I’m glad I stumbled upon the Quake Halloween Jam! I finished The Black Procession tonight, a map that takes place at the Church of Quake (I’ve decided). Even with these old visuals there is still something beautiful about this digital hellscape, or maybe I just like the night sky,
I only have one map left to go through, then I might have to look into the other Halloween Jams! It’s a great way to keep an old game alive! As usual, if you want to see a couple more snaps I’ve posted them over on Mastodon.
After venturing around for DOOM Halloween mods the other night I wanted to see what the Quake Community had to offer. I found the Quake Halloween Jam from 2018, which sports a total of nine spooky maps to play. So far I’m two levels through it, each level presenting a challenge even on Normal difficulty.
It’s like a world you can actually jump into.
When you load the Halloween Jam you start off underground in a coffin, but eventually make your way to a haunted house containing large portraits on the walls that you can leap into. I played Pumpkin Grind, which lives up to its name of having lots of pumpkins and being a grind (a FUN grind!).
Mood lighting at its finest.
Then I ventured through The Four Incantations, where you have to fight off four wizards to open a seal to leave. That one also did a good job of throwing monsters at me. It gave me an excuse to download the latest vkQuake to check out. It was pretty easy to get up and running. I never really did much in the way of modding the old Quake. It was always DOOM and Quake III Arena that got my most modding attention as a kid. Better late than never I guess.
Quake was calling my number tonight like a good ol’ friend in need of a chat. Even managed to get a few achievements! Rare ones even! So far I’m half way through the second episode. Still finding all of the secrets, maybe I’ll finish this ep during vacay. :v
Finished the first Episode of Quake! Only took me how many decades to finish? Now the next question is when will I waltz into Episode 2? The answer is actually pretty simple: Long before we ever see HL2 Episode 3. :v
Playing DOOM in Portal 2 the other night set me in the mood to check out the remastered version of Old School Quake, even got some achieve-o’s after a long day. I’m three levels into the first episode. I do like some of the accessibility features, like contrast, and disabling bobbing.
On another note: I read today that The Two Johns are reuniting for DOOM’s 30th Anniversary! Hard to believe it’s been that long… I feel old.
Kicked off the weekend by Livestreaming some Quake Champions:
Despite getting our asses handed to us on a silver platter we managed to have a good time. I might even do another one tomorrow. I got some more work done on the videos, and I’m deciding to keep them as two part videos. To keep a consistent release schedule (somewhat) I’m not going to release any video until I complete both parts. But if anything good comes up (such as pictures) I’ll post it here on the blog, or on the Steam Chat or Discord. But now that I’m on my weekend I’ll be taking a break from my project and focusing on other things… like maybe a game to play. I haven’t really done much playing apart from the last couple of multiplayer mishaps with Yutram. I haven’t had much of a chance to use my gaming laptop at work, been grocery shopping during my lunch breaks so I won’t have to do it after work when the entire place is flooded.
I remember Quake, excellent FPS of the time with excellent graphics of the time, then glQuake happened and it became even better. Now thanks to Novum we have vkQuake! A totally vulkanized version based off of the QuakeSpasm sourceport. Someone made a video showcasing the OpenGL (QuakeSpasm) version vs the Vulkan version.
The Vulkan version sports a nice performance increase (not that you really need it for Quake in this day and age, but still very nice. 😛 ) and it has a nice sharper look to it. I may have to retire Darkplaces and switch to this version, which can be downloaded here.
Happy Easter! I’ve had a quiet day so far, any noise I heard came from my Quake playtime. I setup Darkplaces as a nonsteam game and played the first episode. Got the earth rune, and now I’m thinking of making a Steam Controller config. I thought it would be pretty cool to play it out in the living room. I’ve already made ones for Quake 3 and the original Tomb Raider. Making one for Quake/Darkplaces should be easy.
It’s literally everything but Quake. What happened? That’s like having a CyanWorlds Myst pack and leaving everything Myst out of it, or Valve leaving everything Half Life out of their Complete Pack. It doesn’t make any sense.
