Quake Live

I can still remember my first schooling in the art of Quake. A young staff writer fresh out of university, I found myself working late one night, and the office Q3DM17 expert offered to give me a run-around and a few tips.Talk about school of hard knocks. He railed me from a mile away. He railed me while performing mid-air pirouettes. He railed me when all he could see was the pixel on the top of my head. He was a frickin' railgun prodigy, and his name, rather aptly, was Mr Chafe.is basically Quake III Arena playable – thanks to some astounding plugin Gandalfery – in a browser. It runs like a dream, and it's surely a sign of things to come that a razor-edge, competitive FPS that demands sublime net-coding runs in a browser, and still taps your PC's hardware for its needs.The Quake Live servers are stuffed with Mr Chafes, and it's still a game of frightening speed and precision, but it's immediately plain that id's Tech Engine 3 browser-streamed incarnation of Quake knows the difference between good and amazing players when matchmaking.

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Even so, in the beginner-grade match-ups you'll meet some extremely skilled combatants.Dropping into a quick match is easy, and for old hands, there's a warm sense of familiarity to the maps. I leapt straight into The Longest Yard, and found it as insanely frenetic as ever. Every time I took the long jump to the railgun platform, the same player got right up in my grill, trying to place rockets on it just as I landed.

We singled each other out repeatedly, and aside from the inevitable interference from other players, sparred riotously for the whole match.All this is free, but ad-supported, which isn't as intrusive as you might imagine. For a few seconds before a match starts, you're served an ad (Fallout 3: New Vegas at time of writing), then it's gone. You can pay for the game, which disables ads and offers you extra features, but for casual players, there'll be little incentive to upgrade.

The free-toplay version is bulging with classic Quake maps, and you can jump into all the match-types you'd expect: free-for-all, capture the flag, team deathmatch, duel and clan arena. Blood and tiersThere are two levels of paid subscription – premium and pro, at £1.59 a month and £3.18 a month respectively – and the extra features they offer cater to the clansman.

Exclusive maps, frequent content updates, clan creation tools and so forth, you only get with a subscription. Interestingly, you can only create and customise your own games if you pay for the top-tier service. Go free or premium, and you can only join rolling servers. Which for casual players who just fancy a quick blat, is fine.Quake III Arena was sublime, and that's what this is: sublimity in a browser window. Every match is a white-hot opera of surging gunplay that leaves the crump-and-pew of rockets and rails ringing in your ears for minutes afterwards. It's as immersive and pure an experience as it ever was, and it's even hard to care that the engine is showing its age.

Oh, and it's free. What are you doing? Stop reading this now, open a browser window and sign up.

The size of software and games these days can be quite a bother. Although internet connections are getting faster as well, downloading a few gigabytes is never met with too much joy.

More and more do we see an evolution of some kind, and do we meet a world where installing stuff becomes a thing of the past.

Installing software is passé; out-of-browser software is the new black, as a figure of speech.

An even deeper black are out-of-browser games. Not the crappy, eye-hurting kind of games, but games a gamer can be proud of. Games like Quake Live.

Quake Live – Are You Ready?

Quake Live is id Software’s newborn child. It’s an energetic and fast-paced Massive Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. The project is funded by means of in-game advertising, and released as a free download.

The game works through a Quake browser plugin, so it still needs you to download something, but a 3.78 MB download can hardly be called a bother.

The Game

Quake Live is based on the Quake III engine, and feels incredibly smooth. When you boot the game up in full screen, you’ll forget you’re playing out of a browser.

The game hosts 30 arenas of varying sizes, and over 250,000 players.

Like in all Quake games, the weapons are something to be proud of; ranging from good old shotguns to plasma and lightning guns, overkills can be expected.

Currently the game is limited to Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, but developers are seriously focusing on bringing the game to Mac and Linux platforms as well.

Game Types

The available game types are:

• Free for All (FFA) – also known as plain old deathmatch. You score points by killing or fragging other players. There are no teams, every individual for itself.
• Duel (1v1) – the name says most of it. It’s a ten minute face-off between two players. Other players spectate the game, and can challenge the last duel winner.
• Team Deathmatch (TDM) – like FFA, only in teams. Two teams face each other, and points can be earned by killing or fragging members of the other team. What’s special about this gametype is that you can earn negative points for teamkills.
• Clan Arena (CA) – two teams face each other in a last man standing match. There are no instant respawns, and the team that manages to eliminate the other gets awarded the points for that round.
• Capture the Flag (CTF) – two teams in the classic capture the flag mode. Each team tries to steal the other teams flag from its base, while protecting its own flag in the process. To get the other team’s flag to your base – with your flag present – awards you one point.

Portability

Perhaps the most unique part about this game – as a result of it being a browser game – is the portability.

Instant Play Baby valley. is pushed to its limits when you can go fragging at any computer with an internet connection. You can instantly play on your Quake Live account when you’re at a friend’s place – or at Joe’s Interwebz Pub for that matter.

All that needs downloading is an incredibly tiny browser plugin that works in both Firefox and Internet Explorer.

The Queue

One of the biggest irritations of Quake Live – and a slight cutback on the instant play – is the game’s queue.

Due to massive response – heavier than the developers expected – the Quake Live Team was obliged to introduce the queue. This queue puts you in line, to keep the server from overloading; mainly to assure that those playing don’t end up on an infinite laggy server.

The Quake Live Team is currently working on this problem. They’ve already slimmed the line down from tens of thousands of players to a few thousand of them.

While in the queue, always keep in mind that Quake Live is a completely free game, and the developers aren’t charging you a dime to address the overload problem.

Start playing Quake Live now!

Are you ready to start playing Quake Live? Register right away and hook into the action.

Not so long ago MakeUseOf also did an article on free online shooters Top Five Free Online Shooter Games - Must Read For Gamers Read More , you might want to check it out as well.

Tell us what you think of Quake Live in the comments!