Finally got to check out the anti-air rocket thingie the other day, so here comes another installment of 2142 Best Weapons.
The big tank-gun thing
Better than the default, but nothing totally amazing. It's main utility is in not having to guide your shot, so you can pop up, fire, and get back in cover fast. It does a bit more damage than the default rocket, for instance if you shoot a tank in the ass it will blow up immediately, instead of giving the crew a few seconds to bail out and rob you of your kill.
Overall, a solid upgrade. Worth taking.
The Anti-Air rocket launcher thing
Complete and utter shite. I would have been so pissed if I wasted an unlock on this turdfest.
Up side: it's fire and forget, and seems to be fairly accurate. You get tone, shoot your rocket, and that's it.
Down side: it does almost no damage. You'd be better off spitting at your foe. I put two rockets into a hovering aircraft and took off maybe 25% of it's health. And of course you only get two rockets per clip, and it takes 100 years to reload. So to actually destroy anything you'd need to find something that was already badly injured, or come across a mentally retarded pilot who'd wait around for the ten minutes it would take to blow up his plane with your rubber-band shooter.
CRAP! stay away!~
Monday, November 27, 2006
Monday, November 20, 2006
2142 Gripes
Ok, I've played enough hours to start making a list of complaints about the platform and the gameplay.
Titan mode
The big selling point in differentiating 2142 from its predecessors is almost unplayably laggy when the action shifts from battling over the missile silos to attacking or defending the titans themselves. And it's much, much worse if a commander moves the titan around after the shields are down and combat is raging.
Word is the 1.5 patch will fix titans in place once their shields go down, which is all well and good...but how hard is it to figure this stuff out before release? You think it would be clear after one round of playtesting, and the fix doesn't seem that hard to impliment.
Oh, and then there are the various ways to grossly inflate your point totals in titan mode, also fairly obvious and seemingly easy to fix.
Minimize to Desktop
Very annoying randomly occuring bug where the game minimizes itself during mapchanges and you have to ctrl-alt-delete, quit out and restart to get back in the mix.
There is also a variation of this that afflicts me, where the game just flat-out DISAPPEARS after you click the 'join' button. This usually happens once a session, sometimes more. Annoying in the extreme.
Crappy hit detection
Only occurs when trying to shoot someone who's hopping around like a bunny rabbit, which is a popular form of defense once players figure out it largely immunizes you from bullets. Although I'd prefer my futuristic combat minus the side order of aerobics, it's not game breaking because turn about is fair play. They hop, you hop, it evens out. Stupid looking, yah, lame, yah....but not game breaking.
Rudimentary collision detection
Snowy pointed this out to me, and now I see it everywhere.
Not a problem with vehicles, but individuals basically just run through each other. This gets really annoying on those maps where a bunch of guys are trying to get their knife badge and running around in close quarters, it's like fighting ghosts.
Vehicles are obviously a big focus here, but it would have been nice if they spent more than 20 minutes on collision detection for the infantry.
Sticky Textures
Probably once a night I'll get "stuck" on something and killed, either a box, or the edge of a building, or some rubble. I've had this problem in some other games, but never to this extent. Annoying.
Still, overall it's fantastically enjoyable. Buggy as a beehive, but great fun in spite of it all. Here's hoping the 1.5 patch adresses more problems than just the titan lag.
Titan mode
The big selling point in differentiating 2142 from its predecessors is almost unplayably laggy when the action shifts from battling over the missile silos to attacking or defending the titans themselves. And it's much, much worse if a commander moves the titan around after the shields are down and combat is raging.
Word is the 1.5 patch will fix titans in place once their shields go down, which is all well and good...but how hard is it to figure this stuff out before release? You think it would be clear after one round of playtesting, and the fix doesn't seem that hard to impliment.
Oh, and then there are the various ways to grossly inflate your point totals in titan mode, also fairly obvious and seemingly easy to fix.
Minimize to Desktop
Very annoying randomly occuring bug where the game minimizes itself during mapchanges and you have to ctrl-alt-delete, quit out and restart to get back in the mix.
There is also a variation of this that afflicts me, where the game just flat-out DISAPPEARS after you click the 'join' button. This usually happens once a session, sometimes more. Annoying in the extreme.
