If, like me, you’ve written somewhere in the area of 5,000 words to meet various deadlines over the past three days, I highly recommend Alien Arena as a way to stay sane. It’s an open-source first-person shooter that offers pretty solid texture and lightning, a humbling AI (I am still suffering the taunting computer voice repeatedly telling me in hard mode, “The bots have won. You will have to replay the level again.” Or maybe my fragging skills have atrophied.), and it runs quite smoothly on a mid-grade processor.

One thing’s for sure: you can never go wrong with robots and lasers as a diversion.