Quake III Revolution - PS2

To paraphrase legendary Russian pop duo Lenin and McCarthy (are you sure about this?) “You say you want a revolution, well, you know, we all want to change the world.” Well, I think it’s fair to say that anyone whose life has been touched by any of the various Quake games, the PC versions in particular, maybe has had their gaming perspective altered in some way. Quake’s various guises across the platforms quickly became the benchmark by which all ‘first-person shooters’ would be measured. The universally popular brand has made something of a hurried transition to Sony’s black ‘n’ blue box, and at first glance, the lightning-fast game-play and celebrated brutality and bloodshed is evidently intact. So is it really time to dump that copy of Timesplitters and fork out for the purported real deal that is Quake 3 Revolution? Let us enter the arena…

A straight port of an existing PC version of Quake wouldn’t make a great deal of sense – at the time of release, the PS2 features no online capabilities – so whilst id Software have retained old favourites like Orbb and Daemius, and delightful locations such as The Place of Many Deaths and The House of Pain, five new maps, more weapons and more playable characters have been implemented to lure you in. Career mode in a FPS game? Sort of. In a single player campaign, you can develop your chosen character, save it to a memory card, and import to a friend’s PS2 so you can battle as a bot, even when you’re not around. The multi-player modes, whether involving just two contenders or the maximum of four, are as good as one would have hoped for, which sounds like faint praise, but isn’t. You know Quake, it manages to blow you away every time. There’s no need to go overboard about it because those who play it know it: it’s the best FPS around and it’s now available on what is alleged to be the premier console. The lack of online play and combination mouse/keyboard control is disappointing, and the loading times for the game are frustratingly long, but once in the thick of the action you will realise that Quake 3 Revolution is another good reason to own a PS2.
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