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Y RYAN MCCAFFREY Developer Infinity Ward and publisher Activision have announced 2019’s Call of Duty game, which is called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Yes, it’s a reboot of the 2007 classic Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (as had been rumored), not a Modern Warfare remaster, prequel, remake, or sequel. What is the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Reboot? The new Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will feature returning characters like Captain Price in a new “ripped from the headlines” single-player campaign. It will also include a suite of PvP multiplayer modes, as series tradition dictates, as well as "an all-new cooperative play mode, featuring a collection of strategic co-op missions." The original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) did already receive a remaster in the appropriately-titled Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (2016). So once again, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) is a new, completely different game -- albeit with a similar title. Here are the three different games: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (2007) -- The original. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Remastered (2016) -- The remaster. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) -- The reboot. What is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare's Release Date? Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will be released on October 25. Activision has confirmed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare will feature cross-play, will not have a season pass, and is being developed in a brand new engine. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare preorder information is now available. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Reveal Trailer “This project is different [than Infinity Ward’s previous Call of Duty games],” studio head Dave Stohl told IGN. “It's a real passion project for the studio.” He added that the team is pivoting away from the futuristic, sci-fi tilt that Call of Duty games (outside of 2017’s Call of Duty: WWII) have taken on in recent years, and returning it to its more realistic roots. “This is a military sim. It's more about that kind of authentic experience.” Don’t miss our first-look preview at the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare campaign, which looks set to be at least as provocative as the controversial “No Russian” mission in 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. We also spoke to the developers about the decision to reboot Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. Will There Be a Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Season Pass? Of particular note is that the new Modern Warfare will not feature a traditional season pass, so that, as Activision notes, "the team can deliver more free maps and content as well as post-launch events to all players." Cross-play is also supported: "With the launch of Modern Warfare, the team is taking steps to unite the community," Activision added. "First, the team plans for Modern Warfare to be played together across PC and console through cross-play support." The PC version will be "fully optimized" for PC and available through Blizzard's Battle.net. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare – First Screenshots Infinity Ward was famously shaken by scandal and a lawsuit in 2010 when studio heads and co-founders Vince Zampella and Jason West were fired by Activision due to an alleged breach of contract. They sued Activision over unpaid royalties and eventually settled before founding a new studio, Respawn Entertainment, also in 2010, and hiring a number of their former Infinity Ward colleagues. Fast-forward to today and a number of original Modern Warfare developers are now back at Infinity Ward and working on this new Modern Warfare, including art director Joel Emslie, animation director Mark Grigsby, and audio director Stephen Miller, among others. Meanwhile, the project is headed by Jacob Minkoff and Taylor Kurosaki, both formerly of Naughty Dog. Since the shakeup, Infinity Ward has developed Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Every IGN Call of Duty Review We’ll have much more on Call of Duty: Modern Warfare at E3 2019. Our coverage of the show begins on Saturday, June 8. Be sure to tell us what you think the best Call of Duty games are in our poll, too.

When Crash™ Team Racing Nitro-Fueled launches on June 21, you’ll have plenty of game modes to choose from to race against your friends or with players around the world. Today, though, we’re thrilled to lean into the single-player campaign mode for the game: The Adventure Mode. In CTR Nitro-Fueled, you will get to choose from the “Classic” or “Nitro Fueled” variants of this mode! Each mode offers a lot of things to earn along the way, though there are some slight differences. Here’s what each is all about: Classic Adventure Mode: Racing Like It’s 1999! The original CTR Adventure mode is available to play like you remember it, except updated with new visuals: Prevent Nitros Oxide from turning earth into a parking lot by beating your opponents in numerous races across five hub worlds, starting at N. Sanity Beach! In this mode, you have various types of races and challenges to complete: Trophy Races: Ready to hit the track? Race against your favorite crazy competitors and earn Trophy as you win. Then use those Trophies to unlock the next tracks to continue your adventure! Boss Keys: When you’ve claimed all the Trophies in a particular world, you get to race a