Quake III Arena – coming to a web browser near you
If you have been a gamer for a long time, you will remember Quake III Arena as a rather big milestone for the Quake series, coming from the godly John Carmack. The graphics were out of this world in Q3, id Software was rather fond of its OpenGL game engines and this was no different. Unlike Q1 and 2, there was no real back story to this. You were dumped in an arena and the objective was to kill as many people as you possibly can, Unreal Tournament style. I remember when the two franchises were competing and it was nice to have the choice.
Of course, you had the obligatory Capture the Flag mode and Team Deathmatch. I personally preferred Free For All, so you don’t have to worry about who you were shooting at. The bots were quite clever too, and you could name them. This was a nice addition, you could call all your bots of people you hated or loathed, oh look I just gibbed Jamie Oliver! (good cook, annoying as hell).
Therefore, to read that this fantastic game was going to be released free and working in a web browser in the form of Quake Live was quite a surprise. I’d like to see how they pull this off and whether it looks as good as it did back in the day.
I hope that you can use custom maps still, there are literally thousands of them out there done by the Q3 community. My favourite map that came with the game has to be The Longest Yard. It had bounce pads all over the place taking you to higher platforms. The highest had the prize of the much-loved Quad Damage.
I really like this idea, and after reading this hands-on article it looks very promising indeed. The open beta started yesterday 24th February, there is a link to sign up to Facebook event and also a Twitter feed here.
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