The Rats are Leaving the Ship

By Vermouth

Sequels Don’t get much bigger than these two. Earlier this week I got a chance to play Quake 4 and Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, both from Activision, both sequels in storied, storied franchises and both really disappointing. I’ve been a huge fan of both these series but frankly these games can’t be described as positive steps for two of Activision’s biggest franchises. I’ll find it hard to believe if these two games don’t pick up a significant number of most disappointing awards when it comes time to dish out the yearly wrap up.

The only bright side is that I didn’t have to pay full blow to play either of these games — but I haven’t finished either of them, not that I plan on it. I rented Tony Hawk and received Quake from a friend for a bit.

I’ll start with American Wasteland since it’s problems are a bit easier to wrap up. For starters, the real crime here is they took a series that was primarily about challenging the player to unlock more and more stuff and buff their skater and made it super easy. A lot of times you’re practically lined up exactly in position to do what you need to do, it’s merely a matter of rolling off combos in a relatively easy fashion. None of the setting it up challenge that was always there, of needing to really plan things in advance. Just wing it and press the right sequence of buttons. This makes for a game that’s kind of ridiculous. Further, the feature they’d planned to incorporate, a streaming seamless city ala GTA is there with an asterisk. I mean instead of showing a loading screen they make you barrel down a featureless tunnel for the length of time you’d normally be looking at a loading screen while it streams in the stuff. This game isn’t a lost cause, the music is nice and the skateboarding is still reasonably fun to string combos off in, but it’s really a series entering it’s Twilight years if Neversoft & Activision don’t do something quickly. Frankly I think the best prescription for this series would be a bit of time off. This is their 7th major entry in the Tony Hawk Series in 6 years, just think about what that development cycle must look like. Not only that but it’s been on the Playstation, Nintendo 64, Dreamcast, Playstation 2, Gamecube, Xbox, Playstation Portable and soon the Xbox 360. (Nintendo handheld versions were all done by Vicarious Visions not Neversoft). It’s time to give it a rest for a year or two—I know it won’t happen. People must buy this annually to be put on such a breakneck pace.

Quake is one of my favorite franchises in history I mean seriously this is one of the big ones. Further, I’ve always been a fan of Raven Software’s work. From Hexen and Heretic to the Star Wars, Star Trek and X-men games they’ve made, they really knew how to do licensed work. Regardless of their track record they put out a real stinker in Quake 4. I mean the game has elements of Halo, Star Trek Elite Force, Call of Duty, and such but the problem is it take the bad elements from those games. It’s got the optimization issues from Halo without the great AI or interesting story, it’s got the annoying level design from Elite Force without the story, it’s got the story telling from Call of Duty without the amazingly intense firefights and so on and so forth. My machine isn’t really what you’d call a power system by any means but it’s no slouch yet, with an AthlonXP 2500+, Radeon 9800se and 1Gb of ram, but yet to get a consistent frame rate of more than 30 i needed to take the resolution down all the way to 800×600 and set the details as low as they’d go. My machine runs Doom 3, and F.E.A.R. At 1024×768 and Half-Life 2 and Farcry at 1280×1024 with medium details and doesn’t bat an eye so I don’t know what kind of optimization they were doing there but it was pretty poorly done. Further, despite the graphics being good in some regards (the lighting is excellent), the gore in this game looks so strange as internal organs all have a plastic look to them.

But I’m no graphics whore, it’s all good if the game play is good; and I have some of the lowest demands of anyone out there on a shooter. It’s not about innovation, it’s about simply making it fun to play and extremely well made. Unfortunately Quake 4 fails in both of these regards as well. The AI is probably the biggest problem as it really is pretty pitiful, you could have said the same of Doom of course, but unlike this game, stuff isn’t scripted very tightly so you often wander into packs of just meandering enemies. It’s not really a scary game, albeit somewhat atmospheric in some parts and it just doesn’t capture the feeling that that game had. Furthermore, and most unforgivably, the firefights aren’t particularly enjoyable—in part because of the optimization issues but I think it’s more than that. The guns just aren’t very fun to use and they’re all terribly standard but not really well done versions of old standbys. The multiplayer modes in Quake 4 are the standard DM, TDM, CTF, and 1v1 Tournament and these are the game’s one saving grace. I’ve had some time to play some Lan style games of these and they’re fairly intense and do a good job of capturing the spirit of the first Quake games; but with only 9 maps and not all of them very good, I just couldn’t seriously recommend that someone pay 50 dollars for this game.

I don’t really know what exactly went wrong with these two games but I can say this: as a long time fan of both of these franchises I hope that at some point they can get these two huge genre defining games back on course to being extremely awesome games. I’m not sure what the answer is for Quake, how you keep the old Quake feeling without making it a mess, and for Neversoft they either need to reinvent the series in a really bold new way or perhaps go back to it’s roots and ditch the whole story effort in favor of just skating for it’s own sake. It seems only the die hards are going to stick onboard the good ships Tony Hawk Skater and Quake, even the rats are leaving the ship these days.