In the time since its release, Quake 2 has established itself as the lofty standard by which all others must be judged. The Turoks, Sins and Unreals have come and gone but only Quake 2 still has a permanent presence on our computers. That of course, and the test for Quake 3. So, when we first heard about Quake 2 making its debut on the N64, we were cautiously excited. Cautiously because Quake for the N64 was a sad excuse for a game, failing in all the normal ways that PC to console ports fail. By attempting to recreate a game on a system that couldn't handle the load, the developers gave N64 owners a choppy, unplayable mess. Although Activision promised that Quake 2 was going to be a very different experience, that song and dance is old hat.
Well, the good news is it wasn't any old song and dance. Activision delivered. Quake 2 isn't the same game as it was for the PC by a long shot and, believe it or not, that's a really good thing. All of the levels are original, the graphics are heavily modified and the single player game is, well, actually fun. That amazing innovation alone sets the game apart from the PC, whose monotonous single player game we all dutifully played for a couple hours and then happily ignored forever.
Levels are based around multi-part missions with easily understood goals. The lack of on-the-spot game saving ability so common in PC shooters eliminates the creeping, careful approach completely and yet doesn't cause the frustration levels so prevalent in console shooters like Duke Nukem: Zero Hour. Levels are short enough that save points appear fairly often, and when forced to reload a game you are always close enough to the causes of your death that the mad urge to rush back and spray them with rocketfulls of your screaming vengeance usually outweighs any annoyance.
Quake has always been dark and ugly by design. On the N64, Quake 2 has to lack a lot of graphical detail in order to run smoothly, which hurts many ports but works fine here. Hallways are dark, rooms are dank, and the game just feels creepy. More importantly, the frame rate runs fast enough to make fragging an opponent while running backwards and jumping off an elevator as effortless as it should be to any accomplished gamer. That says Quake 2 to us.
The only area where we'd pick nits is the game has sparse animations and lackluster graphics for the baddies. Their movement is a bit jerky, their blood is pixilated, and there is not much variety in their death animations. But, we choose not to nit pick because the game moves at such a nice pace that either you or the aforementioned nasties will be dead long before any of these details occur to you.
So, Activision delivered an excellent single player version of Quake 2. But who cares about the single player version? The real problem is porting a multi-player PC game to a system with no link cables, no Internet connections, and thus, no twenty player frag-fests. Meaning that not only does the single player mode become all-important, but deathmatches must be compelling with as few as two people. They are.
The Multi-player levels are craftily designed, well lit and deceivingly compact. Players can type in their names, choose colors, skins and control schemes as well as tweaking every conceivable option. Not only that, but with the memory expansion pack the game runs just as well with four players as it does with one, allowing deathmatches to capture all of the magic that started the Quake 2 phenomenon. Throw in team battles, capture the flag, and an extremely addictive "odd-man-out" mode and it's possible we'll be playing Quake 2 on N64 as long as we did for the PC.
The Bottom Line: The best multi-player PC shooter becomes the best new multi-player N64 shooter (Goldeneye still wears the overall crown, but only by a slim margin). Activision and Raster Productions even threw in a great single player experience just to sweeten the deal.
