(Quake Gameplay) Bigeye #30: Am386 DX-40!!!

Yes, this is a brand new rerecording. Why? Well, for one, I figured it would be much better to give you the raw deal of what it's like to play this game on a 386 without any spices added, and furthermore, the last attempt felt a bit too easy. Now it makes sense; trying to go to the end map directly through the console didn't set the right difficulty I had been using the whole time.
So, here is the true ending of Bigeye, an absolutely tedious to watch 35 minute run of the final level of Quake on the nightmare difficulty. This one was definitely not something I could do in one try. I rehearsed on a couple of my Pentium 4 computers and failed on this 386 twice before. Following the gameplay, you get to see the full ending struggle to print out, and I even log on to the Razornet from Windows 95 as a little victory lap.
Without any estatic crowd surrounding me, I could now see how anticlimactic it was to try to win at Quake on a 386. Whereas a game like G-Darius knows it's hard and it has so many qualities that would make you push yourself to complete it in a single life, Quake is not supposed to be run on a 386 and doing so just arbitrarily inflates its difficulty in such a way that you'd only want to accomplish this for comedy purposes. I did it so you don't have to!
Closing Statement
This may be the end of Bigeye, but it is only the start of a new future on Razorback. I have something in the works that longtime viewers back at the old, cursed realm will really love. See you soon.
Specifications:
Biostar (Bioteq) MB-1333/40UCQ-B VER1 Motherboard
AMD 386DX 40MHz CPU
IIT 3C87-40 40MHz 387 FPU
16MB FPM RAM
Tseng Labs ET4000/W32i
Windows 95A (MS-DOS Mode)
Timedemo: 1.4 FPS
Created on August 30th, 2022
oh thank god, he actually redid this one. that old ending was AWFUL. and by technicality it was invalid, given the entire game was supposed to be played on the hardest difficulty! even though this is four times as long, it's actually way easier to sit through because now i can finally see how quake ran on a 386/387 combo without any obstructions, only the raw meat. i wish kugee would have given the other videos from episode 4 the same treatment but i guess i can see why he wouldn't want to make too many compromises
with that return to form in place, this was a really interesting demonstration. it was oddly meditative, and it shows how quake happens to be barely usable on a platform coming from the 80's. throughout the video you'll see how kugee regularly changes the screen size on the fly to gain or lose speed, a technique you'd never be using on more capable hardware.
the final boss of quake is very underwhelming once you know what you're supposed to do, and for sure it was less fun than the huge demon from episode 1, but then again, the fps genre was bad at having bosses for a while. the only great one i can think of is the cyberdemon from doom
apart from much of episode 4, this was a really fun series, and for sure a brilliant way to put a large count of various pieces of hardware on display in such a well organized layout. a few other people had come up with the idea of showing gameplay progression across multiple hardware configurations before, but none had been so cleverly executed as bigeye, and it would've been amazing to see more of that.
a poll was held on razorback in 2023 asking people what the next game should be to follow in bigeye's format, with doom winning over unreal. unfortunately the production of bigeye ii may have never even gotten started, as kugee shut down the website several months later and has probably been following through with his plans to downscale his vintage pc collection, so we're probably never gonna get it
on November 14, 2023, Kugee's website, Razorback, shut down, and hundreds of the best retro tech videos vanished with them. He sent me some nvme drives with raw footage and project files so I can preserve his videos in the best format possible. so this is effectively the official archive of Razorback (and kugee's youtube channel)

[@danehenry895]

Kids today have no idea, I was absolutely content playing this on my 486-dx back in the day before I moved to a Rendition Verite then finally a 3DFX Voodoo!