an arc i didn't expect myself to go through within the last year is my Quake arc. i didn't know a thing about Quake prior to March of 2024, i might've seen the Shambler once or twice, and i knew Speed Demos Archive was related to it somehow, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. then i was gifted Quake 1 by a friend, and i almost instantly fell in love. i'd say the first Quake ranks in my top favorite games of all time now, and i don't even like shooters all that much. after finishing Quake 1 for the first time, i immediately hungered for more, and decided to buy the entire Quake series on Steam. i was soon hit with the harsh reality that each of the four Quake games are completely different from each other in a lot of ways, and i didn't like any of them at first. Quake 2 felt super generic, Quake 3 didn't have a real singleplayer mode, Quake 4 looked like Call of Duty. where were the Shamblers? the weird castles? the Nine Inch Nails music? the ATMOSPHERE? i played each of the other three mainline Quakes for all of 10 minutes before heading back to replay Quake 1 for the 10th time, and didn't even give Quake Live or Quake Champions the time of day.

since then, i've become a lot more open to each of the Quake entries and what they have to offer. Quake 2, while still having a really boring setting and ugly enemy designs, has some of the most satisfting, fast-paced, electrifying gameplay in any shooter i've ever played, at least in singleplayer. Quake 4 looks absolutely insane for a game released in 2005, and that's all thanks to it running on id Tech 4, which also powered games like Doom 3, Prey and Wolfenstein (2009). i have nothing nice to say about Quake Champions. but what about Quake 3? that was easily the one i bounced off of the most. i mean, no singleplayer? what the hell kind of a joke is that? as i said in my Solitaire review, i'm not really one for competitive head-to-head games, and things like deathmatch or capture the flag never really clicked for me. i mean, for crying out loud, nearly 80% of my 730 hours in TF2 were spent in either Mann vs Machine or playing Surf maps. so what could Quake 3 Arena possibly do to get someone like me to not only play it, but now consider it tied with Quake 1 for my favorite in the series?

it's simple. you make an engine with some of the most fun and complex movement in any FPS i've ever played, expand on the already extremely fun to use arsenal of weapons previously established in the series to create the best lineup yet, have a dedicated fanbase hellbent on keeping the community alive with custom maps, mods and servers, and make the game look so distinctly late-90's-FPS that i can't possibly hate it. yeah, my opinions on Q3A have done quite the u-turn since March, and i just need to talk about this game to anybody who will listen.

so, let's address the main thing. do i enjoy deathmatch here? surprisingly, yeah. i'm not super great at it, and it usually devolved into a chaotic mess when the server has too many people in it, but i think that makes it more enjoyable to me. the chaos makes me feel inclined to not take it as seriously. sure, i'm dying every couple of seconds, but so is everyone else. plus, competitive games these days always feel the need to have a leaderboard or a battle pass or EXP or whatever. (i'm looking at you Quake Champions, and not in a nice way.) it makes me feel like i NEED to be good at the game to enjoy it. but Q3A is the purest extract of online deathmatch, no extra bells or whistles, and it makes laughing off stupid deaths or spawn camping much easier, since it doesn't matter.

now, there's something important to address when it comes to online games like this. most of the people playing Q3A online these days probably aren't playing as lax as i am, and there's gonna be assholes. but i kind of love observing the kind of people you meet in online games like this. it's like sitting on the bus and listening to all the random conversations people have, just taking in all of this activity going on in the world. it's a hard thing to explain, but if you've played online games like this you'll probably know what i'm talking about.

