Decay's been wanting me to learn to play a computer game other than Dungeon Siege for a fair while ... so, one of my new years resolutions was to at least try my hand at playing any one of a gazillion first person shooters in Decay's catalogue of games ...

So, what did I do last night? Decay attempted to get me started on the FPS deal by loading up Quake III ... not quite from first principles but argh ... too fast!

Was a bit frustrating running around and losing where I was because the mouse had decided it wanted to aim up or down or generally not where I wanted to head ... then I spent the first 15 minutes holding shift key down so I'd be walking everywhere instead of running full-ball so I'd be able to use the mouse to aim where I wanted to go instead of crashing into everything! After some fiddling with the mouse sensitivity (down ... way down!), it got a little better and I managed to get through a map set on the "I can win!" level of difficulty, and without getting killed, or killing myself by shooting the rocket launcher at inappropriate times ... like when I'm facing a wall ... oops (: Then my arms got tired, so I stopped.

I've been having another go this afternoon, but I haven't actually run backwards, or left or right while trying to avoid the really quite stupid bot running about trying to let me kill it ... I can now run around and not crash into things generally, but I haven't mastered the art of stopping and shooting ... I tend to just run through the dude, by which time I've run out of cells for the plasma gun and I'm firing rockets into walls which are too close to me, which nearly gibs me into meaty chunks ... oops (:

However, I'm going to end up as cannon fodder if I actually play against real people, so no multiplayer matches yet! Methinks this is the beginning of realising Decay's vision where we'd be having domestic conversations in the talkboxes while playing <insert FPS of moment> ...

Update
I had another go at the running around and killing things this evening ... and now I'm expecting my mouse to tilt the screen all the time, instead of just in the game... this makes me freak out a little when I'm actually just node surfing about @ E2 and I'm afraid the text will tilt too far for me to read ... However. I managed to beat the second map's dude, but I did kill myself, and get killed a few times regardless ... I have problems finding where the dude has gone in the map ... I did attempt some use of the left and right strafe type movements ... backwards is still a bit lost on me ... Decay says he's glad he's not the only one who steers with head movements ... but it's not like I can help it!