Quad Damage



A Power Up that yields temporary boost in speed, power, or damage for a character. Most common in the First Person Shooter, Third Person Shooter, and melee fighting games. A mild version of the Invincibility Power Up, and cousin to the Nitro Boost.

Often accompanied by some sort of conspicuous glow or aura that lets players know who has the power up. Some games let the player pickup the Quad Damage after killing the player who holds it. These factors tend to make the player holding the Quad Damage a priority target.

Named for one such item in the first Quake game, which does exactly what the name implies (except in 3, where it only triples the damage). Later appeared in Unreal Tournament, Serious Sam and subsequent Quake iterations.


 * The original Doom had an item called Berserker pack, which would not only allow players to do as much damage with their fists as they would with the rocket launcher, but also make them rip and tear enemy guts for the rest of the level.
 * Doom 3: Resurrection of Evil featured a rechargeable artifact that would stop time, make the player invincible, and exponentially increase the player's attack power.
 * Duke Nukem 3D had the "steroids", which, when activated, increase running speed, jumping distance, and melee damage with the kick attack. It also returned you to normal size if you had been hit with the Shrink Ray.
 * Unreal Tournament 2003 introduced the adrenaline meter. When filled, by your actions or by finding pickups, it allowed a player to enter a button combo for a specific bonus: speed, extra damage, extra armor or regenerating health.
 * All the Unreal games had the UDamage; a floaty-rotatey gold or purple double-damage powerup vaguely in the shape of the letter U. (Unreal only had a toggled power-amp inventory item which only affected energy weapons.)
 * Oni's health pack, the hypospray, would also trigger a special overdrive mode if it raised the health of the character over 100%.
 * Grand Theft Auto - At several points in the third game, as well as Vice City and San Andreas, you can find an "adrenaline pill". If you pick it up, everything slows to a crawl for a brief time, and when you punch anyone, they literally go flying twenty or so feet backwards, usually dying on impact. Unfortunately, the pill cannot be picked up and used somewhere else, so its effectiveness is somewhat limited.
 * This can be enabled by a cheat without the everything-slowing-down side effect. The results are hilarious.
 * Note that the adrenaline pill is not normally available in San Andreas (most likely due to the strong anti-drugs theme of the game), only available through mods or trainers.
 * Grand Theft Auto II had some "Fast reload" and "Double damage" pickups, which do exactly what they say.
 * Monster Hunter had an extensive list of power-ups the player could brew to temporarily boost his stats, have infinite stamina, or even extend the length of his or her health meter.
 * Heretic and Hexen featured the Tome of Power, which not only powers up all your weapons, but changes the way they functioned. For instance, a Tome-powered pistol (excuse me, that should be "Elven Wand") shoots out a shotgun-like spread of pellets, and your chaingun (sorry, "Dragon Claw") shoots out large orbs which shoot bursts of pellets in all directions.
 * Eternal Darkness plays with this a little. A Functional Magic spell (Enchant Item) provides a boost of attack power to any weapon, but only if you cast the spell using the alignment that beats the enemy's in Elemental Rock Paper Scissors. Using the wrong alignment will either result in a very tiny bit of extra damage, or hardly any damage at all.
 * Played perfectly straight with the rune, though, which provided bonus damage against absolutely everything.
 * The Smash Ball in Super Smash Bros Brawl, which allows a character to perform a Final Smash, is like this. In particular:
 * Bowser and Wario's Final Smashes are both temporary Quad Damage effects: with Bowser's being a large increase in reach and knockback and Wario's being a large increase in speed and mobility.
 * 's Final Smash is like this too, giving him for a little while.
 * The 2*Damage utility from Worms not only doubles damage, but also doubles the blast radius and launching power of the chosen weapon. If you have a Super Weapon on hand, you can easily destroy a third of the map on that turn, along with either overkilling or drowning any worms there.
 * Slightly done in Final Fantasy VII with the Quadra materia, which let you cast the connected magic materia 4 times in a row at a weaker than normal power (usually about 75%).
