Quake2/Halflife : Top 5 Influential PC Multiplayer Games In The Philippines

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.

Starcraft : Top 5 Influential PC Multiplayer Games In The Philippines

Starcraft wasn't exactly a groundbreaker in many things. By the time it got released locally in 1998, people in my school were already playing real-time strategy games like Total Annihilation and Red Alert, both of which already had a relatively loyal fanbase. Selected internet cafes were already offering head-to-head local area gameplay for these games as well.

More after the jump.

Thinking about it, despite its hype overseas, the reception of the relatively small PC gaming community of this game locally was far from impressive. Of course, not many people had internet connections at the time so we didn't know what the world thought about it, and game magazines were imported and reserved for our rich pompous asshole classmates who had relatives overseas. We were left to our own devices to find out about Starcraft, but like many good things like porn and torrent, it was more of an inevitable discovery than a lucky break.

Gameplaywise, Starcraft featured three distinct races that basically had zero common units that played differently, which made games like Red Alert and Total Annhiliation look like boring chess variants. Starcraft also limited the number of maximum units that could be created in the game, forcing players to manage resources and construction time better. Suddenly, multiplayer games were no longer about who could click the fastest alone (although rushfags will always exist). Personally, I'd like to believe this was the turnkey feature that enabled RTS to be turned into an electronic sport. Strategy was brought into the limelight, where it would stay up to this day.

As another revolution to gaming locally, Starcraft featured a dial-up connectivity mode, enabling anybody with at least a 28kbps baud modem and an unguarded phoneline to connect to a friend from miles away for some head-to-head/co-op games. Considering prepaid internet would not be introduced until a year later, and would not become mainstream for at least 2 more years, the dialup function gave local players a taste of what it felt like to rape somebody ingame, at the comfort of their own home. On a lighter sidenote, Starcraft also introduced the first time parents got angry over the overusage of telephone lines for a reason other than "telebabad".

With its amazing sprite graphics, flexible multiplayer-for-poor-people capabilities, fluid gameplay, and robust support for abusive zerg players, Starcraft invaded local networking haunts and served as the standard way of settling disputes about who has the bigger e-penis among the select few network gamers for a veeeeeeeeery long time.


Runner up : Warcraft 2
Warcraft 2 is the direct prerunner of Starcraft and had many of the features that made Starcraft a staple game for many of us. However, it was a game well ahead of its time, and could only be enjoyed by the select few who already had computers capable of running the game, which wasn't a lot. (I got my first pentium around mid '96, but didn't start playing games on it until the following year, when Red Alert already existed)

5 Games That Changed The Philippine PC Multiplayer Gaming Landscape

Nowadays, one of the biggest subsets of the video gaming culture in the Philippines is that of the Multiplayer PC Games category. With games like World of Warcraft, Counter Strike: Source, and Defense of The Ancients (DoTA), pc multiplay has permeated so deeply into the culture of youth that not knowing anything about these games could actually make you feel "weird".

This has not always been the case, of course, and as somebody who grew up during the coming of age of multiplayer video gaming in general, I can tell you that the road to the current state of things has been long and detailed, filled with games that tried, failed and succeeded, revolutionizing gaming as we see it today.

In a series of 5 articles, we will discuss the 5 games that actually contributed to the evolution of the local PC gaming landscape, so that future generations can savor the unique double-edged experience of "total pwnage".

#5: Starcraft