So, the Quake Live open beta has started today. Looks like today is not a good day to play.

My queue spot actually got higher as I was cropping this image and putting up this post – guess I’ll be playing Battlefield Heroes tonight.

As part of my Valentines Days gifts I recieved God of War, God of War II and Killzone. That’s right three old school PS2 games. With the God of War and Killzone sequals getting so much coverage, now seems like the perfect time for me to catch up on some more games that I’ve never played. Also, it’s nice to get three games and know that it won’t hit the wallet as much as say three new 360 titles. Thank you PS2 for helping us through these hard economic times.

So far, I’ve only put a little time into Killzone, since I’m going to work through each title before starting the next. Killzone, came out back in 2004 right around the time Halo 2 came out, in fact I think it was the same week. Since, I didn’t own a PS2 back then I didn’t really pay much attention. I do remember a fair amount of hype surrounding the game, can’t remember what the hype was about but, I do remember that the game didn’t quite live up to it in some reviewers eyes.

I’m only around thirty minutes into the game so it’s not fair to start judging it yet so we’ll have to wait and see how it goes. Maybe I’ll post a follow up after I make it through a couple of chapters. For now though it’s time to get back and fight off the invading Helghast forces.

It’s about time! I finally got a Quake Live beta invite. I got it earlier today so, I setup my account and installed the browser plug-in. Since, I was knee deep in work I left myself logged into the site and let the it cache around 280 megs of data. The data files are stored in C:Documents and Settings<profile name>Application Dataid Softwarequakelive.

Anyway, I had a chance to play through the ‘tutorial’ level during lunch. It started out very easy until, I had around 15 kills then the bot AI decided that to put up a fight. After that point, it was a hard fought game with the bot Crash closing the gap to 17-11. I also played a couple of short practice round on a few different maps. Practice rounds are easily setup with bots which will allow new comers to learn the map. Short games are nice too, ten minutes or ten frags – I could get used to that. I don’t think we’ll see too many short games during the beta but, we’ll see.

Replaying the tutorial level I found Crash remembered our previous battle and brought the fight right at the start of the match. After that all was left was to ruin my perfect standings in the game and join a live free for all match. It started off pretty going with my establishing a nice path around the map pretty quickly. At least that’s what I thought until some one who had obviously been playing Quake 3 since it was originally released. Going from zero to 15 in just a few minutes. Of course, part of his killing spree was hanging out sniping people with the rail gun – until I realized he was up there and ended that.

I’ve only seen one piece of advertising in the game so far and it’s an ad for a boxing match. I’m not sure it speaks to the demographic of the typical Quake player but, I’m no ad wizard so who knows.

I am seriously behind schedule on my game design project.  I think at least partly because I’m not really interested in doing an educational style game.  It’s not very exciting.  It kind of reminds me about when I found out I was on the team for the game that still says “shhhhh…..” over on the sidebar.  I was not very interested in the project, which made it difficult to work on.  I spent most of my time playing the still work in progress Guitar Hero for Wii.  Anyway, I’m going to buckle down this week and actually get some work done – I swear – and considering that it’s Friday already…

For the project I decided that I was just going to make a Pac-Man-ish maze style game in which the main character is attacked and then trapped by the evil “Energy Hogs”.  She then has to work her way out of several mazes while defeating the enemies.  She will be collecting power ups that will allow her to remove enemies from the play field.  Unlike Pac-Man the enemies are removed will not come back.  Once an enemies is defeated the player will see a short blurb on the joys of energy conservation – the message will display in a manner as to not cover the play field.

That’s all I’ve got so far – not very exciting – but, I’ll be whipping up a prototype tonight and continue to work on it throughout the weekend in hopes of coming up with something I’ll be able to turn in for a grade.  Of course that will probably not happen since I’m sure I’ll end up playing Left 4 Dead…