 * Final Fantasy VIII has Rinoa's 'Angel Wing' limit, which greatly increases the damage she does with magic at the cost of her using random spells... usually spells of the Standard Status Effects variety or Scan. The selection can be improved by simply emptying her stocked spells of any but the most powerful magic, at the expense of her stat junctions.
 * This one could actually be turned into a Game Breaker by giving her nothing but Meteor and defensive/support/curative spells, none of which she would cast. If you boosted her Magic and Speed, she could easily deal absolutely absurd damage, easily one of the three best attacks in the game.
 * Final Fantasy VI had a similar item, but for weapons - the Offering turned the typical Attack option into four successive attacks. It's also possible to simultaneously equip the Genji Glove to hold two weapons at once and get four attacks with each one. At high levels this is sufficient damage to kill any non-physical-immune enemy you encounter including the final boss.
 * The black orb dropped as a reward for a large-enough Combo in Drakengard grants you a massive damage boost, with a black-and-red trail from your weapon being the visual cue.
 * Painkiller used the Black Tarot mechanic, where players could complete optional challenges in levels to get new cards, which were places using gold collected in the levels. Two types of cards, Silver and Golden cards. Silver cards were permanent, meaning they lasted through the entire level, but there were only two slots for them. Golden cards had three slots, and could be activated one per level. (More with the right Silver cards.) In fact, one of these is a literal quad damage card, and with a card that doubles your attack speed, it's possible to get effective octuple damage.
 * There's also a skull powerup which temporarily removes many weaknesses of many weapons (for an example, making shotgun accurate).
 * The Spirit Command "Valor" in the Super Robot Wars series, which doubles the damage. The original Japanese name for it is "Nekketsu" which of course means "Hot Blood". Several of the "Official" games in the series (i.e.: those that have licensed series'), also has "Soul", which raises the damage to 2.5 (or, in older games, to 3x).
 * TAGAP has a Quad Damage powerup which causes your weapon to fire 4x the usual number of bullets per shot. The manual lampshades the improbability of these kind of powerups, stating that it is "based on alien technology and obviously designed after spending too many nights at the arcade, so stop asking how it works, okay?"
 * In Pokémon, several moves have the effect of boosting the Pokemon's attack, special attack, speed, or critical hit rate. These stat boosts only last until the player switches Pokemon. There are also a few items (X-items, berries, etc) that can give the same temporary stat boosts, though most held items have effects that last the whole battle.
 * Team Fortress 2 has critical hits, which, while not generally triggered at will by a map-specific power-up like most entries here (generally a chance for one is rolled every shot taken, with more damage done prior yielding higher chances), can be triggered by a Medic wielding a fully-charged Kritzkrieg. It is available in power-up form, mind, but only on the Halloween maps, where killed players drop buckets of candy that briefly give players crits.
 * Certain usable items can also grant brief moments of crits or mini-crits, with Scout being their most notable users. The Crit-a-Cola gives you infinite crits for a brief amount of time, but also causes any hit landed on you to become crits. The Sodapopper (which is apparently made from a Crit-a-Cola) grants you moment of crits after you run a certain distance.
 * Vay has the Thyxaal spell. It has one of the highest MP costs of any spell in the game, but it grants any ally (usually Sandor) a massive strength boost for their next attack.
 * The Nazi Zombies mode in Treyarch's Call of Duty games has "instakill", causing all damage to be lethal for a short amount of time.
 * Lineage 2 has Soulshots and Spiritshots (Including it's "Blessed" variation), they're wasted depending on the weapon (though they're bough in thousands usually) and are divided in grades (no-grade, grade D,C,B,A and S).
 * The Elixir Soup in The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker doubles Link's attack power until the next time he is hit by an enemy or hazard. The Fairy Tears and Rare Chu Jelly have a similar effect in The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess, but only for a few seconds.
 * Blood has the Guns Akimbo powerup. It allows you to fire two weapons at once, doubling your firepower.