A small matter of addiction

I recently received a submission from an author (who prefers to remain nameless) that, I feel, provides a unique perspective on a much-hyped game released by id Software. I'm speaking about Quake, of course.

Now, I enjoy a nice computer game as much as anyone, but as this piece attests, sometimes it's possible to go a little too far. Let this be a word of warning to those who download the shareware version ...

uake was released amid some really huge hype. I mean, everyone was waiting for it to hit the Internet. I knew people who were staying up nights, pinging the id Software home page every now and then with their browser to see if they'd released it. If browsers were physical objects, their "Reload" button would be worn smooth from all that tapping.

I was anxious too. I knew Quake was going to absorb a huge part of my waking hours after I'd installed it on my machine. It seemed reasonable that, for something this momentous, I should keep a written journal, something to chronicle my experiences with Quake. So, that's what this is all about. There's probably no good reason to start one, since my memory is pretty good and all and no one will read this anyway.

Here goes. I'm not going to go into my background, where I came from, all that David Copperfield crap. If anyone ever reads this, suffice to know I'm a pretty average guy that happens to love playing computer games. I'd rather play them then watch television or go down to the mall, so you might say I'm a geek. That's fine, you can think that. But name the game and I'll kick your ass. I'm not the best, but I like to think I'm pretty good at these things because I set my mind to them.

A fter I'd downloaded the shareware version, I stayed up all night playing it. I felt like a newborn child. All my patented moves, the ones I'd been using for years with Doom and Duke Nukem 3D, seemed insufficient. It took all I could to get past the first level, and I had to start over a few times. What gives? If this had been Doom, it would have been over in minutes. The grunts are slow and stupid and the rottweilers-from-hell are little more than pests.

But the game play is incredible. Jumping around, running down a dimly lit hall, swimming through a murky grey pool of who knows what ... underwater, the rippling across your line of sight is boss. The guys at id know what they're doing.

I've got to get good if I'm going to deathmatch. Already people are setting up Quake servers all over the Internet. I logged into one a few hours ago and got beat up like a fan at a soccer match. I might as well have been hobbling through the level on crutches. My pesky 28.8K modem was no help. I had to log into six sites before I found one with an acceptable response time. "Acceptable" quickly diminished as I discovered there was no way I was going to find a server without at least some delay.

I finally one run by some guys at the local university. They must have been sitting in the lab with the server, because they run around and kicked my ass for breakfast. I haven't had a pasting like that in a long time, not since I started playing Doom. I'll take out those guys out some day.

L ast night, as I slept, I dreamed I was in Quake. Not playing it, but actually teleported to this strange world of zombies and dungeons and nailguns. I was playing level four, "The Grisly Grotto". A slimy larval-like scrag was flying around, bobbing and flinging streaks of green fire at me. My feet were heavy like cement and my fingers were on five-second delay. The shotgun was aimed all wrong. It was pointed too low to hit the scrag. When I could manage to squeeze off a shot, it would just ricochet off the brick wall behind it. I could swing left and right, but I just couldn't get my aim up at the scrag.

Finally, I ran backwards and started climbing some stairs. The scrag was right on me, bellowing out hot death. As I climbed the stairs, my shotgun was no longer uselessly aimed below the wizard, but right on him. I frantically started pumping rounds into his torso. I felt the kick of the rifle against my shoulder and the smell of burnt powder wafted across my nostrils. I squeezed the trigger, over and over and over, until the scrag let out a grunt and dropped straight to the floor.

I was so jumpy I kept firing, but with the beast on the floor, I was just shooting over it and hitting the wall beyond. Finally, I ran out of ammo.

And woke up.

S o now, I've developed a winning combination of keyboard mappings and mouse settings that gives me full control inside of Quake. I map the keyboard in such a way that I can move in all three dimensions with my left hand and use the right to control the mouse, which aims, fires, and switches weapons.

This configuration took quite a bit of time to develop and then master. When I started playing Quake, I was using the "classic" Doom mappings, which actually are just Castle Wolfenstein 3D mappings -- this has been around for years! Any dolt can figure them out: the cursor keys moves forwards, backwards, turn left, turn right. CTRL fires. ALT "strafes", which means the left and right keys sidestep rather than turn. My only modification was when I was hooked on Duke Nukem 3D. Since it incorporates the Z-axis into gameplay (versus Doom, which just provided an illusion of the third dimension) I had to move up and down. I added the 'A' and 'Z' keys to the Doom layout.

