A few years ago, I was in Paris during the summer, and it was so intolerably hot that I needed to stay in for the middle of the day. My friend Mike, whose family I was staying with, was also there, and just as tired of the heat. We resolved to put our MacBook Pros on an ad hoc network and play through Quake — you know, instead of visiting the Louvre or something. And I recalled then just how awesome that game is.
We played through most of the original episodes. Some years before that, I had played through Quake II during a lull in real releases. And of course I played Q3A when it came out. Now that I think of it, I seem to have played the entire series in reverse.
Anyway, the point of all this is that the Quake series is really, really awesome in the classic-FPS sense. No stupid invisible walls or mission objectives. It’s just you versus a legion of reanimated dead and terrifying Shamblers. Seriously, you’ll enjoy every second if you haven’t played these already, and you can get them all on Steam for $15 at the moment. You can play them original style, or you can get Tenebrae or another mod and play those suckers in HD.