first person shooter

Chris Knight's avatar

This coming December will mark thirty years since the original computer game Doom was released by id Software.  Gadzooks!!  Where did all that time go to?!?  Well, Doom sucked me in hard and refused to release its grip.  There had been a few first-person shooters before, notably id’s own Wolfenstein 3-D.  But it was Doom that showed off the REAL potential of the genre.  And it broke the ground for other high-drama atmospheric entries in the category, like Star Wars: Dark Forces, Duke Nukem 3-D, and Quake.  Those in turn showed the way for more advanced games in the forthcoming generations, such as Halo and Call of Duty.

But no matter how advanced home computers and gaming consoles have become, my heart belongs to 1993’s Doom and its contemporaries.  Especially for how editable it was, and it seemed like everyone and their brother was creating WAD files containing new graphics ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

The techies at Waterloo Labs in Austin, Texas are putting “shooter” into the first-person shooter game… literally! Using accelerometers, a big sheet of drywall and computer triangulation, they’ve made it possible to play a FPS like Half-Life with actual firearms and other physical weapons!

Behold the carnage…

I’d love to play Doom like this, but knowing me I’d just wind up chainsawing the drywall to pieces not long into Episode 1 Mission 2 😛...

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Chris Knight's avatar

This morning I was having a workout on Wii Fit (here’s my initial review). My personal regimen right now is some strength training, some yoga and a lot of hard aerobic activity, followed by the “fun” stuff like the Ski Jump. That and the Ski Slalom might be the most addictive activities of the entire package… but Lisa swears that Bubble River will have you just as hooked.

Part of the aerobics that I’m doing right now is Jogging the long distance. It’s really clever how this works: you don’t use the Wii Balance Board at all. You just put the Wii Remote in your pocket (or if your pants lack pockets you can just hold the Remote in your hand) and then you start jogging in place. If you keep a brisk pace while swinging your arms in good wide circles you can work up a serious...

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