To those of you who sing from the Quake hymn book and believe that the Supreme Being at id Software can do no wrong, reading further may prove to be a little traumatic. For despite introducing new weapons, new features and new gameplay.

Team Arena is poor-to-middling in quality and does nothing to reclaim its sibling's position as top online shooter.

In many ways, id has only itself to blame, having released all its trade secrets in the form of game engine source code. There are now so many first-class mods and conversions available freely on cover discs that players expect a whole lot more from their software when it has a price tag swinging from it.

Aug 16, 2014 Quake III: Team Arena General Discussions Topic Details. Aug 16, 2014 @ 5:58am Flickering screen in menu, crappy resolution and absolutly not playable. While none of the features added by Team Arena actually change the graphics engine in Quake III Arena, they do add a few new graphics for you to take advantage of. New skins, weapons, and maps present new visual tidbits to feast upon, and the rendering power of the Quake III engine makes them well worth looking at. Quake III: Team Arena, often abbreviated TA or Q3:TA, is the expansion pack for Quake III Arena. Team Arena was Released by id Software on December 18, 2000. 1 Description 2 Clans 3 New Content 3.1 Game Types 3.2 Maps 3.3 Environment 3.4 Bots (Tournament mode) 3.5 Weapons 3.6 Powerups 3.7 Team.

As an expansion pack, Team Arena requires that you have Quake 3 already installed, meaning a total investment of around $50 - not including the 16Mb accelerator card that the new game demands, or the 128Mb memory necessary for the galaxy-sized outdoor maps to render at a decent frame rate. Compare TA to Half-Life or Unreal Tournament, both of which offer similar play styles but at less than half the cost, and it should be clear from the outset that the odds are stacked against it.

All That Glistens

Visually, Team Arena is pure confectionery for the eyes. With the super-cheeky Quake 3 engine behind it, the game supports all the graphical tricks and treats we know and love so well, including dynamic shadows, curved surface rendering, specular lighting, bilinear filtering and quadriplegic dribbling.

Trouble is, nobody cares any more. If you've played Counter-Strike, you'll be intimately familiar with the single greatest map of all time, Dust.

It is by far and away the smallest and simplest setting in the game, comprising one or two monotone textures, a couple of choke points and a few boxes. There are no stairways, balustrades, balconies, ducts, vents, mezzanine floors, vaulted arches, domes, obelisks, stained-glass windows or weird techno-gothic architecture whose only purpose in life is to heat-stress your video card. What makes a map great is the way it plays, and it's here that Team Arena short.Included in the pack are 19 new levels, four of which are essentially Quake III Capture The Flag maps with the odd nip and tuck, leaving 15 really new ones in total. Four of these are one-on-one tournament-style maps, which by definition don't belong in a team game, and so now we're down to 11.

For the most part, these 11 are fast and well balanced, but like the techno-metal soundtrack and Unreal Tournaments voice taunts, they're pretty forgettable affairs. The outdoor variants - which drag Quake players from their narrow factory corridors out into the open air -are too large to be popular with existing players. While initially rattier captivating ('Look, DeAtHReAper, floor made of grass!'), they soon become tiresome, with the long trek between enemy bases turning levels into more of a slog than a mission. Additionally, much of the terrain makes le combat alfresco a chore as your progress is hindered by hills, dips and crests in the landscape.

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Both the nailgun and chaingun make a welcome return, although the former is useful only as a last resort, and the latter so powerful it disrupts the balance of play. New to the game is a mine launcher that drops small proximity charges which stick to enemy clothing and explode a few seconds later. Although this may sound fun, it serves only to encourage bad play, with respawn areas, cap points, entrances and walkways often ending up covered in the damn things. Meeting your maker in Quake should be an honourable thing, your twitching corpse a recognition of another player's skill. Legging it through a level base before spontaneously exploding out back is hardly a noble end.

Power Extreme

There are six new power-ups: doubler, ammo regeneration, kamikaze, invulnerability, guard and scout, with each bestowing special abilities upon its owner. There are a finite number of them on each map, so if you're after one in particular, you may have to wait until the player carrying it dies.

In the case of kamikaze and invulnerability, you don't have to wait long.Kamikaze explodes in a huge atomic blast that encompasses a substantial area of the map, while invulnerability renders the user impervious to assault but immobile for the duration. Guard and scout provide a pseudo class structure, with scouts able to run at double speed but with no armour, and guards able to replenish their health without running over spheres.

Trouble is, Quake III already had too many power-ups floating about its levels, and Q3TA levels are positively festooned with the bloody things. It's reached the point where you have to stop and think twice about which novelty you're walking over and what the hell it does. It also makes newbies a real curse, as they tend to stomp about aimlessly picking everything up ('Ooh, pretty baubles!') and preventing the more experienced players getting the toys they need to win.At the heart of Q3TA are four new teamplay modes, including your common or garden CTF, Overload, Harvester and One Flag CTF. Overload is without doubt the most entertaining variation, as it encourages your team to work as one and destroy an obelisk set deep inside the enemy's base.

It's nigh-on impossible to destroy this object single handed, so you need to rely on the co-operation of your team mates in order to get the job done. Harvester involves collecting opponents' skulls and dropping them off behind enemy lines. Although it may sound good on paper, the reality is it's rather flawed: instead of dropping to the ground when you frag someone, the skulls appear alongside a pillar in the centre of the map and can be collected by anyone, meaning most of the action gravitates towards them, with the remainder of the level remaining eerily quiet.

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The same is true for One Flag CTF which, as its name suggests, revolves around a single flag and requires little in the way of tactics or group strategy.

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In the final analysis, it has to be said that Team Arena does nothing to enrich the lives of existing Quake players, especially if they've dabbled in Unreal Tournament or Half-Life. While gameplay variations such as Overload will force many people into rethinking the way they play, and should encourage old-skool deathmatchers to evolve into half-decent team players, $19.99 buys three days of modem time -more than you need to cruise the web and download every Quake III mod ever made.For at its heart, that is all Team Arena is, and not a particularly impressive one at that.