This easy layout doesn't work for shit in Quake. The dream I had unlocked it for me. Somehow, in my excitement to just play, I overlooked that I didn't have full control. For one, you get attacked from all over ... death from above and death from below. And, unlike Doom and Duke, you can't just face the monster (who might be at the top of a staircase or down in a pit) and hit them with your weapon. You gotta aim right at them, otherwise you're unloading ammo into a brick wall whilst they're unloading hellfire into you.

Once I got Quake's controls figured out, the game fell into place. Or maybe I fell out of place. Same difference.

A fter I figured out the keyboard stuff, I started to kick ass. Now, I fly through the levels like I'm a tour guide. The big "secret" is learning to strafe opponents. Once you've mastered that, most of the monsters are a snap. I can drop an ogre before he gets a chance to pull a grenade out of his bottomless bag o' explosives. The scrags are faster, and get in a few shots, but weaving back and forth confuses them. A few blasts from the ol' shotgun snuffs them like flies. Larval flies.

I sneak in a half-hour of practice time at work, come home a little early, and power through the levels. I get so into it, I forget to stop at a good time and save the game. Couple of days ago I went through three levels before an ogre killed me so I had to play through them again. I didn't care.

I f I ride rollercoasters all day long, I can still feel the ups and downs hours later. Usually it's no big deal, but riding after a greasy burger and oil-soaked fries makes me wonder why science hasn't perfected a way to temporarily detach your own stomach.

I mention all this because Quake does the same thing to me. After my nightly eight-hour marathon, lying in bed waiting for the excess adrenaline to disperse, I can feel myself running around, lugging a rocket launcher and diving into a pool of gray slime. I keep replaying the deathmatches in my head. I congratulate myself for awesome gibbs and flagellate myself for walking into obvious traps.

(A "gibb" is when you hit an opponent straight on with so much force it causes him to explode into a pile of steaming meat. There's not much left resembling their previous body. The only thing recognizable is a severed head with a permanent look of surprise affixed to its face, as in "where'd the hell that grenade come from?")

I t's starting to get bad. I'm getting three hours of sleep a night. I stumble into work like a zombie. I drink an entire pot of black coffee before lunch hour.

Work sucks. My boss is all over my case for not keeping up with the paperwork. She's so blind, I'm a little behind but it's nothing to get in a knot over. What the hell does she know anyway? She couldn't finish a round of Minesweeper if there was a gun to her head.

I should quit. I've got a little money saved up. There are plenty of other places out there that could use a good worker like me. Maybe I could take it easy after I quit. Take a couple of weeks off and hone my Quake skills. I could be like those friggin' college students who spend all their waking hours logged in to their precious little server.

They've started getting nasty. There's only a couple of servers on the Internet that I get decent ping times on, and theirs is one of them. Well, with them playing at teh school, they practically have no delay. Me, sitting behind a phone line and going through an ISP, I get the occasional Deadly Freeze. I'm running down a hallway when something happens ... a packet drops, the server burps, my modem decides to fire up another joint ... and suddenly I'm stopped. I can't move or fire, just sit and watch. That's what's so damn painful, watching in horror as some bastard comes running up, makes a couple of easy shots, and gets to count you as another frag. (A frag is a when you kill another player.)

So, I'm dealing with this sort of crap when some moron calling himself "DeathDealer" shoots me down with a burst of nails. Yippee. I'm as mobile as the Spruce Goose and you waste me. Don't get too excited.

Well, he did. Right there he sends some really nasty message to everyone, something like "who let this sorry loser play on our server?" Someone writes back that they don't know who I am. So then he goes "well, let's kick him off because he's just getting underfoot."

This DeathDealer guy is pretty good. He's definitely leading the pack, but it's not like he holds some huge lead. I'm maintaining a respectable third place. Considering my ping time is twice all of the other player's, I think that's pretty damn good.

So I write back that I'm suffering from heavy-duty lag. I shouldn't have to say anything else, he knows how to check ping times and see that I'm severely handicapped. But instead, he keeps riding me like I'm some newbie. I just sat there and watched him spew out this really insulting crap, three or four lines worth. Finally, I just disconnected and turned off my computer. Guys like that really piss me off.

I can't get any sleep. I lie down and close my eyes but I'm mad as hell. How do you get to sleep when you're hyperventilating?

D eathDealer is going to have a crown of nails when I'm done with him.

After he verbally harangued me, I stopped visiting their server. I didn't want to deal with him, at least not while I'm seeing their server's world via Slo-Mo Cam.

But now he's gone too far. I was responding to a post on the Quake newsgroup, something about how to configure the keyboard. Just trying to help out someone a little new to the game get over that first hump I had trouble with.

