User:Hydrargyrum

My user name means "Quicksilver" — I'm a mercurial sort of fellow. I live in the San Jose, California area, i.e., in the Pacific Time Zone.

I recently pulled out my old copy of Quake II to have some fun, installing it on an old Windows 98 SE system I maintain, and while looking around the Web for a walkthrough guide, I found that most were of uniformly poor quality and were stored on systems where editing and corrections were not possible, except by petitioning an absentee or disinterested site owner. When I found StategyWiki, I was impressed by the quality of the walkthrough that had been started for Quake II, although it was woefully incomplete. The difference was that it's a wiki, and I can add to it and improve previous contributions.

Most game walkthroughs seem to be written by individuals who have spent too much time playing games and too little time honing their writing skills. The results are game guides rife with spelling, grammar and syntax errors, ambiguous sentences and hopelessly imprecise descriptions of where to go, where to look and what to do. Nonetheless, as I work on the Quake II Walkthrough, I am drawing on some of these resources for ideas and rewriting them in my own words. &mdash;HydrargyrumT @ 15:02, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Current activities
Thursday, April 14 2011 — I'm working on the Jail Area unit, fleshing out the Quake II/Torture Chambers map walkthrough.