Just Read: Kaleidoscope Century, John Barnes

[amazon.co.uk]
A man wakes up in a cabin on Mars at the end of the 21st century with a case of amnesia. Luckily, he left himself copious notes, and he's only lost bits of his memory. This book follows his attempts to work out who he is and how he got there. I quite enjoyed it, but it didn't really grab me - it's mostly a tour of a century's worth of future history, with little plot beyond that.

I am a dolt...

I thought that the Unreal Tournament 2003 demo didn't include bots. Well, it does, I just had a blind spot.

So, are they any good? After tweaking things so I get decent frame rate, a few hours' play reveals no obvious changes from the original UT bots. They still have a decent number of difficulty levels, which allows people to find something fun to play against. They're still too good at spotting visually obscure targets. They lack the levels of personality demonstrated by the bots in Quake III. They still miss in "inhuman" ways, generating a very random-looking scatter of link/pulse gun bolts, for instance, which makes them strangely dangerous at long ranges.

So, UT, but prettier. And none of the demo maps is as much fun as DM-Morpheus used to be...

One to buy on budget, then. By which time I should have a machine that can run it at decent resolution.