Pulse Cannon
Michael O’Reilly
Wow a week goes by pretty fast. No time to stop and smell the roses, no time to look and see if anybody actually read my first column, no time for nothing but eating (sometimes) sleeping (maybe) and working (lots of that). Just enough time to turn around and see that it’s Thursday again. So ya, once again in case you missed last weeks column, I’ll be using this spiffy new column to detail my experiences in gaming in the past week while also encouraging you to send in your own wacky or humorous experiences. Send em in and maybe you’ll see your name in lights….on the interweb.
So anyway, onto the week in O’Reillyland gaming. This week was Doom 3, Madden 2005 and Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic.
I’ll start off by talkin about KOTOR for a bit. I already played through the game twice, back when it was first released on the Xbox. I recently got back into playing it as a friend of mine crawled out of the MMORPG rock he was living under and discovered it, so I got to see all the fun stuff you could do all over again, and that just got me
back into the game. I played light first and then dark the second time around, and this time Im just goin where my answers take me, not trying to do it light or dark. Anyway, I’ve realized just what a chore it is to play through Taris (the first part of the game) without your Jedi powers. Actually I figured it out the second time i played through, but I didn’t mind as much that time as I do now. I’m just about to kill Bendak Starkiller, so I know I’m not too far away from getting off the first rock, but it feels a bit tedious. Makes me wonder how some people can play through rpg’s over and over. It’s taken me months to want to go back and play this one for just a third time.
In sports, I go back to something that occured Friday, just before my brother returned Madden. I played through the preseason, and basically shut out everyone I played against after the first game. The Raiders sure made a killing out of picking up my blitz’s and picking apart my zone defence. Twice the buggers went deep on my cover 2 defence, and life Madden said that was a failed coverage. Guess who got cut there? After the Raider game though I didn’t allow a single point until last minute of the last pre-season game. This had me all cocky going into the regular season…where I promptly got hammered. I like that, it’s a nice touch when a game is so like reality that the preseason means just as little in the game as it does in real life. Another thing that caught my eye was how close Madden came to predicting the score in the first preseason game. In real life it was Raiders 33 49ers 30, while in Madden with me at the controls for the 49ers it was SF 33 Raiders 30. If thats a fluke then thats cool, otherwise it is really impressive. If it gets it right again next week I think I’m gonna use it to predict games I’m betting on…or maybe not.
So now we move onto the main event. The game many PC gamers have been waiting on for so long they have children now. Doom 3. The game I tried to finish Far Cry quickly for. So I got it and it installed, and actually ran on my machine. I did a little dance when that happened. New drivers from ATI made it run just a little bit smoother, so I was even more pleased. I get into the game and find it to be a very different experience from the previous Dooms. No longer a frantic frag fest, it seems to me to more closely resemble Resident Evil in the way you hunt down scary things and blow them away. In fact some of the same tricks that worked in RE work here too. Crouch in front of a zombified worker and blast him with a shotgun. One shot, no more zombie. There hasn’t really been anything that I would call scary just yet. Alot of
dark passageways and flickering lights aren’t doin much for the tension level. That might change as I run out of ammo, but for now my boomstick is loaded and I’m not takin crap from nothin. I will say that while it’s not scary, it definitely qualifies as creepy at times. I just know at some point I will see something i don’t care for. Till that time though, it’s shotgun shells for everyone. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition….
Since I have to be at work in 20 minutes I’ll bring this issue of the Pulse Cannon to a close with a reminder. Don’t take crap from no zombies. Adios!