This past weekend I was busy playing video games. After being a professional video game tester for six years and two years after I left Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, different owner, multiple identity crisis), I’m finally getting back to being a “normal” gamer at home and playing for fun.

I finished playing SiN Episodes: Emergence (PC), a first person shooter that reminded me of Quake II when it first came out. The game was solid for the first half. I really needed a flashlight in some parts of the game that were too dark and re-adjusting the gamma on the monitor didn’t help. The second half of the game just fell apart because the A.I. was being stupid. At the bottom of one set of stairs, I tossed a grenade to the top landing to take out an A.I. that I suspected was hiding there and went up the stairs to find another A.I. waiting to ambush me even though I just turned his partner into hamburger. A point-blank headshot from the M90 took care of him. I’m looking forward to the next installment of this game.

Two other games I just started playing was Half-Life 2: Episode One (PC) and Resident Evil 4 (GameCube).  I suspect HL2E1 will be better than the SiN Episodes. The big challenge I have with RE4 is getting used to the third-person camera view and setting aside the 30- to 45-minutes of playing time needed to get to the next save point. I normally play in 15-minute spurts since my days—and patience—of playing a game for hours at a time are long gone. That might change when Caesar IV (PC) comes out later this year.