Quake II (Remastered)

I will be honest, as much as I love the original Q2, and the not very well hidden low gravity level was brilliant, I was there mostly for the soundtrack.

Just tried a bit of Call Of The Machine. Good stuff, very atmospheric, found a "secret" trial area with waves of enemies, and there are several large bosses who turn up with several Tanks as sidekicks. Although the enemy AI has a habit of making them try to come at you through lava and eliminating themselves in the process.

I played this for a bit over the weekend, but then I went and played Turbo Overkill (which is fucking excellent!) and decided I didn't need to wallow in slightly ropey NostalgiaLand to get my retro fix.

The so-called Boomer Shooters are really hitting their stride nowadays! Prodius, Boltgun, Turbo Overkill... what a time to be (a lot closer to no longer being) alive.

Quake 2 is done. Even with the extra difficulty, killing the Makron is way too easy when you have an invulnerability and quad damage saved for use. I think the expansions made it so that power-ups wouldn't work against bosses, so they should be a lot harder. Last night I played the new Deathmatch Dimension add-on for Quake (some amazing level design btw, I'm always impressed by how expert the Quake map community has become) as a palate cleanser before starting Quake 2 64.

You know, even if I think Q1 is the more distilled essence of 90's shooters, in the end I prefer the shooting feel of Q2. It's just how it is, and how it's always been.

So I completed the first two episodes of 64 this morning. It's not been bad so far. For the most part it's mostly different, but one map has been a near direct transposition of the PC equivalent, and it's clear that the level architecture is somewhat simpler. It's also missing the interconnected maps of the PC version. It also seems like it should be quite short. In less than one hour I completed 6 levels out of apparently 19, and on hard difficulty to boot.

Played a little of the Quake 1 remaster last night and seems great so far. The image did look a little blurry though, which I only realised afterwards is likely down to the anti-aliasing being used. Does Quake 2 remaster have a better implementation? A nice bit of DLAA would be ideal.

Thanks. Blaming AA was just speculation. It is just an AA off/on option, so not sure what type it uses, but I guessed it was using something like SMAA or some other post-processing technique that often makes things smeary.

It was mostly in motion it looked blurry, particularly with enemies moving around.

I think I had texture smoothing off already, but not sure.

I'll have a little play around this evening to see if I can remove the vaseline.

I wonder how many people will be talking about Boltgun and Maximum Overkill in 20 years

I think they’ll be talking about Dusk in the future, and if Cultic pulls off the second episode as well as the first then that’ll be on there. Maybe Amid Evil, especially if the expansion is good. The main difference will be the lack of multiplayer and mods meaning people are more likely to forget them though - especially Quake 2 has a lot of its old identity tied up in things like Action Quake. There’ll be a place for GZDoom/EDuke stuff like Ion Fury and Supplice too as there’s that direct lineage from the 90s classics. If you haven’t tried the demo of Selaco, that stretches GZDoom to its absolute limit and accordingly requires a surprisingly quick CPU.

Everything else will probably end up in the same bin as Strafe. A little unfair but there we go.

Agree.

Yeah. When playing the main campaign of this and the first Quake, I turn off texture filtering to replicate the old school PC look, but when playing the 64 ports, I turn it on to replicate the old N64 blurry textures look.

Nobody, obviously. But that doesn’t change the fact that plenty of people are having fun with them today. And in my case, enjoying all of ‘em more than the Quake remixes which I appreciate for different reasons.

I always play Q1 with texture filtering off (in the original, the best way is to use nearest neighboring and mipmapping together, to avoid both blurriness and shimmering), but Q2 plays great with it, I think. It was always meant to be played with hardware acceleration after all, and this remaster does away with the wobbly animation interpolation too.

AA on the other hand is always off, because I like my jaggies.



Uhm, I need to return to it then. I stopped after episode 1 because it seemed so generic and uninspired. I liked HROT much better. But if the second episode of Dusk is where it gets going, I'll give it another chance.

I didn't notice Quake 64 was included in the Quake remaster.