I got the game when it came out — Xmas, 1997. Eleven years ago. I had played the original Quake into the ground — I had downloaded the demo when it came out, gotten the full version when it was released, and found the online community of extras (more maps, etc). So, Quake 2 seemed like a good idea.

Hmmm. Not so much.

Quake 1 was a pretty simple story. Just go out and fight and attack and explore. The levels were hard, the adventure long, and the rewards good. The whole thing was pretty linear, too — you just kept going forward, and the adventure was laid out in front of you. The weapons were cool, but the combat was balanced — a fair fight. And the whole dungeon concept was pretty cool.

The other thing Quake 1 had going for it was network play. Me and the boys would get together for a Saturday of beer and killing each other. Those same simple elements of success for the game increased exponentially on a LAN. Quake 1 was strong because it had both good single player game and good network play (online play wasn’t a reality yet). The trifecta came with good user-created content online — stuff to download and add to the game.

Quake 2 only got two of these — network / online play was good, and so was the user-generated stuff you could download and add on. Single player just wasn’t that good.

There are a couple of reasons for that.

1. There was a whole new story line. Which is fine, that they tried it. Good effort, just irregular implementation. You and others have been sent to the homeworld of the enemy, to counter-strike. You get updates on objectives, and new missions as you have success. It’s OK, but the game took hits for this new sci-fi angle.

2. It wasn’t linear. You had to go forward and backwards at times, to get the objectives. This makes it difficult at times to know what to do next. Where to go. What you missed. If you play the game, experience it, exactly as the designers intended, it’s probably smooth and flows well. But I doubt many did. I wasn’t alone in being left with the feeling of what the hell do I do next?

Unlike Quake, I abandoned the single player Quake 2 stuff mid way through the 10 chapters. I got frustrated. I wasn’t enjoying it any more. I felt like I was getting stuck, and wandering aimlessly for something that wasn’t obvious to me. I played a lot of online Quake 2 — I loved the capture the flag add-ons — but wrote of the single player.

Why pick it up again, after all these years?

Well, I got it running on my Mac. id Software had released the game engine software, and someone had ported it to OS X. I decided to tinker with the OS X version, in preparation for going back to Iraq; a buddy of mine from back in the Quake 2 days is headed there with me, and we thought it’d be a kick to play the old game again. I got it working, after a few tries.

And I gotta say — on a modern Mac, the game is very fast. The graphics aren’t very slick, but it is smoooooth. And I gotta say — single player game play isn’t any better. Same issues, same complaints.

One additional issue, though, that I think is toed to this OS X version. The aim is off. By just a hair. You have to aim just to the left of the target to hit it dead on. Not an issue with, say, a shotgun, but an issue with a precision shot or a rocket at distance.

It was nice to play the old game, but I won’t play it through again.

I grew up around Macs, but moreso around PC’s after I got into high school. I think I did a decent job of staying fluent in Mac-speak, though, as I always found a way to “need” to use them, be it in the lab for school or laying out newspapers or magazines. It helped that I married a graphic designer; from then on, we always had a Mac in the house, no matter how many PC’s we had, too.

But the PC’s. A big chunk of the PC usage, other than email and some surfing, has been games. And a lot of that has been first person shooter (FPS) games. Run around shooting things and others, cooperatively, on teams, or against the machine itself.

On the PC, because the Mac just didn’t make it happen. Not an option, for the most part. Best FPS games were on the PC.

But I’m a Mac guy now. I want to be a Mac guy now. I don’t want to play with Windows any more. Don’t like it. It’s rude. Its ugly. It’s mean. It doesn’t play nice with others. Do. Not. Want.

But I want FPS games from time to time. And I’m headed back to Iraq, and a good friend is headed there with me (which makes it sound more like a road trip than a return to war). And he’s a Mac guy, too, and a first person shooter fan, to boot.

So, want / need a Mac solution. Thus, Quake.

Why Quake? Quake, Quake II, and Quake III Arena were all written by id Software, and have all been released under the GNU General Purpose Library.

In other words, they’ve been set free.

Not the whole games, mind you. Just the engines. A lot of the cosmetics were not — the images used to make the walls look like a wall, and fire look like fire.

Quake lives on as, well, Quake. It hasn’t changed. It looks and plays the same as it did back in the day. After the game was released, some additions were made, like a patch to make use of the OpenGL advances in graphics. It plays the same, though. Same adventures, same monsters, same gameplay. It’s available for Windows and OS X. Download it, here.

Quake II. I know what you’re thinking — Quake II, a sequel to Quake. Well, not really. It’s related in name on. It’s much more of a soldiering game. Much more like conventional war fighting. Great story, great adventure — just not as good, I thought. Making it work for OS X is, well, a bit tricky. There doesn’t seem to have been as much of an effort to wrap up a nice, complete package. Buuuuut, I did manage to cobble something together with the open source engine and the PC demo. You can download it from my server, here. It’s not the full game for single player — it’s just the demo — but the multi-player stuff, both online and LAN, seems to be rock solid.

Open Arena is based on the Quake III engine. And it’s really, really good. When id make Quake III, they opted to forgo single-player stuff and focus exclusively on multi-player. It has solo play, but it’s nothing more than tournament play with bots — computer generated opponents (that are really, really good). Very much like Unreal Tournament, if you’ve seen or played that. Open Arena has the same functions, the same type of play. And best of all, fans have re-made some of the classic maps from the earlier Quake games — it’s like a stroll down memory lane. There’s also Alien Arena, another game built on the same engine, but the OS X version doesn’t seem to work very well and error outs. Open Arena is the one — it rocks. Download it, here — and yes, that file contains everything you need to play it in Windows, OS X, or Linux. Mac users, unzip the file, then mount the .dmg file, and copy the files from the .dmg to the unzipped folder. It works like a charm.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nexuiz. It’s a free game, written as free code with free content. It’s based on a highly modified version of the original Quake game engine — which will blow you away when you see the graphics. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing accomplishment, because it’s a modern, playable, awesome game — that’s for free. Like Open Arena, it makes single player game thrugh the use of bots — and it does it very well. It’s an awesome compliment to Open Arena. Download it, here. And like Open Arena, that .zip file contains all you need to play it on the different platforms.

I’ve got three more to play with. Tremulous (download, here), which looks pretty good (and seems to have a stable OS X version); Urban Terror, which is online / network only; and Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, a free online-only multi-player expansion to Return to Castle Wolfenstein. Also, I want to play some more with Quake 2 — I’d love to figure out how to get the full version to play on OS X. And I’d like to bring back some of the classic Capture The Flag games for Quake and Quake II — LMCTF, for example. I am sure I can figure it out — just need some time. Of course, I’ve got a massive take home exam to crank out this weekend, and some other crap to do, but hey, we’ve all got our priorities, right?