I played the game using a Radeon 9200 (shut up), an Athlon multi-gigahurt-something-or-other and a gig of ram. Win2Ksp4, DX9, peaches and cream. Ran at 640x480 low quality because I CAN. Naturally the game did the nightvision thing right off the bat. I wound up making an alias to the application and set the following in the Target blank:

"C:\Program Files\iD Software\Quake 4\Quake 4.exe" +set com_allowConsole 1 +disconnect +seta r+renderer "ARB"

The first + makes the console ~ instead of the damnass multikey shortcut, the second + skips the damnass splash screens and the third + gets rid of nightvision at the expense of the game looking like it takes place on whatever planet the aliens in the Star Trek episode "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield" come from.

You gamer monkies might tell me that a Radeon 9200 is balls for Quake 4 and you're right. When I have enough money to buy my own Intendo (or possibly a DreAMDcast) it'll have a real video card. Until then, I make do.

1. The game is short. We're talking less than twelve hours from install and driver updates to roll credits. I'll admit I used the god code but I figure if they didn't want people to use it they'd pull a Halo and have no cheats at all. :P As a comparison, it takes me two sittings to do Doom 3 (with the god code, of course). I should note that I think things like health are an annoyance - I logged a few hundred hours on Tetris during my misspent youth and I can assure you that those hours would have been seconds if I'd had a life meter and the fucking blocks were shooting at me. I'm playing this thing to have some fun and health management is only part of that whole "fun" thing in multiplayer, thank you. If you're going to be killing me at least have the decency to make it turn-based so I can plan for it. My reflexes aren't what they used to be.

2. The weapons are completely Unreal Tournament. You might think that's a good thing, I think it means they all look plastic and chintzy and GI Joe. More importantly they feel cheap. Unlike Doom 3, the grenades are useable. The Dark Matter Gun (DMG) looks like a supersoaker. I thought the nail gun would be pretty kickass, but I only used it when I ran out of ammo for other weapons. This didn't happen often, despite Quake 4 carrying on with Quake 2's fine tradition of enemies that take for-fucking-EVER to kill with anything but the biggest damned gun you've got (and sometimes even THEN!). The weapons you'd think have alt-modes do, the weapons you'd think don't need alt-modes don't have them, and the rocket launcher allegedly has an alt-mode but I'll be damned if I could ever get it to work. I think the lightning gun takes too little to kill weak enemies and too much to kill slightly tougher enemies, and a clip-fed shotgun was a very nice touch. Still waiting for a Doom 3 engine flamethrower.

3. Holy fuck scrollwheels are nice. Too bad the game chungs and wallows when you're rolling through your weapons. I dunno if it's shitting its pants loading models or quivering at the thought of what you might do with them but damn that bit got annoying fast.

4. Strauss++

5. The stompy walker thing and the hovertank are cool. They have the same basic weaponry but it feels like the walker's machine gun is orders of magnitude more powerful than the hovertank's mg. Maybe because I had to hose down baddys on the off chance they'd give up and go home with the tank, while the fuckers had the decency to die quickly in the walker.

6. I hate the rail shooter sequences. I somehow managed to get through the first one after loading a quicksave seventeen or eighteen times, but the second rail shooter bit was so fucking frustrating that I skipped the level. The second rail-shooter is a lot like the button-mashing torturething in Metal Gear Solid - up until that point in the game, I was fine... then I COULD NOT FUCKING GET THE HAPPY ENDING ON THAT SCENE NO MATTER FUCKING WHAT BECAUSE I'M NOT FAST ENOUGH FUCK YOU KONAMI. k? k. It spoils it, you see.

7. Strogg Kane looks like a cross between Robocop and Tron. Only meatier, with a Halflife paint job.

8. The derivative bits don't stop there. Combine Halflife Robo-Tron with Unreal weapons in a setting that's initially Doom 3 Meets Quake 2 and all's well for awhile... then (post Tronifiication) BLAMMO! The industrial grit Stops Cold and the game feels like Halo mixed with Doom 3. No sign of Quake grittiness anywhere. Design-wise, the game feels a lot like Doom 3 play mechanics with Halo-styled squad bits, layered onto an OMFG GRITTY and an OMFG BLOO design. That BLOO fails to feel Strogg in much the same way that Bush fails to sound intelligent. Hit the second half - when you're all Master Chief Only Ugliered the fuck up - and just close your eyes and think of England. Only pretend it's the second half of Halo and it's not sucking for a change. It feels like Halo with Unreal weapons, dammit, and the Stroggified marines sounds almost exactly like the zombie marines in Doom 3.

9. This seems like a good place for screenshots. Here's the fattest thing ever and the creepy dude from the second season of Ghost In The Shell : Stand Alone Complex. Hell of a cameo, what with the lack of limbs and all.

 

10. Speaking of Halo and Doom, Quake 4 has a lot of the good shit from both games and almost none of the stupid shit. It's got Halo's checkpoint system, but it also allows you to save whereever you want (fuck you, Bungee!). It's got Doom 3's graphics, but the goddamned flashlight comes with a gun (blaster or machine gun) attached to it. There's only one enemy that teleports and it's in that part of the game where if it were Halo you'd be getting ready to choke whoever thought the Flood was a good idea. Compared to a rabid wave of fucking fungus, an Iron Maiden with locational issues is a breath of fresh air.

