User blog:Le Rottweiler/Finding oddities

Deathstalker is occupied reading a book series and replaying Thief, so I don’t have much scheduled for next week (or this week, depending on your calendar). I became so tired of worrying about and neglecting my damn studies that I’m cancelling a subscription to an educational resource so that I can relax for a while. I’ll probably acquire my General Education Degree at a later point, but right now I think that it’s best that I try something different and wait until I’m serious and prepared to continue my education. Perhaps I’m still immature, even being twenty‐one.

Anyway, I want to talk about discovering oddities in Quake. Yesternight, Deathstalker and I were playing a level titled I must break you. Prophetic, but it actually added more confusion to that night. During a few replays, we noticed that the only enemy that we ha’n’t destroyed yet was the Spawn. I was repeatedly assaulting it, but none of my projectiles stopped it. At first, I thought that the map was titled such because of its invincible Spawn. Not the case. During some plays it would explode, and during others it wouldn’t. We were trying to figure out what was going on, so we lured it into the teleporters. Nothing. Then into the Nail Trap. That just killed it. I figured that it may have had something to do with the only Radioactive Container in the level, so we stood near the Container to make the little sucker hit it, but it would just explode. Unsatisfied, we did more tests and we figured it out: making the Spawn explode the Container can grant the Spawn invulnerability. I thought that hitting the Container beforehand may’ve had something to do with it, but after doing another test tonight, it’s improbable.

Given that it’s extremely rare to find Spawns and Radioactive Containers together, there’s a possibility that this is a recent discovery. Further tests could be performed to see if it has the same effect on other monsters, but what’s unique about the Spawn is that it explodes when it dies, whereas other opponents in the main campaign do not. Nevertheless, the game thinks that the monster is dead so it counts the Radioactive explosion as a kill for the Spawn even though it’s obviously still alive.

It seems like every time I replay Quake with my amigo, we learn something new. A while back we discovered a square‐shaped hole in E1M3: the Necropolis, but it’s impossible to get into it sans cheating. Another one is that mêlée enemies can sometimes hit somebody through a wall. We would think that a game that’s almost 20 years old would be completely well‐documented in every aspect, but we’re incorrect. There’re probably more glitches or oddities in that game awaiting discovery, which is why it’s utile for us to replay it.

Anyway, am hoping that somebody else can replay this product with me. It’s utile to construct walkthroughs, but it also gets lonely. It is, nevertheless, comprehensible that somebody may not enjoy watching someone else compose a walkthrough, which is why it can be more fun to look for oddities. So you lot desire to assist us, you are welcome to join me.