Speakin' of secret areas, levels, and such: while I stumbled upon quite a few hidden things by accident the first time `round thanks to an occasional stray shot, I decided to cheat a bit to find the ones I'd missed before by checking out a few resources on the internet, including www.gamewinners.com/DOSWIN/blquake2.htm. This particular site also lets ya in on such cheat codes as unlimited ammo, invincibility, and enhanced armor. Er, not that I need to use such codes to totally kick @$$, of course...

But despite the carnage o' fun I've had playin' Quake II iover the last few years, there are a few downsides that bum me out a little. While I'm not too hip on not being able to hold onto more than two of each kind of power-up item (e.g. Quad Damage, Invincibility, Environmental Suit) on the "medium" difficulty setting, I gotta admit it does give me an incentive to use the power-ups I have more wisely. I'd also have preferred the enemy combatants not be quite as predictable in their movements and reactions to my presence, as I've gotten a bit too good at ducking and/or otherwise eluding the shots they fire at me. Another downside to Quake II is that I become nauseous when I play it for long stretches! You know you're a mess when you need to pop a couple Dramamine before you play a freakin' computer game...

Anyhoo, I don't know why some yahoos say that video games like this will make the people who play `em actually go out and massacre every livin' thing they see. Heck, I've been playin' this bad-boy ever since it came out, and I've never developed any such urges whatsoever...

SATAN, THY DARK LORD AND MASTER, COMMANDS THEE TO KILL, KILL, KILL

Whoops-- time for me to take the "happy pills" the nice orderly just handed me...

`Late

"Still the standard-bearer of the gaming realm", Quake 2 is much more than a game; it's a gaming phenomenon. This game set the standards and provided the very engine of hordes of first-person shooters (as well as less kill-or-be-killed oriented games) that followed in its wake. It took online gaming to new heights with its plethora of multiplayer options. Gamers the world over designed their own maps and created their own online worlds in which to raise havoc against the Strogg hordes as well as their best buddies. Some seven years after its release (in 1997), Quake 2 is still more than capable of brazenly stealing one's entire day, weekend, week, and beyond. Quake was great fun, mind you, but there you were on defense, trying to defend your planet against these mechanistic aliens who decided that humans would make great raw material for new cyborgs (although some lucky individuals would of course find their ultimate fate in the form of exotic ingredients for certain Strogg gourmet delicacies). In Quake 2, you take the fight to the Stroggs, by gum; you smear their guts across their own walls; you add a little chaos to the uglified place they call a home planet, and you make those soldiers pay for having dared attack Earth; before you're done you bring Makron himself, the biggest and baddest Strogg of them all, to his knees before terminating him with extreme prejudice.

Those Strogg are wily, though. Oh, we all thought it was a good idea to secretly follow the brutes back to Stroggos through their black hole-generated gateway; they'll never see us coming, we said, and we'll be on them like white on rice before they even have time to blink a bio-mechanical eye. We were wrong. The Stroggs took out a majority of our pods before the invasion even got started, but you made it to the planet's surface - albeit way off target. You'll have a little help from HQ in terms of your missions, but it's pretty much up to you alone to somehow infiltrate and destroy the enemy. You'll see stuff here you never saw in Quake - new monsters, much smarter enemies (the Stroggs actually learned how to duck), more puzzles (albeit of the find button and push it variety), and - best of all - more carnage. When you get one of these guys down, you'd better make sure he's dead; a guy with no legs can still shoot a gun.

Some of these infernal puzzles can be frustrating at times, but just about any player can play this entire game in single-player mode and come out victorious (given enough time and saved games); then, once you start thinking you're all big and bad, you can play at a higher difficulty level. You'd better be good before challenging your friends to some multi-player mayhem; when you're ready to go online, though, you'll find countless multi-player options at your disposal. The world's pretty much your oyster when it comes to multi-player options, ensuring that Quake 2 will be played and played some more for a long time to come.

"Sweet game", This game is the best game on the pc that i've ever played! The graphics are decent but not as good as CoD or anyof the newer games but still with opengl it looks as smooth as any newer game, but with only software render it looks like a ps1 game. The gameplay is a real treat! The AI is magnificant but could be better. My favorite levels are jail through the end, you see your comrades crawling around like mindless zombies after they've been tourtured. Like once i opened a cell to let out one of my buddies. He crwaled out of his cell and started begging me to kill him, truly a work of great AI. The game also has some good expansion packs but the original quake 2 will always be the best. Multiplayer is also great, it should be since people still play a game that was made in 1998, 6years ago i mind you. So do yourself a favorand get quake 2. It may not have the graphics of quake 3 but its single player is alot better thaN UNREAL TOURNAMENT or QUAKE 3. So here is it in a nutshell, a great game with good graphics and sweeter gameplay, do yourself a favor and go by a copy, you won't regret it!

"Ughhh...", Everything about this game is terrible, which is surprising since ID used to make the most amazing games. Let's face it- since John Romero left everything has gone downhill. Rather than anxiously awaiting each level, I constantly asked myself "Will this game ever end?"
The music is horrible- repetitive generic metal songs with occasional electronic elements. The monsters are boring and overused. The levels are for the most part bland, though a few do stand out. The main character also seems to have 6 different voices.
There is absolutely no story whatsoever. It's just the same "Go to this room and get this item so you can go to next the room" type of game (Wolfenstien 3D, Doom, Heretic), poorly disguised. In fact, when you beat the game, instead of finding out what happens you get a screen which reads "THE END."
The worst part has to be the weapons, however. The Super Shotgun goes through ammo like crazy, the Machine Gun constantly raises itself when firing so you have to keep tapping the fire button or soon you'll be shooting above your enemies, the Rail Gun takes about a second to fire, then needs to recharge itself, the Rocket Launcher also has a recharge period, and the BFG takes forever to even fire! Much longer than the original took.
In short, this game was a complete letdown. I should have spent the money on a disk of Doom wads instead.