You get the phone call at 4 a.m. By 5:30 you're in the secret installation. The commander explains tersely, "It's about the Slipgate device. Once we perfect these, we'll be able to use them to transport people and cargo from one place to another instantly.
"An enemy codenamed Quake, is using his own slipgates to insert death squads inside our bases to kill, steal, and kidnap..
"The hell of it is we have no idea where he's from. Our top scientists think Quake's not from Earth, but another dimension. They say Quake's preparing to unleash his real army, whatever that is.
"You're our best man. This is Operation Counterstrike and you're in charge. Find Quake, and stop him ... or it ... You have full authority to requisition anything you need. If the eggheads are right, all our lives are expendable.."

As you would expect from an id game, the story is not the thing that makes this game great, it's just the usual scenario of an undescribably dangerous and ugly force threatening to wipe out life on earth as we know it, set in a not-so-distant dark future.

The first thing you notice when you play Quake is the incredible 3D engine, The engine is a true 3D engine. The engine makes Quake behave more three-dimensional than any other "3D game", a good example of this is the ability to look almost strait up or down, after you have tried this in Quake you'll notice that the same feature in Duke Nukem and the Marathon series are completely unrealistic. The whole atmosphere of the game is also fantastic - The sound effects are the best ones in any computer game since Myst and the music sounds more like a soundtrack than just "background music".
The layout of the levels are pretty similar to the ones in Doom (they have just added a dimension), You'll remember the "hitech-future vs. hellish-nightmare theme" from the Doom series.
The maps are filled with that scary feeling you'll remember from your nightmares of hell - this in definitely not some kind of "kick ass and chew bubblegum"-game, this is dead serious.

Quake also uses it's 3D engine to create some of the most fearsome monsters seen in any game, when your weapons really hasn't changed much since Doom II, it doesn't seem quite fair - but who ever said that Hell was supposed to be fair?

One of the best parts about Quake is that it is possible for anyone to create extensions to the game to change just about everything about the game. When other companies usually don't like people messing around with their game (remember the dialog boxes form the marathon games warning you about using non-bungie maps or physics models) id really encourages you to do just that. The result of this can be seen if you visit any of the unofficial quake sites on the net. Since Quake has been out for some time for the PC there are a lot of conventions available to chose from. All of these are of course compatible with the Mac version too. You can find the strangest things here, or how about a convention that can turn Quake into a racing game, a flight sim, or a game of soccer? These are just a few of the things you can find.

One other great thing about Quake is the multiplayer options. You can play a multiplayer game of Quake over any network (AppleTalk, IPX and TCP/IP [like the Internet]). It's also compatible with the PC version (so you can gib them to).
Quake is a lot more fun as a multiplayer game that an a single-player game - face it, Quake was built to be a network game, if you haven't played Quake over a network you have really missed the best part.
To make network play even more fun you can play on different teams or play with people from all over the world on an dedicated Internet Quake server.

Some people have complained about the speed of the game, compared to other 3D games like Duke Nukem 3D and Marathon Infinity, Quake requires a much more powerful Mac to run at the same screensize and framerate. Simply because it's a much more powerful game. Few people will probably use a screensize larger than 320x240 with pixel doubling (without the help from a 3D graphics accelerator). However all the same people will probably buy the game anyway because it's simply the best game available (and probably will be for some time).


Test Computer: Requirements:
  • Performa 6400/200 (PowerPC 603e @ 200Mhz)
  • 48 Megs of RAM
  • 8x CD-ROM
  • 256 Kb level 2 cache
  • PowerPC Mac required
  • 16 MB Megs of RAM
  • CD-ROM
  • 50 MB hard disk space
Retail Price: Demo:
  • Around $40:00
Related Links: Updaters:
Rating:

Reviewed by Hampus Edvardsson