PC Zone 38 (May 1996)(uk)

Scans

Taken from 8f756f426e90dfda4ab5d5357bda3bef PC Zone 38 (May 1996).pdf (thanks to Pix2 on UG)

Quake on the cover. A preview. Letters to the editor. Nothing on the CD.

Transcription

Set your 'pleasure polyps' onto 'spooge mode'. Cancel all forthcoming weddings, relationships, social events and babies. Our first taste of Quake - the follow-up to Doom and the gaming event of the year - is here. David McCandless gets all sweaty around the belly…

"But surely my lord, something of such dimensions would not fit in such aperture?" And so it came to pass that on that fateful evening, Saturn'S Day, day twenty-fourth of the second months of the ninety-sixth year of the twentieth century, a file, large but humble, wide but not empty, emblazoned with the legend QTEST1.ZIP didst materialise on the holy Internet site of iD Software. Lo and many an unsuspecting ethereal traveller did pass the shady file and paid it none heed. Until one did espy the mysterious 'file description' symbols:

The Official Quake Deathmatch TEST Released Saturday, February 24, 1994 Copyright © 1996 iD Software, inc.

"Hmmm," pondered the traveller. "Tis an official public test release of Quake: Son of Doom. How interesting but forsooth I have many illegal paintings to - QUAKE?!! Quake? Jesus! It's Quake! What the f-?"

His cries of astonishment were heard by many a nearby traveller. In the oral tradition of his people, the word was spread around the world at great haste. Soon the holy site was deluged by the clamouring of many travellers. So packed was the site that many important journalistic wise men were unable to enter the area and dist get into a 'strop'. But this magical, fortuitous discovery was met by all with the pealing of joy-like bells and with the sound of 'love juice' slapping on cobblestone.

WELL, WELL, WELL, WELL, WELL, well - it's here. Sort of. Quake - aka 'The Game Of Our Dreams', aka 'We're Not Worthy', formerly known as 'Spooge II: Yamming Great Continents Of Spooge' - has finally arrived. Okay, okay, it's just a three-level, network-only game demo, released for bug-testing purposes. And okay, ostensibly, it has no monsters, very little in the way of super-complex architecture, nothing at all to offer as a single-player game, and runs very slowly on anything less than a Pentium, but it's a taster. And not just a brief dollop on the tongue of expectation, but a whole facial of the game they're already calling Marriage-Breaker, Son of DoomBachelor.

This sketchy blueprint of things to come gives us a good indication of what Quake will be like, how it will look, what it will contain, what it won't contain, how the things it will contain will make the things it won't contain er, containable, how it will play, and how it will work. Rest assured: Quake is guaranteed to leave computer keyboards and monitors all over the world frosted with spooge.

First impressions

Well, it's a first-person perspective game, which wouldn't break the Trades Description Act if it was subtitled "Doom III". It's you, a bunch of serious hardware, a variety of enclosed environments (castles, dungeons, bases etc), monsters, blood and lots of Satanic imagery. This isn't really that surprising coming from iD, who have built their success on games which basically involve 'powering around a level and shooting things'.

Be awesome, transcribe the rest of this.