“My momma shoots better,” yells the enemy as he races across the floor of the arena. It’s meant to be a taunt – and you can’t sit still for a taunt or a target.

“Keep talking, sucker, ’cuz in about two seconds your momma won’t recognize you,” you growl as you site him in.

The rocket accelerates out of the launcher.  A blink of the eye later, what used to be a cyber-humanoid is merely a thousand chunks of blood-streaked flesh bouncing off walls and across the arena floor. It’s gonna take a squeegee to clean that one up.

When it comes to first-person shooter games that are a raging blood fest, few products can equal the fragging ability of the Quake series from id Software and Activision. For the most part these games are reflexive exercises that require you aim quickly, stay light on your cyber feet and be bold. After all, in arcade fashion, there are weapons, reloads, armor and power-ups to be won. Quake III Arena placed the gamer in a variety of arenas in a free-for-all. Yes there was a point, sort of, and that was to kill everyone else without suffering too much damage yourself.

Now there is Quake III Team Arena, featuring the same weapons and fragging fun of Arena, but expanding it into a cooperative effort. In Team Arena, there are five clans and four humanoid types, if you want to consider the B’Rakku humanoid. These clans engage in four contests in the Arena of the Vadrigar: Capture the Flag (just like the children’s game, except it didn’t have the consequences of failure this does); One Flag (you snag the white flag in the Arena’s center and carry it to the enemy’s base flag); Overload (destroy the skull portion of the enemy’s goal obelisk); and Harvester (a fragged player forces a crystal skull to pop up in the center of the arena, and players must grab and carry that skull to their enemy’s goal.)

There are three new weapons in this program:
- The Nailgun hurls a cloud of spikes at the target that dissects the target at an alarming rate).
- A Prox Launcher  sets mines on any surface. Enter the sensor grid and kablooey – time to get out the mop.
- Chaingun which cuts apart an opponent faster than the standard machine gun.

Medals are awarded for skills demonstrated on the fields of battle. There are two items which can be carried and do incredible damage. The Kamikaze is a ring of floating skulls that surrounds the player and when activated, plays the role of a small nuclear device. Oh, yes, you die too. Invulnerability freezes you in place, but allows you to pivot and shoot through the crackling force field which surrounds you.

As in any team game, there is a leader who issues orders and followers who obey. There are eight order types (including help, attack, camp, defend, follow, patrol, retrieve and escort) and if you don’t follow orders well, you may find yourself on the outside of a multiplayer contest looking in.

The game environment is quite rich; featuring wonderful obstacles, boost pods which send you flying, vortex portals, viewing panels, stairs, and different arena levels. The high ground is always the best place to snipe the enemy.

The controls are very simple to learn and use, which is a tremendous advantage in this program. However, just because you know how to control your cyber-counterpart doesn’t mean you are going to survive the high-speed action of the arena.

You can play this game as a solo, but it is a team game, and as such you really need to play in the multiplayer campaigns.

There are several ways to play the team game. You can go the LAN route, Mplayer or the Internet. The latter provides the most sites and diverse gaming obstacles. On the nights visited, there were more than 370 games going on. If you don’t find one of those to your liking, you can host your own game. The basic plots are all intact, with 21 arenas and five skill levels from ‘I Can Win’ through ‘Hardcore’ to ‘Nightmare.’ If you are a novice and enter a hardcore game, the experience won’t be much fun. The people who participate at the upper levels know what they are doing, and waste little time explaining or protecting the weak. It is survival of the fittest.

Overall, Quake III Team Arena is faster paced than Q3 Arena. The arenas themselves are more diverse and entertaining, while the overall graphical quality of the program may slightly exceed Q3 Arena. The program is incredibly challenging and pulls you quickly into the thrill zone. If you don’t mind all the graphical depictions of the number of ways a body can be blown into bits, then you may enjoy the entertainment value of this program.

This program is rated for Mature players (17-plus) due to animated blood and gore, and animated violence.

Install: Easy. The game wants 400 megs of hard-drive space, but you must have a Quake III Arena installed on your system if you want to play Q3 Team Arena. And if you have the minimum installation of files, you need to have the CD in the drive to play.

Gameplay: 9. You will need to be on your toes, because the action happens at a frenetic pace. The only time you will slow down, is when your character is dead.

Graphics: 9. This program features matter that is definitely not everyone’s cup of tea, but it is very well put together.

Sound: 6.5. The taunts are a little lame, and the blasts and sounds of weapons discharging is retreaded material from other games (including Quake III Arena).

Difficulty: 9.5. Playing against the computer opponents in a single game cannot prepare you for the multiplayer game. There is actually some thought that takes place, and human foes – assuming the parties on the other end of that phone connection are human – aren’t very predictable.

Concept: 7.5. The team concept is quite nice, though the contests aren’t very original and all seem centered on charging into the enemy’s camp.

Overall: 8.5. This is a violent, violent game that targets reflexive ability more than cerebral. But it doesn’t presume to be anything but a frag-fest. In that regard it can’t be denied that this program does what it set out to do very well.