23 - script kitty (ฮธโจบ) & actual real life vampire
wife: @evie-src
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ๐ต๐ธ
UT99 seemed fun at first until you realized it was nothing but gimmick maps with no solid level design flow, and everyone's gaslit themselves into thinking CTF-Face was fun gameplay
And now UT is all but dead, and Q3A lives on in QL and QC, which proves my point that solid design has staying power over gimmicks
Hilariously enough, Q3A added a "flak cannon" in their Team Arena mission pack, though it wasn't as satisfying to use. Still devastating, tho!
While I know it was part of planned dev all along, the fire-under-ass of UT99's bot teamplay support was a comically obvious "me too!" moment for id software's Team Arena, a vibe they'd revisit again when DOOM 3's expansion pack, Resurrection of Evil, added a gravity gun that was also planned all along (and was actually used as a dev tool internally).
Sometimes things are just good ideas, though. I long ago stopped caring about the "originality" of game mechanics like that.
I'm one of those people that prefers UT99 over Q3 on a good day, but I think the reasoning for that is I'm primarily an offline VS bots kind of player! If fighting bots is your jam, UT99 is hands down the best game to play. The gimmicks and weird, badly made maps covering a ton of game modes are a big reason for that.
Q3, in comparison, is like chess, and much like chess, playing against bots is zero fun. If you're not a "play to win" player, Quake 3 has very little to offer with its bareboned modes, either. Mods and Team Arena do improve the experience, but it's not there out of the box for someone that plays against bots.
Edit:
That said, Team Arena's CTF mode with the runes? Hands down better than UT99's CTF.
I can definitely see that. Q3A was a very pure distillation of deathmatch experience filtered from the prior two games with an eye towards the legitimizing of a nascent esports industry. There's very little room for silliness, but that helps out my mind in being able to just... zone out and stop processing other thoughts.
While I enjoy the beauty of Q3A, my fondest memories are actually from Quake 2, which had a far broader range of wacky mods and player models, and even today on tastyspleen's servers it's a truly bizarre experience of Homer Simpsons running around with railguns, teleport pads that shoot back, and tiny lemmings camping the BFG.
It's funny, despite preferring UT99, I got way more mileage out of the Q3 mod scene! Superheroes is still an old favorite of mine that I need to revisit. I believe a lot of those old Q2 models got ported to Q3, too, including the infamous Homer Simpson one.
While I'm feeling nostalgic, do you know what's the best way to play Q3A these days? I know there's at least one or two ports, but I'm curious if there's anything else I need to know first.
The two main ones I bounce back and forth between are Quake3e, and vkQuake3.
Both work well with a high-res asset pack.There's a few floating around out there, and it really comes down to preference. Some of 'em are kinda absurd, though (I think I saw one for, like, 16k textures lmao), so a bit of skepticism is useful. The one I use seems to have been taken down for some reason unknown to me. If you're curious, I can try rehosting it somewhere. It's definitely worthwhile to at least get an update to GUI elements with the High Quality Quake add-on. The original textures still hold up okay-ish in the middle of battle, but oh god, the menu fonts...
As for player community, there's some discord servers out there that will organize get-togethers regularly for Q3A and other early ID games, like the US Doom & Quake Community Server. Also, whenever QuakeCon rolls around, usually someone tries to get something going.
Other than that, I guess just prowl around on ModDB for anything else that might catch your fancy.
Happy fragging!
IMHO quake is a better e-sport but a less fun game (the same might be said of starcraft vs. total annihilation).
I'm firmly on team UT99 here I'm afraid. Both are solid plays, but there are little quirks with Q3A (running over a weapon I already have automatically swapping to that weapon, and the only setting to disable it being to disable all weapon swaps completely, even for weapons I DON'T have; "Quad Damage" only doing triple damage, which is fixable with a console command but ain't nobody's gonna do that for their servers; the stock maps being mostly red/brown; surprisingly unmemorable music given the prior two games; this being the game that made the Quad Damage wind-down noise use the biosuit wind-down noise instead; small bugbears like that) that make me prefer UT99 overall (playing UT99 first probably sealed tho).
Q3A does have the better rocket launcher tho. UT99's is versatile, butQuake's one-click-and-done design is punchier. (There is a setting for that in at least one UT, but then the rockets feel weaker too.)
That's one thing I will defo hand to UT99 is the music absolutely slaps, and Q3A's was most definitely lackluster. I get the complaint about the red/brown levels, but I feel that's a consequence of having solid and consistent art direction (of which, as an artist, I admire immensely), which has always been id's strong point after Quake 1. It's just they happened to pivot hard towards a Gothic style for most arenas up until the "space" maps, which were also tied together really well. Team Arena helped a bit with variety, and even had a sprawling outdoor map. Not everyone jumped on board with the mission pack, though, if they felt vanilla Q3 was all there would be.
Hah! I nearly forgot about the whole triple-damage quad damage controversy! I remember being irrationally upset about it.
