This game makes me want to put my hair up in liberty spikes and set fire to a car.
Quarantine is a First-Person Vehicular Combat Game developed by Imageexcel and released by GameTek in 1994 for MS-DOS and the 3DO Interactive Multiplayer. It was part of the wave of first-person games that followed the release of the original Doom in 1993.
The game is set in the 2040s in a cesspool of a burg called KEMO City. Criminals roam the streets in armored hovercars, terrorizing citizens without fear of retribution. OmniCorp rules the city with an iron fist, via a massive wall around the city under the guise of a "defensive measure". The wall has only one -sealed- exit, so essentially the entire city is one big prison for everyone who lives within it, criminal or otherwise. Construction of the wall started off in 2029 and was completed in 2032.
Just prior to the events of the game, Omnicorp decided to test the behavior-altering chemical Hydergine 344 on the citizens. This chemical was supposed to pacify them, and was distributed through the city's water supply. Unfortunately, OmniCorp failed to predict the chemical's reaction to the stagnant water, resulting in massive brain damage and insanity in many citizens. More than half the population became crazed killers overnight.
You are Drake Edgewater, trash-talking, hard-drinking cab driver and one of the lucky few unaffected by the spreading virus. You drive a '52 Checker "hovercab", armed with an assortment of lethal weaponry. Your goal is to deliver passengers and packages for what money you can scrounge, buy upgrades, and eventually escape.
The game later received a sequel, Road Warrior, which featured largely the same gameplay but a more mission-based, story focused campaign. Neither of these should be confused with the films of the same names.
This game provides examples of:
- Armor Is Useless: Armor serves as a damage reduction, greatly reducing the damage you take as long as it's intact. However, Steel Armor, the first armor upgrade you get, costs $399 and can barely withstand three explosions. Given the fact that Kemo City is absolutely littered with mines, floating bombs, and psychopaths throwing molotovs, Steel Armor will barely last one job. The two later armor upgrades are much more reasonable in their longevity versus cost, offering the same damage reduction but being more durable in general.
- Arms Dealer: The Weapon King shops.
- Awesome, but Impractical: Most of the weapons.
- A Buzzsaw affixed to your front bumper? Awesome! But you bounce off other cars, sending both of you apart, making it difficult to stay in contact for a long period of time and inflict damage.
- A missile launcher? Great! But you need at least two missiles to kill another vehicle, and you only get 10 shots.
- A mine thrower that sends enemies flying when they hit? Very cool! But the mines move slowly, they don't inflict enough damage to justify using them, and they expensive and limited in supply anyway. They do have a niche purpose, though: if you need to clear someone out of your way, you can throw the mine and blast them upwards, then drive right under them.
- Upgrading your basic machine guns gives you an Uzi that you an use by looking out the side windows. You will absolutely never want to because looking out your window takes your eyes off the road, and the road is extremely dangerous.
- Bad Ass Driver: Drake.
- Bottomless Magazines: Averted. Every weapon has a specific ammunition pool, and some weapons have more ammunition than others. Your basic .22 caliber guns that you start with, for example, have 250 rounds, which are not shared with the Punisher minigun, which has 300 rounds.
- Car Fu: Not very effective here, curiously enough, as ramming other cars is as likely to damage you as them. Pedestrians on the other hand...
- A specific upgrade (the C4 Bumper) instantly kills any vehicle you run into. It only has four shots, however, and it's expensive to "reload".
- Chainsaw Good: The Thrasher, which is a hood-mounted circular saw that can rip apart vehicles and any hapless citizen that gets in your path.
- City Full Of Crazy
- Collision Damage: Averted; you don't take damage from running into other cars. That doesn't mean it's safe though: rebounding off another car is very likely to run you into one of the many, many explosive traps strewn throughout the city.
- Continue Your Mission, Dammit!: Subverted and justified. The various passengers you pick up for your Timed Missions will complain in an "are we there yet?" mentality if you pause to check your map.
- Cool Car: Your character drives a '52 Checkered Taxi very similar to the one in Escape from New York, though with added guns and Anti-Gravity lifts in place of wheels.
- Cut Scene: Road Warrior had these, in the form of comic-book pages. Typically, they involved Drake complaining about something. The 3DO and PC-CD versions of the first game had working full motion video cutscenes for both the intro and ending of the game.
- Death Course: Early in Road Warrior, Drake must negotiate a desert in the midst of a sandstorm, and filled with hostile tanks. His cab stands no chance in combat against said tanks, and the player's only option is to speed past them and hope you don't crash directly into one, thanks to the low visibility. They can't see you too well either, so they're firing wildly trying to hit you- and just might. And if you don't hurry, you'll run out of battery power.
- Drives Like Crazy: The mooks in their cars do this to you if you get in their way. You, too, can likewise do the same, though it's better to do it on pedestrians unless they wave their hands at you for a fare.