Boss! Whether it’s Ripper Roo, Papu Papu, Komodo Joe, or Pinstripe Potoroo, face off against each one and beat them to claim their key: It’s the only way to unlock your final battle against Nitros Oxide! Now, bosses will be unlocked as you beat them. CTR Challenges: Reckon you can take first place? What about when you’ve a “C”, “T”, and “R” token to grab during that race? Those letters can be hidden in some fiendishly-cunning locations, and you need to grab all three as well as finishing first! Crystal Challenges: Bonus Round! Once this opens up, you need to collect 20 crystals before the time runs out. Succeed, and you earn a special purple Token! Relic Races: Gather strange Relics by finishing a solo race in the fastest time possible! As well as learning all a course’s shortcuts and proper turning techniques, you also need to smash Time Crates to freeze the clock for an additional time bonus. Gem Cups: Once you’ve obtained four CTR Tokens of the same color, expect a weird and wonderful warp vortex to appear; transporting you to series of (usually) four races. Beat all opponents to unlock some extra-special rewards! As with the original Adventure Mode from CTR, in the Classic setting you can only pick one character to use from start to finish, there are no customization options (meaning you’re racing using the basic kart from CTR), and your opponents are chosen from the original cast. There’s also no difficulty option. But don’t worry; you still receive the cool new rewards even when you’re playing this Classic variant! Nitro-Fueled Adventure Mode: Revved Up to the Max! Available in Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled is a new way to play Adventure Mode: Choose the Nitro-Fueled setting, and you’re able to switch your character or kart whenever you want, and choose from any character skins, decals, wheels, stickers, and paint jobs that you have unlocked. Expect your rivals to sport some new looks too! Finally, there’s a new Heads-Up Display (HUD), and a choice of three difficulty levels depending on how challenging you want your Adventure Mode to be! No matter which version of Adventure Mode you pick; your unlockable rewards will be the same. But what rewards can you receive? Glad you asked, as Thomas Wilson, Co-Studio Head at Beenox explains: “There are new items all throughout the Adventure Mode in CTR Nitro-Fueled. You will still be earning the boss characters like in the original, but now you will also be getting new kart parts, character skins, or kart customization items with every victory. Also, players will now earn the boss characters immediately after they beat that boss, instead of after Gem Cups. This includes the ability to earn the infamous Nitros Oxide himself!” Get Ready for a Crash Course of Content! The two ways to play Adventure mode is just the beginning: Check back with the Activision Games Blog over the coming weeks as we discuss even more cool game features! For now, why not check out the Adventure mode video? Remember too; if you pre-order the game on PlayStation® 4, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox One, you receive the Electron Skins Pack, which contains the Crash Coco and Cortex Electron Skins, each having a unique podium animation. Also, if you purchase the PlayStation® 4 version of the game, you can re-live the ‘90s and choose exclusive retro Crash, Coco, and Cortex character skins, retro karts, as well as racing on a soon-to-be revealed retro track!, Finally, purchase the Nitros Oxide Edition of the game to play as Nitros Oxide, Crunch, Zem or Zam from day one, race with Oxide’s Hovercraft from day one, and receive exclusive skins and customization items!

Y BRIAN ALTANO Super Mario Maker 2 is the giant new sequel to Nintendo’s “build your own Mario” game that launched in 2015, allowing players to create and share original Super Mario levels instead of waiting for Nintendo to make some for them. For Super Mario Maker 2 on Nintendo Switch, Nintendo is adding loads of new single player, multiplayer, and building options. So how does it all come together? While the first Super Mario Maker relied entirely on the Wii U’s touch screen, Nintendo Switch lacks an included stylus and can be played entirely on your TV with a traditional controller, so Super Mario Maker 2 presents you with a few choices to work around that. You can build stages on your Nintendo Switch touch screen in handheld mode or the slightly more cumbersome controller button presses in TV mode. I focused on the latter, since that was the one I had the most questions about, and what started as a frustrating experience gradually improved as I got the hang of it. It takes nearly every Switch controller button input to create a Mario Maker 2 level, including the d-pad, shoulder buttons, and clicking the right stick to zoom in and out. Some things need to be selected manually while others appear when you hover over an icon for a second. Then there are also pop-up windows and wheels to swap sprites, adjust case-sensitive item designations, and more. Thwomps, ninjas, and castles at night. These are the kind of unique and bizarre stages you can build in Super Mario Maker 2. I suspect the variety of stages after launch will be staggering. What feels instinctual with a touch screen or stylus is instead a bit overwhelming and unwieldy with button controls. I found myself misplacing blocks while trying to draw out platforms for Mario to run on, only to have to erase them and redo them. It’s kind of a lot, and sort of feels like playing MS Paint with a Pro Controller at first until it slowly starts to click. Eventually, I began memorizing what each input did and started to get better at building and