Lately I have been playing Doom 3. The game sports a state-of-art graphics engine. It is second to none! The gameplay, however, does not innovate at all. It shamelessly falls back on the key hunt and monster ambush mechanics of the original Doom. New to the game, but far from innovative, are elements such as the abandoned-yet-mutant-infested space station story (first seen in Half-Life), the duck-and-cover enemy AI (first seen in Unreal) and tram vehicles (first seen in Half-Life). Also, the game is dark. Very dark. So dark it does not look good on my LCD monitor. I crank up the gamma, but then the bright colors are washed out.

In other gaming news publisher Namco Hometek Inc. announced today the upcoming U.S. release of Xenosaga Episode II: Jenseits von Gut und Böse will not arrive until February 2005. I enjoyed Xenosaga Episode I. The anime-inspired RPG set in futuristic world of space travel makes a fun break from the swords vs goblins dungeon crawl RPGs.