Compare TA to Half-Life or Unreal Tournament, both of which offer similar play styles but at less than half the cost, and it should be clear from the outset that the odds are stacked against it. Visually, Team Arena is pure confectionery for the eyes. With the super-cheeky Quake 3 engine behind it, the game supports all the graphical tricks and treats we know and love so well, including dynamic shadows, curved surface rendering, specular lighting, bilinear filtering and quadriplegic dribbling.
Trouble is, nobody cares any more. If you've played Counter-Strike, you'll be intimately familiar with the single greatest map of all time, Dust. It is by far and away the smallest and simplest setting in the game, comprising one or two monotone textures, a couple of choke points and a few boxes. There are no stairways, balustrades, balconies, ducts, vents, mezzanine floors, vaulted arches, domes, obelisks, stained-glass windows or weird techno-gothic architecture whose only purpose in life is to heat-stress your video card.
What makes a map great is the way it plays, and it's here that Team Arena short. Included in the pack are 19 new levels, four of which are essentially Quake III Capture The Flag maps with the odd nip and tuck, leaving 15 really new ones in total. Four of these are one-on-one tournament-style maps, which by definition don't belong in a team game, and so now we're down to For the most part, these 11 are fast and well balanced, but like the techno-metal soundtrack and Unreal Tournaments voice taunts, they're pretty forgettable affairs.
The outdoor variants - which drag Quake players from their narrow factory corridors out into the open air -are too large to be popular with existing players. Additionally, much of the terrain makes le combat alfresco a chore as your progress is hindered by hills, dips and crests in the landscape. Both the nailgun and chaingun make a welcome return, although the former is useful only as a last resort, and the latter so powerful it disrupts the balance of play.
New to the game is a mine launcher that drops small proximity charges which stick to enemy clothing and explode a few seconds later. Although this may sound fun, it serves only to encourage bad play, with respawn areas, cap points, entrances and walkways often ending up covered in the damn things. Meeting your maker in Quake should be an honourable thing, your twitching corpse a recognition of another player's skill.
Legging it through a level base before spontaneously exploding out back is hardly a noble end. There are six new power-ups: doubler, ammo regeneration, kamikaze, invulnerability, guard and scout, with each bestowing special abilities upon its owner. There are a finite number of them on each map, so if you're after one in particular, you may have to wait until the player carrying it dies.
In the case of kamikaze and invulnerability, you don't have to wait long. Kamikaze explodes in a huge atomic blast that encompasses a substantial area of the map, while invulnerability renders the user impervious to assault but immobile for the duration. Guard and scout provide a pseudo class structure, with scouts able to run at double speed but with no armour, and guards able to replenish their health without running over spheres.
Trouble is, Quake III already had too many power-ups floating about its levels, and Q3TA levels are positively festooned with the bloody things. It's reached the point where you have to stop and think twice about which novelty you're walking over and what the hell it does.
It also makes newbies a real curse, as they tend to stomp about aimlessly picking everything up "Ooh, pretty baubles!
Overload is without doubt the most entertaining variation, as it encourages your team to work as one and destroy an obelisk set deep inside the enemy's base. It's nigh-on impossible to destroy this object single handed, so you need to rely on the co-operation of your team mates in order to get the job done.
Harvester involves collecting opponents' skulls and dropping them off behind enemy lines. Although it may sound good on paper, the reality is it's rather flawed: instead of dropping to the ground when you frag someone, the skulls appear alongside a pillar in the centre of the map and can be collected by anyone, meaning most of the action gravitates towards them, with the remainder of the level remaining eerily quiet.
The same is true for One Flag CTF which, as its name suggests, revolves around a single flag and requires little in the way of tactics or group strategy. In the final analysis, it has to be said that Team Arena does nothing to enrich the lives of existing Quake players, especially if they've dabbled in Unreal Tournament or Half-Life. For at its heart, that is all Team Arena is, and not a particularly impressive one at that. With killer technology and a dominant brand name, Quake III: Arena is the first-person shooter to beat this year.
Can id make lightning strike thrice? Of course, that's just a warm-up for the bloodbaths that await hearty players on the Internet. From die outset, players will choose between Light, Medium, and Heavy classes--as you might expect. Light soldiers can move fast and rocket-jump higher, while Heavy guys can take more damage as they lumber around. The player models have also been segmented into head, body, and legs for even more realistic movement About 12 player models are expected to ship with QIIIA, along with numerous skins and insti-uc-tions on how to digitize youiself into the game.
Acceptable performance will require a Pentium II , and the game won't run without a 3D accelerator. Meanwhile, many of the elements are being crafted widi complete newbies in mind, so they won't be overwhelmed.
It's a delicate balance, but if anybody can pull it off, it's id. Quake III's gaming world will feature such goodies as curved surfaces, dynamic shadows, rotating mirrors, volumetric fog similar to the smoky stuff found in Unreal , bit color textures, and displacement maps, which will finally solve that blocky-when-you-look-at-it-up-close problem.
Familiar weapons will include the super shotgun, machine gun, grenade launcher, plasma gun, rocket launcher, railgun, and some form of a BFG. New weapons include a flamethrower and perhaps a return of the lightning gun. The guys at id are still finalizing the guns, as well as working on balancing for each weapon. To iron out bugs in the networking code, id released a test version of Quake III Arena -not an official demo, mind you.
The test release came with one human player model, two levels, and a handful of weapons. Spruced-up versions of the shotgun. There's also a personal teleporter power-up to help you get out of tough spots like lava in a flash - literally! Arena's engine can do all kinds of neat tricks: curved surfaces, fog effects, reflections, and transparencies, all with blazing gameplay speed.
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Developer's Description By id Software.
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