Crappy hit detection
Only occurs when trying to shoot someone who's hopping around like a bunny rabbit, which is a popular form of defense once players figure out it largely immunizes you from bullets. Although I'd prefer my futuristic combat minus the side order of aerobics, it's not game breaking because turn about is fair play. They hop, you hop, it evens out. Stupid looking, yah, lame, yah....but not game breaking.
Rudimentary collision detection
Snowy pointed this out to me, and now I see it everywhere.
Not a problem with vehicles, but individuals basically just run through each other. This gets really annoying on those maps where a bunch of guys are trying to get their knife badge and running around in close quarters, it's like fighting ghosts.
Vehicles are obviously a big focus here, but it would have been nice if they spent more than 20 minutes on collision detection for the infantry.
Sticky Textures
Probably once a night I'll get "stuck" on something and killed, either a box, or the edge of a building, or some rubble. I've had this problem in some other games, but never to this extent. Annoying.
Still, overall it's fantastically enjoyable. Buggy as a beehive, but great fun in spite of it all. Here's hoping the 1.5 patch adresses more problems than just the titan lag.
2142 Review Review: Armchair General
clicky clicky
Not much more than a puff pieces that skims the surface of the game and decides that it's pretty fun, even if it is a lot like Battlefield 2.
ZZzzzzzzzz.
Two paws down.
Not much more than a puff pieces that skims the surface of the game and decides that it's pretty fun, even if it is a lot like Battlefield 2.
ZZzzzzzzzz.
Two paws down.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
2142: on the topic of unlocks
One thing I love about the Internet (among many, many, many, many others) is the access granted to the thoughts of foreign gamers who's English skills lag a bit behind their enthusiasm for sharing insights.
For example, this exceptionally entertaining post on the unlocks for the support class.
I urge everyone to read it in its gorgeous entirity, but here are my favorite bits for the ADD crowd:
on the EMP grenade
on the Ganz HMG
Really excellent stuff.
For example, this exceptionally entertaining post on the unlocks for the support class.
I urge everyone to read it in its gorgeous entirity, but here are my favorite bits for the ADD crowd:
on the EMP grenade
Go up to an emey and yell in his face: "I HAVE NO FEAR FOR I AM FEAR INCARNATE!!!" then run back, in a second your enemy is dead, ok rewind!!!!!!!!
on the Ganz HMG
ARGGG the GANZ!!!! why i dont like this: TOO CRAZY TO FIRE WITH though great dammage i say the accuacy is well... pitifull, well i might be bugged but i heard its suposed to be stable, arggg skrew it NEXT UNLOCK!!!
Really excellent stuff.
2142 Best Weapons: Support
I'm too lazy to copy and paste the disclaimers and warnings, so just scroll down to the Best Weapons: Assault post below for your daily dose of iron and vitamins.
Ganz Heavy Machine Gun
I know the name of this one because it sucks so hard it stuck in my mind. What a piece of crap! I does a bit more damage and has slightly better armor penetration than the default LMG, but compensates for these advantages with a much slower rate of fire and crosshairs that take FOREVER to dial in after you stop moving.
The fun I've had with this doorstop of a weapon is chewing up jeeps.
It makes fairly short work of them, delivering a nice surprise to those a-holes who spend their time zipping around looking for infantry to run over.
Other than that, it's about as useful as a cocktail shaker at an AA meeting.
Rating: Avoid At All Costs
The Shotgun
It shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with my CounterStrike career that I dig the shotty. It's pretty much the same as other examples of the genre- devastating at close range, slow rate of fire, and if you miss your first shot you'll probably get gunned down. But it's a viscerally satisfying weapon, and it shines in the close quarters of city maps.
I like it, but perhaps more than other weapons YMMV. It's an acquired taste, one that I have an unquenchable thirst for.
rating: PUMP-A-LICSIOUS!
Ganz Heavy Machine Gun
I know the name of this one because it sucks so hard it stuck in my mind. What a piece of crap! I does a bit more damage and has slightly better armor penetration than the default LMG, but compensates for these advantages with a much slower rate of fire and crosshairs that take FOREVER to dial in after you stop moving.
The fun I've had with this doorstop of a weapon is chewing up jeeps.
It makes fairly short work of them, delivering a nice surprise to those a-holes who spend their time zipping around looking for infantry to run over.
Other than that, it's about as useful as a cocktail shaker at an AA meeting.
