Occasionally my coworkers and I will engage in lethal combat at work. That's right, we fire up Quake 3 and have at each other.
I have a decidedly unfair advantage, because I am used to the control system used by the game. Quake 2 defaulted to a mode where moving the mouse forward or backward moved you forward or backward in the game, and your gaze always stayed level. Quake 3 uses "mouse look" mode by default, where moving the mouse forward makes you look down (or in Greg's case, up), and moving it backwards make you look in the opposite direction. Forward and backward motion is then controlled via the mouse buttons or keyboard. I had switched between the two methods years ago, but the other guys spend a lot of time looking at their feet (because they incorrectly push forward to move forward).
Our file server has been quite sick lately, which has given us the opportunity to play a bit more while waiting for files to be restored from tape. With any luck, the new file server that I ordered in response to our recent woes will put an end to the downtime. We splurged a bit more than usual to get one with redundant power supplies and disks, with the hope that we'll avoid catastrophic failures in the future.
With Quake 3, my machine is used as the game server host, and the other players share the program image from my CD-ROM drive. Since we are all connected via LAN, the response is very good, although arguably I have another advantage because my machine is the host. Such is life - I'm the one who shelled out for the game, after all.
One aspect of the game that was absent in Quake 2 is "the axe". In the original Quake, it was possible, but difficult, to terminate your opponent with an axe. In Quake 2, all of the weapons were ranged weapons, so there was no need to get up close and personal. In Quake 3, you have a "power gauntlet", which is essentially a glove with a circular saw mounted on it. If you manage to wax someone with it, the announcer calls out "Humiliation!" It's pretty funny.
When playing, an interesting conundrum arises: If you have your boss centered in your sights, should you whack him? My answer to this is "most definitely". I'm an equal opportunity hitman.
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