We all know that Quake 1 is one of the most important games in history. Is it basically Brown Doom with a Y-axis and a fondness for Nine Inch Nails? Yes, and that's what's so great about it. It's also an effortlessly iconic shooter that still feels good today. A few clunky aspects and inconsistent level quality give Quake a case of Super Mario World syndrome; it's often more fun to play custom levels in its engine than it is to actually play the original campaign. I guess that's the price you pay for changing games forever.

There are a million different ports and forks of Quake nowadays, and they're pretty much all fine, but I have no qualms recommending the Nightdive remaster. It's packed with extra content and quality-of-life features, runs well on modern platforms, and, seriously, even the Switch port is great (just take the time to calibrate the gyro aiming).

The decision to make player characters egg-shaped is a pretty clever way of communicating that there are no headshots in this game, something that has always seemed a bit confusing to newcomers jumping into Quake in the post-Call-of-Duty era. The decision to release an esports-ready competitive shooter with no personality of its own on the Fortnite launcher wasn't quite as clever. Diabotical may as well have been dead on arrival.

It could still be lots of fun, of course. It's transparently a Quake III clone at its core, the movement and shooting were both as fun as always, and the original maps all felt adequately designed. But multiplayer shooters live and die on so much more than just the competence of their design. Slavish adherence to arena shooter tradition alone doesn't bring in new blood, as much as we all wish it could. Without the community to back it up, Diabotical became a mausoleum for its own ambition.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is vulgar auteurism in game form. The hallmarks of Arkane's oeuvre are all here, but with none of the polish or restraint you're used to. Violence and sex and the plots of the pulpiest fantasy books you've ever read swirl like ether in its sorcerous hands. It's what Thief would be if the developers were influenced by Half-Life 2 instead of Ultima Underworld. Dark Messiah is clearly an immersive sim, but tune your expectations of what that means: instead of intricate stealth sandboxes, it throws you into a linear, setpiece-heavy physics playpen where your greatest joy will be finding increasingly grotesque ways of murdering orcs. It's hard to believe that the dedicated kick button didn't permanently alter the course of FPS design the way Halo's regenerating health did.

It's also insanely horny, like it was written by the guy from your first high school D&D game who was always trying to seduce the NPCs. It's janky, it's too dark to see half the time, and it would crash at least once every hour, even after I found a fix to stop the most game-breaking crashes. When it works, though, it's also a brisk, bloody, brilliant time.