60 Second Review of…

Quake III Team Arena

Tom's Review: After Unreal Tournament, Epic releases Bonus Packs. After Half Life, Valve releases Team Fortress. After Quake III, id releases Team Arena — and has the audacity to slap a $30 price tag on it. The fact that there's some good stuff in this expansion is almost irrelevant. Team Arena is an affront to the way content is added to first person shooters, a concept pioneered and now abandoned by id. Consider it a merely decent mod with a mandatory $30 tip jar in front of it.

Mark's Review: For the past few years id has been accused of being a "technology company" rather than a game developer. With each new release, they come closer to meeting that definition. Like Tom says, this is the kind of content we've come to expect in free downloads. What's really disappointing is seeing id's failure to step up to meet the challenge of Epic and Unreal Tournament. We should have received a creative, robust expansion worth the $30. Instead we get this? A few new maps, some uninteresting character models, and so on? Finally, by making people pay for this, id is dividing the FPS Quake III community. Expansions traditionally do just a fraction of the sales volume that the original does. It's almost a guarantee that a number of shooter fans won't pick this up. It's as if id wants to drive even more players towards CounterStrike.

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Publisher: Activison
Developer: id
Genre: first-person shooter
Requirements: PII 233 RAM, 64 MB, 4X CD-ROM, 3D Accelerator with 8MB of video memory, 70 MB Hard Drive Space

December 27, 2000

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