- Ejection Seat: You can eject your current passenger out of the car, while still moving. The Manual even comes with a handy table that shows the force of the impact in relation to speed (which serves as the Copy Protection). In some missions you have to do this with bombs.
- Emergency Weapon: Your headlight-mounted "Hood Guns" are fast-firing .22 caliber machine guns that will eventually kill anything: pedestrians die quickly, vehicles take several dozen rounds. You always have access to the machine guns, and can fire them in conjunction with one of your other more specialized weapons, but while the ammunition pool is generous, it is limited. You can upgrade to .33 caliber, .44 caliber, and eventually .50 caliber hood guns that are much more potent.
- Emergency Taxi: You spend the game driving one.
- Energy Weapon: The Fusion Boy is a fusion gun that fires bolts of energy. It has a Charged Attack that can destroy certain vehicles in one hit at the cost of draining 3 cells when fully charged. Not until the second level will you be able to get it from the weapon shops.
- Escape from the Crazy Place: The main goal of your player character, whose only means of escape are through underground tunnels that can be accessed only by OmniCorp passwords for completing all missions from the respective maps.
- Every Car Is a Pinto: Smashing into another car hard enough will cause it to catch fire (as will shooting it enough) to show that it's almost dead. Hoverbikes are incredibly prone to this.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: The city is full of psychopaths, and they're creative psychopaths. Expect to see mines and floating bombs, molotov-throwing pedestrians and heavily weaponized vehicles, and if you still feel safe after all that, the outer road of every zone has missile launchers. Even the things that aren't trying to kill you, like normal pedestrians and non-hostile vehicles, will get in your way, and possibly bump you into one of the many traps laying around.
- Expy:
- Although Drake Edgewater is hardly given any characterization, he's essentially Travis Bickle with an Iron Woobie streak who justifiably thinks himself as the Only Sane Man in KEMO city, and wants to get the hell out of the corrupt city for good which he eventually does.
- OmniCorp is a riff on Omni Consumer Products from RoboCop, complete with a near-identical logo.
- Gangland Drive-By: Probably the first video game to feature it long before Grand Theft Auto III. Purchasing the machine gun upgrade from the Weapon King shop gives you an Uzi SMG which allows you to fire out from the side windows of your cab to clean out both pedestrians and vehicles alike to make your life easier.
- Gatling Good: The Punisher (no, not that one [even though he probably will get wet dreams about the weapons and psychos in this game]) is a miniaturized Gatling-style revolver cannon that can hold up to 300 rounds. Then there's the even more powerful variant, the Banshee, which eats up ammo like a starved animal and will not appear until the third level.
- Glass Cannon: Armor upgrades aside, your car can dish out a whole lot more punishment then it can take. Keep moving or die.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Kemo City was always kind of a scummy city: despite being "the hovercar capital of the world", it was decided that policing the increasing and incessant violence was not worth trying, and OmniCorp stepped in with their titular Quarantine program to turn the city into a prison. Once they did that (and violence erupted from criminals and normal citizens now trapped in the city), OmniCorp then decided to test their Hydergine-344 chemical in the water supply, intending it to calm people down as it had in lab testing. But it reacted with something the polluted Kemo water and turned into a virus that drove people even more insane, and it's only getting worse.
- Gorn: This game was known for its gratuitous violence, causing a bit of a stir back in those pre-ESRB days.
- Hover Car: All the cars in the game use anti-gravity propulsion, save the tanks seen in the sequel. They are tied to a power grid embedded in the roads and run on batteries whenever they go off-road.
- I Shall Taunt You / Precision F-Strike: You can taunt at other people with a button that has you utter out, "Up yours!" However, this has absolutely no effect in gameplay, making this a curious novelty.
- Kill It with Fire: Your car can mount a hood-mounted flamethrower that can easily cook other vehicles as well as turning pedestrians into human barbecue. It won't be available until the third level, though.
- The low-level version, the Fire Belcher, is essentially a moderately powerful incendiary-tipped artillery launcher, available from the start of the game. Have fun trying to aim it, though.
- Lockdown: The entire city is a walled-in prison. And each district has access tightly controlled (as in: you're not going from one district to another without Omnicorp approval).
- Macross Missile Massacre: You can mount missile launchers for your cab, but only one particular version that is only available once you reach the third level can launch a missile which has the ability to split into multiple warheads that can ravage a vehicle in one hit depending on what vehicle you're facing, and it's rather pricey to get, especially its ammo.
- MegaCorp: The aptly titled OmniCorp, who use less than scrupulous methods of keeping KEMO City under control.
- Minimalistic Cover Art: And a really cool one, too; see above.
- More Dakka: In terms of bullet-based weapons, you have your "Hood Guns", a pair of fire-linked machine guns emerging from two of your cab's four headlights, and the roof-mounted "Punisher" Gatling Cannon. All of these can be fired at once.
