quake/articles/1997/art-998

Path: mantis!not-for-mail

From: "Brent Phillips"

Newsgroups: rec.games.computer.quake.announce

Subject: Review of Q!ZONE

Date: 24 Jan 1997 18:18:41 -0000

Organization: ioNET

Lines: 46

Sender: moderate@jobstream.co.uk

Approved: quake@mantis.co.uk

Message-ID: <01bc096d$cb2954a0$185881d0@ConnectAmerica.paloverde.com>

I just purchased Q!ZONE for Quake ($19) by Wizard Works.

It contains 3 new episodes with about 8/9 levels each. It also includes

about 8 deathmatch levels. A grand total of about 35 levels. The level

design is very uneven. Some are really short and easy, others are big and

long. A few are very, very good; most are not. In fact, if you go to the

web sites that rate the top 10 or 20 levels, you will find ALL of them

better than just about any on Q!ZONE. With a view to deathmatch, two of

the DM levels are very good; and if you unpack the .pak file about 10 or so

out of the three episodes are great for deathmatch. Oh yes, there are new

textures that are rather nice.

It has one new weapon - the double nailgun is replaced with a ninja-star

gun called Slicer. It is probably better than the double nail gun. (I

never did care for the double nail gun anyway, so anything would be an

improvement over it.)

It has about three or four new monsters. They are not as good as the

original beasts, and the sounds for the new enemies are rather poor. The

new enemies are Headless, Nuker, Flyer, and Snapper. Headless and Nuker

are interesting and about as much challenge as the Grunts. Flyer, well, he

is tougher. And Snapper is just a stupid red barbecue grill sort of thing

- what's the point?

Installation is easy and takes up about 24Megs. The front end Map and

Level Manager is okay with a few interesting features that allow you to

select various parameters. But you will need to edit the batch file that

starts it up so that when you exit the game it does not start up the front

end all over again.

OVERALL RATING: 5 out of 10 (Very Average)

Hey, I really like QUAKE, and I like playing new levels. Q!ZONE has its

moments, but it does NOT really improve much of anything over the original

game. Almost all of the levels in the original game were much better, and

there is not much in this game to recommend it as being anything special.

I still enjoyed playing through this, but some upcoming Partial and Total

Conversions and Add-ons ought to be much better. Look for them to come out

sometime at the end of January or the first of February. This is one of

the first add-on releases (authorized by id) that has come out. My

suggestion -- wait for these other add-ons and for HEXEN II.

Brent

mimpchnk@paloverde.com