So I got my shit together woke my flat mate and said take me to Quake 4. this happened, I located the EB store, traded my money for Quake 4 and went home and installed it.
I was sitting there during the loading screen hoping for some sexy eye candy with the intro (running 1024x768 high quality) and boy did I get the goods, the intro is fantastic, it's been done very well and looks brilliant, something along the lines of strahip troopers but better.
After the intro loaded, I was thinking now we're getting into it wonder what the gameplay is like; first thing I noticed was omg there is no stamina bar! the next thing I noticed was how big the map was, it was outdoors with battle sounds all around the environment sounds fantastic if you can support OpenAL and have a 5.1 speaker system.
Now the gameplay which everyone has been bitching about in reviews is total bollocks, those guys were playing .gifs or something as this is the best action game I've played in a long time it leaves Doom 3 for dead, forget Doom 3, think Quake 4, non-stop intense action.... if you play it on hard you're garunteed a huge arse kicking, but it's done well though it's not 100 monsters kicking your arse, it's 4-5 strogg screaming their battle cries as they come running towars you to stretch your meat a little bit. (I'm still early in the game but everything is perfect so far) And no it's not dark, black dark and black like Doom 3, it's well it and it has colours in the lighting which really contrast well in the einviroment, very nice use of the realtime lighting engine. Of course the flashlights, so far I only have the Blaster and the Machinegun and both have flashlights, and yes the Blaster is fudgin sweeeet it's rappid fire with a charge shot which has quite a kick. Also Medics are your friend

Now onto the actual graphics of the game, I was happy to see that it wasn't a shiney house of wax. it's metallic, nicely done metals ,sexy in all it's glory. The special effects like the strogg evaporting with a borg like affect is uber cool. The Strogg models themselves are very very well done too, the best looking alien monsters I've seen for quite sometime the architecture of the maps so far is pretty impressive I'm very glad that Quake 4 has delieverd to me what I've been expecting it to be for years if you had any doubts that this game was going to suck, well think again buddy, this game
fucking rocks my jocks!
Z