Old Games: Encyclopedia Bombastica: Quake II

Awesome, love Quake 2!

People always seem super down on this game, I loved this campaign.

THIS SOUNDTRACK IS FUCKING RIPPING

@evilsbane: For me the single player was also the main reason I liked Quake II. The atmosphere of that game was really on point.

awesome music!

The singleplayer is pretty cool. Never liked the multiplayer though.

And Sonic Mayhem soundtrack F T W.

Also: 3D EXPLOSIONS!

I first played through Quake 2 in 2012 and had a great time with it. I love the enemy and gun noises in old first person shooters. Also all the secrets packed in to the levels. It's a rare type of game style now and games like the new Shadow Warrior or Painkiller don't really cover it as they're more arena/wave shooters. So you pretty much have to go back to these older games. I'd suggest using KM_Quake to make it a little prettier. Well, relative to when it came out prettier.

The hottest of mics.

I'm liking the influx of these Bombasticas. Great feature!

As Quake II was probably the first game I ever played, I've been looking forward to this.

As soon as I saw a EB about Quake, I knew Brad would be doing it

I think I still have some back issues of PC Gamer.

I remember them hyping lighting and light sources attached to enemies, and it started the crazy playercounts for online (think it had 32v32 or something silly), though Quake 2 never really caught on to the extent of the original

I got this with my first 3d accelerator card - a canopus pure 3D card. It was amazing at the time!

Brad nerding out about Id Software games is always the best.

Ha, I was playing that first song in Audiosurf last night. What an awesome soundtrack.

YES

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6VpX-feA2M

I could watch GB crew play Id games for days. Good EB. Quake I deserves one; the single player still holds up really well and does unique stuff.

If we have a Doom and Mechwarrior 2 Bombastica my childhood will be nearly fully represented.

Throw in Everquest and Counter-strike and I'll basically be 12 again

MMX FTMFW!! I remember playing a weird version of this on n64, hah.

First online shooter i played too, i think (though only a little here and there)

Ugh linear texture filtering!

My husband (then my boyfriend) bought me Quake II when we were first dating. I was really into early FPS (Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Dark Forces) but my family had never purchased a Windows PC. I played Doom and Wolfenstein 3D on the SNES and Dark Forces on the Playstation. So, when we were talking about games, he wanted to know if I had played Quake or Quake II, and I hadn't. Within a few months, we ended up getting a PC, so he installed Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein 3D and Quake. It was awesome.

Then, one day, he gives me a box set for Quake II. It was the game, the mission packs, all the cool stuff. I played the crap out of that game. I still have the disks, too.

Quake II is a great game and is one of my personal favorites, if only because I associate it very closely with my SO and when we first started dating. It's a weird connection I know. :D

Oh, and I own all the action figures that they released too. They're really neat. I think my favorite was the Iron Maiden, but the female marine was dope too.

Quake 2 had a shitty campaign full of backtracking and lame levels. The multiplayer saved it.

I went there.

Brad, that is actually not how the Doom BFG worked. Basically, the doom BFG first fired a big plasma ball that did tons of damage to anything it hit. After it had detonated, 40 invisible "rays" are fired out from the BFG in a cone-shape in front of the player, doing extra damage. Those are the things that kills everything that wasn't hit by the initial plasma ball. So, the way to do the most amount of damage to a big dude is to walk up to the enemy and have it fill the screen, and then fire the BFG. That way, the big plasma ball as well as all 40 rays will hit him.

Fun fact: Doom had a very simplistic random number generator for calculating things like damage. This random number generator was very bad. It is so bad, in fact, that it unintentionally nerfs the BFG. That is to say, in Doom, the BFG has a max theoretical damage it can do, but the RNG can never actually produce the sequence of numbers that make this max damage happen.

Doom BFG projectile did damage when it collided with an enemy then a bunch (invisible) rays shot out of the player in a cone aimed at that projectile and did damage giving the impression it killed most anything you had been looking at when you fired it. Contrasted with the Quake version that shot rays out of the initial projectile it was a slightly different take on the original weapon from Doom 1+2. Fun video, thank you @Brad !

Rocket Arena was definitely a thing in Quake 1.

I remember being very impressed with the tech in Quake 2 but found both the single player and multiplayer disappointing. Quake 3 was good for multiplayer but by then LAN-parties wasn't a thing in my sleepy town any more because internet had become fast enough for people to both play multiplayer and download "warez" which killed the huge weekly LAN-parties we used to have and playing online multiplayer never really spoke to me.

