Entries Tagged 'FPS' ↓

I recently gave Mistress S Left4Dead for Christmas and she finally got an opportunity to play it this week. She had a great time playing it and I had a great time watching her playing it. She’s the kind of person that gets very tense during zombie movies and flinches when the zombies lurch out of the darkness to chomp out the delicious salty brains of the protagonists. She’s also the kind of person that gets very tense in FPSes and moves her body left and right slightly as if she were dodging the shots being fired in the game. Combine zombies and FPSes and you get a situation where when zombie hordes attack she gives cute little shrieks and sometimes finds herself firing frantically at the ceiling, floor, or her teammates as natural anti-zombie panic responses kick in, then laughs at herself afterwards for being skittish.

This reminds me of something that I noticed in FPS gamers a long time back; that there is a spectrum of affective responses to being placed into this weird simulated combat situation and that part of becoming a skilled player is to desensitize yourself to the shock of being virtually shot at and the general mayhem in which you find yourself. Often people who play these kinds of games for the first time move their meat selves instead of their virtual selves as they try to duck and cover to avoid getting smacked in the gob by rockets, whereas really pro players like DA and Kharn, friends of mine who are veterans of various FPS clan matches, just cooly track their crosshair over their opponent’s polygonal form regardless of the psychological pressure. I’m somewhere in the middle, and have been for a really long time now. When I’m fighting people at medium ranges I’m cool as a cucumber, but when people are up in my face I get flustered, my arm becomes very stiff, my mouse movements jerk around, and I catch myself flinching a little as I try to track them at point blank range. I occasionally wonder if people have a limit to the degree that they can be desensitized and if this is part of the natural limit of people’s skill levels in FPS, just as much as their hand-eye coordination. If so, then maybe it’s actually good for my mental health that, even after so long, I’ve not been able to desensitize myself to virtually blowing my friends’ brains out at 3 paces.

There aint nothing better to do on a lazy Sunday than to game your little heart out. Things got rolling with a visit to City Hunter Bondi Junction by myself, Mistress S, Fluffy, and MadA. There we had the awful and typical experience of finding none of the stuff that we wanted set up on the computers and it taking a good hour of our paid time to establish that it didn’t work. We ended up complaining bitterly to the manager, who decently gave us free time, but it was still damn annoying. We switched tack and played Unreal Tournament 2004 in Mutant mode, where one player is the mutant who has to kill everyone else but gets souped up with speed and partial invisibility. I turned out to be in the FPS zone and won a good deal of the matches before we switched to Bombing Run, where teams compete to take a ball and put it in their opposing team’s goal. The instagib mutator made it ridiculously fast paced and a hell of a lot of fun. It hearkened back to the good old day of gibalicious deathmatch action.

After computer gaming I headed over to Cura’s for some board gaming action and got in another game of Starcraft with Danoot, MadA, Cura, and Illya. The game took 5 hours to complete including learning, which was largely due to Illya’s analysis paralysis and difficulty with the rules. The other caught on really quickly, but for some reason it just didn’t stick with Illya. Cura rushed Illya’s base but was repelled by a solid force of Zealots. Danoot expanded twice and so did MadA, taking advantage of the fact that Cura and Illya were not going for their naturals. I was too far away from everyone to do anything other than expand to my natural.

Z-axis switcherooing saw Cura and MadA suddenly become neighbours, with MadA’s home base totally undefended. MadA managed to pull his troops back home in time to stop any of Cura’s shenanigans. I snuck in a Zergling to kill random some workers, annoying MadA in the process. Danoot managed to hold a ridiculous 5 worth of control points and put himself neatly within 2 turns of winning, which I pointed out to Cura, who helped me punish him for his overextension, but not before he had managed to rack himself up 10 VPs.

With Danoot subdued, MadA was still in control of 3 planets with a large ground force. Illya attacked his baseless outpost and wiped out his expeditionary force. MadA streamed units into my home planet and assaulted my home base, killing my defenders but losing a lot of attackers in the process. I then counter-attacked and took back the base before the end of the turn, avoiding losing it. The final phase 2 event was drawn, putting us into endgame with both me and Illya achieving our special victory conditions, but I with more victory points I took the win.

The game was interesting because it was a lower tech game than any of the previous ones we’ve had, with much more constant fighting from start to finish. I managed to get to Ultralisks, but not until the final turn, and MadA managed to get Mutalisks, but they weren’t decisive since I had Hydralisks to counter them. As a result the combats felt a lot less one-sided than the Battle Cruiser vs Zergling fights that we’ve had in the past. I really want to try more mid-tech builds, in particular Dragoons and Reavers seem like they would be great. I still don’t see the point in building Scourge.

Last night I went along with a bunch of friends to CityHunter net cafe on Sussex Street. I’d discovered that they have both World in Conflict and Team Fortress 2 installed there and was keen to give them both a shot. We all rocked up at around 10pm and staggered off home after 5 hours of rip-roaring video gaming fun. We had none of the problems that had often plagued us at CityHunter, such as incorrectly configured installations, although several people’s machines crashed while playing WiC. It was a very satisfying gaming experience.

