You can re-live these days, at least if you happened to play Quake Arena, by heading over to Quake Live to play a remake of the game that stays in many regards true to its original. Probably the biggest difference is that Quake Live is played in a web browser. It is however unlike any of the standard browser games that you may have encountered.

Before you can play, you need to register a free account. The game is free to play by everyone, but offers additional features to paying premium users. They can for instance create Quake Live servers that they can control, or do not see advertisement when the maps load. For the beginning though, free is good and everything that you need to get started.

During installation, a plugin needs to be installed in the browser. Without the plugin, the game won’t load and you cannot play.

Once you have setup your account you have options to learn some techniques in a training center, practice offline against bots or jump right in and play against human opponents online.

Quake Live determines your skill during the first matches, and suggests matches based on those skills. You can override this easily by opening the match browser and clicking on the Customize link to customize the game selector.

Before you head out you may want to customize your character. You can select one of the available skins or change controls and game settings. Here you can enable full screen play which is highly suggested for the best gaming experience. You are otherwise stuck with a maximum resolution of 1024×768.

Quake Live keeps tracks of all kinds of statistics, like a player’s accuracy, frag to death ratio or wins. The developers have added an award system similar to achievements that have become popular in past years. The awards do not affect the game though.

Quake Live has a friend system which you can use to add all your friends to. This way it is a lot easier to play with your friends in the same games.

The game itself is extremely fast paced, even more so if you are used to modern first person shooters like Modern Warfare, Call of Duty or Battlefield. Think of those games with a 200% speed increase and you may come close to the speed of this game.

If you played Quake Arena back in the days, you will feel at home right from the start. Maps and weapons will feel familiar and give you a head start in matches against players who have to accommodate first. If you have not played Quake 3 Arena before, you are probably best of playing a few practice matches against bots, before you jump into multiplayer games with human opponents.

The game runs well in the browser. While I have a high-end PC and Internet connection, it is likely that it will run as well on standard systems. Players will find loads and loads of games at any time of the day, enough to keep them busy for months, if not years.

Here is short video demonstration of a free for all match.

Why do not you head over to Quake Live to try it out for yourself?

Now if they only would make an UT Live, that would be awesome.

In many of his videos, he combines the real world with video gaming, and that’s where it begins to get funny. Ever wanted to know how an aimbot would look like in real life? How a Portal gun could have its uses? How cart racing would be that more exciting if it would be Super Mario Kart racing instead?

Below is a selection of videos that I personally liked. Freddie has uploaded almost one hundred videos to his Youtube channel. Most videos have a play time of around one minute. The videos are professionally done thanks to his background as a video producer. Lets start with the videos.

Aimbot: Cheaters use aimbots in games, either for the fun of destroying the game for other players, or for showing of. Watch how an aimbot would look like in real life.

Rocket Jump: Many first person shooters offer a rocket launcher in their arsenal. Team Fortress 2 is such a game for instance. You can do rocket jumps in those games to reach areas you either cannot reach at all, or not directly. Watch how a rocket jump could help you out in real life combat situations.

Future First Person Shooter: A first person shooter with real characters. How would it look like.

Real Life Portal Gun: A portal gun can have its uses in real life. But you better be sure you know how to use it.

3D First Person Mario: Animation this time, but really funny nevertheless.

There are lots and lots of videos like the ones linked above. If you like them, visit Freddie’s YouTube channel to watch them all.

AssaultCube

AssaultCube is a quite simple 3D FPS available for Linux, OS X and Windows, which just reached version 1.0 about a week ago. The graphics are not very advanced, but a benefit of this is that it’s easier to run a server and that it can run on nearly any machine.

The best aspect of AssaultCube is the online play; there’s always a few busy servers available where one can play capture the flag, deathmatches or variations on those modes. AssaultCube is limited to seven weapons: sniper rifle, assault rifle, handgun, grenades, knives, shotgun and submachine guns.

Maps can be created for AssaultCube quite easily.

Sauerbraten

Sauerbraten is an FPS built on the same engine on which AssaultCube is built but has much more sophisticated graphics and is built in a fantasy world as opposed to a real one.

In Sauerbraten, weapons include crossbows, guns and rocketlaunchers. This is definitely a more interesting variety than AssaultCube! Once again, CTF and deathmatch are popular game modes.

The game notably lacks a crouch mechanism and struggles to run at higher resolutions on my MacBook Pro. However, it is an amazing open-source game with many fantastic maps.

Once again, Sauerbraten is orientated towards online pay but the CPU games are much better than AssaultCube’s.

Interestingly, the game can also be played as a 3rd person shooter!

Nexuiz

Nexuiz is an FPS with quite fictional weapons, like electricity guns etc. The game clearly belongs in the realms of fantasy, being set on a space station where one must shoot aliens.

I find the game difficult to play. Movement is far too fast compared to Cube engine games and it really does require quick reflexives.

The game isn’t smooth either. Before a game starts, there’s a text-only screen telling me what is loading etc. and the menu at the start looks terrible, especially at my screen resolution.

It’s still a fantastic game to play, however.

AssaultCube

Sauerbraten

Nexuiz

Needless to say there’s scores of other good games, these are just my favourite free (as in beer and freedom) shooters.

I have been playing pro level Unreal Tournament for about two years and it was always a pleasure to witness an embarassing death. Unreal Tournament however was not the only game that I was playing. I also enjoyed Quake 3 Arena, Counter Strike (Source) and many other PC shooters.

The website that published the list is currently not available, here is a short recap of the five ways:

• The “Otherâ€? Nade Kill – Being killed by a grenade is a common way to die in Counter Strike. Dieing because someone (a team mate for instance) hit you with the grenade subtracting 1HP from your hitpoints is pretty embarassing. Everyone else will have a good laugh though
• Crushing People – Some games subtract 1HP if you fall on someone. This is another funny way to die.
• Cratering – I’m able to make that jump.. Well, seeing someone trying to jump from a cliff to the other side and failing miserably is funny.
• The Shank – Being killed by the worst weapon in the game.
• The Telefrag – the beloved telefrag. This was the BEST weapon in Unreal Tournament until Epic decided to nerf it. A friend of mine was so good with the friggin teleporter that he was constantly accused of cheating. There was no cap in the beginning which meant you could teleport around many times in a second.

  Telefragging means that your character appears in the same spot that another character is standing in. The character standing in that spot is instantly integrated which means that this is a very good way to get rid of someone with armor, shield and the best weapons.

Are there other ways that you can think of ? Rocket Boosts gone wrong for instance is surely a nice way to die although it resembles Cratering.