Recent reviews by qlip

peak fiction

god i love being shodan's errand boy

I'm an avid rpg lover, and while I do very much enjoy other genres, I like RPGs the most for being able to create believable or memorable casts of characters or worlds. In the 90s, I feel japanese producers dominated storytelling in video games. Deus Ex is on a whole other level.

Deus Ex's narrative invokes a questioning of the player's moral choices, takes place in a believable, cohesive and explorable world and has some of the best ambience I've ever felt in a video game. The NPCs I talked to and interacted with felt alive, and the locations your missions take place in feel truly lived in. I loved the characters; Tong, Paul and Bob Page most of all. The light RPG elements involving gaining and assigning skillpoints allowed me to try and experiment with different playstyles and will no doubt make replaying the game feel fresh. There's so many possible paths, actions and dialogue choices you can make that lead to only the slightest difference in a scene or how the story plays out, that its fun to test everything out and see the potential outcomes.

I implore you to play this any way you can. Its almost nearly infinitely replayable, cheap, and can run on just about anything.

it lets me play funny fart noises ingame

Worthy of being part of the "build engine trilogy". Its fast, occasionally funny, fun and requires a good amount of skill to succeed at.

Everything about this game is art. The movement, the enemy design, the art direction, the aesthetics, the sound design, the music; it all meshes so well to form a game that feels like it came out in the late 90s, and I mean that in the best possible way - its like one of the classics that the devs had to go above and beyond on and make the most out of on a still limited engine. If anyone ever tells me that shooters are mindless low effort games that appeal to the masses, I'm going to point to this one, and tell them to play it. This game should make Quake quiver.

There exists a launcher mod that allows you to launch mods, official expansions and more via eduke in addition to 20th anniversary for episode 5 or episodes 1-4 with true 3d rendering. Pick up the launcher mod in addition to the sound restoration mod for the definitive dn3d experience. I'd rather not give Randy my money but this is the best and unfortunately only option at the moment. Still an excellent game.

Apparently this game was only called "Quake 2" because they were unsure of what else they could've called it during development. Still an excellent game, just surprised they went with Quake 2 over "Doom 3", honestly. Doom 3 came later, of course, and while it was still a great game it played very differently to what came before it. This is still very much a natural evolution of Quake just as Quake 1 is an evolution of Doom, however, and its still very much worth a play. Seen a lot of negativity surrounding this game and can safely say its unwarranted in my opinion.

While the first half is easily on par if not better than the original game and its first expansion, the second leaves a lot to be desired. Dodgy level design rears its head after the fourth level of episode 2, and the final boss fight was short and not fun to fight against due to the low gravity, earthquakes, lava and 1-3 hit death attack from the boss. The new weapons and enemies are really good, but I can only recommend playing the first half, or at least only playing the second half on a lower difficulty. Its still Quake, and its still mostly enjoyable, but its flaws put it below Quake's original campaign and Scourge of Armagon's expansion campaign.

Quake 1 but more difficult, with better level design, an actual final boss fight, some new enemies and a new weapon.

tldr; Its really, really good.