It was the night of a hundred demos. Well, what else are you going to do with gaming night surprisingly switched to Friday night, and only four of the nerdy people plus sometimes Bunny. We tried out Vietcong, Codemaster's Race Driver, and then again tried Bandits: Phoenix Rising.

Vietcong is different from the other first person shooter games that we have played. There is an abundance of foliage. Trees, bushes, scrubs, they are all over the place. You can walk just about anywhere. So unlike CounterStrike, where when you hear someone you know that they can come from this direction or that direction, in Vietcong, you hear someone, and they can be anywhere, and that's great. The drawback of the game is that it was choppy on most of the machines, even our high end machines.

I had fun in Codemaster's Race Driver. The demo allowed us to race against each other with three different sets of cars. One set of cars had a higher top speed. In another set, the cars handled really well. The final set were in the middle range of top speed and handling. Every race was strictly racing. No guns, no mines, no nothing, but you could still run into other cars. What did we learn from all this racing? As in real life, this new kid, who likes to use the name DeathStar, can't drive at all. Did you know, that last week this kid gets a speeding ticket on Monday, and then he gets another speeding ticket on Tuesday. In Race Driver, DeathStar has a problem with crashing. The maps all have a few hairpin turns and you have to really slow down before the turn or off you go crashing into the wall. Every single time DS went into a turn, we would hear tires squeal and then a crash. It was pretty funny.

We ended our demo run with Bandits: Phoenix Rising. I love the idea of finally playing a Car Wars type of game. We played this game a little last week and I was eager to play it again. I forgot though that I suck at this game. The only part of this game that I was good at was running away from BadKitty. An ironic twist is that DeathStar kicks butt in this game. I think his strategy was to run into the side of his opponent and then to keep shooting him with his machine gun. If you get right next to someone, they can't shoot you because the gun on top of their car can't depress far enough to hit you. So, with DS doing good and me doing bad, I think that's the last we will see of that game.

All in all as the Jar of Shame continues to grow, we are still looking for the next greatest game. Various gaming magazines predict that the new games coming out in the next couple of months will be very good. Until then, we still have our CounterStrike. And if Pisser can ever figure out how to configure his router and server to allow internet players to play on our server (which BunnysFan insists can be done) maybe our far away friends can join us.

--Mischief