[Game Review] Quake

Id software were at the height of their fame when they released Quake, but it came at a sincere cost.  Id had been running on a string of hits since the early 90s.  Commander Keen had proved that wiz kid John Carmack could do the impossible (in this case, make scrolling backgrounds for platformers work on a PC, something that was surprisingly difficult at the time without the dedicated hardware of consoles like the NES or SNES).  And then with Wolfenstein 3D, John Romero was able to put his fantastical creativity, both in crazy settings and in spectacular level design, to good and critically beloved use.  But it was Doom, one of capital-T The games ever released that both Johns came together to make something spectacular and iconic.  Carmack's impressive engine with its complicated binary space partitioning was able to fake being 3D even when it technically wasn't.  Did you ever notice or wonder why no map in the original two Doom games ever overlapped itself?  That was because, as far as the engine was concerned, it was loading a 2D game, but drawing it to the screen as a 3D game.  Thus, there was no Z-axis outside of rendering.  The logic underneath only knew two axis.  But that was no real limitation for Romero, who quickly stitched together a tone and feel for the game that would be equal parts Doom's character.  Romero, always the wannabe rock star, wanted to create a game that would emulate a DnD campaign he and his fellow coworkers at id had played that ended with Hell invading and collapsing the game entirely.  Thrash metal, waves of demons, and a darker aesthetic (again, thanks to the lighting in Carmack's new engine) gave way for Romero's Freudian ego to run amok to glorious results.  Building on the principals they set up for Wolfenstein 3D, they created the true (although not literally true) birth of the shooter genre.  They released stop-gap Doom II while Carmack worked on the next game engine, but the industry wasn't slowing down.  Carmack's Doom engine was being leased out everywhere (or otherwise copied), and soon the market was swamped with oddware mods or imitators of Doom, from Hex to Marathon to self-proclaimed competitor Duke Nukem - there was no shortage of "Doom clones".  A true follow up was highly anticipated, and Romero had no shortage of ideas.  With Carmack's new 3D engine, showcasing true 3D rather than the 2.5D of Doom and with a killer new lighting engine, the engine that would be Quake's blew their competition out of the water.  It was just about making those ideas a reality.

But, reality bites and Romero's vision would soon be truncated to a simple coat of paint (a helluva coat of paint it was, though).  Romero envisioned a fast paced action RPG with Nordic and medieval setting and characters.  His ambition was hampered by the slow development of Carmack's new engine, which was swamping him.  Making matters worse, Carmack was simultaneously developing a new TCP/IP system for online matchmaking in the game (two things Carmack would later say should have been on "two different projects").  The slow goings on the engine equally lead to slow development, and the scope had to be narrowed down.  It was a concession that would lead to Romero leaving id Software after Quake's completion, and id Software would never quite be the same.  This is where Romero infamously made his own company to create Daikatana, the game he initially wanted Quake to be, and a veritable disaster in its own right.

This doesn't mean that Romero's vision wasn't still paramount to a lot of what Quake would have to offer.  Doom felt like a comic book come to life in a lot of ways, like an R-rated Saturday morning cartoon based on whatever that kid in the jean jacket carving pentagrams into his desk at the back of class was interested in.  Quake, on the other hand, was far darker in aesthetic.  Quake's style is still incredibly unique to this day, and that can partially be attributed to its balls-to-the-wall kookiness.  High powered weaponry like shotguns, lightning guns, rocket launchers, and oddly nail guns (and I mean literal guns) would be your paint brush as you chewed through medieval knights, zombies, ogres with grenade launchers and a chainsaw for a hand, and a slew of Lovecraftian horrors.  Noticeably, the color pallet was shrunk to mostly greys and browns (an infamous design choice for the generation of consoles two gens later, but here was something "gritty" and "real", adjectives that still had some semblance of power behind them).  Shadows were incredibly dark, darker than most any modern game you could think of, even those that work in the medium of dark-light dichotomy like horror shooter F.E.A.R.  Partially, this was due to the game's setting.  Gone were Doom's sci-fi military bases (mostly) and hellish nightmarescapes (mostly) and in were . . . medieval castles?  Each of the four episodes found in Quake had a slightly different setting to them, all of which was conveniently tied together with the plot's "slipgates", inter-dimensional portals that . . . to be honest, the plot doesn't matter much at all.  It reads as highschool dark fantasy fiction (a sentiment equally represented in its stellar soundtrack, done by none other than Nine Inch Nails), with its one notable aspect being in how wide its stylistic draws seem to be coming from.  We have the dark ages' medieval knights and castles smashed together with space marines in dark, metallic bases.  Lovecraftian horrors shoot green spells at you like wizards from the void, and your go to attack is going to be with a nail gun or rocket to the face.  Quake's style feels a lot like some strange outsider art trying to tie together too many pieces, and it succeeds largely in just how blindly excited it feels about what it's trying to do.

