Quake II (Xbox 360) Impressions

For his last birthday, I got the Staff Quake 4 (Xbox 360), which comes with a bonus disc that contains Quake II. Since I missed out on Quake II back in '97 and only played through the PC demo about 2 years ago, the Staff was kind enough to lend me the bonus disc for my retro-pleasure.

I played it for an hour or so last night, and I can't think of a better example of the differences between an FPS on the PC and a console. I can not play Quake II on the Xbox 360, it simply wasn't balanced for the Xbox 360 controller, and I find that an incredible shame.

Any reasonable gamer will agree that the use of a mouse and keyboard is much faster and more precise for an FPS than a console controller. One can move and track faster with a mouse than an analogue stick since the stick needs to move the entire distance from point A to B, while a mouse does not have this problem.

To overcome this issue, console developers add in a certain amount of auto-aiming to console FPSes, and this works quite well. If you're aiming in the general area of your target, usually very close to them, the console game will register it as a hit where the PC would demand the player to be more exact.

This was not implemented in Quake II. I have found that this makes it very hard to hit the game's fast moving enemies, and while I could live with this since there are plenty of health kits lying around, the real problem is that whenever I tap the right thumbstick to the left to adjust my view/aim, my marine will keep slowly turning his head to the left until I manually force the stick a bit to the right. This makes precision aiming impossible.

I do not know if this is a bug with the game or an issue with my personal controller, and I don't have a second controller to test this out. Because of this aiming difficulty, however, I find Quake II to be too much of a chore to play. This is all the more a shame because the Xbox 360 version is presented in beautiful wide screen with FSAA.

Perhaps someday I'll find it dirt cheap on the PC and indulge myself, but until then, I'll simply have to battle the Strogg in the newer Quake 4 on my PC.