Going back to our list of influential local pc games, our next game in the list is a tie. Actually, it wasn't like that at first but long time resident blog asshole Fishcake was quick to remind me though that sometimes more than one game causes a change to the pc community, the same way it took more than a couple of Final Fantasies until we realized Squaresoft was just fucking with us by trying to find out how much zippers,belts, and emo they can cram into a single game before we start cringing.
Anyway, on our second spot, we have Quake 2 and Half-Life, both first person shooters that signaled the reincarnation of the first person shooter as a fast-paced, true 3d competitive game where characters can actually jump (fuck you Doom)
On a side note, Quake 2 for me is like my first entry into the pirated games market. I bought it as a gift to a friend and couldn't resist playing a few before giving it to him. The CD was with me for 24 hours and I ended up playing with it for 20.
Lan-games-wise, this is the first game that I actually played in a net cafe with friends, teaching me three things:
- if you don't know how to aim, look for the biggest gun available
- if the biggest gun is unavailable, learn how to aim
- Fuck railguns
Quake 2 was a game that played infinitely faster than any RTS. You login, you create a game, people login and then you just keep killing each other until it's 9PM and you're still 40kms from your house on a weeknight. It's that fast.
Half-Life was not too different from Quake 2, although admittedly I had more fun playing this game because in fact it came out much later and featured more fun things (like the killer alien pikachus you can throw at your enemies for maximized humiliation) as well as more interaction with the environment. Half-Life marked the first time the First Person Shooter Genre decided to grow the fuck up and throw away the morbid emo-goth themes of Quake/Heretic/Doom and just go with bright sunny outdoors shootouts. Suddenly even people who had low tolerances for huge contrasts of bright and dark found themselves hooked into LAN games.
Why Quake 2 and Half-Life though? I can simply answer it based on the idea that those two games started requiring computers to have videocards installed. See, once upon a time, we didn't have to spend half a month's salary to get a videocard that eats more power than a vacuum cleaner sucking water out of a pool. Half-Life and Quake2, unlike Starcraft actually ran much FASTER with a videocard on, and of course, the graphics was significantly enhanced, making the gaming experience much much better (and getting humiliated by a backstabbing crowbar much much more evident)
Overtime, net cafes that didn't have any videocards on their computers became old hat and the race to provide the best vidcards started, never unding up until this present day.
While the introduction of videocards was both eventual and inevitable, it's the requiring force of the two games that made shop owners wise up and actually start focusing on the quality of the game machines instead of just the quantity of units.
Because of that force, I put Quake2 and Half-Life in this list.
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3 comments:
i dunno but i prefer Q2 more than HL. Also Q2 is the very first, lan game i ever played. first 1st person shoot out i played. first time i get dizzily addicted to a pc game. i remember we shed at least P40-P60 / hour just to play these games at UM. And i can even remember playing with the potential best Q2 players of the country back then or so i think they are.. Yeah maybe i thought they where. :))
I'd go with Half-life. Q2 don give no gibbs like Half-life does. Haha!
If I might make a request, Red Kinoko, I'd like to see your reviews for online games, as well. :D
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