We had such high hopes for this game. When the teaser of Quake III Test hit the market, gamers everywhere drooled over the exciting new levels, new weapons, video effects and sounds. Gamers around the globe were able to play against each other in a gory and concentrated gaming environment. (Most of Brian's summer evenings were devoted to playing in an arena hosted by a guy in Germany.)

The original Quake was by far the best gaming environment on the planet in its time. It easily made the quality of its predecessor, "Doom," look like a GameBoy game. QuakeWorld only intensified the excitement of the original Quake by provoking millions of gamers around the world to test their skills against others online. Clans formed and Quake quickly became a global community.

Quake II was a phenomenon that we passed over. Looking back on the years, we don't know why Quake II ever came out. It never struck us as being anything special. It had higher system requirements but didn't deliver an equally higher quality of graphics rendering.

Two years later, the first Quake III test came out. It had wonderful graphics, stunning new sounds, and gripping playability. It was far more addicting than the original Quake had ever been. With every week that passed, we couldn't wait until the final game came out. We looked each week online for possible leads in the "underground" scene, and found nothing for months.  Finally, the Quake III Beta was released.  Yuck.

With extremely high-end graphics, and hideously ugly characters, Quake III Beta quickly became more of an annoyance than anything else.  Bots were added, (computer players that played intelligently against you), and that really enhanced the game as far as not having to go online to play anyone but yourself.  Aside from that though, the Beta really did nothing for us. 

We have pretty powerful machines (a PII 450, 256MB RAM, 12MB VRAM and G3 300, 224MB RAM, 6MB VRAM, respectively), and Quake III Arena won't run too smoothly on them.  Good luck finding a machine that meets their stringent requirements.  Even their suggested minimums are asking a lot of the average computer buyer.  You have to be a serious gamer to run Quake 3, and that really bothered us.  We really wanted to give it a fair shot.

Name: Kazador
Comments:
The rest of the gaming community has evolved, you are both prehistoric twits. You both should play under the handle Denver the last dinosaur. I demand a rewrite of this article.

Name: WiT
Comments:
Hey stupid heads- your problem lies in your graphic cards. Hate to break it to you but 6 and 12 mbs sucks. Most all of the new graphic cards are using 32 mbs of ram. i don't have to be a math major to know that a there is a huge differance between 12 and 32. It also doesn't take a genius to know that when you build a new game you never build it for the older computers because it will be outdated to fast. I have a pentium 2 333 with a matrox g400 graphics card. Quake 3 is unbelievable. By the way quake 2 sold more copies than any other computer game ever made. You just didn't notice because you were in apple land where the only games availible were quake 1 and simcity. I don't think this article was written objectivly or with or with enough research. You based this entire story on your anger of being caught in the wake of progress.

Name: SnotPhan
Comments:
the story for q3 is the worst part

Comments:
test

Comments:
Dave, Are you on campus? Let's duke it out! :)

Name: Dave Shifflett
Year: SR
Major: IS
Comments:
Hey guys, I have Q III and I haven't had any trouble running it. I have an "old" PII 300 w/ 128 RAM, I cant crank the settings all the way, but it still looks great. but you're right it does require high sys requirements to run at it's full capability.