testing stages in TV mode. While totally doable, building Mario Maker 2 stages with a controller takes a lot of getting used to and I suspect many players might just forgo that option after fumbling for a few minutes, opting to build levels entirely in touch-screen handheld mode. See that bar up top? You can pin your favorite and most used parts to it to make building stages quicker and snappier than ever. Oh, and you can create slopes now! Luckily, there are some nice quality of life additions that help. For instance, the item bar up top is customizable with pinnable parts, or you can po[CENSORED]te it with your most recent and frequently used parts. And unlike the last game, every part is unlocked from the start, so you can jump right in and start building everything immediately. I imagine most players will decide to build stages in handheld mode and play stages in TV mode. That’s not as instantly intuitive as the Wii U was (I never thought I would say that…) with the original Mario Maker’s dual-screened approach but it all works if you’re a little patient with it. If you don’t plan on jumping into custom level-making or multiplayer antics right away, Story Mode allows you to take on over a hundred custom Nintendo-designed stages in whichever order you choose. This mode feels much more robust than the pre-made levels in the last Super Mario Maker game. These stages are doled out in large groups at a time and you can choose the order you play them in. Finishing a level comes with a coin reward that - along with the coins collected in each stage - can be spent to rebuild parts of the now demolished Mushroom Kingdom castle, layer by layer. Nintendo isn’t talking yet about how exactly Peach’s castle was toppled to the ground, but I have some theories, such as “It’s probably Bowser” and “It’s definitely Bowser.” Toad gives you "jobs" to complete (AKA a bunch of totally different levels to beat) and you'll use the coin rewards to rebuild the castle. It's weird seeing him wearing a hard hat but his natural head is probably soft and spongy so it's good to see him taking care of it. The levels in Super Mario Maker 2's Story Mode are wildly creative, tightly polished, occasionally weird as hell, and frequently bounce through every classic Mario game style available. If you’re a younger player who didn’t grow up with vintage Mario games and you’re wondering why exactly a murderous sun is chasing you through a Super Mario 3-themed level, for example, handy menus can be accessed to give you a brief history lesson. Story mode works as an inspirational showcase for the kind of levels you could be building yourself in Mario Maker 2, but it’s also totally fun and rewarding in its own right. Slowly rebuilding the castle is a wonderful new metagame for the Mario formula and I really hope it returns in future games. This particular Story Mode stage put a new spin on the classic Mario "ghost house" theme by letting me navigate a labyrinth with Yoshi while stacks of creepy pumpkin Goombas stalked me. Super Mario Maker 2 brings the addition of a construction kit inspired by Wii U’s Super Mario 3D World, albeit redesigned as an entirely 2D game. You can’t bring your Mario Maker level creations made in the 3D World tileset to any of the other art styles like Super Mario 3 or New Super Mario Bros, which is a bit odd considering that’s such a key component of the rest of the building mode. 3D World has unique cat-based move sets like wall climbing and diagonal dive bombing that would probably be weird in the original Super Mario Bros. style, so this section sort of lives in isolation from the rest of the game. Sure, 3D World is mostly known for having a cat suit, but these custom 3D World inspired stages bring all sorts of other crazy new gameplay mechanics, too! They don't carry over to the other classic Mario art styles, however. At first I was a bit disappointed that creations made here don’t carry over to the classic Mario art styles available in the rest of this sequel, until I started to approach it for what it was: an excuse for Nintendo to introduce all sorts of modern and classic 3D Mario standalone game modes (like Super Mario Odyssey, Super Mario Galaxy, and Super Mario 64) to Super Mario Maker 2 without having to worry about them communicating with the 2D Mario tilesets. Playing Super Mario 3D World style levels entirely as a 2D platformer with custom levels feels like a totally new Mario game, and a really unique one at that. Finally, I got together with a few other people and gathered around a single television for some local multiplayer across a set of custom-made Super Mario Maker 2 levels that were available. If you’ve loved playing four-player Mario games like New Super Mario Bros. U or Super Mario 3D World in the past, Super Mario Maker 2 allows you to basically recreate those experiences, but with user-made levels that you can either build yourself or download from the internet. Each stage had its own parameters and goals such as “work together” or “collect 100 coins” or “be the first person to the goal," which took the already chaotic co-op experience of previous multiplayer Mario games and made it even crazier. This mode is insanely fun and the idea of sitting around with friends and having a nearly infinite supply of Mario multiplayer levels to download and play is tremendously exciting. You can also have two players build a stage together by each holding a Joy-Con if you’d like a co-op experience that involves much less frantic yelling, fighting, and cheering. Local multiplayer is hilarious, blissful chaos that had me screaming obscenities at friends and strangers. To be abundantly clear, I have zero regrets about this.

