Surviving Quake Live

So Quake Live is finally up and available for public use in its current Beta form. For those not in the know, Quake Live is an amazing piece of technical wizardry that aims to offer the enjoyment of Quake III Arena in the convenience of your web browser, for absolutely nothing! Totally free! Being the excited little gamer that I am, I immediately visited the site and cast away all those feelings of rejection from not being invited to the closed Beta. And then something unexpected happened, something that didn't even register on the fun radar. A queue! I signed up, and joined the end of the line at number 30,000 or so and waited, for what felt like forever. In the mean time I got some work done and signed up to the Quake Live twitter account to get live updates about the various technical difficulties the site was having and how I should find the queuing times dropping imminently.

And then something magic happened. The mentioned improvements to the queuing system took place and I watching as my place in the queue took a sharp drop (getting down to 4 digits seemed like a miracle, the drop to 3 was mind boggling) and the pace at which I approached the front of the queue vastly improved. But then, as if some evil little devil was watching over my shoulder, waiting for the ideal moment to screw me over, when I hit position 145, I got hit! By a metaphorical articulated truck doing 80 mph with the intention of mowing be down. I jumped right up to 300,000 odd in the queue, and then slipped down to 29,000. 29,000, not 145 where I had been before. It was at this point that I considered using the keyboard to commit suicide, possibly by impaling myself upon it by jumping out of a twenty storey high building, with the business end pointed at my midriff, in a desperate attempt at eviscerating myself. This little routine continued for some time, with the queuing system constantly torturing me like I was an ant and it was a pissed off child with a magnifying glass.

I was getting upset and the profanities where getting worse. This seemed a bit silly, after all I was trying to play a free version of a game I used to play (and still own) just because it was free and in a browser. But whilst on it's own it sounds a bit simple, as an idea it really is something quite amazing. Here, in the year 2009, a company is actually squeezing an entire game that once came on a CD-ROM into a web browser. We're not talking about a simple 2D puzzle game here, we're talking about a full blown 3D shooter that once stood as a pillar, a standard by which all other games within its genre would be compared. I truly think that what they've done is quite an amazing achievement. So, with that in mind I busied myself with other things that were probably more important and did my best to remain patient as I watched numbers that I had already seen pass before, pass again, as my new nemesis, the queuing system, mocked me.

Eventually, at the point at which my spirit had been well and truly broken, the golden gates opened, and the evil electronic bouncer let me in. I'm assuming that all the swearing followed by crying worked in my favour. So how does the game play? Well, I've got to be honest, it feels just like Quake III used to feel. They have pretty much recreated a game that I played years ago, and made it work in a browser. Sure there are problems, and I did get kicked out of a couple of matches because of errors with the host server and one game didn't even load at one point, but this is a Beta, minor problems like this are to be expected. Other than these teething difficulties the game plays smoothly, sounds great and the tutorial even helped me to remember how to play, even if I struggled with my rocket jumps (something I never could get the hand of). All that waiting felt worth while, even if my first few kills where just for stress relief.

This is a milestone in gaming and a true technological marvel, I recommend that you get yourself over to Quake Live, get yourself signed up and take a trip down memory lane, it wont cost you a penny, only your time and (if you have the problems I did) possibly your sanity