Quake Live (beta) [2009]

Quake III Arena was a big thing for me at its release, one of the first first-person shooters I truly invested myself into. It was fast-paced, arcade-type action, with simple, yet memorable weapons. The railgun. The BFG. Of course, the rocket launcher. Friends would come from all over my neighborhood to play. Good times. Now, like some wet dream of mine, it's back. It's free. It's playable in your browser, with a Steam-esque friends utility built in for organizing games with your comrades. Also included is the latest trend in games, in-game achievements.

To those who have never played Q3A, it's a straightforward FPS in terms of your objectives, with these game modes: Deathmatch (kill everyone else until a frag limit, or time limit, is reached), Team Deathmatch (kill the other team), and Capture the Flag (you know this one). Also included is Duel (one-on-one with someone) and Clan Arena (kind of a Duel for clans). While those are basic game modes, the action itself while playing is unique to Quake. Your character is very mobile, with a relatively fast run speed compared to other FPS games, and also bolstered by the jump pads usually strewn throughout a level. You can also rocket jump. Yeah, that's as fun as it sounds. Those aforementioned jump pads throw your character to where they point, and often times connect with others so you can quickly get out of a sticky situation and find yourself in an entirely different area of the map.

The characters that populate it consist of space biker mercenaries, re-animated skeletons, aliens of all kinds, and cyberpunk chicks on hoverboards, among others. You can choose any of those at your leisure from the settings menu. Settings vary from combat on hovering platforms in the vacuum of space (where knocking people off with splash damage, and not falling yourself, is often key to success) to the tight quarters of occult temples. An in-game announcer details the vital things as well as when you do something like frag several people in rapid succession. Further increasing the frantic gameplay is the fact that usually players are constantly spawning all over the map, with no delay. Also notable is the no-frills HUD which is highly customizeable.

The game is in beta, but the gameplay is smooth, and I've yet to experience any bugs in either the game itself or the browser-based UI. The game is seemingly intact from its Quake III: Gold iteration, with no trite additions to gameplay or weapons. The HUD has been streamlined, however. As I said, the game is played directly from your browser, that being IE or Firefox in Windows XP or Vista, but id plans on branching out to OS X and Linux eventually. How the browser connectivity works is summed up on Wikipedia:

“The program is a modified version of Quake III: Gold and executed as compiled code on the user's processor, the user downloads the game in the background as a part of the registration process and interacts with the program either through a browser plugin that can be embedded on the webpage or as fullscreen.”

No Flash or derivations thereof. After signing up, you download the client while going through a quick tutorial and training match with Crash to determine your skill, as the game suggests servers for you based on your talent relative to the players there. Note that you don’t have to follow these suggestions.

Quake Live is a terrific idea, executed well, and hell, it’s free. If you’re looking for a game to try out with friends, give it a shot. Nothing to lose.

Verdict: Win [8/10]

http://www.quakelive.com/

Left 4 Dead (PC, 2008)

Even though I consider myself primarily a PC gamer, I have often visited Valve titles out of a sense of obligation more than genuine excitement. The science-laden world of Half Life never really did much for me beyond it's storytelling style and clever design. I primarily spent my time with modifications to Valve's games like Counterstrike, Team Fortress Classic, or more recently Team Fortress 2. Left 4 Dead, then, is the first Valve game that had me positively squirming in my seat with anticipation from the moment I heard about it. Zombies? Co-operative focus? Zombies?! Ravenholm was my favorite section of Half Life 2, and I knew that Valve could do the undead right. (Ew.)

The gameplay of Left 4 Dead is divided into two modes, Campaign and Versus. Campaign pits you and three friends (or bots, you pathetic loser) against the hordes, while Versus puts you and up to 7 friends on teams of four, with one team playing the Survivors and the other playing the Infected, taking turns moving through the levels. Versus can't be played with bots, so if you want to play a zombie and gnosh some brains you'll have to get online and play with other people.

On that note, the singleplayer functions in Left 4 Dead aren't even worth discussing. If you're playing this game with bots, you're absolutely doing it wrong. Get at least three friends and a microphone, and before you know it you'll be yelling obscenities at the Infected and screaming for your buddies to remove the cranium of the Hunter on top of you.

It's in those types of moments that Left 4 Dead really distinguishes itself from the rest of the multiplayer world. There isn't a game on the market that can top L4D in terms of co-operative experience. Whether you're playing the Infected and trying to run the survivors into the ground or you're a Survivor just trying to make it to that next safe room, you simply won't succeed or have as much fun without your teammates.

