There's a sudden power surge at your house at 6pm when you're sitting on the couch, and the first thing you do is look around you in all 360 degrees of vision to make sure that nothing's attacking you.
[The rest of this post is boring game commentary stuff, stop reading here if you're uninterested.]
I'm probably around halfway through the game, and here are some more impressions:
-The attention to detail is among the best games ever made. Never is there dull scenery, items are placed everywhere to reward the curious, and there are so many things going on in the environment (TVs running, other people's emails / audio logs) that it's probably on par with Max Payne 2.
-As expected, it's a technical masterpiece. I can run the game with almost all the special effects turned on, 2x anti-aliasing, and get a solid 30 frames per second while the game looks gorgeous. Did I mention I'm running *medium* detail levels? You'd need a just-bought-it-yesterday Alienware system to run high quality comfortably, and just about any computer today is incapable of running Ultra quality.
-The game is
extremely psychological. Play it through on hard the first time you get it, otherwise it'll seem too easy. And you can't play this game like a tourist. The constant tension in the game is so high that you breathe a sigh of relief on load screens and you can practically feel the stress when you're not even playing.
-It's definitely the Doom experience all over again. I don't mean run-and-gun at this breakneck speed kind of experience. I mean the one where you're looking for somewhere to run out of desperation while you're on your last few bullets and you're sure that the enemies aren't stopping anytime soon. All the throwbacks (old-school monsters, weapons) are truly sweet.
-Multiplayer is a different story entirely. It wasn't the main focus of the game, so don't expect a heavily tweaked game or a lot of variety. In fact, there are only 5 maps. But then again, Quake shipped with 6 maps and Quake2 had multiplayer basically patched into the game, and those are two of the best multiplayer games of all time. This *is* the ridiculous run-and-gun game that the old-school Doom memories bring to mind. Turn on always run and you're constantly flying all over the place. I can't wait to start playing this against other people on LAN. It looks like it'll have a lot of depth though. Trickjump videos have already started to come out. Maybe it's all the similarities with weapons, and the q2dm1 remake, but deathmatch feels a lot like a very, very, very sped-up Quake2 deathmatch.
-Coop mods are on the way. Oh yes - this will be *ridiculous* with 4 players on Nightmare skill.
