Remember that little known game called Quake? Remember how it spawned many sequels? I’m sure you do, well remember Quake 3, yes the death match one that’s right. Now ID Software the geniuses behind the whole FPS genre have brought Quake 3 online for free via your web browser. What’s it called I hear you say? It’s called Quake Live and its mighty fraggin good!
It really is quite impressive and right now Quake Live is in beta and has been since February 2009, and you can sign up and register for an account now. There is lots to like about Quake Live, it has all the playability from the original which by now ID software have perfected to a dark art. It also has top notch presentation, from the menu screens to the updated character model choices, Quake Live brings online browser games to a whole new level.
I signed up myself recently and whiled away a few hours seeing how rusty my fragging skills were, I did however remember that my favorite weapons are the rocket launcher and the shotgun which allows you to inflict some serious damage in a short time. My fragging skills these days were severely lacking and to put it bluntly I got an ass whooping. You however might be better at Quake or have more luck that me, or have mastered the very tricky reverse jump rocket um move thingy.
To give you some help I used a 5mb connection a Intel Core2duo at 1.8 and a Geforce 7600gt and the game ran like a dream, but my friend has had it running on a more modestly specced laptop. Quake Live while being based on Quake 3 uses a more up to date version of the ID engine but its focus is definitely more on speed and useabilty over competing with Crysis.
If you fancy getting on board of the Quake Live bandwagon while it’s hot you can jump over to the official page here. Registering and downloading is fairly easy, be aware however that Quake Live does install a program called Punkbuster on your pc which I noticed runs in the background all the time. Punkbuster is an anti cheating piece of software to stop you using voodoo magic to unleash the cheating gods on your opponents, you can always uninstall Punkbuster at a later date.
Overall Quake Live is an interesting experiment in the future of browser based games and a must for fans who love their deathmatching on the cheap.
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