so, the deathmatch feels less serious and more enjoyable and approachable because of that, but what about the gameplay itself? i mentioned a couple paragraphs ago that this game has some insane movement tech, so let's finally go into detail about that. the first three Quake games pretty famously have some very interesting physics quirks that let you move in very unique ways. i mean, it's the series that invented bunnyhopping and rocket-jumping. Quake 1's movement was so interesting in fact that it kickstarted the entire subcommunity of speedrunning. (i mean, technically Doom started that, but SDA was made for Quake so i'm giving the point to Quake here.) Q3A continues that legacy by not only having very fun and fast paced movement, but also making those techniques relatively accessible, at least compared to other games like Quake 1 or Half-Life. in Q1, you have to let go of the forward key to gain speed while b-hopping, which is REALLY hard to unlearn when you've been playing games as long as me, and in HL b-hops are frame perfect and you have to rebind your scrollwheel or whatever. Q3A makes things relatively simple to learn, yet has a skill ceiling so high that people are still discovering new techniques to this day. strafejumping is the name of the game here, and it's what makes Q3A for me. to strafejump, all you gotta do is hold forward, jump, hold a strafe key, then slowly move your mouse in the direction you're strafing. by zig-zagging your strafejumps and chaining jumps together, you can gain loads of speed in the matter of seconds. and that's just one of the many, MANY different techniques people have discovered and perfected, i can't even begin to get into the complexities of circle jumping, plasma-climbing, rocket-jumping, surfing, and the other crazy stuff in just Q3A alone.

but with that said, there's probably something that doesn't sit quite right with you. sure, there's all this cool movement stuff you can use in multiplayer, but there's no singleplayer to speedrun or optimize with it. isn't that kind of lame? and to that i say, first of all, i never said Q3A doesn't have singleplayer, i said it doesn't have a real singleplayer. come on, pay attention. second of all, i'm glad you brought this up because it leads me directly into the next thing i wanted to talk about: DeFRaG. some Q3A players were so over the moon with the delectable movement systems at play in this entry that they made an entire mod and gamemode dedicated to said movement systems. did you really think Mot "I'm Not All That Into Shooters" McGee spent all her time playing deathmatch? DeFRaG takes out all the combat and fragging (hense, de-frag) in return for one main goal: go fast. REALLY fast. the mod is entirely geared towards race maps, or maps with the sole purpose of being traversed as quickly as possible, usually in stylish fashion. if you've ever seen Surf in CounterStrike or TF2, this is Q3A's equivalent to that. there's leaderboards that automatically track your best times on each map, tons of community servers for players all over the world, and a fairly active community of dedicated players, most of which are super chill and will gladly teach you new techniques to help you with your runs. if you couldn't already guess, this is the mode i've sunk the most time into. i'm a speedrunner at heart after all, and this is my bread and butter. what can i say? the self-improvement of DeFRaG speaks to me in a way deathmatch never has. i want to do a full review of DeFRaG on its own at some point, so i'll save all my thoughts on this mod for another time. just know that DeFRaG is sick, and you should at least go watch some replays people have uploaded.

one aspect i've yet to touch on in regards to Q3A is its presentation. both Quake 1 and Quake 2 had very defined and focused art styles, prioritizing fantasy and sci-fi respectively. Quake 1 was dingy, soaked in John Romero's vision of a dark fantasy shooter with eldrich beasts and a forboding atmosphere. Quake 2's sci-fi setting is pretty boring to me, but i can at least appreciate the ideas at play there, what with the unnerving imagery of the Stroggs, an alien race that harvests their opponents' body parts to be used to create more of their kind. so, what's Quake 3 Arena got going on? surprisingly, kind of a mish-mash of both? the story is extremely basic and borderline non-existent, a race called the Vadrigar steal the universe's greatest warriors and force them to fight each other for their own amusement. as such, i guess the combination of Q1 and Q2's art directions kind of makes sense. you have these huge castles and cathedrals, giant machines and factories out in space, and everything in between. then you get to the lineup of playable characters, and all sense of unity goes out the window. it seems normal at first, you've got Ranger and Bitterman, the main characters of Q1 and Q2 respectively, the Doomguy, Tank Jr. from Q2, but then there's the new guys. some standouts to me are Anarki, a sugar junkie who rides a hoverboard, Sorlag, a reptilian alien that's referred to by the game itself as a "scumbag of the first order" (and who is also probably transfem? based) and my personal favorite, Orbb. Orbb is the best character in any videogame. it's an eyeball with legs! sure, the character roster is kind of all over the place, i mean for christ's sake you can play as some of the developers. but i kinda love that, it's got this chaotic energy that you really don't get with modern games. now, does Q3A look good these days? objectively, no, not really. but fuck man, i can't help but love the look of this game. it absolutely reeks of late 90's FPS, what with its bold menus, oversized font, blocky maps and playermodels, and i eat every last bit of it up. it makes the game almost feel like it's some random indie project, despite the fact that Q3A was made by id god-damn Software, was insanely popular at the time and is commonly regarded as one of the best multiplayer shooters ever. again, i know i said it before but you really ain't gonna get something that has the same look and feel as Q3A in modern day, and it's super unique in that regard.