I played a bunch of this campaign back when it came out, but never finished it on PC. I finished it for the first time many years later when a 360 port came on a second disk with Quake 4 at that console's launch.

Goddam i miss games like this. Just let me shoot stuff with a good soundtrack in the background. Last game that was like this was Shadow Warrior returns.

Btw Brad please fix the clipping mic, it sounds horrible ;(

I love this game! Later when we had 2 computers, I liked to play this in LAN co-op!

I like when Brad gets all nostalgic :)

Shoe Bradmaker

Hand grenades were the best thing about the game.

But yea, it was the weakest of the big 3 in terms of multiplayer. That rocket launcher sucked.

We bought the multi-tap so we could play four player splitscreen on the PS1 version.

What is he blabbering about, Quake 2 has one legacy and one legacy only 3D. Literally everyone I knew went out and bought 3D cards for this game.

Also, fuck yeah Quake 2. So many great memories from both single and multiplayer.

Only played through Q2 as co-op. Tried to replay it again few years ago, but it was too scary - the creepy noises and the atmosphere just got to me.

Q2 multiplayer is where the magic was at though. Played so much Rocket Arena and Action Quake 2. Still load up AQ2 every now and then - tons of fun, even now.

Holy crap, you just reminded me that I have the female marine (with the double-shotgun and tentacle-doggy bad-guy) stashed in my closet somewhere!

I'm a bit surprised Brad never really went into how different this game was from Quake 1, thematically -- Quake 1 being basically Doom 3D, with medieval-future demon-monster-thingies being the main bad guy, and Quake 2 being an odd Proto-Gears-of-War military sci-fi shooter. Even the music was a compete 180 in the second game -- the soundtrack for Quake 1 was an awesomely produced atmospheric electronic creep-fest from Trent Reznor, and Quake 2 was grindy industrial-metal (but still great).

@ares42: I bought a 6MB(!!) 3D card for this beauty.

QUAKE 2 IS THE BEST FPS EVER MADE. DESCENT INTO CERBERON IS THE SHIT!

CHUNKS OF MEAT AND METAL... MEATAL!

As an aficionado of colored lighting, I approve.

Back when PC games were PC games, not gimped ports of console games. Back when you could get excited for a PC game.

The game still has some of the best enemy placement and level design of FPS games.

Now all I need is a Soldier of Fortune Encyclopedia Bombastica video!

THIS SOUNDTRACK IS SHREDDIN', DAWG

I could watch Brad play this all day, so many great early PC fps memories came back with this that I'm ready to break out my 3dfx video card and 56k modem.

Quake 2 had a story? Ok.

Watching this really makes you appreciate the innovations in level design, scripting and interactivity games like Half Life and GoldenEye brought to the genre.

Oh man, this game. A couple years ago I went through a bit of a Doom 1/2 obsession, and I decided to play through all of Id's major FPS games from Wolf 3D through Rage. I'd touched a few of them previously, but that was the first time I'd beaten any of them. Quake 2 was the low point, especially coming right off of Quake. Brad mentions in the video that he didn't dig Q2 multi-player because the changes to the physics and weapons made everything slower than Q1, and I thought the same thing playing single-player. The map design tries to create more of a sense of place than Q1's abstract murder-dimension, but even for 1997 it's too samey and industrial, especially compared to the detail in Duke 3D a year earlier or Half-Life just a year later. A lot of the changes that I think hurt Q2 were in service of video-game "realism," but chasing that rabbit just made shooters slower and less interesting for a lot of the late 90s and early 2000s.

I can't say whatever it was complete shite, because it's been way too long since I played the game, but it definitely got completely trampled by Duke Nukem 3D for example. But that didn't really matter, because it looked amazing back then.

...and alien cyber-zombies? Strogg, goddamnit! Even Drew knows that.

Even better video than Dark Forces. I could definitely do with more FPS encyclopedias.

Quake 1 is a million times better than any other Quake. Come at me.

I didn't really play PC games as a kid, but my dad was into FPS's and RTS's so I must have seen him play this at some point.

I don't know if it was 1 or 2, but I remember him showing off a weapon that was a mod he had downloaded. It was some kind of spiky ball on a stick that you could send away like a boomerang and it would stick to enemies, you could also use it as a grappling hook to get across gaps. It's one of the first things I think about when I see these games and it probably wasn't even in the base game.

Quake 2 had the best SP of the franchise. It just felt so *good*, and while Stroggos is abstract and samey, I love running through it just the same. And I still love the designs of the Strogg themselves. Kind of a nightmarish Borg equivalent.