The ending for Quake 1 was not lame at all. For all you bloody nose gushing snobs, Quake was very revolutionary and groundbreaking at the time, back when all you teenage loosers liked simplistic, colorful, fun episodic games crammed with levels involving a finding the key, finding the secrets, killing all the enemies, butchering a big mean boss at the end, and reading little story descriptions with cheap illustrations on the side. I liked the ranger standing firm with a rusty axe after exploding Shub Nurggath's flesh into the lava (Why didn't id contiue with the original Quake storyline). My only complaint is that Quake should have had more creative bosses besides the giant demon or the mangled flesh faced witch. It's basically a higher tech version of Doom with more perspective, but it nonetheless changed the face of gaming, next to Duke Nukem 3D (which was a misogynist distortion of the original platform classic!
.... well, not really).
Back on topic, I haven't played the full version of Blood 2, but I know that the developers didn't take their Blood franchise seriously enough. Blood 2 could have tried follow Jedi Knight's level design, take inspiration from Blade Runner, Batman, Ghostbusters 1 and 2, improve upon the Litech engine, and at least go for a System Shock approach to the monsters. The story sounded exciting before the game was released. Why couldn't they have taken their game seriously enough to make a decent Blood 2 ending cinematic? (Personally, I wish they could have taken the Dark Forces 2 approach to cinematics: that is film cutscenes in live action, except with much better actors. Well filmed twisted B-Movie horror, with an excellent plot, and convincing and not to cheap monsters).
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