WiC was the hit of the night. Several people there had never played it before but quickly got the hang of things, especially MadAdam, who was running and gunning with his infantry in no time. We tried several different formats: All vs. AI, 4v2 and 3v3 and I think that ultimately 3v3 was best, but having 2 more players would have made it gold. The absolute best thing about the game is that it’s easy for people to just jump into and play. One of the big problems with getting a fair sized group of people to play most RTS games is that you have to wait for everyone to be ready, which isn’t true of WiC since you can just fire up a server and have people jump in when they’re ready. There’s also no player elimination, which is one of the most serious downsides of most RTS games, since it means people sitting around bored whilst waiting for the other players to finish.

I racked up some serious kills as infantry, which is now without a doubt my favourite role. The fact that you can counter any units (aside from artillery) by yourself and also hide in forests makes them great fun to play, if a little micro intensive. I particularly enjoy locking down a point then sallying out across the map in choppers or trucks to cause mischief, or paradropping behind enemy lines, hiding in forests, and causing mayhem.

Team Fortress 2 was also a hit, which made me very happy. Again, we had people playing who’d never played it or the original, but had a great time. With small numbers of players a sentry gun can really make a big difference in a map. Also, the map sizes for most of the conquest-style maps are quite appropriate for small teams, particularly the maps where there’s a roughly linear route between command points that need to be captured since they channel the small number of players into the same area. The highlight of the game was certainly the medic and double heavy weapons guy defense put up by Mistress S, Valenos, and I on the final control point of (I think) Well. Both classes are so much better than they were in the original QWTF. With her healing us, we were practically immortal and managed to hold out for a good 5 minutes of frantic capping attempts before they finally snuck through and won.

We also had a crack at Starcraft, which was aulde skewl. That game has not aged terribly well! The graphics were understandably dated, the resolution is pathetically low, and I couldn’t for the life of me remember what half the stuff in the game did. I remember did that battlecruisers rock though and also that there’s no such thing as too many SCVs, so I pumped out both like there was no tomorrow. I blitzed Valenos’ base and expansions before finally succumbing to a horde of carriers backed by arbiters. I’d completely forgotten that stasis totally rocks out and it effortlessly neutralized my carrier horde. IMBA!

There will certainly be a repeat performance and I particularly hope that WiC will become a staple of our gaming group.

My first Internet gaming addiction was to the amazing Quakeworld Team Fortress. After a 10 year wait TF2 has finally was finally released in December and I’d been wanting to try it out ever since, so yesterday I took advantage of the fact that The Orange Box costs half as much on Steam as it does to buy in a store and bought the damn thing. The latest incarnation of TF left me scratching my head at times, but it manages to scratch that nostalgic itch in a good way.

TF2 is a strange beast. It’s like the original but with the sharp corners rounded off, a funky paint job, and a shiny coat of lacquer. The number one major difference, beyond the obvious graphical changes, is that there are no grenades of any kind, off-hand or otherwise. When I first heard this I thought it wouldn’t be a big deal, but it turns out that it makes a big difference to how the game feels. As a soldier you have your RL, shotty, axe/spade, and nothing else. Gone are the days of throwing a nail grenade up onto a ledge to kill a sentry gun or timing your grenade so that it explodes simultaneously with your rocket impact. No nail grenades, concussion grenades, mirv grenades, or flame grenades. It seems like pyros get shafted hardest because they also lose their flame-rocket launcher, meaning that they have no effective way of taking out a sentry gun from a distance. Engineers come a close second in emasculation, having lost their devastating EMP grenades.

Graphically TF2 is a huge improvement over the original and its cousin TFC, with cartoon-like models which give the game a fun, slapstick tone. Adding to the fun is the fact that the game tracks who has killed whom and assigns nemesis status to people who’ve taken you out a lot, rewarding you with a cry of “REVENGE!” when you kill them. There are also UT-like announcements that pronounce people’s prowess when they kill a whole bunch of people in a row and the game tracks stats like how long you’ve been alive, how many people you’ve killed since dying, or how much healing you’ve done and presents you with a snippet of this information whenever you die.

The changes to the classes which jumped out most at me are the aforementioned removal of the pyros RL, addition of a teleporter to the engineer’s building options, removal of detpacks from the demoman, addition of a cloaking field to the spy, change to the way the sniper rifle works (it’s now fired by clicking rather than releasing the mouse button), and overhauling of the medic healing. Medics can now heal from a distance with a short ranged, auto-aiming healing gun and when they do so they build up a charge which they can expend to make themselves invincible for a time. Battlefield healing is now much more of a possibility than it was previously.

Is the loss of grenades a deal breaker? It certainly radically changes the play experience. The game still feels action packed, but it’s as though it’s been repackaged for a more casual audience. In general I feel that all the additions have been good for the game, particularly the spy’s cloaking field and the changes to medic healing, but I mourn the loss of everything that was taken out. I’ll certainly continue playing the game, but I’ll be yearning for the grenade spamming days of yesteryear.