited bag of tricks. I'm broadly familiar with the Doom mapping scene e.g. I have played and finished Hell Revealed and Alien Vendetta.

Of Quake's mapping scene I know little. Id used a complex process to turn the three-dimensional level geometry into a usable map, and I have the impression that making levels for Quake was not an easy task. The only user-made Quake megawad I'm familiar with is Arcane Dimensions, which looks gorgeous. I also have the impression that Quake's mapping scene is relatively small because the game only had a couple of years in the sun before being overshadowed by Quake II. The distinctive character of Doom still draws people to make maps for it, but from a mapper's perspective Quake is, as of 2022, just one of many old 3D engines, no more distinctive than any other.

QTest had a few sprites. In the final game these globes are almost all that remains of the demo's sprites, and they only appear in one level.

Proper 3D wasn't anything new in 1996, but earlier 3D games tended to be very slow. This is Driller, from 1987, running on an 8-bit ZX Spectrum:

The maps are tiny, and it runs at about one frame per second, but conceptually Quake isn't all that more advanced than Driller. In both games the player has total freedom of movement in a three-dimensional world. Driller even allows the player to lean left and right and crouch and tip-toe, which is more freedom than Quake. And virtual reality had been a thing a few years before Quake, so the idea of three-dimensional environments in general was not especially mindblowing.

Incidentally later versions of Quake had native support for stereoscopic 3D, and it could be made to work with the Forte VFX1 virtual reality headset and its Cyberpuck controller. However by 1996 VR and motion controllers were on the way out, and Quake doesn't have official support for modern VR headsets. There is however a fan-made port of the original engine, PC only, that does support VR, and judging by the trailer it looks awesome.

However what Quake lacked in conceptual newness it made up for in speed. It did everything System Shock did but backwards and in high heels and in a dress. If you had a monstrous 486 or a merely decent first-generation Pentium it was fast and smooth, and within a year a fan-made port upgraded the game for GL-compatible 3D graphics cards. Quake was released on the cusp of the modern age, a modern age that it helped create.

There are only half a dozen of these explosive barrels in the entire game. Perhaps the team planned to do more with them.

I've always wondered what effect Quake had on the human mind. There must have been a point in history when a man gazed at the animal in the water and realised it was him, that he was one of many objects in physical space. There was a point when someone drew a map in the dirt for the first time and imagined what it would be like to gaze down at the world from a great height, a point when someone looked at a distant, silent scene through a telescope and pondered the difference between the speed of light and the speed of sound. At each of those points human consciousness made a small jump to a higher state of awareness, or at least a different state.

I can remember the first time I listened to music through headphones. Until then I had not been conscious of environmental sound. Sound was a thing that just happened. It wasn't until I took the headphones off that I realised there was sound. What if I could wrap a television around my head and replace the whole world with something else? What then? I would have a television wrapped around my head.

Away from the silliness, Doom's automap really did teach me to navigate with a map. In the image at the top, if I want to turn to the north I just press the 'left' key, which is obvious because north is to the left.

Now look at the image at bottom. If I want to turn to the west I have to press the 'right' key, because I'm upside-down. At first this confused me, then I learned to think about it, then I no longer had to think about it. Doom taught me that.

Did Quake have a similar effect on my mind? No. My horse had already bolted, but perhaps younger players might have been affected by it. I suspect that whatever effect it had on society was overwhelmed by The Matrix a few years later, which spelled things out more explicitly, and of course the human mind is under constant pressure from a million things. What effect did smartphones have on us? Not just our behaviour, but our underlying thought processes, our essence? The human animal is a mass of learned responses, driven by external stimuli, of which we have no shortage.

In 1996 I was disappointed with Quake. I should have loved it, but it left me cold. It reminded me of Millennium, the TV show. The two things came out within a few months of each other. Millennium was the long-awaited new show from now-forgotten-but-then-genius X-Files creator Chris Carter. It was an attempt to make a television version of Se7en but with explicitly supernatural elements. It was okay, and looking back it was better than I remembered, but it was dour and monotonous and had none of The X-Files' character or charm. In particular it had an air of pretentiousness about it, as if Carter believed that by writing a TV detective show and taking out all the humour and personality he could brute-force profundity. Quake was a bit like that.

On a visual level Quake is infamously monotonous. Brown, green, dark red, purple. Apparently the limited palette was a side-effect of 256-colour VGA, which was the dominant PC video standard at the time. The engine couldn't light the maps in real time, so the lightmaps were all prebaked, with a palette of fifteen colours split into sixteen colour gradients for the shadows, plus a few more colours on top. And because it was set in castles and swamps it had to be brown and green.

Thus despite the engine's strengths the game just didn't look very good. Especially given that a lot of it was dark and dim. It was clever on an intellectual level, but it didn't impress me the way Doom had impressed me, or Unreal a short while later with its reflective floors and procedurally generated water. It had none of the visual variety of Duke Nukem 3D. It took place almost exclusively in small rooms, with a limited draw distance. The only outdoors scenes were tiny enclosed courtyards.