11. The marines (as a whole) rock. Good thing most of them are invincible.

12. THERE WAS NO "FIND THE BLUE KEY." Lots of running around using Strogg Powah to open shit up but none of The Usual - proof (along with that damned BLOO) that iD didn't develop the game.

13. Much like Doom 3's attempt to make it look like Hell was slowly consuming the Mars Base (which succeeded in one little section of an entry corridor that had a nice snotty crossfade between some wiring and some entrails and otherwise looked pretty blatant), the whole Strogg cybertechnology thing feels pretty damned forced at points - specifically, this is the second damned iD engine game I've seen an organic thingy jam flush into a wall without so much as a splatter/scar tissue texture around the border. Boo. Big chunks of intestines 'n shit are fine, the fakeass thunderstorm-in-the-heart-chamber-for-dramatic-effect thing was fine, but after The Protagonist gets back to base post-Strogging, the game abandons even the ghost of a pretext at organic-integrated technology. You might as well be on a fucking space station. It's there, don't get me wrong, but I'm one of those assholes who has an extremely powerful and disgusting visual of what this kind of thing could be (read : hard time telling where the tech begins and the squish ends) and Q4 either nails it, gets close, fails, or doesn't even bother trying - often simultaneously. Oh, and they're using limbless and headless torsos as some kind of power source. That's so fucking orginal it hurts.

14. I cheated, so I can't judge difficulty, only annoyance - and I've covered that above. I'm glad the fucking pooper-scooper dudes from Quake 2 aren't around to hurl you all over the place, and I find it amusing that they've been replaced by an upgraded version of the supersoldier from Return To Castle Wolfenstein. Good to see the bastard pounding the floor for cheap Tesla effect as opposed to rubbing his ass all over it like a dog with a bad case of 'roids. It would have been nice to see modern versions of Quake 2 standards, like the four-legged tongue-dog things, the fucking TRAPEZOIDAL DOORS WHAT IS UP WITH THESE DOOM THREE DOORS, and hey, I liked the old Iron Maiden design as well and I don't see why we couldn't have both, dammit. Even the minigun dude would have been neat, but the Quake 2 boss and "Stroggs use organic stuff in their technology!" are the ONLY Q2 influences this game has - it pulls the rest from everything but Q2 - and while it all looks nice and plays nice, it doesn't feel anything at all like Quake 2. But Quake 2 had nothing to do with Quake 1 and Quake 3 was iD's answer to Unreal Tournament, so, uh.... yeah. At least Doom 3 was a straight-up remake. The Quake series is a really cool logo with a string of FPSsen hung off of it like some kind of spiky christmas tree. Consistency isn't exactly a hallmark here, folks.

15. The physics is cute, particularly when you're cutting loose with the DMG. Grenades and rockets don't seem to do much of a splash, so you've gotta hit the weaker enemies right to see any sort of Painkiller goodness - and the bodies don't stick around long (flatly contradicting story bits early in the game), so enjoy it while you can.

Waiting for the Mac version so I can do another assessment of just how shitty either OS X (in the "handling games" sense) or Aspyr's port is. Also multiplayer, especially since Quake 4 has done a vastly better job of handling a whole hell of a lot of enemies being on screen at once. I could have done with a couple of more hours of game time, and a hell of a lot less of the rail-shooter elements (two turned out to be one too many in my experience). Overall, I enjoyed myself - enough so that I'm writing this up at five in the friggin' morning, well after I should have gone home and gone to bed.

02:42 <@xeno> [ The above King Fat screener ]
02:42 <@xeno> vs
02:43 <@xeno> [ What blubberbutt looks like on a real Intendo ]
02:43 <@xeno> YOU PLAYED IT ON A GAMEBOY.
02:43 * xeno continues reading
02:45 <@xeno> in paragraph 13, it's because your rig sucks
02:45 <@solios> uh?
02:45 <@xeno> me I've seen an organic thingy jam flush into a wall without so much as a splatter/scar tissue texture around the border. Boo. Big chunks of intestines 'n shit are fine, the fakeass thunderstorm-in-the-heart-chamber-for-dramatic-effect thing was fine, but after The Protagonist gets back to base post-Stroggin
02:45 <@xeno> etc.
02:45 <@solios> dude, halfway through the game they get sick of being industrial and then it looks like FUCKING HALO.
02:45 <@solios> it's all blue n shit.
02:46 <@xeno> THAT IS BECAUSE YOU ARE RUNNING IT IN DIRECTX6 YOU WANGWAGON.
02:46 <@solios> 9.
02:46 <@xeno> the rig you are running it on can't even support an eigth of the texturing
02:46 <@xeno> no.
02:46 <@xeno> 9200 will not support 9
02:46 <@solios> sweet.
02:46 <@xeno> nor 8
02:46 <@solios> eh.
02:46 <@xeno> nor SEVEN.
02:46 <@solios> 9 installed.
02:46 <@xeno> yes.
02:47 <@xeno> which is also 8, 7 and 6.
02:47 <@solios> this is me caring:
02:47 <@xeno> for old fucks like you.
02:47 <@xeno> :P
02:47 <@xeno> oh, i care fuck all about the game. i looked at it and went oh look, it's doom3 with ducttape.
02:47 <@xeno> BUT.
02:47 <@solios> yes.