Since there have been humans, there has been war. This mission concerns one family, their brave history in the face of unending strife, and their home, a castle called Alcazar.
Built over four hundred years ago into a remote Spanish mountainside, Alcazar has in some ways come to objectify the steadfastness of a family blessed, or perhaps cursed, with progeny who are extraordinarily adept, courageous, and willing in the ways of warfare. At least one member of this family has been involved in almost every major human conflict since the early eighteenth century. As each generation passes, the family's eldest members marvel at the simple miracle of their having survived another generation. With such a rich and impressive military lineage, it can be no surprise that the castle's trustees can lay claim to one of the most sought-after American military stand-outs of the past half century.
A commanding presence both on and off the field of battle, this driven family patriarch ascended through the ranks of one of Earth's mightiest military institutions, the United States Marine Corps, and attained the rank of general shortly before the planet's encounter with the slipgating alien scourge known as Quake. Many said that the General's finest moments were in dealing with that menace, not realizing that it would be these experiences which would ultimately lead to this man's psychological and spiritual undoing.
Less than 2 years after the Quake conflict had ended, the now retired General descended into a deep madness, undoubtedly accelerated by the prior decades of exposure to extreme violence coupled with the virtually unattainable standards of discipline and excellence he'd set for himself. Senior kin, with tradition, unwritten rules and intuitive familial protocol guiding their inaction, stood unapolagetically by as this now obviously unwell man transformed his family's most precious heirloom into a living monument of war, an homage to the very notion of conflict.
Shortly after the Strogg invasion of Earth, a large Strogg platoon targeted Alcazar for seizure. The family responded in kind by amassing a private force, including immediate sons, distant cousins, and men fighting with the same mercenary company which employs you, to liberate the imperiled General. They succeeded, but took heavy casualties and lost control of Alcazar, a calamity and indignity which had never before been suffered by the family. The General, wounded and divorced from all reality but not unable to appreciate irony, could do nothing but observe from a helicopter as Strogg forces occupied an Earth stronghold which appears nothing short of custom-built for its invaders.
From his private hospital bed in a southern region of Portugal, the General falls in and out of consciousness, clinging to life through his sentiments for his fallen kin and for two prized possessions: his personal war journal, and his family's beloved battle saber. With his delirium and deluded irrationality escalating by the hour, his world now exists entirely in his mind. The loyal family physician has suggested that if provided these beloved items, the General could perhaps call forth the intestinal fortitude necessary to live.
The Strogg have had control of Alcazar for less than 72 hours, and intelligence reports indicate they have not yet fully entrenched themselves in the stronghold. Your mission is to penetrate Alcazar, retrieve both the General's journal and battle sword and escape the castle. If you succeed, your bounty will be of sufficient size to retire ten lifetimes over. Good luck.
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Installation and Play:
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1. Unzip the contents of the file you downloaded, wa.zip, into your \Quake2 directory. This will create a folder called wa, containing the files necessary for playing.
2. To play, open a DOS window, move to your \Quake2 directory and start Quake 2 with the following command line:
quake2 +set game wa +set skill 0 +map wa1
For skill level, use a value of 0, 1 or 2 for easy, medium or hard skill level respectively.
Information
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Custom Elements: Weathered Alcazar contains the torch and flame models from Quake 1, courtesy of Q2 Mappack. It also contains many textures and sounds from Hexen 2 and Quake 1, and a couple of models from Quake 1 as well. Also, it uses the e1dm2 environment map from the Daikatana deathmatch demo.
Known Issues: Under 3dFX there are a couple of visible compiler inaccuracies resulting in some poorly-lit bsp splits (don't know how it looks under true OpenGL).
Support for:
Single Play? Yes
Deathmatch? No
Cooperative Play? No
Easy/Medium/Hard Skill Settings? Yes
Credits
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- id Software for Quake 1 and 2
- Raven Software for Hexen 2
- Ion Storm for Daikatana
- Armin Rigo for QuArK
- Phillip Martin for Quake 2 Modeler
- The guys at Omega Development for Q2 Mappack
- Franτois-Xavier Delmotte for his incredible "ogro" texture set
Individual textures:
- "Pain Ring" by S. Garofalo
- "General George Washington, 1777" by Don Troiani
- "Flank Attack" by Robert Stack (not the "Unsolved Mysteries" guy, a different guy)
- "In the Trenches" by ?
- "The Two Thousand Yard Stare" by Tom Lea
- "Med Evacuation" by Jim Pollock
- "Raid to the Euphrates" by Frank Thomas (not the baseball player, also a different guy)
- Various public domain Ares works by ?
Thanks for playing!
- Scott r406@hotmail.com
Hints below (contain spoilers)
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Hints
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In the final room, the 4 buttons on the floor, when pressed, each cause one of the 4 pillars to drop and spawn an item. The items are cells, a pair of bullet boxes, a large health, and grenades. When spawning these items, the pillar drops and, thus, you lose your cover from incoming fire. A good strategy is to push a button and run past the spawned item and behind another pillar. Then, wait for the enemy to fire, and then before the lowered pillar rises again, swoop in and collect the item. Also, each pillar will only spawn 3 items in total, so make your shots count and be careful.