Playing the remaster twenty-five years later I can appreciate it more. The architecture is blocky and simplistic but imaginative, and the lighting is used effectively to create a few good jump scares. The level design encourages fast, fluid play. I probably played Quake first with a keyboard, in which case I suspect it was a slog. And conversely playing it a few years later with mouselook it was too easy, too simplistic. The levels are packed with health kits and as long as you can get some space between you and the monsters you can snipe them with the rocket launcher or the super nailgun.

However playing it on a PlayStation 4 is a lot more fun. It's the Deus Ex: Human Revolution effect again. The PS4's controller is fluid enough to encourage fast-paced play but not so precise that the game is a walkover. I felt as if I was playing the game at the level of skill it was designed for, e.g. very early mouselook. With this slight handicap some of the maps are legitimately tricky, and there's something refreshing about the almost total lack of puzzles, dialogue sequences, cutscenes etc. Quake was released at a time when video games had just started to include huge cutscenes, but Id were uninterested in epic storytelling. Quake doesn't tell a story with in-engine dialogue, a la Half-Life. In fact it doesn't have a story at all. You're a man with an axe. You have to kill a big monster called Quake.

And when you finish the game there's no cutscene at the end. In fact Quake's storytelling is less advanced than Doom, because that game had a little animation with a bunny rabbit. Quake does not have a bunny rabbit.

If Quake was a brand-new game built as a homage to shooters of the past, and it sold for £10 or so, along the lines of Ion Fury, it would be... slightly disappointing because the original maps are very simplistic. The expansion packs lift it up a notch however. I'll get to them in a bit.

Quake on the PS4 has a number of graphical options. You can use the original models, or replacements. The replacements look great - more detailed, but still grungy - so I turned them on.

You can also enable texture filtering. I prefer the look of the original, grainy textures, so I left texture filtering off.

I can take or leave the distance fog. It also has antialiasing, that doesn't really improve things, and smoother monster movement.

This is a swastika, isn't it?

Some of the things that irritated me about Quake in 1996 are still irritating today. Quake supports variable gravity, which is used to good effect in one of the maps, "Ziggurat Vertigo". But only one of the maps, and it's hidden away, and the map only amounts to two large rooms. Along similar lines the game occasionally experiments with wind tunnels and impossible geometries - at times it feels like a distant ancestor of Portal - but because the developers were exhausted when they came to build the levels those ideas were used once and then never again.

All of the weapons in Doom have a use, even if it's niche, but the axe in Quake is a waste of space. Some modifications of the game give it the ability to kill zombies, which makes it a lot more useful. The maps don't appear to have been designed for a pistol start, which is awkward when zombies appear because the only weapons that kill them permanently are the rocket and grenade launchers, which aren't present on every map.

My biggest disappointment at the time was the gameplay shift from Doom's large-scale slaughter to a more bitty experience. Quake couldn't support the model density of Doom, so it tended to chuck monsters at the player one or two at a time. Doom had some big slaughter-style maps where the player mowed down hundreds of baddies, but even the largest maps in Quake only have 50-70 baddies in total.

This was what I missed about Quake. The large-scale carnage. Some of Doom's most famous user-made "slaughter" maps had thousands of baddies, occasionally tens of thousands. This one has 20,000! NB the level at the top is Europa 1 by Erik Alm, PhD, which only has 745 baddies.

I can understand why Doom had so many baddies. Doom's monster AI is rudimentary, so the only way Id could make the levels entertaining was to throw masses of monsters at the player, or constrain the player's movement, or surprise the player with traps. The huge monster count compensated for the lack of individual challenge, but it was just plain fun to mow down large crowds of stupid monsters.

There were signs that Id was trying to move away from that kind of gameplay even as early as Doom II. The Revenant and Archvile, introduced in that game, had notably more complex behaviour that the other monsters, which were essentially mobile turrets. They feel like prototypes of the baddies from Quake. The Revenant had a ranged attack that homed in on the player, but it also had a devastating close-range punch. The Archvile could resurrect dead monsters, and it had a damaging explosive attack that could only be avoided by dashing into cover. They were both surprisingly fast, so you had to deal with them quickly.

The monsters of Quake are essentially variations of those two ideas, with some filler baddies that make the enemy ranks bigger but feel a bit out of place. The game has an odd structure whereby the four episodes begin with a techbase level that has soldiers armed with shotguns and lasers, but everything after that is medieval-style torture dungeons with Lovecraft-inspired abominations. I've always wondered why Id didn't combine the techbase levels into one episode. Perhaps there wouldn't have been enough monster variety, who knows.

Most of the first person shooters that came after Quake followed its template, with small numbers of smarter baddies. The problem is that although the monster AI of 1996 was more advanced than Doom, it still wasn't very good, so until Half-Life in 1998 and the bots of Unreal Tournament shortly afterwards the first person shooter market was characterised by dumb enemies that soaked up bullets and were a chore to kill. It strikes me that I would enjoy Quake a lot more if all the monsters were half as strong, but there were twice as many of them, but sadly the maps aren't large enough to sustain that kind of monster density.