Rating: Avoid At All Costs
The Shotgun
It shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with my CounterStrike career that I dig the shotty. It's pretty much the same as other examples of the genre- devastating at close range, slow rate of fire, and if you miss your first shot you'll probably get gunned down. But it's a viscerally satisfying weapon, and it shines in the close quarters of city maps.
I like it, but perhaps more than other weapons YMMV. It's an acquired taste, one that I have an unquenchable thirst for.
rating: PUMP-A-LICSIOUS!
Monday, November 13, 2006
2142 Best Weapons: Assault
I've had experience with most of the unlockable weapons now and figured it was past time to shoot my mouth off.
First, a suggestion:
Unlocks are precious.
If you roll with a decent squad you should be getting plenty of temporary battlefield unlocks- when you get close to your dream weapon, give it a test drive. Weapons are a matter of taste and the ones I think are fantastic might not suit your temperament or play style.
And a disclaimer:
I don't know the names of any of the guns except the SCAR 11, so pardon my clunky descriptions.
Unlockable Assault Weapons
the light machine gun at the end of the 'medic' tree...the Voss?
I don't like it. It takes forever to kill anything and the accuracy is nothing to write home about. The large capacity clip is nice- if you were looking to suppress the foe in a squad environment so your teammates could wipe them out it might serve. But I felt slightly cheated after burning an unlock on it. IMHO the default AR is superior in every way except ammo capacity.
the heavy assault rifle
Oh yeah baby, now you're talkin' my language!
You'll probably want to use it on single shot most of the time for reasons of accuracy and ammo conservation, because both the recoil and the rate of fire are crazy. But it puts big holes in things and it has fantastic single shot accuracy. And if you get up close and personal where you can let it rip full auto, you can MOW.
Two paws up, with a stern warning about fire control, because it burns through clips like an alcoholic frat boy burns through cans of crappy lite beer.
First, a suggestion:
Unlocks are precious.
If you roll with a decent squad you should be getting plenty of temporary battlefield unlocks- when you get close to your dream weapon, give it a test drive. Weapons are a matter of taste and the ones I think are fantastic might not suit your temperament or play style.
And a disclaimer:
I don't know the names of any of the guns except the SCAR 11, so pardon my clunky descriptions.
Unlockable Assault Weapons
the light machine gun at the end of the 'medic' tree...the Voss?
I don't like it. It takes forever to kill anything and the accuracy is nothing to write home about. The large capacity clip is nice- if you were looking to suppress the foe in a squad environment so your teammates could wipe them out it might serve. But I felt slightly cheated after burning an unlock on it. IMHO the default AR is superior in every way except ammo capacity.
the heavy assault rifle
Oh yeah baby, now you're talkin' my language!
You'll probably want to use it on single shot most of the time for reasons of accuracy and ammo conservation, because both the recoil and the rate of fire are crazy. But it puts big holes in things and it has fantastic single shot accuracy. And if you get up close and personal where you can let it rip full auto, you can MOW.
Two paws up, with a stern warning about fire control, because it burns through clips like an alcoholic frat boy burns through cans of crappy lite beer.
Sunday, November 12, 2006
How To Disable the 2142 Intro Movies
courtesy of Ivan, via one of his shadowy online resources:
It's ridiculous that the game doesn't let you esc past them like every other computer game I've ever played, but this little trick works like a charm.
Disabling the Intro Movies
The introductory movies to BF2142 add to the startup time for the game, as well as the memory usage. To disable them permanently, you can't use the +restart command line command, as this no longer works. I also don't recommend deleting the movie files - this may cause problems with verification of client information on certain servers and/or with Punkbuster. So the simplest method to skip the startup movies is to go to your \Program Files\Electronic Arts\Battlefield 2142\mods\bf2142\Movies directory and rename all the .bik files to something else (e.g. rename EA.bik to EA._bik). This will prevent these movie files from loading at startup and take you straight to the main login screen. Alternatively, you can create a new folder in the same directory (with any name you wish) and move all the movies there to achieve the same effect.
Note that renaming or moving the Titan tutorial movie titan_tutorial.bik will cause problems if you try to view the Titan Tutorial by clicking the 'Titan Tips' option under Multiplay, so I don't recommend renaming this file - you can leave it as is, as it does not add to the startup time in the full version of the game.
It's ridiculous that the game doesn't let you esc past them like every other computer game I've ever played, but this little trick works like a charm.