welcome

Good job

I'm 12 hours into fantasy RPG Outward when I travel to its second region, visit the city of Berg for the first time, and buy my first proper backpack. Strange to say that buying a backpack feels momentous, but dammit, it really is. I feel triumphant to discard my primitive satchel and shoulder a real pack on my back. Not only does it fit more loot, but I can hang a lantern from it too, so I can have both hands free and still see in the dark. That's the kind of game Outward is, one where the things you take for granted in other games feel like a real accomplishment. I've also been humbled repeatedly in those 12 hours. I've been battered unconscious by large birds and angry deer, gouged by hidden spike traps, and pummeled senseless by scruffy bandits. One time I even ran into the wrong castle and was imprisoned in a mining colony beneath it, from which I only escaped by first convincing the guards to let me work in the kitchen, stealing back my precious backpack from the fort's storage room, then leaping into a pit and washing up later on a beach, freezing, confused, wracked with pain, and dying of thirst. I had to build a fire for warmth, chow down on some dried mushrooms, tear my hood into linen scraps to use as bandages, and brew a potion with my alchemy kit to regain my senses. Outward is a fantasy game with monsters and wizards, but it's also a completely engrossing survival experience. I tend to enjoy the beginning of RPGs more than the endings. I love to start Oblivion or Skyrim over with a new character, penniless and talentless, relishing the early hours of play when every rusty dagger and basic leather boot is a treasure. I find the hardscrabble life more satisfying than hours later when I'm dumping complete sets of armor out of my inventory because I simply don't need them and can't even be bothered to sell them, that's how damn rich and powerful I've become. I also love games like Stalker and DayZ where no matter how many hours I put in, and no matter how much great gear I collect, I'm essentially no stronger or sturdier than the average person. I remain fragile and mortal, where the slightest misstep can leave me inches from death. It makes every encounter a tense and memorable one. You'll wake up again, bruised, battered, often hungry and thirsty and suffering other negative effects. I find those same feelings pervade in Outward. You play as an ordinary, common person who can contract a cold and suffer from indigestion and can easily lose a fight to a large crab. I get genuinely excited at every piece of new gear I find or buy, even knowing they won't turn me into a superhero. And this feeling of being a common mortal is especially interesting here, because you don't actually die in Outward. Similar to games like Mount & Blade, losing all your health in a fight results in you falling unconscious to the ground. You'll wake up again, bruised, battered, often hungry and thirsty and suffering other negative effects. Sometimes you'll be thrown in a bandit's camp or fort and have to find your gear and make an escape. Other times a mysterious, unseen benefactor will have dragged you to safety and you'll awaken next to a burning campfire with a helpful potion and a friendly note. Sometimes you'll be unceremoniously dumped outside the dungeon you were defeated in, other times you'll wake up in in the safety of the nearest big city so you can put yourself back together. This sounds like an extremely forgiving system—and some might say it's not a true survival game if you can't actually die—but at times it can feel pretty punishing. Typically, upon losing a fight in a game, I want to reload my last save and plunge back in. Outward auto-saves for you constantly, meaning there is no going back. Make a choice and you're stuck with it. Lose a battle, and you'll have to pick yourself up and find your way back to it to try again. After a defeat I've woken up clear on the other side of the map, so it can take ages to pick up where you left off (and there's no fast-travel, either). I failed a timed quest because some monsters beat me up and I woke up too far away to return to the quest giver in time, which was a considerable setback. The lesson is clear. Don't start fights unless you need to. Flee when you have to. Make choices carefully. Always be prepared. Losing isn't fatal, but it can certainly be a headache. I also acquired my first magic spells in those dozen hours, after a considerably tricky journey to the center of a mountain to meet some wizards. And even using spells is a bit of a survival challenge. To begin with, you need to permanently trade some of your maximum health and stamina to even acquire the mana needed to cast spells, making yourself physically weaker in order to become more spiritually powerful. And as for the spells I learned, one is called Spark. It's weak. It's wimpy. It does a bit of damage, and burns enemies a little over time, but it's like flicking a lit match at someone and hoping it overwhelms them. To really put it to use, I need physical components. I can mine Mana stones from glowing mineral deposits with a pickaxe, and then use an alchemy kit (purchased) over