quake – The Daily SPUF

How to Easily Obtain the Hardest Achievement in Quake

July 27, 2022July 20, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments achievement, guide, quake, speedrun, the painless maze

“The Painless Maze” is one of the rarest achievements in Quake, requiring you to beat E4M6 “The Pain Maze” on Nightmare difficulty without taking damage. As one of the longest and toughest maps in the game, few people have done this. But today’s guide details how you can earn it without premade saves, cheats, or Nightmare-level skills required! A Note on In-Game Cheats As this guide notes, right now you can just use sv_cheats 1, toggle “god”, and get the achievement that way. But in case the devs ever patch this (or you want to earn it more legitly), this guide will detail… [Continue Reading]

Featured

A Brief History of Glass in Team Fortress

July 25, 2022July 25, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments glass, map design, quake, quake ii, Team Fortress 2, team fortress classic, TFC

It may seem odd that I’m devoting a whole article to glass, an incredibly common and straightforward building material. Some games let you break it, others let you shoot through it, and many don’t. Within a few minutes of playtime, you’ll probably notice Team Fortress 2 is decidedly in the latter category. Case closed? Not quite, because glass actually has a more checkered history than you’d first expect. It first came to my attention when I started playing Team Fortress Classic and noticed that only one map had glass: Rock2, letting the flag-scoring player watch their pursuers die to toxic gas.… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Quake II RTX – Review

July 20, 2022July 22, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments graphics, lighting, quake, quake ii, ray tracing, RTX

Having recently finished Quake’s expansion packs, I was curious to see where id Software went from there. Imagine inventing the FPS genre, codifying it, and then propelling it into the third dimension within a mere 4-year span. Even more impressively, they’ve gone back and updated Doom and Quake to run perfectly on modern systems. At first, I didn’t think they’d given Quake II the same treatment, before remembering an experimental tech demo I encountered at GDC 2019: Quake II RTX is a “remastering” of the original game that ray traces every single asset. Ray tracing is a unique way of… [Continue Reading]

Featured

A Review of Quake’s Expansion Packs (Part 2)

May 17, 2022May 8, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments dlc, expansion, quake, retrospective, review

I wasn’t sure whether to write this article. You see, I wasn’t quite as enamored with the concept of the new expansion packs as I was the old. Sure, it’s nice to have more Quake, but I was bummed that they only used the base-game content. Plus they ignored all the new assets/weapons/enemies from the expansion packs. But I wanted to complete the entire set, and was curious to see what sort of gameplay updates developers had figured out in the many years since the originals released. Dimension of the Past This first expansion pack was released in 2018, to… [Continue Reading]

Featured

A Review Of Quake’s Expansion Packs (Part 1)

May 16, 2022May 8, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments dlc, expansion, quake, retrospective, review

On April 19 2021, the Steam version of Quake got a massive enhancement update. It added graphical updates, cross-play multiplayer, restored original soundtracks, and four expansion packs. Two of these, Scourge of Armagon and Dissolution of Eternity, were the canonical expansions released back during Quake‘s normal commercial cycle. The final two (Dimension of the Past and Dimension of the Machine) were added decades later, as free celebratory add-ons. This article will be focused on the earlier pair, with hopefully another for the latter two coming later. Quake For a Modern Audience Before I played through these, I re-completed the original… [Continue Reading]

Featured

A Moment of Silence for Quake’s Ogre Marksman

March 14, 2021March 31, 2021 aabicus 0 Comments cut content, monster, mourning, ogre, quake

I recently wrote an article about a cut weapon from Doom. Today I want to dedicate a similar eulogy for a similarly-redacted element from Doom‘s sequel series, Quake. But first, we need to talk about Ogres. What is an Ogre? Ogres are the most frequently-appearing of the many enemies in Quake. Wielding chainsaws and a grenade launcher, they don’t seem to have much in common with the sort of medieval tropes you’d expect to see. But nevertheless they set the benchmark for enemy damage. The 5 enemies that deal more then the ogre are considered “upper-tier” and a high-priority. While the 7… [Continue Reading]

Featured

Quake: Does it Hold Up?

March 8, 2021February 7, 2022 aabicus 0 Comments early review, first impressions, first thoughts, quake

In keeping with the spirit that inspired me to play the original Doom and Doom II to fill the pre-Team Fortress Classic hole in my repertoire, I would be remiss to not also try id Software’s other magnum opus. Their followup game that nevertheless managed to redefine the shooter genre again and take the gaming industry by storm. I don’t know how they managed to do it twice, but the original Quake is a fantastic experience. If you haven’t played it, you really need to go see what all the fuss was about. Now I must confess that I didn’t… [Continue Reading]

Featured The SPUF of Legend

Starting Out

July 13, 2018July 12, 2018 aabicus 0 Comments medic, mercy, overwatch, quake, spuf of legend, Team Fortress 2, TFC

Team Fortress Classic, Team Fortress 2, and Overwatch have defined my gaming career. TFC was the first online multiplayer game I ever played, TF2 will forever be my most-played game with over 3400 hours clocked, and Overwatch was my flagship title when I started getting really serious about creating GIFs, videos, and overall promoting myself within the gaming community. In any game I play, I’ve always considered the “first life” something worth remembering, since it’s my very first story told from beginning to end within the confines of this new universe. I actually played TFClassic first, even though I started my… [Continue Reading]