Quake II Review

Yes, you read right... I wanted to give my impressions of a game I just finished last month called Quake II. I know its old but it came bundled with the special DVD version of Quake IV that I purchased on GoGamer's famous 48 Hour Madness sale for $29.99. Since Quake IV story line takes off from the ending of Quake II I figure I would start the series right by playing the "prequel" first.

As you can imagine, a modern PC based system can easily handle the meager recommended hardware requirements of the game (Pentium 133, 24MB of RAM) so I was able to crank up the eye candy and the resolution to the max with no apparent slowdown. I was even able to play the game in windowed mode with no drop in frame rate. Another benefit of system overkill was that the game loaded in about 4 seconds. The graphics were suprisingly good considering the game came out in November of 1997. The only keyboard modification I had to make was to enable mouse look. Using the keyboard to change the POV was just to archaic for me.

The game itself was very enjoyable. I can't remember why I never got around to playing it when it first came out. I think it might have been because I was turned off by the lack of gameplay in the original Quake demo (which doesn't share any of the storyline of Quake II or IV) or perhaps I was still playing the ever popular Duke Nukem 3D. Either way I was glad to have finally experience Quake II. It had some cool Easter Eggs at the end including a level where you can see the id developers in a sort of hall of fame level.