For all that Quake was trying to do stylistically, the gameplay may feel quaint by comparison.  Quake is a shooter, and marked the death of the "Doom clone" business going on in the gaming press at the time.  While it got some cocked eyebrows at release for being, essentially, Doom 3 by certain standards (rather broad standards, if you ask me), it was overwhelmingly praised for its tight, frenetic combat, impressive graphical fidelity, and its grotesque style.  Frenetic might not even cover it, to be honest.  Quake is intense.  The shotgun, your standby during your plunges through Doom's demon infested hallways, was paltry at best against Quake's enemies, a clear sign that you were in for something much more challenging.  While Quake is on average more difficult than Doom, it never gets much more so at its peaks.  Key to this difficulty was in its enemy design, and its odd take on weaponry.  Given your shotgun is no longer a viable option but rather a last resort, keeping tabs on ammo is a little more important, especially in the latter two episodes.  The nail gun does good damage, but I could never keep enough ammo to feel all that comfortable using the thing as a default weapon.  Thus, I rode the grenade launcher and rocket launcher (both of which use the same ammo type) for most encounters, at least for the spongier enemies.  While knights and soldiers will show up often in the early game for each episode, they will quickly slide away in favor of the ogre as your main "low-tier" enemy, which almost always created a formidable encounter.  Getting too close to the ogre would lead to a chainsaw in the face, and in Quake up close melee damage is just about the worst damage you can receive.  Thus, sticking far away is your ideal option with most opponents, but especially the ogre.  The ogre, unfortunately, also wields a grenade launcher, bouncing explosives around the map and making constant movement a must.  Adding a couple of ogres to any encounter always meant you were going to have to act quickly and listen for that ting of the grenade as it bounced wildly around the room (physics in a 3D space were, to put it mildly, incredibly new and not nearly so reliable or predictable).  Black knights equally worked as low-tier enemies, able to slice you with their sword as well as put holes in you with some fiery projectiles when you were out of arms reach.  Mid-tier came in the form of fiends, which could take an absurd amount of damage and would leap across the room to tear you apart with their claws, and vore, which would shoot homing explosives in your direction.  All the enemies in Quake were designed with movement in mind, forcing you to be aware of your surroundings and of where items were located in a given level.  Ducking and diving around corners to bait enemies into a state of vulnerability (or to avoid a projectile) is paramount to playing smart.  At times, the game would intentionally place you in limited spaces, meant to force creativity in your approach, and a lot of this is due to the newfound Z-axis.

In Doom, jumping was basically running over gaps, hoping your momentum got you to where you need to go.  Quake, with its true 3D architecture, could now have a dedicated jump button.  Platforming is now something required to get to the end of a lot of levels, and one platforming challenge the game particularly likes toward the end of its (relatively short) run is to make you run along tie-rods of wood no thicker than you yourself are.  Making a structure of these wooden beams in an arena full of enemies makes for a particularly challenging fight, and also makes running through a virtual impossibility.  Quake's idea of platforming is serviceable, even though it rarely ever uses it for more than a modifier toward its main loop.  Occasionally, it serves exploration, which is where I would say it excels at.  In service of exploration, however, is one of the most iconic tricks in PC shooters: the rocket jump.  Rocket jumping is a risk-reward move, allowing yourself to take damage in order to make a larger/longer/taller jump.  Rocket jumping can outright allow yourself to skip whole sections of the game, and became a staple of the online meta.