2142 Squad Unlock Review
courtesy of our very own Von Demon via the Tips, Tricks & Tactics thread on the Tard Forums:
-[ORD]Von Demon
I've been using the Squad Leader upgrades for awhile so here are my thoughts on the equipment effectiveness.
1. Deployable Spawn: Need a minimum of one additional squad member to deploy. Great for back capping as it allows instant redeployment close to the objective but make sure to keep it out of any potential arty retaliation on your flag cap attempt. Also a must have for Titan assaults or flag/silo defense when you’re squad is outnumbered and prone to quick deaths. This may be common sense to some but I must admit it surprised me at least twice. Make sure to keep away from ANY over hanging structures like cat walks or protruding roofs as they will block the ability to drop.
2. Targeting Drone: Need a minimum of two additional squad members to deploy. This is my favorite toy. It does a great job of tagging nearly all hostiles with a red diamond for your squad, if not all teammates in the local area to see. I haven’t figured out why all enemies aren’t tagged but it’s not 100%. The best results I’ve had is when I activate it and them jump into a walker. Talk about racking up kills. The other team must be completely surprised as I pop around a corner firing and strafing their entire squad as if I know exactly where they’re hiding Wink This advantage is only magnified when I have a support gunner. The targeting drone is also highly effective a close urban maps. Note: Don’t bother trying to hide with this floating over your head Wink
3. SMG Drone: Need a minimum of three additional squad members to deploy. While I love the idea of the added firepower, the effective range and damage dealt is far lower than I expected; similar to the deployable sentry gun. In fact, the best success I’ve had with this item is after I’m dead as it often grants me a post mortem on my assailant. Another characteristic it shares with the sentry gun is it’s desire to shoot at enemy through walls inside the Titan. It doesn’t actually kill the bad guys, it just TKs unfortunate members of my team who inadvertently step in it’s kill zone. Where this drone really shines is with flag/silo defense, especially when combined with the sentry gun and my support machine gun. If someone makes the mistake of getting too close to my staked out position, they're dead before they see me.
-[ORD]Von Demon
Thursday, November 09, 2006
shitty server alert: clan [NC]
I've played there a few times with no problem, then today I got kicked by a stat-padding prick named [NC]Skunk because I got tired of orbital strikes, went recon and blew up the radar dish.
Skunk was commanding, and camping at their base in a tank, so I was promptly blown up.
Even though commanders cowering at the base in armor that would be more use at the front is lame, fair play for getting me.
The problem was that he then KICKED me right after I respawned.
In my short 2142 career I've run across some ghey rules, but this is the first time I've been kicked for doing something that was explicitly approved in the server message, where they had some fluff text about Recon being allowed to "blow up assets" as long as they didn't shoot anyone who didn't fire on them first.
Poking around online, I found some other examples of their childish behavior.
Another server to add to my growing ignore list.
Skunk was commanding, and camping at their base in a tank, so I was promptly blown up.
Even though commanders cowering at the base in armor that would be more use at the front is lame, fair play for getting me.
The problem was that he then KICKED me right after I respawned.
In my short 2142 career I've run across some ghey rules, but this is the first time I've been kicked for doing something that was explicitly approved in the server message, where they had some fluff text about Recon being allowed to "blow up assets" as long as they didn't shoot anyone who didn't fire on them first.
Poking around online, I found some other examples of their childish behavior.
Another server to add to my growing ignore list.
Wednesday, November 08, 2006
New Old Video Card
Glocks' Upgrade Altar, Artist's Conception
Kudos to Snowfarmer for not only offering up his old video card to the Upgrade Altar, but shipping it out with such alacrity it arrived today, just in time for my weekend.
Sure, a 9800 Pro 256 may not be cutting edge, but it's a substantial and welcome upgrade to my current card.
Plus, it's AGP, which perfectly suits the slightly archaic motherboard demands of my aging system.
Thanks again Snowy- I'll be looking for you tonight.
Assuming, that is I can figure out how to open up my got-dam 1st generation Dell Clamshell case.
Tuesday, November 07, 2006
2142 Grenades
battlefield 2142 grenade, artist's conception
Does anyone else get the feeling if a butterfly flaps its wings in China, the grenade you've just thrown will spontaneously veer off course like a boomerang, or hit the ground and bounce 20 feet, like a Superball?
