This past weekend, my friends and I got together for a LAN party, as we do every few months. Karen was kind enough to let me bring her computer as well, so one of the people with less-than-cutting-edge machines could play.

We were all set up by about 9:00 Friday night, and played until sometime after 5:30 AM the next morning We grabbed a few hours' sleep, then went right back to it, taking a break at around 6 PM to go have dinner at an Indian restaurant; then we played again until 5:00 Sunday morning. We slept long and hard, with most people waking up around noon, and then went back to it until 8:30 that night. A good time was had by all.

We played Deus Ex, Jedi Knight, Empire Earth and Medal of Honor: Allied Assault. We had some other games lined up (I bought Half-Life especially for the weekend), but we spent the majority of our time playing Jedi Knight and Medal of Honor.

Medal of Honor was amazing. It's the best-looking game I've ever seen, and great fun. One of our favorite maps was "Stalingrad", a bunch of bombed-out apartment buildings surrounding a courtyard. Everyone selected sniper rifles, and we had a blast popping up in windows trying to find someone on the other team before they found us. We also went through "Remagen" with bazookas on both sides. I know a lot of seasoned players are contemptuous of "rocket n00bs", but when everyone's using them, it pretty much evens things out.

Did I mention that the game looked amazing? I absolutely loved it -- trees swaying in the wind, great lighting effects, photorealistic textures, excellent character animation, and realistic movement (you can't make a 100-yard dash in five seconds, like you can in other games). Thinking back to what games were like ten years ago, and then looking at today's crop, it's hard to imagine what things will be like in another ten years.

But perhaps using MOHAA as the yardstick isn't a fair comparison. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, which uses the same gaming engine as MOHAA, isn't even in the same league. The first mission of the RtCW demo wasn't bad — you're escaping from a cell in the eponymous castle — but the second mission turns into a Quake wannabe, with zombies and other monsters. MOHAA restricts itself to the real world, and depicts it beatifully.

I rarely play games, and have only ventured into Internet gaming once (with Deus Ex), but MOHAA was such fun that I've got to see what it would be like on a 32-player server.