[Aristotle Gumball]

Did anyone here ever play this?



I'd been trying different TC's for Doom and wondered if there were any for games like Quake or Quake 2. Malice is basically a whole new game inside the Quake engine. New guns, maps, enemies, textures, storyline (with cutscenes!), even a primitive inventory system. Oh, and you get a hoverboard. Bit annoying to get to work, but well worth the time. Came out in 1997. I'd literally never heard of it and neither have most people it seems.

[cybdmn]

thricecursed, on 01 November 2018 - 03:51 AM, said:

Did anyone here ever play this?

I played it back when it came out. The best Quake TC, it's far better than the mediocre Shrak. I remember i had hours of fun just moving through empty maps with the hoverboard.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Yeah, the hoverboard is surprisingly not gimmicky, neither is the parachute. You need both to advance in some levels. I was mostly just surprised by it's relative obscurity next to other retail games at the time. It never seems to get a mention, despite being pretty good.

If anyone wants to give it a go, I'll make your life easier. Make a new folder in your Quake folder called "Malice" and put all the game files there, then download either Quakespasm or DirectQ (tried a few others with no luck) and add this to the target line: -game malice -bind r "impulse 12" -bind u "impulse 13" -bind "impulse 14" y -bind e "impulse 30" -width 1360 -height 768 +fov 100 -bpp 32 (edit the resolution, fov and key bindings to whatever you want, r=reload, u=use, y=cycle through items, e=third person view)

Edit:

Fix for map with a missing parachute:
https://www.quaddict...epoch/d8fix.zip

Fix for wonky minigun texture that appears for some people:
http://quaketastic.c...texture_fix.zip

[OpenMaw]

With DirectQ it's pretty painless to get up and running. I enjoy it thoroughly.

I'm fairly convinced that Malice helped to inspire some of what ultimately became SIN. It has a similar attitude and environment.

It's a lot of fun. The soundtrack is pretty slick too:

[NightFright]

I happen to own the boxed retail version. It's probably the best commercial third-party addon for Quake ever made. The levels have a lot of atmosphere, supported by awesome music. A pity it didn't get much attention back in the time of its release.

[leilei]

Malice has had its good publicitiy....... in all of the quake circles not ostrichingthemselvesintoTF anyway. X-Men Ravages of Apocalypse had some undeserved mainstream spotlight though, and the most virally known was that damn rough Aliens TC that was notable for getting foxed.


And yeah Quake has had TCs much like Doom had then. idgames2/ has a total_conversions and a partial_conversions directory for them.

[Aristotle Gumball]

leilei, on 02 November 2018 - 03:50 PM, said:

Malice has had its good publicitiy....... in all of the quake circles not ostrichingthemselvesintoTF anyway. X-Men Ravages of Apocalypse had some undeserved mainstream spotlight though, and the most virally known was that damn rough Aliens TC that was notable for getting foxed.

Yeah, it got some glowing reviews back in the day, but has been mostly ignored since then, I think. People who aren't Quake fanatics would be into it, too.

leilei, on 02 November 2018 - 03:50 PM, said:

And yeah Quake has had TCs much like Doom had then. idgames2/ has a total_conversions and a partial_conversions directory for them.

From what I've seen, the TC's for Quake have scarcely been as good as the ones for Doom, and the community's less active.

[leilei]

There's a few factors to the Quake dryspell:

- PlanetQuake had two exoduses - one in early 1998 for promoting more Quake2 than anything else, and one towards the end of 1999 when Fileplanet started and idgames2/ was to be shut down in favor for that. Exclusivity rights for file hosting, corporate drama etc. Millennials 'nostalgic for gamespy' don't know the quarter of it, and Quake isn't the only game whose creative community was hindered. I mean it could've happened to Doom too if it were still new and relevant. (it still happened but in a relatively minor fashion and not on doomworld)
- Valve already snapped up and hired the big community pillars.
- There's also a few TCs that stopped with a commercial deal for a game release later. most notably Gunman
- Many mods migrating to Quake2 with full optimism typically hit a snag, usually code-related as that MSVC entry barrier for compiling win32 .dll game modules is significantly higher than qcc'ing a progs.dat together
- it's not as impactful as Doom as far as a brand and cultural influence goes the lovecraft baggage definitely doesn't do any favors though, even Q3 distanced from it...


The quake dryspell broke a bit after Arcane Dimensions fortunately, and a decent mature representative sourceport for once (Quakespasm). It's currently the most active creative community of that series with near-regular mapping jams, as Quake2's dead stuck in a deluded self-promotion vortex of desperate server ops, Q3 just has defrag race mappers, Q4 had a few old mod teams with a burden and QL just has thieves. Still nowhere near doom's current gusto though

[Aristotle Gumball]

Interesting. I wasn't aware of most of this, except for the one about Doom being the bigger brand. I heard that it sold better than Windows 95 at the time, which is pretty mind-blowing.