Quake also began Id's peculiar disdain for the shotgun. The shotguns from Doom were fantastic, but the shotguns in Quake are weak, except at uncomfortably close range. This idea carried on with Quake II and reached its nadir with Doom 3, where the shotgun had such an enormous spread it was essentially a melee weapon.

Does anything else irritate me about the original Quake? No, that's all I can think of. Let's concentrate on the strengths from now on. The 2021 remaster comes with four expansion packs and some free addons, including a recreation of Quake 64, which was the Nintendo 64 version of the game, although you have to sign up for a Bethesda.net account to get it. Of all the contemporary consoles the N64's hardware was the most advanced, but it was hobbled by its use of cartridges, which meant that Quake's 80mb of textures had to be squeezed into 12mb. The end result isn't pretty. The N64 only had 4mb of memory, which meant that the maps had to be slimmed down as well.

Technically the remastered version of Quake 64 is just a bunch of levels, textures, and music for the new Quake engine, e.g. it doesn't try to emulate an N64, so I can't judge how well the N64 played Quake. It apparently ran at around 20fps. The maps however aren't all that badly cut down, and it would probably have been decent fun on the console.

Amongst the many textures removed from Quake 64 was the dopefish, a big fish that was one of Id's early mascots.

The expansion packs are a mixed bag. As mentioned earlier Scource of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity came out shortly after Quake and have more advanced scripting and more complex levels, which has the effect of making the game feel like a generic first person shooter rather than a streamlined blast of adrenaline. Of the two Armagon is more ambitious but looks uglier, Eternity is closer to Quake and feels more like an extra episode rather than an extension of the game. Of the two I prefer Eternity.

The other two expansions include Dimension of the Past, which was released for the twentieth anniversary of the game, in 2016. It was written by MachineGames, who developed a couple of the new Wolfenstein titles. I've played a bit of it; it's fun. It feels like a good Doom megawad. However it pales in comparison to Dimension of the Machine, which was made for the 2021 remaster, also coincidentally the 25th anniversary of the game. Machine is at times gorgeous, especially one set of levels that take place in a giant foundry:

And also another episode that takes place is a surreal church that turns upside-down at one point:

Gameplay-wise it's great fun, harder than the original, but fair, with huge levels that guide the player around well. If it had been released for Doom it would have won a Cacoward.

Quake has an original score by Nine Inch Nails. It's really good! The main theme begins with a minute of industrial metal that sounds uncannily similar to Mick Gordon's later work for Doom, but almost everything thereafter is a load of creepy ambient moans. As with Aubrey Hodges' ambient tunes for the console versions of Doom it's an atypical score that works incredibly well, and I wonder if part of the reason I didn't like Quake in 1996 was because I always played it with the music off.

The odd thing is that although Quake looks aeons old the soundtrack hasn't really dated, so playing Quake with the music on makes it feel like a modern retro homage rather than a game that actually came out a quarter of a century ago. Originally the music was a bunch of audio tracks that streamed from the CD, but for the remaster the soundtrack is a set of compressed audio files. There are grumbles on the internet that the files are too compressed, but it's apparently easy to replace them with your own vinyl rips.

Despite the fact that the soundtrack is essentially an hour-long Nine Inch Nails album that slots in between The Downward Spiral and The Fragile it's surprisingly obscure. Id didn't make a great deal of Reznor's involvement at the time, and for many years digital versions of the game on Steam didn't include the music, apparently because the contract with Id meant that it could only be distributed as uncompressed Red Book CD audio. I mention all this because I remember listening to the music once, in 1996, and then never again until recently, so it's like discovering a great long-lost treasure.

The two contemporary expansion packs, Armagon and Dissolution, have music by Jeehun Hwang, who did the famously top-notch score for MechWarrior 2. It's closer in spirit to Sonic Mayhem's music for Quake II. Nine Inch Nails' tracks were formless and looped well, but Hwang's songs get repetitive very quickly. It's good, solid, above-average mid-90s video game soundtrack music, but that's all it is.

Do I have anything else to say about Quake? It disappointed me in 1996, but after a quarter of a century I can appreciate its simplicity. It was technically more advanced than Duke Nukem 3D, but on a visual level it was monotonous, and the gameplay was relatively simplistic. In 2022 however the lack of complication is refreshing. Quake now feels like a first-person recreation of those old arcade games - Defender, Berzerk, Robotron - where everything not related to the action was cut out, and I can understand why it remained a popular multiplayer game even after Quake II was released. The remastered edition is an easy way of getting the whole thing cheaply, and it plays well on consoles as well.

Oh yes, one thing. In Doom the engine's limitations meant that whenever you rode a lift, you never exited from the direction you entered. You could be reasonably certain that when the lift stopped, the baddies would be in front of you. Quake doesn't have that limitation, and the expansion packs in particular often open the lift doors behind you.

It struck me while playing the game that Quake's way of doing things is actually closer to real life - unless it's a posh lift you enter and exit from the same side - but Doom had trained me to think that real life was weird. How else has Doom messed with my head? I avoid the blue potions until I have 100% health, but everybody does that.