I can't be the only one wrassling with these damn things...
Saturday, November 04, 2006
Review of a Review
2142 review from bit-tech.
random comments:
The screenshots make me wonder what game they're playing. =(
Vehicles, vehicles, vehicles...blah. The walker and the hover tank are neat, the rest are OK I guess.
No comments on the similarities to BF2, since I didn't play enough of it to generate an opinion. I'll just say I like 2142 and have been playing it constantly, and I played BF2 maybe three hours over the several months I had it installed. My response to the reviewers query "is it better than BF2" is a hearty YES.
I disagree.
Titan mode is both too complicated AND too ambitious for this old Tard.
But I agree 100% with his following comment:
True. The only reason I play titan is that you can accrue a HEAPING ASSPILE of career points with very little effort. Between Titan Defense and Titan Assault points you can rack up a massive score even if you're playing lone wolf.
I agree, and this is one of my complaints with many modern FPS games. They provide SO MUCH of everything that the experience lacks granularity. I've played a ton of this game over the last week, and I can't really remember any individual engagements. Contrast with the more limited in scope Counterstrike, where scarcely an evening went by without some kind of memorable encounter or event.
It's telling that disasters stand out in greater relief than accomplishment- my Walker screwup, or accidentally shooting a helicopter full of teammates.
I'm skipping the graphics page, it would just depress me.
I don't really understand anything on the sound page either...not surprising, since the last sound card I bought was an OEM Soundblaster Live! card back when 5.1 support was state of the art. All this chatter about X-Fi is Greek to me.
This bit I disagree with:
Yes, they're annoying.
But they give you a competitive edge.
Leaving both languages enabled can give you valuable audio information about who's nearby.
Conclusion:
He likes it, but admits it was a lot like BF2 and complains about EA's ridiculous server problems.
I also like it, didn't play BF2 that much so the similarities aren't bothersome, and also decry EA's shoddy server performance.
Overall, pretty good review, if a bit shoddy on the prose style.
random comments:
The screenshots make me wonder what game they're playing. =(
Vehicles, vehicles, vehicles...blah. The walker and the hover tank are neat, the rest are OK I guess.
No comments on the similarities to BF2, since I didn't play enough of it to generate an opinion. I'll just say I like 2142 and have been playing it constantly, and I played BF2 maybe three hours over the several months I had it installed. My response to the reviewers query "is it better than BF2" is a hearty YES.
Titan mode is a triumph for me. It takes a well known formula and spruces it up without being too complicated or too ambitious.
I disagree.
Titan mode is both too complicated AND too ambitious for this old Tard.
But I agree 100% with his following comment:
you slog it out with the other team and in the end one or the other side will watch a titan ship blow up. It doesn't really matter if it's yours because ultimately you're playing for points. You're playing for points because you're an addict. An addict like me.
True. The only reason I play titan is that you can accrue a HEAPING ASSPILE of career points with very little effort. Between Titan Defense and Titan Assault points you can rack up a massive score even if you're playing lone wolf.
What moments were memorable? None in particular, the only impression you have is of the overwhelming battlefield experience.
I agree, and this is one of my complaints with many modern FPS games. They provide SO MUCH of everything that the experience lacks granularity. I've played a ton of this game over the last week, and I can't really remember any individual engagements. Contrast with the more limited in scope Counterstrike, where scarcely an evening went by without some kind of memorable encounter or event.
It's telling that disasters stand out in greater relief than accomplishment- my Walker screwup, or accidentally shooting a helicopter full of teammates.
I'm skipping the graphics page, it would just depress me.
I don't really understand anything on the sound page either...not surprising, since the last sound card I bought was an OEM Soundblaster Live! card back when 5.1 support was state of the art. All this chatter about X-Fi is Greek to me.
This bit I disagree with:
Also turn off the foreign voices by selecting yes on English VO, those voices are incredibly annoying.
Yes, they're annoying.
But they give you a competitive edge.
Leaving both languages enabled can give you valuable audio information about who's nearby.
Conclusion:
He likes it, but admits it was a lot like BF2 and complains about EA's ridiculous server problems.
I also like it, didn't play BF2 that much so the similarities aren't bothersome, and also decry EA's shoddy server performance.
Overall, pretty good review, if a bit shoddy on the prose style.
