On Sunday, Sep 5, I finally went and bought Doom 3. Lucky for me, it was on sale at Fry's for $37.99.

At this point, I am up to the Enpro Plant level. The newest demons I have encounted are the flying heads. The first encounter with one of those was pretty cool. I have to say, Doom 3 is pretty fun, but my 2 year old computer lags a little bit playing it.

I have a Dual Athlon 1900, 512M RAM, and a GeForce4 Ti 4400 video card. I get 18 fps in demo1.

While playing, some parts are a lot slower than others. It seems like the opening scene of a level when you get out of the elevator are the slowest. In some places even look back at the elevator slows it down to a few frames per second. Also, being attacked by a few demons makes it go pretty slow.

When playing online, everything is fine until any action occurs, then it slows down and makes it hard to kill people.

I have dual monitors, so a couple times while I played, I put the task manager on the other screen and checked out the CPU and memory usage stats. While playing, it constantly uses about half of each CPU, and 150-300M of RAM. In the menu screen it uses about 80M RAM.

I would like to upgrade my video card to a GeForce 6600 when they come out, but I will have to wait for the AGP version.

The game gets it's scary atmosphere mostly by being dark, and you have to use your flashlight a lot. But you would think that in 2145, you could have a gun-light or some night vision. But then the game wouldn't be nearly as creepy.

Doom 3 has many Kiosks you can interact with. Some of these perform nessesary tasks in the game, such as opening doors or sealing a gas leak. Others run informational videos about Union Aerospace Corporation. And then there's Super Turkey Puncher 3. It's an arcade game I've run into a couple times in the game. You can walk up to it and play the game, which consists of punching a turkey until it explodes and a new turkey drops into the screen. The punching hand uses the same graphics from the original Doom. Neato.

I would like to see some mini games that use the Doom 3 engine to render. Maybe someone will come up with a mod that does that. More to come later...