L4D not only does a great job of pulling you into your role as a teammate, it boasts the strongest characterization I've seen in a multiplayer shooter yet. Louis, Bill, Zoey, and the almighty Francis are a lot more than just a randomly assigned skin. They have personality to spare, as do the boss Infected, which is pretty impressive considering they just gibber and scream now and then. (Metal trivia: Mike Patton did the voices for the regular Infected) In all my time spent with Left 4 Dead, I have found myself speaking “in character” on more than one occasion, which stands as an excellent testament to how deeply involved you can get in the characters. I find myself groaning when I have to go and pick up Louis, but rushing to Zoey's aide whenever she's in trouble. Bill, I figure, can take care of himself.

Developers of the world, take note. Good characters are important, even in multiplayer games. L4D really raises the bar here, and I would be shocked if we didn't see more attempts at creating more three-dimensional characters for multiplayer games in the future.

Multiplayer games are intense affairs, with moments of uneasy calm peaking into crescendos of chaos. The Infected will come at you like a swarm possessed, and then return to their ambling state as you move on, lulling you into a false sense of secutity before building to another vigorous, horriffic assault. L4D distinguishes itself here, as well; the other first person shooters of the world tend to be a mix of short, intense battles and the occasional drawn-out ordeal. L4D builds it's intensity in truly sublime fashion, allowing the players to control the pace to a certain extent, but more importantly making the pace a focus of the game. In Versus, you'll find that the team that controls the pace tends to win the game. In Campaign, these moments occur organically as the hordes and boss Infected throw themselves at your bullets.

I would be remiss not to mention the matchmaking interface, as it leads to my only real complaints about the game. There is no standard Source server browsing here, unless you use a console command and connect to a game in progress. Most times, you will start in a lobby with some friends, and the lobby will find a game (and subsequently a server) for you. This kind of system should be familiar with anyone who has a console that they play games online with. Much like on a console, you may find yourself wishing for more features in the matchmaking almost right away. You will end up on servers in foreign countries, servers with terrible connections, and servers that really have no business existing in the first place. Once you're in the game, you'll have to run a vote to return to the lobby if the server is less than great, and start the process over again. Valve, in their infinite wisdom, also decided not to let you see your ping while in game, instead displaying your connection with a color-coded series of bars. Valve, I'm a grown man. Let me choose my own server, and let me see my ping. Color code it if you must, but this is a PC game. I demand the ability to connect to a server of my own choosing.

As soon as you find a decent server, these complaints will retreat to the furthest corners of your mind. You will only be concerned with surviving an onslaught of the walking dead, or picking off the few who dare to resist your undead fury. L4D is immediate and visceral in ways that only the best multiplayer shooters can compete with. Apart from the matchmaking, it brings only good things to the genre, and to gaming in general.

Left 4 Dead could be a perfect 10/10. In fact, depending on the level of support it receives from Valve in the next few months, I may have to revisit the score. As it is, though, the server finding woes are worth a deduction of at least a point. It's hard to find fault with much else, though, and this is as Epic of a Win as you can get without channeling the divine.

Verdict: Epic Win [9/10] (Zombies Killed God)

Call of Duty: World at War (Xbox 360, 2008)

Having never played much Call of Duty 4, I am likely exactly the kind of reviewer that Treyarch wants for their latest foray into WW2 shooters, Call of Duty: World at War. Someone who is fresh to the experience and won't see everything through Modern Warfare-tinted lenses is a rather unique thing, as the previous game from Infinity Ward was tremendously popular, and likely lead to a lot of the interest in World at War. In a rather amusing twist, World at War is so good that it's made me want to play Modern Warfare next.

I have never been much of a console shooter player. I was a semi-competitive Quake player back in the day, and played in Cal leagues for Counterstrike in my post-high school years. Firmly entrenched in my PC roots, I saw no reason to move to inferior control schemes, bad multiplayer matchmaking, and an insurmountable lack of mods for the likes of Halo. Call of Duty: World at War is the first real console FPS that I've enjoyed in a very, very long time.

The singleplayer campaign isn't fantastic, but it does have it's moments. Slinging lead in the Pacific theater as Private Miller, you'll be treated to Japanese Banzai attacks, hopelessly doomed beach assaults, and the iconic voice of Kiefer Sutherland as Corporal Roebuck guiding you through it all. The Soviet missions have you taking on the role of Private Dimitri Petrenko, whose superpower is apparently immortality coupled with an amazing ability to never get promoted despite accomplishing feats of warfare that would make the great generals of history weep. The Soviet missions tend to be a bit more urban-oriented, and I challenge you to recognize Gary Oldman as the voice of your snipin' Sergeant Reznov.