Wednesday, November 01, 2006
NWN2 diary/trailer
I haven't checked it out since I don't have sound at work, but apparently it shows gameplay with voice-over from one of the devs.
Of course, said voice over in a previous trailer nearly made Ivan & Gordo lose their respective lunches (something about how faithful the game was to 3rd generation D&D rules...I think it overloaded their geek capacitors), so you may want to approach with caution.
As a bonus, I think I've found Gordo's dream game....thank me later, dude. =D
Of course, said voice over in a previous trailer nearly made Ivan & Gordo lose their respective lunches (something about how faithful the game was to 3rd generation D&D rules...I think it overloaded their geek capacitors), so you may want to approach with caution.
As a bonus, I think I've found Gordo's dream game....thank me later, dude. =D
Tuesday, October 31, 2006
Most Humiliating FPS Screw Up of All Time
Was on with Vinnie, Bravo & Mac last night, and Vins reminded me of my promise to post the grim tale of my worst ever FPS screw up. Being a Tard of my word, here it is.
So, I'm in a squad with Doc, Mac and some strangers on that one desert map where it's raining. The only vehicles are two mechs and some dune buggys. Spotting the walker at our base after a respawn, Doc and I clambered aboard with great alacrity.
Doc's driving, and having a rough time...we end up getting hung up on a walkway. He tells me this is his first time behind the wheel of a walker by way of explanation, so I suggest we swap seats. I'm no Mario Andretti, but at least I've had some practice. Plus, Doc has to be a significant upgrade in the turret given my notoriously dyslexic aiming skillz.
So we switch, I maneuver us free and head out to get us stuck into some fierce AK-SHOWN.
At least.....that was the plan.
Problem one, I don't know the map.
So what I assumed was a shortcut through a hole in the fence turned out to be a dead end- a path that followed the edge of a harbor, with no exit big enough to afford egress for our lumbering mech.
Ok, no problem, we'll just turn around and go back, right?
Embarrassing? Yeah...but not fatal.
Except that the mech isn't exactly the nimblest vehicle in the game, and it turns out that the path were on is thismuch too narrow for to make a 3-point turn. Halfway around, one of my 'feet' met empty space and we toppled majestically into the harbor.
Ask anyone with more than a few minutes of trigger time in the perilous, grim arena of the future battlefield what the most volatile substance in the universe is.
100 times out of 100 the answer will be water.
We bailed out in time to avoid the violent explosion of our super-sophisticated war machine, were trapped in the harbor, bobbing around like (heavily armed) apples in a barrel.
One way was the out-of-bounds marker, with it's punitive threats. On the other side was a sheer wall, too high to scale. I swam around a bit, finding no means of escape.
Ok, no problem I think. I'll just suicide and respawn.
I do...and ten seconds later I'm back in the drink, because Doc is the squad leader and I set him as my spawn point.
Wait, who are all these OTHER guys in the water with us?
Why...the rest of the squad, of course!
Who had also selected Doc as their spawn point.
=(
To sum up the fiasco:
I kick Doc out of the driver's seat because I'm so much better at the wheel, take us down a dead end, drive us off a cliff and blow up our mech, then trap our entire squad in the water while the enemy runs rampant, capping flags and partying hard with our liquor and women.
For sheer carnage, nothing tops CW TK'ing the entire team in Ghost Recon.
But for pure embarrassment & humiliation I think this misadventure takes the cake...
So, I'm in a squad with Doc, Mac and some strangers on that one desert map where it's raining. The only vehicles are two mechs and some dune buggys. Spotting the walker at our base after a respawn, Doc and I clambered aboard with great alacrity.
Doc's driving, and having a rough time...we end up getting hung up on a walkway. He tells me this is his first time behind the wheel of a walker by way of explanation, so I suggest we swap seats. I'm no Mario Andretti, but at least I've had some practice. Plus, Doc has to be a significant upgrade in the turret given my notoriously dyslexic aiming skillz.
So we switch, I maneuver us free and head out to get us stuck into some fierce AK-SHOWN.
At least.....that was the plan.
Problem one, I don't know the map.
So what I assumed was a shortcut through a hole in the fence turned out to be a dead end- a path that followed the edge of a harbor, with no exit big enough to afford egress for our lumbering mech.
Ok, no problem, we'll just turn around and go back, right?
Embarrassing? Yeah...but not fatal.