Quake's online was a large step up from that of Doom's incredibly popular multiplayer.  The 3D traversable space, faster gameplay, and more eclectic take on weaponry lead to a truly frenetic online shooter.  Quake's online, however, is largely shorted by the fact that it wouldn't come into its own as the powerhouse that it was until Quake III: Arena.  Quake can and should be credited with creating the unfortunately (mostly) dead Arena Shooter genre, whose attempted rebirth in recent years (including Quake's own dismal foray into a revival) has yet to find a foothold in the modern market of hero shooters and battle royale.

Quake was the cresting moment for PC shooters' rise to cultural domination, the moment where the golden years had just about reached its peak, before being dethroned by the console shooter with Halo (although many PC shooters hung on to a lot of renown, such as Battlefield 1942 and, of course, Half-Life 2).  It was also the end of id Software's golden years where the Johns were together making themselves rockstars out of game development.  After this, Carmack and co.'s output would feel slightly less id-like, although they would still have great hits in the follow up Quake titles (until Quake IV, that is, largely developed by another studio).  Quake is an undisputed shooter classic, a game that was brimming with odd ideas and tight execution, one that was never quite matched again.  It lacks the timelessness of Doom, as well as that game's colossal pop-cultural impact, but it made up for it in its technical brilliance.  Quake's engine has been ported, modified, and leased out dozens of times, finding its code in classics such as Half-Life (and inspiring the Source Engine), as well as the modified Quake II Engine finding its ways into Daikatana, Medal of Honor, and the first handful of Call of Duty titles, making it one of the most important game engines of all time.  Quake's importance is undisputed, but its surprising amount of fun even when looked at through modern gaming eyes is what makes it truly worthwhile.  The taste of blood from gritted teeth as my arm locks up trying to duck and swerve away from enemy projectiles never tasted so sweet.  Long live the king, baby.



9.5

[Game Review] Slay the Spire

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was a huge rise in rogue-like games coming out of the indie scene.  In the late 2010s, partially due to the advent of microtransactions as a primary income model and the popularity of previously nerdy subcultures, there was a rise in the digital card game.  It was inevitable then that Slay the Spire would come in to existence, combining both elements into one game (without microtransactions, of course, lest the rogue-like half be entirely broken).  Slay the Spire is particularly interested in something generally found in paper card games called a draft.  A draft is what it sounds like: a group of players buy a handful of packs and try to construct a deck with what they pull, and then play each other.  In hindsight it seems obvious to say that this emulates the basic principles of a rogue-like, but in dissection the relationship becomes even more enriched.  Rogue-likes aren't just about randomness.  They are about a strict set of rules that are knowable, that can be exploited or hedged against in order to proceed, despite the random nature of the game.

Rogue-likes are about quick thinking and planning on the fly as information comes to you.  They generally aren't unfair for a vast majority of runs, finely tuned to make sure that there are ways to succeed no matter what it is you get, just so long as you are good enough and knowledgeable enough to use the game to your advantage.  What loot you get on your run, the collectible or gear or items or spells that mark your progression through the run, might as well be cards as anything else.  After all, loot is little more than an icon with stats.  But there is a particularity with cards that can be utilized as a mechanic, one that finds itself relevant to the rogue-like genre.

When building a deck in any deckbuilding game, the deck needs to have a synergy that keeps it tight, and lowers the randomness from pulling cards.  In Magic: The Gathering, this means often having multiples of the same card to reduce the chance you don't get your combo by the second or third turn.  All of the pieces of your deck have to work together in a seamless engine of attack, defense, and rule tweaks that give you the advantage.  Players of most card games will tweak and refine their decks for a long time, slowly accumulating the cards needed to make it an unstoppable machine (or as best as they can attain that).  A rogue-like, however, doesn't give you the leniency of time and patience in order to refine your deck.  Rather, it exploits this weakness in the card building mechanics to force you into a state of resourcefulness: I can pick up this card, but will it bloat my hand?  I can buy this card, but does that play into my current deck build, or is it starting to teeter into another?  Should I shake up my deck build now, since I'm getting so many of these cards, or should I hedge my bets and split my deck, hoping one of these builds will be favored in my future pulls?  The process of building your deck is active, changing after every encounter, needing to be addressed constantly in order to proceed. It is no surprise that taking cards out of your deck comes at a cost, because slimming your deck and improving its efficiency is nearly as important as gaining.

