Quake Live: Epic pwnage in your browser

If you could see us exactly ten years ago, there's a very good chance we would be wasting company time playing Quake III (or Unreal Tournament II) with our office mates. In the years since then, first-person shooters have come to require the kind of dedicated hardware that virtually no office workers have, effectively eliminating the daily fragfest. Instead, browser-based casual games such as Puzzle Quest and Peggle have taken over as workplace time killers (and have built a huge new market in the process).

In an effort to bridge the gap between 'casual' and 'serious' gaming, the company behind Quake (and Doom before that), Id Software, is readying a revamp of the classic Quake III experience, called Quake Live. Id just completed an invite-only closed beta round test for Quake Live and has opened its servers to a broader public beta test for the game, starting yesterday. And you thought the recession was bad for business.

In the intervening years, PCs have become fast enough, and broadband connections common enough, that the game can be cast as a browser-based experience, played by visiting Quakelive.com and signing up for a free account. With its forgiving hardware requirements and pick-up-and-play style, it seems made for laptops and low-power office PCs.

Having played several rounds of the beta version of Quake Live, we can say the ad-supported game is a fairly faithful adaptation of Quake III, at least as far as our decade-old memories serve, and has all the classic maps from the game, including our favourite, The Longest Yard (set on a series of floating platforms).

The feel is definitely retro, with none of the strategic elements, such as cover fire or stealth, that have defined the last few generations of shooters. Instead, the action is fast-paced and kinetic, with players running around at breakneck speeds, bunny-hopping along the way to avoid getting shot. We'll have a full hands-on with Quake Live later today, so keep Crave in your peripheral vision.

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Source: 'Quake Live': Productivity-destroying Web game on Crave US

• Tags:
• Unreal Tournament,
• Doom,
• recession,
• broadband,
• connections