I just realized that if I don't post something today, I'll have had no posts in November. So without further delay here's some stuff off the top of my head!
I had a birthday. I'm at least 24 years old now, or so I'm lead to believe. I don't feel any more awesome, but then again I was very, very awesome to begin with.
At some point in this month I bought Fallout 3, which is a post-world-war-III game set in the wasteland surrounding what was once Washington DC. The game is essentially a linear story that doesn't have to be strictly followed, in addition to a set of side quests larger than the main story. It plays like a first-person shooter with some RPG stuff thrown in, not unlike System Shock 2, but it is decidedly more like an RPG than System Shock 2 ever was.
I had never played any of Bethesda's other games (which are apparently very similar in gameplay to Fallout 3), nor any of the previous games in the Fallout series. That didn't affect my enjoyment of the game whatsoever. The atmosphere is wonderfully emersive and, most importantly, entertaining.
The main quest is pretty short, though. I'm not much for exploring aimlessly nor for just wandering around in outdoor environments looking for things to kill, both of which this game has in spades, so I admittedly didn't do even half of the side quests the game has to offer simply because I never came across them. This is the same reason I don't like MMORPGs like World of Warcraft. That's not to say that I don't like the idea of sidequests, it's just that I don't like having to work so damned hard to find interesting things to do in the game.
All things considered, the game was worth the money and entertained me for at least a weekend. What more could a guy want?
Another game I picked up at some point in November is Left 4 Dead, an oddly named game from Valve. It's a playable zombie movie. That's pretty much all there is to it. I'm not a big zombie fanatic like some people I know, but regardless of that the game has great co-operative gameplay. You and three of your friends can spend roughly an hour shooting zombies in a campaign. If you're feeling particularly murderous you can play in a versus mode and fight the humans as a special zombie.
Left 4 Dead has been pretty good at holding my interest as long as I'm playing with people I know. With random people on the Internet the game can get really hard really fast due to general incompetence. The game uses a Halo-3–like "matchmaking" system, which doesn't allow players to pick servers explicitly, but rather picking a random server that matches some specific criteria. Not only does this increase the number of poor players you'll encounter while playing the game, but the matchmaking system does not permit filtering by ping response, meaning matchmade games are usually ridiculously laggy. Actually, even on a local server between just two players the game can be pretty laggy. Must be something about transmitting the locations of hundreds of frothy-mouthed zombies across the Internets.
While there hasn't been a Daily WTF programming contest this year, at least there is a Coder Challenge subforum there which recently has had a couple of very interesting threads which have spurred some good discussions in the wide realm of computer science. It's enough to remind me how much I loved working through these kinds of problems in university and how many like-minded individuals may be lurking around these vast Internets. I'm hoping for another WTF contest, I am definitely pleased by coders trying to stump each other with thoughtful problems.
That sums up all the interesting things that have happened this month in science. Hopefully I'll be more interesting in December.