Well I signed up for this back in April, and then of course promptly forgot about it.  What did I forget about?  The all new Quake Live Beta program.  Given that it had been so long since I signed up, I thought at first that the mail I got from iD Software on January 21st of this year was just spam.  However, after reading it I realized that after too many months, they were finally selecting people for open public beta testing.

Quake Live, for those who aren’t familiar, is essentialy what appears to be a modified Quake 3 embedded into a web browser.  I’m sure the NDA I didn’t fully read mentions that I shouldn’t go into too much detail at this point, but I will give a couple points.

It seemed to work in both browsers I tried it in.  Setup was maybe 15 minutes and then I was playing.  Graphics seemed to be pretty good, a far cry from the flash based browser games I’m sure we are all used to.  The training missing flowed well, as did the online matches.  I also discovered that I’m not better at this version of Quake than I was at Quake 3.  Guess the twitchy factor for FPS’s starts to wane after you get to a certain age.

Overall, it’s looking good, and I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys a fast paced, zero storyline FPS.  I’m curious to see how they work free online browser based gaming into a business model.  Ads in games?  It worked for Burnout Paradise, I’d imagine it will work here as well.

Coming to a browser near you around July 31st.

- Ben Mazhary-Clark

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