Mini-Review: Quake Live Beta

• Made By: id Software
• Cost: Free!
• Where to get it: Sign up for the Beta at quakelive.com

I know, I know. Ben, you say, Quake Live? What kind of magical fairy dust are you snorting? This is a site for indie games. Look at the facts, Chuckles: It’s free, it plays in a browser, and it’s made by the guys who arguably started ‘indie’ development and have remained this way all these years. Stick that magical fairy dust in your pipe and smoke it.

Anyway, I got in on the Quake Live Beta a couple weeks ago. This is essentially Quake 3, for free, in a browser, paid for by ads on in-game billboards. If you don’t know Quake 3, it was one of the last remnants of an old age of first-person shooters, an age when weapons hovered above the ground like angels waiting to be claimed, ‘camping’ was a veritable faux pas, CTF was the epitome of multiplayer gaming, in-game life lasted but a few seconds and death was merely a temporary annoyance. Ninja-like reflexes, surgically precise aiming, level memorization and resource control were what put you on the top.

The whole package is all very simple. You install a browser plug-in, endure a quick tutorial and play a one-on-one with Crash, a bot who after the match determines your skill level. After that you customize your settings, look at a list of servers (which also show how your aforementioned skill level matches up with the rest of the group already playing) and click on the one you want to join. It’s very elegant and works perfectly. The game tracks all your stats too and allows you to add friends and such, just like you’d expect from a true Web 2.0 product.

Quake Live has no grounding in reality, nor does it bother with any semblance of context. If you’ve been raised on Halo or Rainbow Six, this might put you off, but if you have fond memories of playing any of the Quake games, then this will be like Christmas. Imagine getting a bunch of friends together and not having to spend an hour getting everyone’s installations up to date just to get a match going. Rejoice when this goes public.

Mini-review: Gravity Hook

• Made by: Adam Atomic
• Cost: Free! (Though I think this may just be the beta)
• Where to get it: here!

Gravity Hook is a game I found through The Escapist’s Indie Developer’s Showcase, and so far it is my favorite of the bunch.

This game reminds me of a lot of the great old Atari games like Kaboom, in that it has one mechanic and it excels at it. You use the mouse to click on randomly arranged floating nodes. A cable appears that attaches a little guy at the bottom of the well to your chosen node as long as you hold the mouse down. The cable contracts and pulls the character up. Using this, you can slingshot poor fellow up and up, trying to get as high as possible.

The catch, however, is that each node is actually a mine, and once the cable contracts too far and the character gets too close, the mine explodes and it’s game over.

That’s it, that’s the whole game. But man is it ever addicting. When you start out, you tend to be very cautious, moving slowly up on long cables. As you get a little more experienced, you’ll find yourself slinging the man around with alarming speed, continually seeing brief flashes of the warning signal as he spins around. I’ve yet to really get into casual games, but now with this I can understand the appeal of having this simple game available anytime in your browser. In fact as soon as I’m done here I’ll be going back to play some more. Can’t… stop.