Slay the Spire works within RPG tropes.  You choose a class which has a starter deck that is the same every run, with a "color" specification of cards that you will find.  You can gain cards from other classes through relics or potions, but generally you will be stuck with whichever limited card stock is available to your particular class.  As you play through the game, you will rack up a score that, when you win or are defeated, will be applied to an XP bar of sorts that will unlock a new set of cards to be added to the random pool of potential gets.  Usually, these cards are all of a similar vein: one set will be four powerful cards built around poison status affects, another will be around the shiv mechanic.  There are only four unlocks for each of the four classes, but each of these tempt you into a new style of play for future runs.

The general rules of Slay the Spire are pretty simple.  You have three types of cards: skill, attack, and power.  Skills will give you block (a number of how much damage will be soaked up before rolling over to your health), manifest orbs if you are the elemental type class, etc. or inflict debuffs such as weaken or negative strength (enemies deal less damage), vulnerable (enemies take more damage), etc.  Attacks are outright damage, but can often come with special features such as variant damage ("Do 6 damage for each skill in your hand"), increasing energy next turn, or applying poison or focus.  Power cards usually add a permanent buff for the rest of the encounter, such as poisoning at the end of every turn, or will otherwise add flat buffs such as dexterity or strength that decrease each turn.  These cards are well designed with different variations of interplay between them.  Coming up with strategies is part of the fun of the game, and the other part is the on-the-fly modifications of that strategy as the cards you need fail to manifest.  If the game allowed for deck construction outright, it would be near broken because of the way the cards can interplay with one another (I've had extensive turns run nearly ten cards before), but as the game's deckbuilding is laid out through random chance and pulls, those perfect decks become patchwork of different ideas being refined in real time to create something cohesive.  

Slay the Spire is a rogue-like first, and deckbuilder second, and that is an important distinction.  The deckbuilding side of the game becomes the language in which the game's mechanics function.  Rather than searching through stat menus and seeing how different equipment modifies them, the stats and modifications are right there on the card.  It is immediately readable and palatable.  The rogue-like elements come in inbetweens, in the methods in which you gain or lose cards, and in a mechanic called relics.  While cards are collected after every encounter or by purchasing them at the store, relics can only be attained at the store or after defeating a boss or miniboss.  Cards and relics and potions can also be collected at certain "events" that happen in "?" encounters, but those are bound to random chance.  Relics generally add buffs (and occasionally debuffs) that modify play, adding another layer to the rogue-like side of things, as well as shaking up any plays you may be planning on.  They can be as simple as allowing you more gold after every encounter to giving you a baseline of block at the start of an encounter.  Some allow you more energy (this game's "mana"), but will often cost you a feature such as no longer being able to rest at rest stops or no longer gaining gold from enemies.  Relics are the truly random aspect to Slay the Spire, but they are essentially all plus, usually allowing you some leniency in one aspect or another.  Potions can also be gathered which add little "get out of shit" quick pulls for when you are in a desperate place.  To limit the abuse of potions (as some of them are very strong), you are limited to three unless a particular relic has been dropped.

While it certainly won't tilt the rogue-like or deckbuilding genres on its collective heads, Slay the Spire is an incredibly tight and replayable (downright bingeable) rogue-like, and my favorite game in the genre in years.  For me personally, it sits up there with titans like Binding of Isaac and Spelunky as one of those games I played until I got sick of looking at it anymore.  Rogue-likes always feel like a hard sell to me, because for a rogue-like to really capture my attention - perhaps obsession would be a more honest word - it needs to have palatable rules that feel usable, rather than random for the sake of random.  Loot shouldn't be the end, it should feed into mechanics, and Slay the Spire is one of the most mechanic-heavy rogue-likes I've played in awhile, and I'm likely to continue playing for an exhausting time to come.




