Rediscovering Quake II

[AHadley]

I've recently bought the Quake pack from Steam and I must say that it's blown me away. I owned Quake 2 on a second-hand CD roughly three years ago and played it all the way through before the CD snapped in two, and I was really disappointed when I lost it. Having downloaded it on Steam (and burnt the soundtrack to a CD - Sonic Mayhem really is awesome) I have rediscovered the old classic. And I've finally got hold of it's three expansion packs, one of which I have discovered was made by the same people who made TRO.

I've also discovered Quake II Evolved, which once I've added a texture pack to makes the game look even better on my PC than HL2. All that's missing now is something resembling high poly models.

Even without these addons it is still one of the best games I have ever played. I think I have a new favourite.

[Axeminister]

If I'm not mistake Quake II is the very first game I ever played on a pc. I remember at first my brothers son would stomp our ass in lan games.  But on the very next visit I was merciless and so began my first person shooter career. As I moved to Unreal Tournament I became even better and still play that game to this day. I remember the second game I ever played on lan was Star Wars: Racer. Very fast paced game.

[technoid]

Welcome back to Quake II.  I still play it online (but only on weekends).   I too have played through most of the commercial expansion packs (Groundzero, Zaero, Reckoning).   And I also have Q2Evolved. The Quake3/Doom3/DX UI that it implements really gives the game a more up-to-date look as you've already seen.   Unfortunately it is the end of the road for Q2E updates from the original devs (Berserk & Odium) a couple years ago.  They are developing their own game engine,  Overdose, so they had to stop Q2E.  The community now basically has taken over what's left of Q2E.  They have since moved to a newer domain, http://www.teamblurgames.com .  There was also the Quake2Max UI modification but I didn't use it much. 

I agree, it could use high-poly models.  For now though you can still get some user-made player models at http://www.polycount.com/models/quake2 , which fortunately is a website that's still around after all these years.

If you'd like to meet me online for Q2 (again, only weekends, so it may be difficult to find me), I am usually playing WODX, which is the latest incarnation of the Weapons of Destruction mod.  It pretty much groups together weapons/tactics from different Quake2 mods as well as some translations from other games.  So basically you'll be using the nailgun and lightning gun from Quake1, plasma gun from Doom, flechette gun from Rogue expansion pak, etc etc.  See http://netdoo.com/wodx . 

Hmm, I only had the UT3 demo, but it was fun when I played it.