Meeting your maker in Quake should be an honourable thing, your twitching corpse a recognition of another player's skill. Although this may sound fun, it serves only to encourage bad play, with respawn areas, cap points, entrances and walkways often ending up covered in the damn things. New to the game is a mine launcher that drops small proximity charges which stick to enemy clothing and explode a few seconds later. Additionally, much of the terrain makes le combat alfresco a chore as your progress is hindered by hills, dips and crests in the landscape.īoth the nailgun and chaingun make a welcome return, although the former is useful only as a last resort, and the latter so powerful it disrupts the balance of play. While initially rattier captivating ("Look, DeAtHReAper, floor made of grass!"), they soon become tiresome, with the long trek between enemy bases turning levels into more of a slog than a mission.
The outdoor variants - which drag Quake players from their narrow factory corridors out into the open air -are too large to be popular with existing players. Four of these are one-on-one tournament-style maps, which by definition don't belong in a team game, and so now we're down to 11.įor the most part, these 11 are fast and well balanced, but like the techno-metal soundtrack and Unreal Tournaments voice taunts, they're pretty forgettable affairs. Included in the pack are 19 new levels, four of which are essentially Quake III Capture The Flag maps with the odd nip and tuck, leaving 15 really new ones in total. What makes a map great is the way it plays, and it's here that Team Arena short. There are no stairways, balustrades, balconies, ducts, vents, mezzanine floors, vaulted arches, domes, obelisks, stained-glass windows or weird techno-gothic architecture whose only purpose in life is to heat-stress your video card. It is by far and away the smallest and simplest setting in the game, comprising one or two monotone textures, a couple of choke points and a few boxes.
If you've played Counter-Strike, you'll be intimately familiar with the single greatest map of all time, Dust. With the super-cheeky Quake 3 engine behind it, the game supports all the graphical tricks and treats we know and love so well, including dynamic shadows, curved surface rendering, specular lighting, bilinear filtering and quadriplegic dribbling. Visually, Team Arena is pure confectionery for the eyes. Compare TA to Half-Life or Unreal Tournament, both of which offer similar play styles but at less than half the cost, and it should be clear from the outset that the odds are stacked against it. As an expansion pack, Team Arena requires that you have Quake 3 already installed, meaning a total investment of around $50 - not including the 16Mb accelerator card that the new game demands, or the 128Mb memory necessary for the galaxy-sized outdoor maps to render at a decent frame rate.
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