I got a wonderful gift certificate from Best Buy from my folks for Christmas. The first portion of which I spent on a Divx-playing DVD player. I still had $40 left over so I decided to get the special DVD version of Quake 4 because it has Quake II attached to it. I have a copy of Quake II, but unfortunately for reasons I can't quite put my finger on, it doesn't work on Winston, my newest computer. Since Winston is the first computer I've had that could play Q2 to its fullest potential (max resolution and so on), I found that to be quite a shame. I figured that whatever problem they had with it (like it being DOS-based, for instance) they would fix for the re-release. On top of that, I would get Quake 4. Even though I wouldn't be able to play that at full potential, I specifically eyed the requirements when I bought the components for my computer to make sure that it would play comfortably. Even if there was a problem with one Quake or the other, it would still be bad-ass worth it.

Unfortunately, there were problems with both.

Quake II exhibited most of the same problems as before. Though it would at least install (the previous one I had to move the files off the file-server), it had the same problem of randomly closing. Whatever problem it has with newer components were not apparently addressed for the new release as I might have figured. Nothing on the computer is off-brand or cheap. AMD and ATI chips in both. It does seem to crash less frequently, but random crashes are random crashes.

Quake 4 is apparently not compatible with my sound card. If Q4 were more like Q2 then this would not be an issue. This is particularly true since I don't even know what Q2 sounds like. I've always listened to music while playing. In fact, there are certain Cowboy Mouth and Robert Earl Keen songs I will always associate Quake 2. And if you have never tried it, playing Erasure's "Always" while blasting the heads off aliens is an unexpectedly beautiful experience. Unfortunately, in Quake 4 there are various characters that are talking to you and telling you what to do. Unfortunately, I cannot read CG lips. Unbelievably, there is no subtitle option. Seriously, how hard would that be to add? Are there no deaf people anywhere wanting to play this game? Do the game developers even care?

The other, slightly more surprising problem with Quake 4 is the speed of play. It feels like my character is walking through molasses. To "run" in Quake 4 is the same speed as "walking" in Quake 2. I would contribute this to hardware limitations, but (a) the resolution and quality of video seem to make little difference, so it's unlikely the computer is overwhelmed, and (b) everything except me is moving really quickly. In fact, even I can move quickly as long as I am not walking forwards or backwards.

I'm not sure, but I think this is the first PC game that I have ever actually purchased. The previous Quake was a gift and I don't play much in the way of computer games (save abandonware). I guess it figures that once I take the initiative to buy something, it'd suck.