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Quake Live's Open Beta
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Quake Live revives its most unusual players.
I am not a graceful man when it comes to fast-paced first person shooters that require me to be almost psychically aware of where my opponent is going to be one moment before a rocket's impact, and I very often was not aware of how many rockets my opponents had, but I was always aware of how many it would take to kill me, and it was usually a lot fewer than they had. You can imagine, as such, that when Quake 3 Arena was the cream of the LAN party crop, I spent a good bit of time scrolling down to find where I landed on the scoreboard. The Thief series and slower-paced FPSes that relied on cunning and tactical planning and precision were always more my speed, but since those never had multiplayer, you can imagine my disappointment, as the best smack-talk I could afford at such events involved an imaginary product that I'm still not sure exists.
Regardless, in the sake of nostalgia, I went over to the Quake Live website and participated in their newly released open beta, and I feel confident that if you were the type of person that I was not back in the LAN party days, it is time for you to reclaim your position in the scoreboard (that position being anywhere in the list above mine).
Quake Live is a gloriously faithful recreation of the old-style Quake multiplayer matches, and brings back many old weapons that feel like familiar friends in the experienced hands of any gamer who was around prior to the Halo series. What makes it a unique release is that it is first of all, entirely free. Second, it is browser based, and third, includes a very comprehensive online matchmaking system that never takes you away from their website or browser. It is possible to log in to your account (which takes less than three minutes to set up, if you type quickly) from any computer with internet access, and frag people like me from nearly any computer. It works with most conventional browsers (Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, and Firefox), and requires only that you install a small plugin on your computer.
Quake Live's matchmaking system is designed so that an initial fight against a bot (named Crash) assesses your capabilities in-game and matches you against people who fared similarly. A note to new players that this will not prepare you for the subsequent beating you will take in your first few matches. It's not a perfect system, but practice is required to see yourself ranking higher match-to-match.
It is still in the beta, and so they are still polishing the final product, which is evidenced by the current top news post on the website, which celebrates their first 24 uninterrupted hours of play on February 27th.
If you're itching to re-live your lan party days of cruelly dominating people, without the fear of broken friendships, you may wish to check out the website, and perhaps their very comprehensive intro video (accessed by clicking the “Take a Tour!” button at the top-right of their main website). Good luck, and if you see me playing, remember that I'm allergic to rockets and would appreciate it greatly if you would stop trying to make me eat them.
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