I actually have the original CD-ROM somewhere... but I'm reasonably sure 
if I dug it out, I'd find it doesn't run on Windows 7. The version 
purchased through Steam, however, runs just fine. Well... almost. It 
doesn't seem to "understand" about wide-screen, so the graphics has a 
slightly weird aspect ratio. But other than that, it works great.

Ah, Quake II. The first 3D game I ever played, way back in the 1990s. Of 

card.

(Remember, back in the day, when you had separate 2D and 3D graphics 
cards, and a pass-through cable? And when you launch the game, the 
GlideFX logo would appear, and you'd hear the mechanical KLUNK of the 
relay switching video source to the 3D card?)

Well, without a 3D card, there's no texture filtering, and no coloured 
lighting. And with a 233 MHz Pentium I with MMX technology, you had to 
turn the resolution down fairly far to get sane frame rates. So running 
at something like 640x480 with a boarder (remember that feature?), the 
display was *very* grainy.

One feature I distinctly remember is that you could tell when you're 
about to get shot, because the video would freeze and the audio could go 
into a 1-second loop, while the virtual memory system desperately tries 
to page the gunshot sound back into RAM. After about 45 seconds or so 
(which is *way* longer than it sounds!), the game would unfreeze. By 
this point, you've had plenty of warning that danger is coming. You just 
gotta guess from where. (Given that this usually happens just as you 
walk through a doorway, not too hard...)

Another feature was that loading the next level used to take about 25 
minutes. I assumed this was *normal*... And then, when we got our next 
PC, it had an ATI Rage128 3D card, and something like 64 MB of RAM. And 
suddenly, loading the next level took about 3 *seconds*! o_O But the big 
difference, of course... high-res graphics! Texture filtering! Coloured 
lighting!!

Playing this again today, what an eye-opener... The game originally came 
on CD-ROM, but Steam informs me that I need 370 MB of disk space to 
install the game. Wow, that's small! I was expecting it to take most of 
the size of a CD-ROM. I guess the rest was used for the in-game music. 
(Quake II had a system where you can't play the game unless the disk is 
in the tray. In a time before CD-R existed, this meant you could install 
on unlimited PCs, but only *play* one copy at any one time. The CD-ROM 
had data on track 1, but the other tracks would play music on a normal 
CD player.) Interestingly, the Steam version doesn't seem to include the 
music. Which is fine with me...

When it comes to actually playing the game... I seem to recall it always 
used to let you choose between Glide and OpenGL. (Remember Glide?) Seems 
to default to OpenGL now. As I said, can't seem to get the aspect ratio 
right, but hey.

This is a game from a simpler time. Today, if you load up Batman: Arkham 
Asylum, you have to sit through several pages of studio logos, then a 
loading screen, and then you get to the fancy menu page, where you have 
to hit the "play the game" button, and then another loading screen... 
and now no doubt a dramatic opening cinematic. Heh.

Load Quake II, and the id Software logo appears for about 4 seconds, and 
then the game goes into demo mode. Like it's an arcade machine or 
something. You get to watch a pre-recorded demo of somebody running 
around level 3 making a meal of taking out a handful of lightly-armoured 
guards. Press Escape, and a minimal menu system comes up. Start a new 
game, and you can watch a whole tonne of debug output flash past on the 
developer console (remember that?), before... the opening cinematic. 
Heh, some things never change. ;-)

(I actually quite *like* this particular cinematic. Although it's grainy 
as hell! What is that, CinePak?!)

When the game actually starts... heh. Forget anisotropic filtering; this 
thing doesn't even have trilinear filtering! It's bilinear only. :-D And 
the "sky box" is *literally* a 2D image. (Really low-res too.) Oh how 
spoilt we are today.

I recall how when I went from Quake II to HalfLife (reportedly powered 
by the same game engine), the jump in graphical quality seemed fairly 
large, and the major thing it took time to get used to was the 
requirement to *reload*. Yes, that's right. In Quake II, you never need 
to reload. If you have 700 bullets, you can just fire all of them. I 
find myself constantly pressing the reload button, which of course does 
nothing here. Cannot unlearn.

Mind you, according to Wikipedia Quake I (which I've never seen) didn't 
even have the ability to crouch, so...

When I first played this, it took me several months to complete the 
game. (How much of that is due to extreme lag I don't remember; I think 
I was probably just bad at video games back then.) This time, I perhaps 
made a mistake playing on the lowest difficulty setting. It only took me 
a few days to complete the entire game end to end. In fact, it wasn't 
until I was several levels in that I came across any remotely 
challenging enemies. I collected no end of quad-damage and 
invulnerability powerups, and never used any of them!

Ah yes, and that's another thing from the arcade game heritage. In 
FarCry, you can take drugs with supposedly sharpen your senses or speed 
the healing process or whatever. In Quake II, there's a magic floating 
symbol which, if you collect it, makes all your weapons 4x more lethal. 
Take THAT, plausible reality! :-D

Water effects? What water effects? Oh, you mean the wavy texture that 
move from side to side in a sinewave, and seems unaffected by gravity? 
:-P It's actually kind of hard to tell what's harmless water, and what's 
toxic waste that kills you on contact. At least the (ubiquitous) lava is 
easy to recognise.

In most games, you walk up to a keyboard and press the "use" key to make 
something happen. In Quake II, you must kind of press your face into it, 
and it activates. Doors open when you walk past them, elevators go up 
when you touch them. Switches are huge cubes on the wall that sink in 
when you mash your face into them.

Given how many decades since I last played this game, it's astonishing 
how many of the rooms I still remember. Considering the meagre graphical 
capabilities, they managed to give each area a reasonably distinct feel 
to it. (Although not quite to the extent that HalfLife did.) Each time a 
new enemy type appears, it's like "oh yeah, I remember this..." And the 
sounds too.

Quake II is also the only game I've ever made a map for. I made a grand 
total of 3 maps, and in the process discovered that I really, really 
SUCK at making maps! :-( The first one was about 12 feet across and had 
nothing in it. The second one was a huge cube, with waterfalls that you 
could climb up. (No physics here!) Most of the enemies killed each 
other, without my help. The final map was a giant brick cube with 
multiple floors, each divided into a grid of corridors... it turns out I 
have absolutely no imagination at all! I suspect I would also be 
terrible at architecture...

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