I... Am... INTERFACED!

You know, it's a funny thing: I can actually feel the emptiness in the spot where my soul used to reside. Well, I could feel it until the tendrils of the internet worked their way into this newly excavated cavity, finally linking up with the already-existent wire cluster where my brain used to be. When a machine goes down, I know it instantly. When a site gets Slashdotted, I can feel it's pain. I am the internet. At least, that's the sort of feelings you start to have shortly after moving from dialup to broadbrain... um, I mean broadband. Fuck, I should really find out where in my brain the backspace key is.

At first, there were problems: Basically, the modem supplied by my ISP was a dick. It tried to tell my router what to do and, let me tell you, my router hates being pushed around. The modem wouldn't relent, however, so a couple of quick calls to the ISP brought a new, nicer modem that didn't try to tell anybody what to do. The router was in a bad mood for a couple more hours, obviously the bad-boy modem had said something that hurt router very deeply. After a little while though, router and modem got along like the best of friends, and my computers even joined the party.

First off, I played a 50 person game of Call Of Duty without any lag at all. It was beautiful, I almost wept. In fact, I did, but not before playing quite a few games of Far Cry, whose multiplayer wonders I could not witness while stuck in the dialup world. I started, as I always do, with a simple deathmatch; eventually moving on to team-deathmatch. It was a blast, but not half as fun as the Assault gameplay mode. I must have played half a dozen Assault games before finally calling it a night, and every one was an absolutely awesome experience. There's a strange, surreal feeling I get playing single-player Far Cry that's almost like deja-vu. I didn't expect this feeling to carry over into the multiplayer aspect of the game, but it does, flawlessly; and that rules.

Just to see how fast I could do it, I also downloaded a couple of UT2004 mods(it was damn fast, by the way) that I'm going to write about over the next couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that. Also, if anyone happens to see an ISP employee with my soul, grab that shit for me.