- Multi-Platform: The game was functionally identical in both the DOS and 3DO versions, but the 3DO version included full motion video cutscenes featuring Drake in his cabnote . It also features an odd collection of tracks by Australian alt-rock bands that really don't sync well with the gameplay, although the game also includes the ability to play your own CDs instead.
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Nintendo Hard: Between the limited number of hits you can take (forcing you to spend a lot of money on repairs) and the sometimes miniscule monetary awards, not to mention that every single mission is a Timed Mission, this game doesn't screw around. Road Warrior was a little better about this. - Nitro Boost: A variation: the booster is powered by argon cells that cost a hundred bucks a pop when going to service shops. It can be somewhat useful for certain missions that you have to complete, especially given the sometimes short time limit in the missions.
- Penal Colony: More like Penal City, as KEMO City had a massive wall built around it by the MegaCorp to prevent citizens, criminal or otherwise, from escaping the city, presumably to curb the spread of crime.
- Ramming Always Works: Subverted. Ramming sometimes works. When all else fails and you run out of ammo, its all you have. You can end up taking tremendous damage however from some collisions so it's impractical, and on timed missions it's inadvisable. If you get the C4 Bumper, however, this trope is played hilariously straight.
- Save Scumming: Really, you're going to have to save your game quite often, as the game's mooks and traps can quickly cut through your car's armor like a hot knife through butter. Also, the missions can have a rather short time limit depending on how far your car is from the actual location.
- Scenery Gorn: You'd be tempted to think the graphics of the levels, for their time, would look rather crude and simplistic. Given that it came out not long after DOOM. However, as the first diverse level of the city appears, you're treated to an atmospheric Crapsack World where chaos is rife.
- Sequel Hook: The ending of Quarantine suggests that OmniCorp has taken severe damage to its assets after Drake had foiled their plans and escaped the city, and they vow to take revenge on Drake. Cue the plot of Road Warrior.
- Shotguns Are Just Better: You can mount a shotgun for your cab and it does pretty much what you expect a shotgun to be. Except it's not a Short-Range Shotgun and it skirts into Game Breaker territory thanks to its near-unbalanced power and dirt-cheap price for its ammunition. It is available once you get to the second level and appears in the later maps from that point on.
- The Stinger: After escaping the nightmarish prison city that is KEMO, the ending has the player character's hover cab running out of fuel that supposedly ran from the city's power grid and now is left stranded in the middle of nowhere.
- Super Drowning Skills: Fall into a body of water in the second and fifth (final, in the latter) maps and it's a Non-Standard Game Over. Justified, since you're in a vehicle and vehicles are not buoyant on water.
- The Immune: Drake himself, and anyone still sane enough to pay the cab fare.
- The Taxi: Quarantine was the original Crazy Taxi, long before Crazy Taxi came along. It would have been more aptly titled since this game has you gaining fares in a city run amok and your car equipped with the best weaponry the city can offer.
- The Virus: Hydergine 344, originally meant to pacify would-be criminals, fries your brain and turns you into an Ax-Crazy psycho.
- Timed Mission: Every single mission is this. Depending on how far the location is, you might end up with a frustratingly short timer while the city's layout can be very confusing if you don't check your map. Thankfully, the red arrow is there in the bottom right screen to help you.
- Also has some leniency in "normal" missions: if you run out of time to drop off your fare, then you lose $10 from your payout every second, which means you can still get a good payout if you have a high fare and just miss the timer. But story missions specifically the "kill a target", "deliver a package" and "blow up a building" have no such leniency: if you run out of time and then complete the objective, you'll get paid, but it will not count as complete and you'll have to do it again.
- Unintentionally Unwinnable: A horrible glitch can be triggered just before you fight the Hoverboy boss, by bizarrely looking at your own map of all things. Doing so registers the boss as 30km away from you (way outside the boundaries of the game's world), and his health also goes off-the-scale, making him impossible to engage, let alone fight.
- Watch the Paint Job: You may have a classic durable yellow cab with a wonderful array of on-board weaponry, but it is most certainly not invincible. You will get shot up to hell and back for just driving through the wrong neighborhood.
- Weaponized Car: Your tools of destruction include machine guns, a Gatling gun, a flamethrower, mines, and cruise missiles. And that's only a handful of weapons to start with, since there's much more as you progress on...
- What the Hell, Hero?: In the ending Drake unleashes the dangerous Hydergine 344 upon the outside, to give the civilized world a taste of their own medicine. Now the problem here is, that's infecting millions to billions of innocent people with a hate plague. This is supposed to be a punk game. Punks rage against the establishment, the corporations, THE MAN. Only thugs target the general populous indiscriminately. Then again, given how human life is valued so little in Kemo, this outcome was probably inevitable.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: You don't have a clear objective beyond "Escape the City", and even that is ill-defined. The second game mostly averts this.
- Wretched Hive: KEMO City essentially has no law enforcement, but plenty of criminals.
