Cable companies are genius. Moving would actually be a pain in the ass if not for the glorious and divine light of the cable companies to grease the gears of transition and make everything all better. I don’t know where they come up with their policies, but they are clearly designed to make transferring your service to a new residence as pain and hassle-free as possible. Really.

Ugh.

Regardless, I’ve finished comics through next Monday, so they’ll auto-update while I circle around the dark side of the moon this weekend. If the brilliant bureaucracy that is Comcast doesn’t have my cable up at the new place by then, I should at least have my office set up to some degree and I can crank out some comics and find somewhere to upload them from. Because, you know, I’ll have electricity at least.

I’ve been playing the beta for Call of Duty 4, and what started as a general “Eh, this is kind of cool”, has grown on me by leaps and bounds. It’s nice to see the modern war setting, because I’m really getting sick of WW2 games. Not that modern war is any less over-done, but it does seem like you have more options with it.

The kill-cam is there, one of my absolute favorite features from the Call of Duty series. Sometimes you just really want to know who the fuck killed you and how.

There are ranks and attached unlockables, somewhat similar to BF2142, or Rainbow Six Vegas. And they’re good unlockables too. Not only do you get weapons, attachments and camo choices, but you get “perks” to choose from too. You can use all of these to create your own classes.

Perks really spice up the game, I feel. A lot of them are fairly standard, more health, longer sprint, bullets do more damage, etc. There there are some that really effect your play style. There’s one that makes you invisible to enemy radar, obviously great for snipers.

One of my current favorites is called Last Stand, and when you get shot and fall to the ground, you pull out your sidearm and get a few more seconds of life. It’s great because a lot of the time your enemy won’t expect it, so he’ll see you go down and turn his attention to something else, and then you empty your clip into him. You’re still doomed, but at least you have a chance to take someone with you.

I played a game last night where me and this guy were facing off, and he shot me, I fell to the ground and pulled out my handgun and shot him. He fell down, and he also had this perk equipped. So we’re both on our backs, 30ft apart at opposite ends of the hallway, bleeding to death, each emptying our pistols, each praying to end the other before we bled out. It was pretty cool.

I could go on for a few more paragraphs, and it’s only a 3-map beta with ranks capped at 11 (I don’t know how many there are, but I saw some stuff that’s unlocked at rank 55). Suffice to say, I’m pretty psyched about this game. It’s still a couple of months away, but it actually falls on a pretty good week. By early November I expect I should pretty much have any Halo 3 out of my system as far as FPS’ are concerned, and Call of Duty 4 will fill a nice niche for a few weeks there before I lose every molecule of myself to Mass Effect on November 20th.