I was too young when Doom first came out, only played years later. First FPS experience was with Blood and Duke 3D. Played Q2 before Q1 as well and remember thinking "how come they made the second game worse?", lol.

Arcane dimensions looks really cool, I'll have to check it out. Thanks!

[Cherno]

I like Malice! My brother bought the game when it came out, it was lots of fun and some things were pretty novel for it's time, like the weapons that needed reloading. Speaking of which, there were some cool ones in the arsenal, even the normal .44 was great since Damage (as the protagonist is called) holds it sideways, "gangsta-style" when he shoots. The autoshotgun that fires incendiary or explosive shells was also cool with an awesome reloading animation. The roster of enemies was surprisingly large with huge stompy mechs and there was even a big fish or wha that was encountered only once in the entire game. The mini-submarine was nice as well. Some levels were difficult to figure out though, especially the one near the end of the game were you had to flee through a dark cityscape while being attacked by three respawning female warriors ("Vasquez") which were something like the elite bodyguards for Bossman. The cutscenes were kind of funny with the dialogues between an incredibly gullbible Damage and his employer. Malice is one game I'd really like to see a remake or sequel of, the Cyberpunk world was realized very effectively.

[Aristotle Gumball]

Cherno, on 22 November 2018 - 06:03 PM, said:

I like Malice! My brother bought the game when it came out, it was lots of fun and some things were pretty novel for it's time, like the weapons that needed reloading. Speaking of which, there were some cool ones in the arsenal, even the normal .44 was great since Damage (as the protagonist is called) holds it sideways, "gangsta-style" when he shoots. The autoshotgun that fires incendiary or explosive shells was also cool with an awesome reloading animation. The roster of enemies was surprisingly large with huge stompy mechs and there was even a big fish or wha that was encountered only once in the entire game. The mini-submarine was nice as well. Some levels were difficult to figure out though, especially the one near the end of the game were you had to flee through a dark cityscape while being attacked by three respawning female warriors ("Vasquez") which were something like the elite bodyguards for Bossman. The cutscenes were kind of funny with the dialogues between an incredibly gullbible Damage and his employer. Malice is one game I'd really like to see a remake or sequel of, the Cyberpunk world was realized very effectively.

The giant fish!! I jumped from my seat when you open a hatch and it's just... right there. Yeah, I think the most annoying level was the one with the respawning guards. I thought you just had to kill them, so I kept doing it until I ran out of ammo. I finally figured it out when my saved game listed the enemies as 00/00 even though I'd killed a dozen.

Another one was at this factory looking place where you have to pass through a lava tunnel while hugging the wall the entire time. I couldn't believe they actually forced you to do that. You kinda have to play it while keeping in mind that the levels don't use a strictly linear layout and to look for non obvious ways to progress. Felt like the devs were just fucking with you at times, but I love it when games do that.

Ditto on the remake. I hope more people play it and that it'll inspire the next slew of retro titles. I love the terrible voice acting too, Damage sounds like a fucking moron, lol. First thing you see is him shooting a man in the back and that sets up the story. Total 80s B movie aesthetic.

[OpenMaw]

For anyone who has yet to play Malice let me sum up the characterization.

Damage: Where muh money?
Bossman: Do another job for me and i'll pay you MORE.
Damage: Okay.

Damage: Where muh money!?
Bossman: Do another job for me and i'll pay you EVEN MORE
Damage: Uh, okay!

Damage: Where muh MONEY!?
Bossman: Erm... Do another job?
Damage: KAY!

Bossman: Yo, Vasquez... Go kill this dipshit.

[Cherno]

Commando Nukem, on 23 November 2018 - 10:53 PM, said:

For anyone who has yet to play Malice let me sum up the characterization.

Damage: Where muh money?
Bossman: Do another job for me and i'll pay you MORE.
Damage: Okay.

Damage: Where muh money!?
Bossman: Do another job for me and i'll pay you EVEN MORE
Damage: Uh, okay!

Damage: Where muh MONEY!?
Bossman: Erm... Do another job?
Damage: KAY!

Bossman: Yo, Vasquez... Go kill this dipshit.

mid-90s FPS "stories" in a nutshell

Still a better lovestory than Twilight, though.

Jokes aside, I kinda liked the description of Damage from a news report in the manual "... armed with nothing but a .44 and a grin." Brilliant!

[Aristotle Gumball]

Damage refers to his brain damage I guess. The idiot savant of corporate espionage.