If you feel yourself swaying more towards the "buy it" side of the fence, allow me to give you a short exercise that will increase your survivability a thousandfold in World at War. Pick up a 360 controller and hold it as you would while playing any FPS game. Now, hit the right bumper button. A lot. Keep going. Yep, keep going. Do this for a few solid minutes, until your finger is about ready to rebel and attack your soft, fleshy parts with a vicious mutiny of nail-scratching fury. The cause of all this bodily strain? Grenades. Call of Duty: World at War requires that you can hit the RB within milliseconds of an on-screen indicator showing up in order to stay alive. It's a great idea in theory; you can throw grenades back at your enemy and stay alive in the meantime. However, the system relies on a grenade detection warning flashing up on your screen that simply does not always work. Equally annoying are the number of times in the singleplayer campaigns where you turn a corner into a grenade that the seemingly clairvoyant AI threw at you just long enough ago to make it explode the moment you try to pick it up.

World at War is an extremely unforgiving singleplayer experience on it's harder difficulty settings. Priding myself on my background with shooters, I decided to at least jump in at the Harder (though not quite Veteran) level. Though easy enough at first, some levels had me throwing the controller around the room and pulling out what little is left of my hair in frustration. I wasn't dying because I was playing badly, I was dying because there simply was no chance to live amongst the torrential hail of grenades the enemy kept throwing my way. If I knew now what I knew then, I would simply skip the singleplayer campaign and go right to the excellent multiplayer offering, but I was lured in by the fact that almost all of the achievements are for singleplayer. Yes, you read that right. Call of Duty: World at War has very few multiplayer achievements of any kind. There are a few co-op ones and a couple of multiplayer ones scattered about, but the bulk of the achievements are for the singleplayer campaign, and a rather large portion of THOSE are for playing on Veteran difficulty. Not my cup of tea, thanks, but it does speak to how highly Treyarch thinks of their own singleplayer experience, I suppose.

The bulk of my time with World at War has been spent in the multiplayer. I haven't had this much fun (or frustration) with a multiplayer console shooter since the original Gears of War, and certainly not with any other FPS. Perhaps it's because this is the first time I've been introduced to the enthralling levelling/class/perk system, which allows the player to gain experience points by killing enemies or completing challenges in multiplayer matches in order to customize their loadouts and abilities. Perhaps it's because I love World War 2 weapons and using them on the virtual battlefield. Perhaps it's because every time I hear the cheesy ass announcer screech "VICTORY FOR GERMANYYYY" when my team steamrolls some Cossaks I get a chill up my spine. (Side note - do the Japanese really always have to talk about shame and dishonor? Come on guys, you can do better than that.) Perhaps it's a combination of all of those things and more, but the point is that World at War does console multiplayer right.

There are some nicks on the surface, though. At the start, you're going to feel dramatically underpowered compared to everyone else. They all have better weapons than you, better perks than you, and they're going to be running circles around you on the maps that you don't know yet. It can be a little intimidating, but a few games in and you'll be hooked, trying to unlock the damned STG 44 that's killed you a dozen times in the past three minutes. The maps, while fantastic setpieces for a firefight, have some problems. Since they have multiple pathways which allow for deep flanking maneuvers, you're either going to be giddy as a schoolboy to sneak up on your enemy snipers unawares, or about to burst at the seams with rage because you just spawned right on top of three flanking enemy soldiers and didn't even have a chance to fire your weapon before they blew you away. Just when you think it can't get any worse, you'll respawn just close enough for their movement to catch you a second time, or for their grenade to land right at your feet as you come to life, eager for revenge. This happens a little too often for my tastes, and means that sometimes you're going to lose, and you're going to lose hard. The attack dogs that you or your opponent can call in after a seven-kill streak seem to be capable of Matrix-style bullet dodging, and your connection most definitely will affect how well you will play more than I like in any game that doesn't let me pick my own damned server.

No matter the problems, though, World at War accomplishes something that I, the great game cynic, never thought possible. It sucked me into a really fun console shooter with multiplayer, and impressed the living hell out of me. In spite of my gripes and preconceived notions about console shooters, I've played it almost every day for the past couple of weeks, and I have no intention of stopping any time soon. Treyarch have produced the pinnacle of modern (ha!) WW2 shooters here, and it's not to be missed.

Verdict: Win [8.5/10] (Seriously, fuck the STG)