Just think: this is how it all started!

That's right! Good old Pong, that cyber-ping-pong matchup that kept us occupied for hours on end during the early 70's. Well, that is until Asteroids came out with more movement and more excitement. Then the Pac-Man family brought color to our lives along with Donkey Kong, Q-bert, and the list goes on and on. And if you didn't want to walk around with pockets full of quarters or tokens, then you could get an Atari console and some cartridges, and play video games in your own home!

Also this time brought us the Commodore 64 computer. Now anyone with the skills to program could design their own games! I wonder if John Carmack cut his game designing teeth on a 64?

It's now the year 2000. The console game racket is beginning to turn from a no-holds barred rumble between the N64 and PlayStation into a three-way dance with the advent of Sega's Dreamcast. Three years ago, it was common to find PC games that listed a 386 processor and 4MB RAM as the minimum hardware you need to play. Nowdays a Pentium 90 processor and a minimum of 16MB RAM seem extremely inclusive. As computer-processing power increased, and as RAM prices have dropped, games have taken advantage of the available computing horsepower. Add to this software developments like DirectX, and the advent of powerful, less-expensive video cards, and the possibilities of recreating (or, more accurately, simulating) reality grows larger and larger. Add to this the fact that man's heart is corrupting more and more, and what do you have? The recipe for a virtual gore-fest in a very popular genre of computer games called first-person shooters.

No one has been more of a leader in this genre and progression than the aforementioned John Carmack and the crew at id Software. These are the people responsible for the Doom and the Quake series of games. Quake has been the supreme game for years now. For a treatment of the first Quake game, as well as Doom and some other games and the Satanist undertones they contain, check out this article on the WWW at Jesus is lord.com . I will show you some things I have observed about the two later games, Quake II and Quake 3 Arena

Before we start, let me say I have played the full version (shrink-wrapped box bought from the store) of Quake II, and a demo version of Quake 3 Arena from a CD from Maximum PC magazine. I have included several screenshots of the action on these pages. These pictures (unless I have cropped them of unneeded things) are 640x480, so now would be the time to make any needed adjustments to your computer's display. Some of these pictures are very graphic, and I will warn you of these ahead of time, as well as provide an exit to another part of this article.