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As I continue to work my way through my Dreamcast collection, it starts to get more interesting. You see I'm forcing myself to play games I probably wouldn't under normal circumstances, and Quake III Arena is a perfect example. I'm not a big FPS fan to begin with. And the whole idea of an arena-style FPS is completely alien to me. But before I delve into the game itself, let me first talk a bit about controls. As many of you far more versed in first person shooters are probably well aware, there is a certain... shall we say
snobbery regarding control methods within the genre. There's a group of purists whom claim that keyboard-and-mouse is the only way to play -- a residual effect of the genre growing up on PC's I assume. And let me just say that my first experiences with the genre as a whole were indeed on PC. I logged many hours into the shareware versions of both Wolfenstein 3D and Doom using the old kb/m setup. But nowadays, I have no idea how that younger version of myself did such a thing. It just makes no sense to me.
And as the genre matured, so too did its control scheme. Later games would start to include aiming on the vertical plane as a thing which only confused me further when a keyboard and mouse were thrown into the mix. Though I grew up dabbling in PC gaming, it was consoles and their controllers that I was at home with. In recent years I've attempted some console FPS games wondering if maybe I could feel more comfortable with a controller. A good example is Borderlands. I mean wow, what a great looking game. I spent several hours flailing my ass around Borderlands never to beat the first boss. It's all kind of embarrassing really. But it's true. My brain has serious trouble understanding how one analog stick is movement and another is aiming. Generally, I can only concentrate one or the other which often resulted in me standing still when I should be running or fumbling awkwardly with the camera to aim at something. Quite the mess.
But recently I decided to try the leaked Dreamcast port of Half-Life because I had found the Prima guide for it. Here was an FPS game not only put on a console with the limitations of its controller, but of course the Dreamcast is lacking that second analog stick. Instead of the left stick being movement and right being aim, we had the left stick for aim and four face buttons for movement. For some strange reason this made a lot more sense to me. Four flat buttons (IE: Up, Down, Left, Right) just clicked in my brain rather than trying to make sense of the four directions in a 3D-space because of an analog stick. When I brought this subject up on the Racketboy forums a member there suggested that perhaps the southpaw control scheme would work better for me when playing FPS games. I was intrigued. You see, I'm a right-hander, baby. Far from sinister. But perhaps in some weird way, my gaming brain is a lefty? Either way I find it appropriate at this point to plug a wonderful blog post by slackur on the plight of the left-handed gamer:
http://www.rfgeneration.c...the-SouthpawClaw-1463.phpAnd now on to Quake III Arena...
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I should start by pointing out that my knowledge of the Quake series is small. And I'm guessing that this particular game does little to change that. Quake III Arena is of course meant as a multiplayer game. It's all deathmatch and capture-the-flag, etc. with no room for a single player campaign. Again, this is quite foreign to me. But finding the controls so similar to the intended Half-Life release, I was able to jump right in and have myself a pretty good time.
The game itself runs great on the Dreamcast hardware. It looks fantastic and has a silky-smooth frame rate. It's fast-paced and has lots of weapon upgrades to keep it interesting. And yet, I'm not sure I could put myself through the entire single player experience. Since really I know all I'm doing is running around killing computer-controller enemies, it kind of loses its luster after a while. And honestly, I'd kind of prefer to just be experience the original Quake on DC instead.
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Oh but there's something I forgot to mention! There are actually still a handful of Dreamcast games that still have some level of online support. And Quake III Arena is one of them. Although the official server has been shut down for some time, Q3 actually has various private servers still supporting the Dreamcast port. And as it happens, I have my Dreamcast hooked up to a phone line, and configured to work with Juno as a free ISP (remember Juno? It's still around!). But sadly my efforts to play Q3 online have so far been a wash. I've checked into various online communities (like the excellent Dreamcast-Talk or OnlineConsoles) and written down a slew of IP addresses of private servers. Yet every time I take Arena online and input the server addresses... absolutely nothing happens.
I still have some reasonably high hopes for this game. I feel like if I could get connected to a server
somewhere then it could be a blast to play against human opponents. But until that happens, I'm sadly stuck with a pretty cool multiplayer game and no multi-
players to play it with.
