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Finally Quake I can sink my teeth into. Quake III: Team Arena Review by Dave "Marauder" Kratky, Jan 15/2001
I'm not a Quake guy, but wow. They've hit it dead on this time. Warning to Quake players: This review contains many references to heathen products such as "Tribes" and "Unreal Tournament" and may cause severe mental stress. :)) Those who know me well will know that I play Quake reluctantly. I'm still convinced that Duke Nukem was far superior to Quake I. (Kingpin smuggled Quake I back from Europe months before it was available here) I played Quake II for about 10 minutes before selling it to Deadeye. I played Quake III for a week or so before I just plain got bored of it. Now, with Quake III I have to admit getting owned by all the guys who played Quake I and II for more than a few hours total might have had something to do with it... But I actually used to play a bit, especially at LAN parties. However, I always felt that Unreal Tournament was a more polished game with more features than Q3A. Tribes as well had alot more going for it. Treh and other Quake III fanatics of course laughed at me.... But guess what? Seems to be a recent huge move towards other games such as Counter-Strike, even by long time dedicated Quake III fans. Heh. In the end Marauder is always right. :) My general feel is that, without real innovation and some team based play (Admittedly we DO have CTF and Team DM in Quake III.) The game will lose many fans as people get bored of the same thing over and over again and move into games with more depth. We may see a reversal in that trend with the release of Quake III: Team Arena. I've been playing around with this game for about a week now.. and I have to admit, they got it right this time. VERY right.
Menus no longer crap! First off, lets start with the menu system. In two words: It Rocks! One of my major bitches with the Quake series has always been the fact that I need to use a stupid console for far too many things. Tribes & UT were much more intuitive and easier to learn in this respect. The new menus are dead easy to learn and use, and hey! I can now callvote without having to ask someone how to do it. :) It's a menu option! Thank god! The new menus are also dead sexy, rather than the boring, crappy menus that the previous Quake's were stuck with. The game browser still can't beat out the ever dominating Game Spy, but it's at least looking much better. (One annoying thing I did notice: If you use the browser for TA to load a normal Quake III game, when you quit it drops you into Quake III, rather than back to TA. Grrrrrrr.)
We Got Game! The new games are EXCELLENT! As I mentioned above, you can only frag someone so many times before it gets boring. Add some interesting games to the fragging and you've got alot more playability.
Now as most non-Quake players (Yes, you Skotos) are going to point out when they read this little review, none of the above games save the One Flag CTF are new, and have been done before. Something very similar to Harvester was done in Tribes under the name Hunters. The Overload game is much like Assault from UT. Hey, it's in Quake 3, and they're alot of fun.. And different enough that they're not really rips offs, just a different take on the same general idea. The coolest game of the bunch in my opinion is the harvester game. It's quite a challenge to kill guys, collect their glistening skulls and capture them at their own start point. A real riot. Oh, some of the new models are pretty cool, but are nothing all that special or worthy of mention. The new models all seem to be pretty human looking, none of the really cool wacked out (ex. Orb & Klesk) influences here.
Powerups! Woot!
TA has some
VERY interesting Power Ups items that give the game some very cool
twists. It's almost like picking a class to play. The Scout makes
you fast as hell, but you can't carry armor. The Guard gives you 200
health & Armor, and your health regenerates. The Doubler is basically
half a quad damage. The coolest power up of them all is the Kamikaze.
When activated it kills anyone near you, and creates an amazing explosion.
Very cool, very annoying to your opponents. :)
The Maps In TA, you're going to see remakes of quite a few of the truly great maps from Quake III, as well as a plethora of completely new designs. There's even an outdoor map that is just killer. It's huge, and looks completely unlike anything I've seen in Quake before. It's kind of a "Tribes meets Quake" sorta map. There's an excellent variety in the new maps, from close range frantic battles in corridors to wide open space maps. There's even a space map with teleporters (It's split up into 3 separate maps basically) that prevents the "Rail sniper in space" syndrome that's so common on these types of level.
New Guns baby!
Yeah, we got new guns! WOOHOO! What would an expansion pack be without some new toys o' destruction? Along with all your old favs we're got a few more to play with now.....First off there's the Chaingun. It's a rapid fire cannon just like the one from Doom2. Enemies come in, but only pieces come out! A little hard to hit with, but when you do. Ouch. The nailgun fires a spread of nails. Basically it's a super shotgun. My absolute favorite new weapon has gotta be the Proxy mine launcher. It sticks mines on any surface. These mines explode when a player goes near them. Heh. Tailgaters beware. It's also great for laying sneaky booby traps as seen above. I can hardly wait to camp somewhere with my rear covered by mines. :) You can also stick mines to a player if you hit them. 2 Seconds later they get a countdown on their screen and.... BLAMO! :) This is going to be one hellovalotta fun.
The final analysis Well, I have to take back all the nasty things I've said about Quake III and iD Software. (Actually there's not that many, I've just never really liked Quake!) They've struck gold with this one. It's pretty steep for an expansion, but it's actually better than the original in my opinion. The only way I can think of to describe it is Quake III meets UT meets Team Fortress Classic. Spiffy. Graphics, music, sounds, models, maps... All so damned good. I really can't find anything to bitch about here. :) And that's pretty damned unusual in itself.
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