One of the greatest weeks of the year!

Why? Because this was the first week of the season that I'm wearing turtlenecks! Those who know me well know that I'm happiest when it's cold, and loooooove wearing turtlenecks. Kind of the opposite of Seasonal Affective Disorder, really. :-)

A quickie with Quake 4

I took a break from WoW to plow through Quake 4. Basically, Raven Software clearly had a design meeting where they said, "What if we make a game using the Doom 3 engine, but unlike ID we'll let everyone see the environment." Although pretty, the gameplay was fairly uninspired. Very much a straightforward run-and-gun first-person shooter, without much inspired enemy AI. I finished it in about 20 hours at the almost-highest difficulty setting (since the highest setting is "get hit with a spitwad and you die" which I didn't find fun). I didn't really find it at all challenging until the last 5 hours, at which point they started throwing a wider variety of powerful enemies at me in nearly-overwhelming numbers. My recommendation: give it a pass unless you've got 20 hours with nothing better to do.

Next I'm going to try FEAR, another first-person shooter, which is getting raves about the sophistication of the enemy AI and the quality of the plot.