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There are many Quake ports, but this one stands out from the others. In this post, I will talk about Quake Remake, a port of Quake to the Half-Life 1 tech (with a twist)

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Right from the start on ModDB page it says that this port is nothing ambitious like Darkplaces, but a faithful remake of the game on the different engine, thus the name. It claims to bring some GoldSource features like decals, muzzle flashes and MP3 music! But the most important and interesting to me is a skeletal animation. If you don't know, Quake I model have a set of frames that each contain vertex data, when Half-Life 1 uses calculates vertices based on bones position and angle. It's quite an amount of work to rig and animate every model, and keep it compatible with Half-Life.

What ModDB page doesn't say is that the game code wasn't just rewritten from QuakeC to C++, it also follows Half-Life SDK architecture. At this point, Quake Remake could've been just a typical Half-Life mod, but there lies a problem. From the beginning Quake Remake was intended to run on the GoldSource engine but due to bugs in engine physics final release runs exclusively on Xash3D, that include specific Quake Remake hacks (for example, in SV_CheckBottom function). It still can run on GoldSource but doesn't work properly, all the items are misplaced, and for me entities wasn't rendering after few change levels.

To run the mod, I had to find Quake Remake the latest version of source code because the original mod was published YEARS ago and the engine had several updates since then. I also had to port it to Linux, because like original Xash3D, it runs only on Windows.... While downloading Quake Remake files in parallel, I noticed that it suspiciously doesn't require any of Quake I game data. ... Not sure what to feel about this, I have bought Quake on Steam anyway. Btw, you can too, it's on the sale right now!

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After completing Quake Remake first two episodes, it really feels just Quake. The gameplay, movement, enemies AI is absolutely the same. The visuals however differs a bit. Everything feels much darker, which is probably because of the different gamma table used in the engine. Second thing, unlike in many Quake source ports, animations feel much better due to conversion to skeletal animation. In minor changes, enemies bleed with the familiar HL1 particle effect, there are detailed textures on the walls, a feature from Counter-Strike: Condition Zero. HL muzzle flashes feel better, never liked these 3D effects in original Quake.

And that's all. Because it's just Quake, I can't say anything else. I wish the mod had something more in it, like some assets could've been redone in Deathmatch Classic style (considering an endgame Easter egg) and since maps were recompiled anyway, Half-Life effects DSP could've been used. Surprisingly, Quake Remake even found its legacy. Its assets were reused in Sven-Coop custom mission. In 2018 another mod came out, called Hipnotic Remake, similar to Quake Remake but for Scourge of Armagon add-on. After that yet another Quake mod was published called Quake Wrapper, which is another take on "porting Quake" by the same developer. I will review both Hipnotic Remake and Quake Wrapper next.

So do I recommend playing it? If you really want to replay Quake. It's an interesting mod from a technical standpoint. Can it call itself a remake? I don't think so. Despite half of the game was remade, the models were remade with skeletal animation, the maps are recompiled to HLBSP and the whole game source code was rewritten in completely different language, I won't call it's a remake. It's basically the same game, a remaster, with pirated assets. Not only that, it also introduced a set of Quake compatibility hacks to the engine, increasing game engine complexity further.

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