okay, i really gotta wrap things up here, so let's go over a couple of smaller topics to round off this review. one, singleplayer. i said Q3A doesn't have a real singleplayer, but that implies it at least has something, right? well, it's nothing huge. it's literally just a set of deathmatches against bots that progressively get harder and harder, it's super lame. two, Quake Live. Quake Live was a sort of rerelease of Q3A that came out in 2010. it let you play a souped up version of Q3A in your browser and was free to play, until 2014 where that version got shut down and was replaced with a Steam version you had to buy. one cool thing about Quake Live is that its equivalent of DeFRaG is Race Mode, which is built directly into the game, no need for mods. i actually got into QLRace before playing Q3A or DeFRaG, and it's what set that seed in me to begin with. it's a little more beginner friendly, since instead of needing to time your b-hops, you autojump by holding down the spacebar. if you want to get into DeFRaG, i suggest starting with QLRace. three, Quake 3 Team Arena. Q3TA is an expansion for Q3A that adds team focused gamemodes like Capture the Flag, Harvester and Overload. it also added some classic weapons like the Nailgun, Chaingun and even the Proximity Launcher from an expansion pack for Quake 1 called Scourge of Armagon. deep cut, but that's pretty cool. i'll be honest, i don't know that much about Team Arena since the community for it is borderline non-existent, and i can't find anyone to play it with. i think a lot of Q3TA's ideas got recycled and reimplemented into Quake Live, so that's good at least. fourth, OpenArena. OpenArena is a free, open source, fully customizable alternative to Q3A that (at least as far as i can tell) perfectly recreates the physics and feel. it's got a much cleaner look compared to Q3A, but it looks shitty in more of an early 2000's way. i think it was Japanese developed as well, which also contributes to its distinct vibe. the community is also, surprisingly enough, still pretty active, despite the fact that the official site hasn't been updated since 2015. it also gets bonus points for carrying on the original spirit of Quake Live by having a version you can play in your browser called OpenArena Live, so that's pretty neat. and finally, fifth, the console ports. Q3A got ported to three consoles, Dreamcast, PS2 and Xbox 360. i don't have a way to play the 360 version, so i'll only be talking about the other two. the PS2 version was called Quake 3 Revolution, and despite online play being commonly supported on the PS2, Q3R didn't for whatever reason. really weird choice for a game that's entire focus is the multiplayer, and they didn't even give it a real singleplayer to make up for that. not to mention, no mouse and keyboard support, which the PS2 was capable of doing. Q3R objectively kinda sucks, but i'd be lying if i said i didn't at least somewhat like it. i always find console ports of janky PC games to be really interesting, since they usually have to clean them up a bit to get them approved for the console. the PC scene is a lot more accepting of jank, but console users? not so much. as such, a lot of console ports of PC games have completely unique menus or a different presentation, like Half-Life on PS2 or The Sims on GameCube. the Dreamcast port fares a lot better, it supports both online play AND mouse + keyboard. there's even fan servers for the online, so you can still experience it to this day! it runs a little choppier and has some more compressed sound effects compared to Q3R, but it's still Q3 and plays great. trust me though, you're gonna want to get that mouse and keyboard setup, because all it takes is one look at the Dreamcast controller to know what the main sticking point of this port is. literally. without a right analog stick on the Dreamcast controller, you've got two options. one, play with tank controls, or two, move with ABXY and look around with the stick. simply swapping the sides of these two actions is enough to completely fry my brain for some reason, i just can never get used to it. if you've ever played that unreleased Dreamcast port of Half-Life, it's the same control scheme, and it's just as dreadful here as it is there.

as you can probably tell by this point, i've got a lot to say about Quake 3 Arena. it went from being the most throwaway game in the series for me to being my second favorite, potentially even first favorite depending on the day you ask me on. not only is it an extremely fascinating piece of gaming history, but it's also got a dedicated community, a visual style i love, and tight gameplay that still holds up to this day. Quake 3 Arena is one of the greats, and it should never be forgotten.