9.0

[Game Review] Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2

Nearly a full year after the release of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, Neversoft released Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2.  Largely, as was common at the time, THPS2 was simply a map-pack of the original game with some fine tuned adjustments here and there.  Goals were expanded, stats could be increased with cash earned or found on different levels, and the almighty manual was added to the growing roster of tricks.  What THPS2 mostly innovated on was an improved soundtrack and tighter controls, with a focus on higher scores, better trick combos, and a more in depth career mode.

Career mode was largely unchanged, as far as the overarching structure of it goes.  You will unlock levels as you complete goals, and every couple of levels or so is a competition where getting the highest score possible allows you to place for a medal.  Gaining a medal will let you unlock the next level.  The difference here from the first THPS is between the lines.  No longer do we have VHS tapes to earn as goals, but rather cold hard cash (of which can be collected in the level as well, usually atop a tight jump, long grind, or high half pipe lip).  Levels are unlocked based off of career total cash collected, making certain goals more valuable than others as far as progression is concerned.  There are far more goals per level, now adding an even higher score to better accommodate the refined combo system, a goal where you need to do a certain trick (usually a specific grind) on a particular part of the map geometry (like a specific rail in Venice Beach), and another goal that seemed to me to have no consistency between levels, such as finding 4 VB half pipe transfers (not really sure what a VB transfer is honestly - Venice Beach? - but I got it nonetheless).  Hidden tapes were brought over, but I found them to be far easier to find than in the previous game.

Gaining cash doesn't just let you in to new levels, however.  Cash can be spent on new boards for the careless, new tricks for the combo-hungry, or on upgrading stats to cartoonishly good standards (my personal favorite, even if it did make some of the game much easier).  Two of the three uses for cash are on playing a better game, which seems to be the primary focus of THPS2.  Combos rule everything here, now that the manual can be used to tie together a string of tricks to different parts of the map without requiring a well placed grinding rail, or half pipe transfer.  When you think of a classic Tony Hawk game, you are most likely thinking of THPS2.  The only real missing component is the ability to transfer forward from one half pipe to another, meaning all transfers are side to side.  Still, with the new features plus slightly tighter controls, THPS2 is the superior game to play.

Levels themselves are almost altogether better designed as well.  No longer were you sometimes subjected to the "downhill" level types that felt out of place or like they should be relegated to their own game type (although, I'd much rather have them as a game type than not having them altogether, just don't put them in the main career mode).  School 2, while a good level on its own, feels the one slight misstep being worse than the original School level from THPS.  The New York level could also be annoying, with its taxi cabs running in to you and the PS1's poor draw distance and the nighttime setting sometimes making reaction time more akin to anticipating something from memory than live reaction.  The level also boasts an exploitable grind jump between two subway tracks that can rack up an insane amount of score easily and quickly.

More than likely, the classic Tony Hawk soundtrack you remember is from THPS2 as well.  Rage Against The Machine, Powerman 5000, and Anthrax and Chuck D burn up the backdrop as you grand and ollie your way to a high score.  There are clunkers here too, but the highs are incredibly high, and match the tone flawlessly.  If I had one gripe, it would be that more classic punk should have been included (can you imagine Crass snarling over Pennsylvania half pipes?).

For the most part, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 is really just an improved version of the first game.  There isn't much in the way of innovation outside of fine tuning what already worked, but reviewing older games like this is hard because of this being the norm rather than the outlier.  Games at this time period would often release follow ups that were little more than improved versions with new levels, such as Doom II (which, admittedly, did get some criticism for basically being pay-for mod) or even the Crash Bandicoot games. The development cycle for older games was vastly different.  Don't forget that engines were built largely in house, even in some smaller to medium sized studios like id Software, and so squeezing out an extra game or two while the next iteration of the tech was being developed was not only normal, it was virtually expected.  Thusly, I have to view THPS2 with almost the same eyes as I would the original.  I see the game as an improvement, one that added several features, tightened up what was already there, and, generally, I see it as the definitive game in the series.  Despite its lack of originality by today's standards when we consider video game sequels, for the time it did exactly what was expected, and when I go back to try this era of the Tony Hawk games, THPS2 is where find myself nestled.



10