Aural pleasures
This brings me, sort of, to the game music. Now, I have a history of absolutely loathing in-game music even when it's pretty good (for me, for example, Fluke's 'Six Wheels On My Wagon' CD is still the soundtrack to Half-Life as I couldn't bear to listen to the game music), I just don't like having music getting in the way of my sound-effects and if the music for the game is coming out of the same speakers as the effects then that's it for me. Obviously, you good readers out there aren't all like me so in the interests of science I left it on while playing RS and I have to say that it's not bad at all. I'm not saying that you're necessarily going to be humming it as you walk down the street (although it has snuck in there a couple of times) but it's well suited to the game and even has the decency to mostly leave you alone while playing - although it does have a really irritating habit of popping up at really crucial times, which is to build tension I guess, but does, in fact, have the effect of making me feel like someone's just put a cloth bag over my head. Personally, I see this as being something of an attempt at a cross-over between computer games and action films (which is something that should be left well alone, in my opinion) where you have moody, atmospheric, music popping up at tense moments in the game, which is all well and good in a game like Silent Hill 2 where the intent is to cause you to favour clothes from the brown section of your wardrobe, but in a game like this all it does is mask the sounds of the terrorists and muck up your timing. I reckon that maybe a lot of game designers don't take account of the fact that the character in the film can't actually hear the music. Still, I seem to be a fairly lonely voice on this one, so I'll have to grudgingly say that the music is pretty good and leave it at that.
For those of you who get lonely playing against a computer all by yourself there are a number of multiplayer options including the usual deathmatch, team deathmatch, and a couple of variations on capture the flag as well as co-operative gameplay, where you get to gang up on the computer controlled terrorists. The manual doesn't actually call these multiplayer missions deathmatch, team deathmatch, capture-the-flag, and so on as that would be a bit crass for a tactical shooter, but the gist is basically the same. There is some originality in that in the capture-the-flag scenario the 'flag' can either be a computer controlled hostage or a player who needs rescuing and that adds a bit of interest to the same old humdrum theme. Personally, I'm absolutely abysmal at deathmatch style levels and the best that I can say for them is it gives me plenty of time to read the manual really thoroughly while I'm waiting to be respawned. For this reason I can't really speak for that side of the game, but the co-operative modes are a lot of fun - when you can find fellow deathmatch abstainers to play with (and there really aren't all that many of them as a rule).