Battleangel | Personal

I tried Quake Live and I have to say I was not very impressed. I don’t know what I expected really. I never did like the gameplay of Quake III. And while this is once again a fascinating feat of engineering by ID Software, I don’t really get the point. So, it does play from your browser. But at the same time it unpacks to about 300 megs or so on your harddrive in the most stealthy way imaginable. And it has some sort of incarnation of punkbuster included that constantly is phoning home. Why not just re-release Quake III free online? Why bother with this browser integration at all? If you have permission to install plugins, access the net, and write to disk, then you are fairly close to being able to install a normal game anyway. This reminds me of Quake World back in the day. You know, the Quake port that no one wanted to play. Regardless of how much of technological wonder it was back then.

I may sound like a broken record here, but the gaming industry is high on some strange shit if they believe this is a model for future gaming.