Rock, Paper, Shotgun

There’s dedication and there’s dedication. The second, slantier version means there’s been a bit more effort being put in. Let’s use Quake as an example: it’s the difference between someone still making Quake levels all these years later, and someone who has built a Quake editor for modern sensibilities, making it all wizzy. Handily for this analogy, that second someone exists, and has just released TrenchBroom, “A Modern Level Editor for Quake.”
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Trent Reznor, who it’s still weird to see referred to as an Academy Award Winning Composer, will be providing the theme tune for Call of Duty Black Ops 2. Both he and the FPS have come a long way from Quake, although I’ll leave it to you to decide in which direction each has been travelling. The news comes along with a trailer for the game that shows the villain for the first time. He has escaped from a place but doesn’t have any weapons but that doesn’t matter because he HAS TAKEN ALL OF THE BLOPS’ WEAPONS. That’s the plot. Oh, and it’s the future, so jetpack dives from space and baby AT-ATs.

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After a number of ventures that took him from an ill-fated N-Gage Red Faction spin-off to an ill-fated Gauntlet sequel, Doom co-creator (with locks that flow like choruses from the mouths of angels) John Romero is eyeing his old-school bread-and-butter. Speaking with Eurogamer, he described his previously hinted at shooter as a “MMO-ish” and “PC first.” I like both of those things. Let us hope his new game is fated to be ill in the colloquial, “that was totally ill” sense and not the one that’s, er, more commonly come to be associated with John Romero.

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Heartening news from Sir Carmack, lord of pixels: preliminary id design discussion about the next Quake game has turned up a hankering to return to the Gothic, semi-fantasy setting and vibe of the original Quake. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty damned bored of bio-mechanical environs and beasts after id Tech 4′s quad-whammy of Doom 3, Quake IV, Prey and Quake Wars, so something potentially a little weirder rather takes my fancy.
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This week, in our Gaming Made Me series, Lewis Denby explains to us how it was that Quake came to make him. In a very personal account, find out how violent videogaming took away a child’s loneliness, and even got him to go to school.

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(Yes, I know there are, in fact, no Stroggs in Quake 1).

Flash: what can’t it do? Well, it can’t fix the wonky big toe I’ve got as a result of kicking a rock when I was 13, that’s what it can’t do. But it can run a remarkably smooth version of the original Quake in a browser. Mouse support, the constant bane of Flash games, is a little off – you have to hold down the left button to activate mouse-look, meaning firing happens with Control, but it works pretty well nonetheless. Quake’s still surprisingly good-looking after all these years – or is that I’ve become so accustomed to brown games lately that The Forefather Of Brown now looks like part of the herd all over again?