a campfire (crafted) to mix oil (found or purchased) with those magic rocks to create fire stones. With those fire stones in my inventory, I can cast a flaming sigil on the ground, and as long as I'm within that burning magic circle, my wimpy Spark spell will now burst with power. Advertisement In Outward, spellcasting is a process, one of preparation and crafting and ritual. It's a lot of work to cast spells, in other words, and that work makes it enjoyable. In Outward, spellcasting is a process, one of preparation and crafting and ritual. It makes spells feel weighty, makes you deliberate before using them, and having used them, feels like an accomplishment (or a waste, sometimes, if you use them on creatures that perhaps didn't justify it). And all this for a simple fireball spell, which most RPGs give you as a matter of course so you're not out in the wild with empty hands. That design follows through with just about everything you do in Outward. You need to keep yourself fed and hydrated and sleep regularly or begin to suffer negative effects on your stamina and health. You can lay down a simple bedroll at night, but you won't rest as well as you do in a tent or a bed, and you may be ambushed in the wild unless you devote some hours to standing guard—meaning less replenishment from sleep. You can get too warm and too cold, depending on the weather and circumstances, meaning you'll want fur clothing for cold climates and desert gear in arid ones. Want to visit another region? Prepare travel rations by cooking meat and salt in a pot, carry any number of restorative potions, bring anything else you think you might need because it's a long, slow trip back if you forget something. And all of that gear weighs you down, right down to how much water is in your waterskins and how much money you have on you. Sure, it's great to have a few hundred pieces of silver to spend in the next city, but the more silver you carry, the less you can carry of everything else. I haven't even talked about the story! There is one, and I'm enjoying it, though I'm not far into it yet. There are lots of NPCs, a main quest, side quests, plus dungeons, forts, and caves to explore. I haven't talked about weapon skills: you can learn them by helping NPCs with quests or purchasing them from experts (I can throw my lit lantern at someone for a makeshift fireball if I'm desperate and can't cast my Spark spell). You can increase your health and stamina and mana, usually by visiting trainers and plying them with silver. There's dozens of recipes for cooking and alchemy and the crafting of weapons and armor. There's a lot going on in Outward. There's even local and online co-op, which I have yet to try. For now I'm mainly taking pleasure in the survival elements, the preparation that I perform before stepping outside the safety of city walls, my lovely backpack filled with potions I've brewed and food I've cooked and weapons I've crafted and repaired, and maybe some silver to spend in the next city. If I make it there in one piece.

Reinstall invites you to join us in revisiting PC gaming days gone by. Today Andy finds fresh fun in the old brown corridors of Quake II. The original Quake was a muddy medieval world of knights, Lovecraftian horrors, and grim castles. But the sequel, cleverly titled Quake II, goes in a different direction entirely. You’re a space marine, naturally, who has crash-landed on an alien world called Stroggos. In a desperate attempt to prevent an invasion, Earth sent an army to the distant planet, but the Strogg knew you were coming and your arrival was a slaughter. The dropships were shot down by anti-air defences and pretty much everyone died, except you. And so, in true id Software FPS style, it becomes a solo mission. There’s a chance you don’t remember any of that. After all, Quake II is not a game renowned for its deep, complex sci-fi storyline. But the inclusion of a plot, and mission objectives, was pretty unique for an FPS in the late ’90s. As you play, a robotic voice regularly drones “computer updated” and gives you mission objectives. By modern standards that’s completely unexciting, but back then it set Quake II apart from id’s other shooters. It was more cinematic, and your actions felt somehow more meaningful. And by ‘your actions’ I mean ‘shooting’, because that’s the beating heart of the game. Shooting things, and avoiding being shot. At the time, Quake II was a technical marvel. Powered by the id Tech 2 engine, it boasted features that seem unremarkable now, but were amazing in their day. Hardware-accelerated graphics, coloured lighting, skyboxes, and the ability to return to previously completed levels were among its once groundbreaking features. After the release of Quake II, the engine powered several other games, including, in the early stages of its development, Half-Life. Quake II also had massively improved networking, making it one of the best early examples of an online FPS. Mod support also dramatically extended its lifespan for anyone lucky enough to have an internet connection with which to download the things. People are still making mods today, in fact, including a few that let you