Quake

Quake, the grandfather of modern multiplayer FPS, was long thought to be impossible to port to 32bit consoles. Due to the complexity and memory-hungriness of the full 3d landscape, the Playstation was never blessed with a proper port. The Saturn however, got a port of Quake, and not just any kind, but an excellent one at that. This game proves wrong all rumors that the Saturn can't do 3d.

Ported by the same Lobotomy who created the ace Exhumed / Powerslave and already proved their worth with a near perfect port of Duke Nukem 3d, Quake was rebuilt from ground up on the Saturn. The PC version was indeed much too powerful to run on the Saturn, so instead Lobotomy opted to reconstruct the whole game from scratch, in their Saturn-optimized engine. This is immediatly noticable minutes into the game: while the game still play like Quake, the atmosphere of the landscape is much better, due to the inheritent use of Lightmaps. Slipgates have a pulsating red aura, and every light effect is a million times better. With all this technical virtuosity, Saturn Quake also runs rather fast, around 15-20fps, making it perhaps the most complex 3d game on the Saturn. The only limitation is that corpses will disappear after a set of time, but when you consider that the whole game is running from 2 MB of RAM, this is not even a problem.

As with all console FPS games, the achilles' heel is the control scheme. Saturn Quake takes this obstacle as well as Duke 3d did, with fully remappable controls, and full support of the analog pad. Of course, even with an analog lookview, the controls will seem very rigid compared to keyboard/mouse combination, but its easy to get used to it, and it is most definetaly very effective.

With the excellent controls, you can dive headfirst into the gritty, rotting world of Quake. The game pits you against hellish, gruesome creatures, ranging from simple zombies to the indescribable. With as much as 40 levels, and hardcore industrial music by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, the game is great single player fun... But, it lacks multiplayer.

Yup, the biggest feature of Quake, Multiplayer Deathmatch, has not made it into the Saturn version. Of course there really weren't many options to get it working, given how rare the Linkup cable and Netlink adapters were. Of course you can still play Death Tank Zwei, which is a frenetic, incredibly game in multiplayer (especially when all ten players play simultaneously), but it's still not the same as a nice Quake Deathmatch party.

Other then the lack of proper multiplayer, Saturn Quake looks wonderful, sounds wonderful, plays wonderful... if you are into console FPS games, it's definitely worth picking up, if for nothing else, but to see what the Saturn is truly capable of.