This DeathDealer character posts a reply to my message about how everyone should ignore anything I say, because I suck real bad. He says that I'm an obvious loser because he racked up forty frags against me in a match.

No way. He wasn't that far ahead, and he forgot to mention the lag issue. Now I'm pissing fire. I was tempted right there and then to log into his server and just whale on him. I knew I couldn't win with the odds stacked against me, but I just wanted to slam him.

I cooled off after a while. I wrote an email to a friend about the situation. He wrote back with an awesome idea.

My friend is an assistant at the university. In his professor's office is a nice Pentium system, and it's on the network. He thinks he can get me in there at night and let me play against them on their own turf. No lag, no delay, no deadly freeze.

But that only evens the playing field, it doesn't settle the score. He suggests I challenge DeathDealer to a one-on-one deathmatch. By placing the challenge on Usenet, it'll make him look like a wuss if he backs down. And with a low ping time, I should be in prime position to kick his ass twelve ways to Sunday.

Yesterday, I posted the bait. I laid down some conditions. We use his server, which can have no modifications made to it. He picks the Quake level, just to give him that advantage. And he picks the time, day or night. It doesn't matter when we do it, because they fired me a few days ago. I'll work on my resume after I'm done wiping the floor with his gibbs.

Hours later he snapped at it, with one change. He wanted to include an Observer module on the server, which lets other people log in and watch, but not play. He wanted to make sure all his friends could see him "get a nice big piece of me."

Come get some, prick-breath.

I had another dream the night before the match. I dreamed I was cleaning out "The Grisly Grotto" again, but this time I was unstoppable. Nothing was hitting me. I circled around ogres like Fred Astaire. Fred Astaire with an automatic rifle.

I swim across the grotto and up next to the castle. There's a bridge overhead, maybe sixty feet up, and I can see another player on it. He looks down at me, nods, and lets loose with everything he's got. Nails, buckshot, rockets, the works. I get pretty beat up. My armor drops real low and a few more hits would've done me in.

Returning fire just isn't that easy. Whenever I take a shot, he steps back and the bridge blocks him. I can't get a bead on him. Meanwhile it's raining grenades.

Sometimes, you realize something in a dream that is normally nonsensical. At that moment, I realized I could just jump up and hit him. He's sixty feet up but it just seems common sense to just jump. And I did just that.

I spring and casually float upwards until I'm level with him. His eyes are full of fear and wonder. Didn't he know you can float around? I train my shotgun on him and squeeze the trigger.

T he appointed time arrived. Thirty minutes to midnight, my friend and I are sneaking across campus to the faculty office he works in. I'm glad he picked midnight, because if he picked sometime in the day I'd be stuck playing at home. I just posted "any time, day or night" out of some warped zeal to prove myself.

I brought all the required supplies: my Quake CD to install on the machine. My mouse, in case the university buys crap peripherals. My keyboard, for the same reason. Four double-lattes, two as a gift for my friend, two to keep me on my toes. And the soundtrack for The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I'd bought the CD that afternoon just for this occasion.

The building was deserted. We quietly walked through the hallways, using the moonlight from the windows to guide us to our destination. After a few turns and a stairwell, we made it to the office. My friend clicked on the light and powered up the computer.

I quickly sat down and surveyed the equipment. Small Logitech mouse, awesome. Those big Microsoft monstrosities are too heavy and slow down reaction. The keyboard was acceptable, but I swapped mine in anyway.

Blowing on his coffee, my friend asked if everything was cool. So far, so good. I popped in the CD and installed the game. Everything went smooth. It detected everything, including the sound card. TCP/IP was installed too.

I fired up the game and tried to log in. No dice. I checked the network drivers, the cable, all that. I couldn't see any problems.

Then it occurred to me. They probably took the server down until five minutes to midnight to keep wanderers from stumbling in. I tried another server, one that an ISP maintains. After a short eternity, the server connected. I wiped the sweat off my brow and took a long drink from the coffee cup.

Fifteen long minutes 'til D-Day. I waited.

Just before midnight I logged in. The server issued a general message:

This server is dedicated to a two-man deathmatch. You may watch but do not join in! THIS MEANS YOU!

Players: Press fire to play. First to 10 frags wins.

My heart was fighting to escape my ribcage. I started the soundtrack to loop on the infamous title theme. I checked the server ping time -- about 100, which is awesome.

Fingers trembling, I pressed fire. And I was in.

"Z iggurat Vertigo" is a really weird level. When the guys at id created the Quake engine, they totally paramaterized it. All sorts of stuff can be twiddled, including gravity.

