I never really liked the weapons of Quake 3, and the dynamics behind the PvP. I don’t know it just didn’t feel like it was playing right. I guess I just liked Unreal Tournament a whole lot more. And I’m not talking 2k7, 2k4, 2k3, I’m talking the original version of Unreal Tournament.

There wasn’t a better game for fragging IMHO. It even had its own stats system, where you could see how well you were doing VS everyone on the internet.

The original Unreal Tournament has to be revived. If id software can do it, I’m sure Epic can pull it off. It wouldn’t even need any significant changes, I would rather no changes, but it would be cool to see a match-up system much like QuakeLive, and an achievement system, etc.

Maybe one day this will happen, until then I am going to have to keep hoping.

On a sidenote, while previewing this post, I noticed that google ads is spitting out links about terrorism. I wonder how the linked terrorism with Quake or Unreal. Does Jack Thompson have something to do with this? LOL.

When I initially created my account, I went into queue and there was about 20,000 people ahead of me, with 500 entering per minute, so it didn’t take long at all to actually download QuakeLive. However, my browser had to be restarted which put me back in a longer queue, then the server went down, and I had to re-queue, and the server went down, and I had to re-queue, then I get in, I get to a page asking for a verification code that was supposed to have been sent to me via email. It wasn’t there and it wasn’t inside of my spam folder. I had to send 3 requests before a code finally made it to me. The code when entered on their website, was invalid, but when I copy and pasted the link that was sent in my email, apparently my account was activated. The servers went down again.

Lovely, time to re-queue. I started at 30,000 got to about 9000 and then the queue reset and I was at 50,000 this time. After about 12 hours of waiting, I finally got to play against Crash, the bot that tests your skill. You do a couple simple tasks to determine which skill level you should be playing at, then you play the crash in a match to 15 frags.

Once you have defeated crash you can now search for games online. However 98% of the servers are full, or become full when you enter the game. All games are currently running unranked, so your scores are not kept as of right now. Which means the matchmaking system probably isn’t working properly either.

Now that we have the negatives out of the way, negatives that will hopefully be fixed very soon, on to some more positive stuff. QuakeLive is extremely fast paced. I was on a FFA server, with 17 other people, and there was no lag. That’s pretty impressive for a beta. However, some of the arena’s aren’t meant to handle that many players, and you may end up running around like an idiot with just the machine gun.

The graphics are good so far, especially for a game loaded from your webbrowser. It can be played in fullscreen mode, and it can be played in ultra high resolutions, aswell as widescreen resolutions. I haven’t tried this on a slower computer to see how it run’s maybe I will check it out on my laptop later.

All in all, I can’t wait for QuakeLive to officially launch with all of the bugs worked out. It’s going to be a great game.

Right now I am sitting at work on my laptop, so I have atleast joined queue. Maybe I’ll get some quake matches in during my lunch. I started in queue posistion 22,000+ and the queue seems to move about 500 spots or so every couple minutes. So I’m probably going to be queued up for a couple hours.

Will write a full review once I get on!