Out of what was mostly boredom, I recently loaded up two of my games from years ago: No One Lives Forever 2 (NOLF 2) and Quake (that's Quake 1 for you kids out there). And I have to say that I've had a tremendous amount of fun running through them again. I had forgotten how nice the NOLF 2 engine looked (especially at a high resolution), but I did have it crash on me a number of times. I'm not sure what that was all about, but I got through those hiccups and finished the game just a few days ago. The game combines two playing style genres: sneaker style (like Thief or Splinter Cell) and full fledged action. Both styles complement one another nicely, and make for an incredible experience. And I had forgotten how hilarious the dialogue is throughout the game; clearly this game has one of the best scripts of all time.

Quake is what I'm plowing through at the moment. So many wonderful memories are flooding back to me as I make my way through each of the four episodes. QuakeWorld was my first experience with online game play, and I got pretty hardcore for a while. Every level I pass through brings back fond memories of late-night capture the flag tournaments. And oh the fun I had with Creeper CTF! For those who don't know, Creeper was a capture the flag variant that added a number of new runes to the game. And each rune gave you a different power: some runes altered the way weapons worked, others altered the amount of health or damage you could take, and yet others would give you new objects (a grappling hook for example). And it was an incredibly fun and addictive mod to play. One particular moment has always stuck out in my mind:

I was playing Creeper CTF and had obtained the Sun rune (which makes the nail-gun ammo super-hot, doing more damage). I also had the double-damage rune (players could carry two runes at once, if I remember correctly) and had loaded up my super-nailgun. With both the double-damage and Sun runes, my nails did four times the damage of the normal nailgun! I then picked up the quad damage in the map we were playing, raising my damage to an incredible 16 times the normal level. Needless to say, in the span of about a minute I scored somewhere from 40 to 60 frags and captured the other team's flag in the process. It was the single greatest online gaming moment I think I've ever had. Wow ... what great times!