Reviews
Game
Quake II is the sequel to Quake. The story has nothing to do with Quake, but the name was used for marketing reasons. It's a first-person shooter and used the id Tech 2 engine, which was state of the art in 1997. In Quake II you play a marine named Bitterman who is attempting to save the Earth from an alien invasion by the cybernetic Stroggs. There are several new weapons in the game, including an homage to DOOM, with the BFG 10K. Aside from the single player game, Quake II offered a very strong multi-player environment which helped keep the game as popular as it was for so long.
Music
Quake II's music is similar to the original Quake; they both have a heavy industrial soundtrack. There was talk before the game was released that Trent Reznor would be composing the sequel's music, but in the end the German Industrial group, Sonic Mayhem, composed the bulk of the game's music. The heavy scratchy noise of their music really helps along the rapid pace of Quake II. Jer Sypult, an amateur composer, also had a break with this game and his song, "Climb", was used as well. Bill Brown, a professional composer, also had a part in the game's soundtrack composing all of the orchestrated tracks: Ntro, Final Showdown, and Ending. Quake II's credits list Rob Zombie as the composer of the Quake II Theme Song (Ntro). While some of Ntro is obviously Bill Brown's work, there is some noticeable differences, which is no doubt Rob Zombie's contribution.
Ripping
Most of the soundtrack is on the game disc in actual CD audio format. This music was ripped with CDex. id Logo, Ntro, and Ending songs were ripped from the idlog.cin, ntro.cin, and end.cin files respectively. The *.cin files are movie files located on the CD in the .\Data\Baseq2\Video folder and the audio is uncompressed 22Khz audio that was ripped with VLC Media Player. The last track, Intro, was downloaded from Bill Brown's Web site, and is not part of the game's data files. It is the original introduction music that was going to be used in Quake II. Parts of Bill Brown's Intro can be heard in the final Ntro track as well as the Ending track. The track is left in it's original MP3 format.
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_II
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