That's the whole thing about Ziggurat Vertigo. The gravity is set way low. Jumping is a stratospheric event. Rockets and grenades travel forever. The level is multi-tiered sky high. Some of the upper levels are only reachable by one-way elevators. To get back down, just find a ledge and step off. You'll float down like a leaf falling from a tree. But, since most of the floor is covered with lava, you can't just fall anywhere.

When I teleported into the level DeathDealer must have been waiting because the he joined in instantly afterwards. The match was on.

I'd never played this level in deathmatch before. I knew the whole layout, but weapon placement is a little different in multiplayer. I'd guess he was counting on that.

The match was interesting. Basically, the low gravity probably equalized my unfamiliarity because no matter how much you practice, when you're floating around you don't have a lot of directional control. Most of the frags were from one person sitting in midair while the other took potshots from the ground with a rocket launcher.

I don't know how long it took before we'd both racked up nine frags apiece. It was that close. I had given him a frag by fooling around inside an elevator, but I'm sure he gave me one some other time.

So, with both of us at nine frags we entered sudden death, literally. It lasted for minutes. We'd start fighting, and one would get too close to death and bail away. Both of us would recharge on health and then come back for more.

At one point, he lost me. He ran through the ziggurat while I was powering up. I heard an elevator go up, but didn't know which one. I could hear him scuffling around up above, grabbing power-ups. I decided that he must've used the elevator that takes you up above the pyramid on the ground. I went on up.

He'd been through the area. Power-ups are missing that should have been there. I was well-stocked on health and armor, but low on rockets and out of nails. I should've gone back down and grabbed more rockets, but I knew he was nearby and I wanted to crucify him.

There's a small platform above the level I stood on. Unless he'd silently dropped back down to the floor, he was up there. But the platform is small, and if I climbed up I'd be face-to-face to him. If I fired a rocket, both of us could be killed. If I died and he lived, I'd actually lose a frag. I wasn't giving him a two-point advantage.

I didn't remember the dream at that point, but I should have. It had given me the clue I needed. I jumped up and back, which put me higher than the platform but far enough to fire with breathing room.

He was up there, on the other side of the platform. I think he was looking down, trying to see if I was on the floor below. It doesn't matter. I had a clear shot, and I had the first shot.

I got two rockets off before he turned around, and a third before he fired his launcher. His was a wild shot and missed me entirely. I landed and sprung again. I got a fourth one off, and then he hit me. I fired again and again. I'd hit every time ... how was he taking all this damage?

He jumped at that moment, and I missed. Gracefully up he went, firing. One of his rockets hit me square on and propelled me backwards. I was out of rockets and out of nails. I had a shotgun and that was it. Oh well, I figured, I gave it my damnedest.

I aimed both barrels at him and fired.

W ith the blaze of flame from the shotgun the match was over. As I think through the scenario to write this, I realize that a superhealth powerup sits up there where I found him. He had just doubled his health points. No wonder he seemed so damn invincible.

Apparently, all those concussions from the rocket launcher had knocked him down to just a little over zero health. When I set my bead and unloaded a shot, I must have hit him straight on, because I did more than waste him ...

I gibbed him. His body simply exploded like a fat little bug hitting windshield glass at sixty miles per hour. In the near zero-gee environment the Quake engine held true to its particular brand of physics. Rather than dispersing into a beef Slushee on the floor, his body (still in midair) mushroomed into a slow-motion blood cloud, flesh bullets traveling every direction. Streams of goop gently arc'd in geometric ballet and vaporized through the electronic ether.

The only part that didn't seem to fly in some oddball direction was his head, now carrying the required expression of surprise. It detached from his torso and launched straight up into the air, gently knocking against the ceiling and beginning it's decent into the pool of lava below.

The whole sight was simply incredible. I felt as though I had just watched (no, experienced) some bizarre filmographic permutation. It was as if they'd rewritten Enter the Dragon in a science-fiction Aliens-ish world as a hyper-violent sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey directed by none other than Sam Peckinpah. With music by Ennio Morricone.

It was a major victory for me, but in the grand scheme of things not that big a deal. I never got an email from DeathDealer, nor did I see him on Usenet again. I never visited their crummy server after that either. It doesn't matter, because I don't really follow that stuff any more.

You see, I realized I'd gone way to psycho on Quake. It was dominating me. There was nothing else worthwhile in my life and I figured that wasn't too healthy. So, I gave the CD to my friend, since he couldn't scrape up the cash with his minimum wage job. I blew away my installation of Quake, all fifty megabytes, and made a solemn vow not to play again. It's tough some times, and I still get the dreams and all that, but I'll pull through.

Of course, I keep hearing that Myst II is coming out this Christmas ...