I finished Doom – well, at least, I finished the original episodes – on Friday night.  I’m not sure if you’re supposed to beat it in the way I did, which was to navigate myself so there was a Hell Knight between myself and the final boss.

This meant that, when the final boss shot at me, he hit the Hell Knight instead, and the two of them got into a bit of a squabble.

This kept them both busy while I burned the boss down with BFG9000 fire.

I’m going to file it under “brilliant strategic moves” and not “cheap exploits”, which is what it really feels like, but what the hell.

Anyway, the obvious next game to tackle was Quake.

I’m pretty sure I never beat Quake back when it was new.  I bought it when it came out, of course, because it was the Big New Thing, but this was also right after the Saturn and Playstation were released so I was pretty heavily into console games.  Specifically, I was heavily into buying console games and then not finishing them, but this also distracted me from finishing the PC games I was ignoring in favor of not finishing console games.

I did play an awful lot of multiplayer Quake over the LAN at work, after hours, so it’s not like I didn’t get any use out of it, just not the single player campaign.

Then Quake got put aside in favor of, I dunno, probably Final Fantasy VII or some other console RPG, and then I stopped playing games on the PC entirely, and then when I got back into PC gaming, it looked like absolute ass by comparison. Time has not treated early 3D titles well.

Anyway, people have spent an awful lot of time working on that whole “looks like ass” problem, so I decided that I’d give the single player game another go.

Like Doom, there are all sorts of replacement clients for Quake.  I eventually settled on Dark Places, which has lots of graphical tweaks and supports 1920×1200 resolution.

Dark Places is both an engine replacement and a mod, something I didn’t quite understand at first.  When I started playing it, I couldn’t figure out why I kept regenerating health, and why everything seemed to be dropping nail guns.

While I didn’t have really strong memories of the original game, these both seemed to be…different.

Quake doesn’t have health regeneration, at least not by default, and grunts (are they called grunts in Quake?) should be dropping shotguns instead.

Turns out, I was going a bit too far for what I wanted, which was a game that was as close to the original Quake experience as possible, just prettier.

Running the Dark Places engine WITHOUT dpmod, ripping the music tracks from the original game CD into OGG format, and adding the quake texture replacement pack, lighting, and new item models gave me just that.

Anyway, none of this has had anything to do with the title of this particular entry, so I’ll get to that now.

Back when I bought my PS3, I rented Heavenly Sword to play on it.  I credit a single Penny Arcade comic for giving me all the information necessary to beat the game, and the post talking about that can be found here.

Anyway, when I was looking up information on Quake texture packs and all that, I was reading posts on the quakeone forums, and a user named Baker had what I consider my new Ultimate Quick Strategy Guide as his signature.

I will reproduce this for your education:

Seeing this told two things:

1) I am going to meet a Big Red Guy.
2) To Seriously Inconvenience the Big Red Guy, I need to find some buttons.

These were rather handy things to know in advance, because when I finally DID run in to him, instead of wasting time trying to kill him with bullets, I ran around a bit asking myself helpful button-related questions like “If I were a button, where would I be?”, and wound up Seriously Inconveniencing the Big Red Guy in very short order.

That ended episode 1. Now I get to start episode 2.