Quake 4, The End

[elfs]

I finished Quake 4, and I have to say that, all in all, I was impressed with the total package. As a follow-on to Quake 2, this "Return to Stroggos" was about as well put-together as it could possibly have been. There are plot holes big enough to drive a truck through (really, if you use the enemy as raw material, would you really start to modify them into a monster killing machine before you reprogram their brains?) and there's always the "gee, the bad guys sure leave a lot of Terran Alliance ammunition lying around, don't they?" Ocassionally, that was excused: you'd find the wreck of a flyer that had crashed into the building nearby, but once you'd entered the heart of the system the writers ran out of excuses and just said, "Here's your ammo. Enjoy!"

Quake 4 was supposed to be different from Doom III, even though both are built on the same engine. Quake 4 was supposed to be a stand-up fight rather than horror, but it can't escape from an essential truth: The Stroggs are gross.

The storyline goes something like this: The Stroggs are nanotech-engineered supersoldiers. They're incapable of engineering themselves or making anything better, and their whole purpose is to take over the universe. We don't know where they came from, but one can assume that they consumed their creators long ago. They can mass-produce a special-purpose line of nanites that make flesh do all sorts of different things, and then they use that flesh. So, in true Doom-like fashion, you end up in a waste processing center where the intakes consist of rows and rows of stumped torsos into which waste is being dumped and out of the other ends the cleaned product is separated from the waste. Later, you discover that being "in the bowels" of the waste processing center is not a metaphor.

There are new and horrible monsters, and this game was definitely written so that nobody could get through it with "just the pistol" or "just the shotgun." Some of these beasts are truly, deeply nasty. And your buddy is a cold-hearted engineer name Strauss who never gives you a fraggin' break, not even after you've been turned into a Strogg.

Quake 4 definitely explores new territory when it comes to high-resolution artwork in support of a violent and shamelessly disgusting but fun bit of pandering. If you go for the violent, Quake 4 is a game for you.

Oh, and a word of praise for the programmers of the Linux edition: I never turned the game off. Never. When I was done with a level, I just left the hero sitting there waiting for more. Sometimes I'd come back and someone had found and killed him and I'd just restart, but most often not. Despite running in-game animations constantly for three solid weeks, the game never crashed once, never died, didn't grow in memory uncontrollably, didn't require a reboot, didn't slow the machine down (bittorrent and usenet continued to run in the background just fine, and the controls and products of both were available to the laptop via SSH). All in all, a solid and shining example of code that others should seek to emulate.

Comments

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

That is an impressive piece of engineering. Says something about the drivers, too.

[omahas.livejournal.com]

You forgot to mention that you were using the Mac version of the game. ;)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I was using the media that came on the Mac DVD. Which, oddly enough, was not in the Macintosh HPFS format, but in the more common UFS/ISO9660 format that Linux and Windows have in common (although Windows has its "Joliet" extermination, er, extension). The binary was supplied by ID.