play the game at high resolutions and with some graphical improvements. It’ll still look like a game from 1997, but it makes it a bit more tolerable to modern eyes. Character movement is mapped to the arrow keys by default, but after some rebinding you can have it playing like a modern FPS. Although, weirdly, strafing is faster than moving forward and backwards. A strange sensation that took me a while to get used to. But for such an old game, Quake II is surprisingly playable. It’s still one of the finest collections of FPS guns on PC, and every weapon you wield has a distinct personality. A big part of this is its arsenal. It’s still one of the finest collections of FPS guns on PC, and every weapon you wield has a distinct personality. The chaingun rattles at incredible speeds, getting steadily faster the longer you fire it. The super shotgun is like a handheld anti-aircraft gun, and you can almost feel the power as you unload it into an enemy and hear that echoing boom. The exaggerated kickback on the machine gun, which rises slowly as you fire, gives it a sense of physicality. And I love it when you fire the grenade launcher and hear the metal clink of the grenades as they bounce around the level. Every weapon, except maybe the blaster, is a joy to fire. But the best of the lot is the railgun. This metal tube of death fires depleted uranium slugs at extremely high velocities, which leave a blue corkscrew of smoke in their wake. The railgun is incredibly accurate—it’s like a sniper rifle without a scope—and it can cut through several Strogg at a time. In fights with multiple enemies, a useful strategy is running around until a few of them are lined up, then firing a slug. Seeing it tear through a line of bad guys is one of the greatest pleasures in first-person shooting. And the things you shoot are just as well-designed. Quake II has the standard FPS structure of starting you out against small groups of easily-killed grunts, increasing the challenge the deeper into the game you get. In the first few levels you’re fighting shotgun-toting Guards, beefy Enforcers with chainguns, and Berserkers who lunge at you with big metal spikes—and later fire rockets at you. The way enemies explode into chunks of bloody meat, or ‘gibs’ to use the parlance of the times, is still gruesomely satisfying. And there are other grisly touches, like when you don’t quite kill an enemy and they squeeze off a few extra shots before they finally collapse and die. But this is just to ease you in, and it’s not long before id starts throwing its meanest creations at you in force. The Strogg are weird cyborg hybrids, with mechanical limbs and eerily human, grimacing faces. Gladiators stomp around on metal legs, firing their own version of the railgun at you. Mutants are angry, feral beasts who pounce on you, usually from dark corners. Brains, perhaps the weirdest enemy, attack you with tentacles and blood-stained hooked hands. There’s a huge variety of things to kill, all with unique behaviours and weapons, which keeps the game interesting—especially when you’re facing several types at once. The hardest thing to stomach when revisiting Quake II is how brown it is. The switch from dark fantasy to sci-fi leaves the levels brutal, industrial, and metallic. There isn’t much variety or detail in the environments, and the colour palette is depressingly muted. The actual design of the levels is great, with plenty of secret areas and multi-level arenas to fight in, but the lack of colour and almost nonexistent world-building make it feel like a bit of a slog at times. But I remember thinking this back in 1997, and really it’s a game about combat, not drawing you into its world. And since the Strogg live only for war, I guess it makes sense that their planetwould be like one giant factory. When you’ve fought your way through the Strogg and infiltrated the headquarters of their leader—a space station in an asteroid belt above the planet—it’s time to complete your final objective: kill it. The Strogg leader is called The Makron, and it’s a two-stage boss fight. Its first form is a powerful exoskeleton which comes equipped with a BFG10K, the most powerful weapon in the game. And, unlike your own BFG, it can fire it multiple times in quick succession. When you destroy the mech, it’s time to kill The Makron itself, which also has a BFG as well as a blaster and a railgun. Luckily the arena is littered with power-ups, health, and ammo, including a secret underground chamber that can be accessed by pressing a hidden switch. When the boss falls, you step into an escape pod, and that’s it. ‘The End’ unceremoniously flashes up on the screen, and your only choice is to go back to the menu. Imagine if a game ended like that today. Quake II is still a great game, and I’m surprised by how well it holds up. There’s something about the feel of the weapons, the way they’re animated and how they sound, that makes them some of the best examples in the genre. Even the new Doom, which is a fantastic ode to this era of shooter design, doesn’t have anything quite as enjoyably punchy as Quake’s railgun. Returning to Quake 2, the legendary shooter that's still fun today.