Jump to content
Washington Football Team Logo
Extremeskins

Quake Live


ChocolateCitySkin

Recommended Posts

www.quakelive.com

pretty cool way to kill time... its amazing how much things have progressed that you can play this on a browser.

Back in 1999-2000 I was a Quake III god-among-men. More or less unstoppable by anyone below the level of clan-quality players and the occasional railgun superstar.

Then I stopped playing for ten years. And time passed...

I picked up Quake Live a few months ago and started playing again. After a couple of weeks I was back up to what I thought was 90% of my previous peak... and I was getting SMOKED routinely by folks who had just picked up the game a few weeks earlier. I was pathetic, basically a targeting dummy for other players who didn't even have the maps memorized as I did. I was critically dependent upon my recollections of various power-up locations and heavy weapons, just to stay alive (barely) against folks who knew very little about where to find any of the best stuff.

FPS games are now so ubiquitous, the entry-level skills of kids coming into a particular flavor of FPS are an order of magnitude better than they were a decade ago. The reflexes, coordination, ability to quickly adapt to tricks and methods that once took the average player hours to master... It's incredible. Just mind-blowing. I was a pretty good student, but these kids grew up in an FPS culture.

And now I understand what it must be like to be an oldster, seeing two or even three younger generations flitting around computers and keyboards with the same facility the older crowd once had with car engines. It must feel like watching some supernatural, incomprehensible offshoot of the species. "Where'd they learn all that?"

So now I've vowed never to let a good skill go bad. If something as useless as FPS game skills threw me for such a loop, I can't imagine what it would be like to realize that I was a decade behind on something important. The mind reels.

And I agree -- it's impressive to see what today's machines can do. Times were, you needed the best machine around to run Quake III to its full visual potential. Now it runs in a bloated browser (plus a big standalone thingy in the background) without much trouble.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
×
×
  • Create New...