Pretty good free gaming

I'm not much of a gamer, but this seemed pretty good to me. I can't compete with the live players, they're too good, but if I set the AI players in the practice games at a low enough skill level I can have a pretty good time.

Maybe this site is old news to you guys, but it proved pretty entertaining to me. I was pleased to see that the makers of my all-time favorite game (DOOM) were still hanging in there.

tanstaafl.

It's been interesting following it's progress. They showed off the early development versions at Quakecon, then let the Quakecon attendees into the beta first. It's now used as their competition game instead of the older local versions of Quake. All the tech exists now in browsers that they could convert it to not use plugins, though I'm not sure if they have plans to do so.


Sadly the people behind it have all departed id now, the ZendiMax takeover has been rough at times. Most of the departures though were so they could continue their talents in other areas. And I'm hearing good things about the next Doom game, a good return to the feel of the old ones.

John Carmack in particular is now the CTO at Oculus Rift, the virtual reality company. Fitting since Quake was initially his vision of pushing some of the virtual worlds forward. And he's reunited with Michael Abrash there which is great to see.

John Romero is off still doing his own thing and getting better. His wife is also been quite productive recently

As Tom said, they've been running QuakeLive for several years now. I played some QuakeLive for a little while and then didn't play again for years. Each year, they send me an email saying that my account will expire if I don't log in. So I log in once to keep the account from expiring and that's it.

Though I had read recently, like, within the last month or so, that they were making some changes to the rules and gameplay of QuakeLive to better support certain kinds of play styles. It made me think of logging in and trying it out. I haven't done it yet.

This would not be a good time to try. From the little bit of information I have been able to find, Quake Live added Steam access on Saturday, and the response was so overwhelming that it swamped their servers -- more than twice as many [attempted] logins than they had ever had. Their forums are down, their validation server is offline, nothing is working.

No idea of when (or even if) they will get things working again.

tanstaafl.

OK, it is now sort of working again. You have to delete your auto-login information and log in manually each time, but you can get into the game. Perhaps he server that remembers you when you go to Quake Live has failed? Once I am back into the game, all my settings (weapons choice, key bindings, etc.) are still there, so that much is remembered. Just not my login id and password.

tanstaafl.