Q3Test Review - Part 1

The Net Experience

Thresh's comments in BLACK

Kenn's comments in BLUE

Before getting online

Thresh
As we started the browser and headed over to snag the actual Q3test files, I kept noticing something horribly wrong. Quickly, I realized what it was - the puck mouse. That friendly, translucent blue rodent is the worst positioning device I've ever used. Not because it only had one button, but it was perfectly round. It was nearly impossible to orient correctly, and always ended up twisted or rotated at some angle, making the online cursor fly off in unintended directions.

Mouse Woes

Kenn
While I'm sure it just takes a little practice to get used to such a device, it's certainly not the ideal solution. Radial symmetry isn't what I'm looking for in an orientation-sensitive device. Besides that, having only a single button was something we had to take care of immediately. We ripped the hockey puck out of the USB port and replaced it with an extra Logitech Gaming Mouse (as neither of us wanted to sacrifice our Intellimouse USBs). Surprisingly, after a few seconds (probably loading generic USB Human Interface Device drivers), the cursor snapped to, and the mouse performed flawlessly!

Thresh
In a related story, Kenn later plugged the dainty Apple USB Mouse into his PC, and got that working as well. However, we'll leave this discussion of his particular preferences for another article ;)

I am your host, Dieter,

Kenn
Wasting enough time as it is, we finished downloading q3test and installed it. Without even glancing at the readme, we clicked on the MacQuake3 icon, and weren't completely surprised to see it refuse to run. Resigned to reading the documentation, we found that we had to install the Apple gaming sprockets, sort of an Apple version of DirectX, and OpenGL drivers.

Thresh
Nothing new, coming from the PC world, right? We downloaded and downloaded, and dropped icons into the extension folder as needed. A couple of reboots later (hehe, we knew it had to happen) and we were all but set. I double-clicked the MacQuake3 icon again, and…