IdSoftware
Quake III Arena

Never quite got the hang of the introspective and convoluted storylines of Silent Hill?

The only place you can imagine putting the crank from Resident Evil 2 is up some Japanese programmer's sphincter?

Do you always run out of ammunition in Metal Gear Solid?

Are you one of those people who think, "if the door won't open, I'll try with the rocket launcher"?

When you don't understand what a character is saying or what an object is for, is the first thing that comes to mind to shoot it?

The first thing you think of doing, always and forever, is to shoot?

Perfect, you're home here.

Quake III is the sublimation of the first-person shooter; zero puzzles, zero plot developments, zero key hunts, even the silly blue/red key cards of its predecessor. If Quake II hid the pleasure of carnage behind the noble goal of saving skin and planet, in this new chapter the massacre is purely for its own sake.

Let's spend a few words on the storyboard: The introductory film shows an aging and muscular military man, cigar in mouth, indifferent to the bazookas raining down on him, diligently emptying the magazine of some futuristic machine gun on a crowd that appears to be soldiers, the basic enemies of QII (the ones that attacked you shouting “UCIO’!”, to be clear). Except that, at a certain point, the magazine really does empty, as the more astute can deduce from the giant "EMPTY" sign that appears on the weapon's display. Our disarmed hero promptly takes cover behind a stone pillar, where, after a healthy puff of cigar, he mentally concocts a brilliant attack strategy that in his mind must have sounded more or less like: “Okay, now I’m going to charge them headlong and bite their ears off.”

So said, so done: abandoning his cover, the guy leaps and throws himself among the enemies. He will never touch the ground; in mid-flight, in fact, apparently for no reason, the body of our macho friend dematerializes. Those of us who have bought the original game (???) know that the inexplicable disappearance is down to the Vadrigar, bloodthirsty warrior deities whose favorite pastime is watching people slaughter each other. To this end, they built the Eternal Arena, a kind of parallel dimension made up of a mind-bending series of strongholds and amphitheaters halfway between gothic nightmare and cyberpunk suggestions, where the best hangmen and fighters from all universes and eras are gathered and forced to fight each other endlessly.

The settings destined to stage the massacre are well-crafted and fascinating, almost always developed over various height levels, perfectly designed to offer the player an infinite variety of clashes. We will have large halls and courtyards where fighters will converge to give rise to epic carnages, narrow corridors or winding passages where to engage in adrenaline-pumping chases, but also high and isolated positions from which a good shooter can slay all those who come into range of his weapon. All is garnished with bottomless abysses that suddenly open up in front of the player, streams of lava crossing the scenarios, mechanical traps ready to tear apart anyone who gets in their way, and treacherous flooded environments. Death is not an issue; every slain gladiator is immediately resurrected, in perfect health and adequately armed. The only important consequence is that a point is awarded to his assassin. Whoever reaches the preset number of points first is declared the winner of the arena.

The Eternal Arena is divided into seven sections, called "tiers". Each tier is characterized by its own category of gladiators and contains four arenas, except for the first and last which each contain one; to move on to the next game section you need to place on the top step of the podium in all the arenas that the tier proposes. As you progress, the arsenal also expands; largely taken from what was already available in Quake II, important innovations are still introduced. The gatling machine gun is downgraded to a base weapon, the railgun (pulse sniper rifle) becomes deadly but extremely difficult to manage, the hyperblaster is replaced by the plasmagun (plasma machine gun). The nailgun, which in Quake II was available only in expansions, is also in this case relegated to the Quake III Team Arena mod.

Special mention must be made of the evolution of the BFG10K, short for Big Fucking Gun, the heavyweight of the arsenal of the previous chapter; it is reintroduced here with new features that I leave to enthusiasts the pleasure of discovering. As for the power-ups, from the second tier onwards the Haste (increases speed of movement, length of jumps, fire rate of the wielded weapon) and the famous Quad Damage, which multiplies the effects of hits inflicted on opponents, will appear. Later on, we will also have the opportunity to use Regeneration (which increases life points by a certain amount every second up to a maximum value of two hundred) and Invisibility. In multiplayer mode Flight also appears, allowing flight. All power-ups are effective for a limited time; their appearance within the arena occurs at random intervals and is introduced by a characteristic sound that the player will soon learn to recognize. Another sound—a ghostly voice that will pronounce the name of the power-up—will resound in the arena every time a fighter picks up one of these bonuses.

The human collection that the Vadrigar keep inside the Eternal Arena turns out to be extremely varied: we will encounter a total of 32 fighters, including the protagonist, and we will be able to take on the role of each of them. Among them are monstrous aliens from distant galaxies, deformed hybrids from other dimensions, futuristic cyborgs from remote futures, and even characters borrowed from other games. We will indeed have the pleasure of seeing Grunt and Bitterman again, two heroes of Quake II, as well as the protagonist of the successful Doom series. Each gladiator is characterized by their own reactions to certain stimuli, combat abilities, weapon preferences, ways of interacting with opponents. If we add to this the possibility that the characters have to dialogue with each other and engage with the player between kills, I would say we can talk of a fun psychological characterization that animates each fighter in a different way, giving rise to hilarious dialogues and jokes that greatly increase the charm of the game.

Though a video game dating back to 1998, Quake III Arena boasts graphics that have little to envy to more modern releases, especially considering the excellent management it achieves of often very large and always richly detailed environments. The gameplay of the title has not decreased in over ten years, but indeed increased thanks to opportunities offered by network play, recently culminating in the emergence of Quake Live. This is a multiplayer version to be played exclusively online, synthesizing the best aspects of QIIIA and the related QIII Team Arena mod. Even in single player mode, the game maintains a certain allure over time; one can be sure that no game will be the same, and that the same gladiators in the same arena will never behave the same way twice. In addition, the "skirmish" option allows for organizing "customized" battles in any arena and with any gladiator.

There are also fun variants of the usual all-against-all massacre (here referred to as "Free For All"); we can indeed enjoy "team deathmatch" and "capture the flag", a revised and corrected version of the childhood game known as rubabandiera. It is also possible to download additional maps, usable in each of these modes or dedicated exclusively to one of them, created by enthusiasts and amateurs; some of these expansions seem to have even caused most of the arenas originally designed by Id Software to fall into disuse.

It remains true that the repetitiveness of the action can nevertheless become tedious in the long run; on the other hand, the simplicity of the offering and consequently, precisely that repetitiveness, once accepted, will be the strength of the title. Ideal for having fun for twenty minutes a day, without having to puzzle over buttons, puzzles, and doors that refuse to open.