First-person shooters are awesome.

The title says it all: first-person shooters are just about the best thing ever. I'm totally addicted to them!

I went to my friend Moonway's house this morning, and he showed me a game compilation CD that he had won in a drawing at his Chinese school. The disc contained about 40 games of various genres, such as puzzle and adventure. They were all shareware, meaning they included only a portion of the content available in the paid versions. Funnily enough, some of the games didn't even work at all.

Out of the those that did, the one that caught our attention early on was a first-person shooter called Doom. For those unaware, it was the game that had gained notoriety following the Columbine shootings this past April. I don't want to sound too morbid, but we probably wouldn't have paid too much attention to it if it wasn't for the shootings.

Learning the controls involved trial and error due to the lack of manuals. In the case of Doom, the two of us spent a good three minutes looking for the "jump" key before figuring that jumping was not possible in the game. We then spent a couple more minutes trying to figure out how to open doors (hint: it's not by shooting at them) and interact with other objects. In the end, I don't think we even got past the first stage - and that was on the easiest difficulty level. There were a few other shooters as well, such as Duke Nukem 3D and Wolfenstein 3D, but they were also pretty hard.

It wasn't just first-person shooters; Moonway and I also tried Brainstorm, a puzzle game involving multi-colored arrows, and God of Thunder, an adventure title starring the Norse god Thor. However, I couldn't help but come back to the shooting games. There's just something so addictive about them.

Up until now, I had never known 3D shooters could be so much fun. Oddly enough, I didn't care much for them when I played Quake and the Nintendo 64 version of Turok: Dinosaur Hunter a few years ago. I guess times have changed.

In other news...

I'll be taking a summer English class at Archbishop Mitty High School starting next week. It doesn't sound very exciting, but the cool thing is that Moonway will also be taking that class. So at least we'll get to hang out more.

Currently playing: Doom (shareware version)