Except that the mech isn't exactly the nimblest vehicle in the game, and it turns out that the path were on is thismuch too narrow for to make a 3-point turn. Halfway around, one of my 'feet' met empty space and we toppled majestically into the harbor.
Ask anyone with more than a few minutes of trigger time in the perilous, grim arena of the future battlefield what the most volatile substance in the universe is.
100 times out of 100 the answer will be water.
We bailed out in time to avoid the violent explosion of our super-sophisticated war machine, were trapped in the harbor, bobbing around like (heavily armed) apples in a barrel.
One way was the out-of-bounds marker, with it's punitive threats. On the other side was a sheer wall, too high to scale. I swam around a bit, finding no means of escape.
Ok, no problem I think. I'll just suicide and respawn.
I do...and ten seconds later I'm back in the drink, because Doc is the squad leader and I set him as my spawn point.
Wait, who are all these OTHER guys in the water with us?
Why...the rest of the squad, of course!
Who had also selected Doc as their spawn point.
=(
To sum up the fiasco:
I kick Doc out of the driver's seat because I'm so much better at the wheel, take us down a dead end, drive us off a cliff and blow up our mech, then trap our entire squad in the water while the enemy runs rampant, capping flags and partying hard with our liquor and women.
For sheer carnage, nothing tops CW TK'ing the entire team in Ghost Recon.
But for pure embarrassment & humiliation I think this misadventure takes the cake...
Monday, October 30, 2006
l337 asshole alert
{tcb} clan.
Hopped on their server just now and was confused by a message about "no armor or ban!".
I mean, I don't like vehicles so I can see the logic...but why play a Battlefield game if that's your attitude?
Anyway, long story short, I took 'armor' to mean, uh, ARMOR, y'know.
Tanks n' stuff.
So I hop in a dune buggy and go tearing up the hill to get into the mix, ignoring the walker parked invitingly by the spawn exit (since it was Armor, by any definition).
I get to a contested flag, kill some {tcb} guy with the turret, hop out and kill another one with the SCAR (in spite of his spirited impression of a Mexican jumping bean)...and get booted, with the message "NO ARMOR read the server rules nub".
Checked their site, was unsurprised to find out they're a CS clan...hah!
This is probably karmic payback for all the doadfags I've banned over the years who are their spiritual brethren.
I did get a couple of laughs out of the experience:
before booting me for the hideous crime of driving a jeep in a Battlefield series game one of the admins was whining about how he barely had time to play because he had to kick so many people.
Helpful Hint:
if you'd rather game than babysit, don't make ridiculous rules that you explain very poorly.
And I found these nuggets of brilliance in their recruitment form (yeah, they're that kind of clan, they have 'junior members' and everything- the really l337 ones get to have a + in their tag, loser recruits wear the R of shame and 'junior members' have a -):
The bar is real high when they have to specify No Cheats with a handful of exclamation points. =D
(And how would you demonstrate a broadband connection? Turn your head and cough?)
Anyway, everyone is advised to avoid the {tcb} Ranked server, unless you want bad CS flashbacks to those unhappy times when South was down and you had to play on random pubs with the unwashed.
Oh, the irony...just checked out their Server Rules.
Check rule #1:
HAH.
What dictionary do you figure they're getting their definitions from?
/edit
In the interst of fairness, maybe I just ran across a couple of bad apples. It's possible that the main CS branch of the clan actually does adhere to their stated principals of fair play and open arms to new gamers. But I'd still suggest steering well clear of their 2142 server, because it's run by infants.
Hopped on their server just now and was confused by a message about "no armor or ban!".
I mean, I don't like vehicles so I can see the logic...but why play a Battlefield game if that's your attitude?
Anyway, long story short, I took 'armor' to mean, uh, ARMOR, y'know.
Tanks n' stuff.
So I hop in a dune buggy and go tearing up the hill to get into the mix, ignoring the walker parked invitingly by the spawn exit (since it was Armor, by any definition).
I get to a contested flag, kill some {tcb} guy with the turret, hop out and kill another one with the SCAR (in spite of his spirited impression of a Mexican jumping bean)...and get booted, with the message "NO ARMOR read the server rules nub".
Checked their site, was unsurprised to find out they're a CS clan...hah!
This is probably karmic payback for all the doadfags I've banned over the years who are their spiritual brethren.
I did get a couple of laughs out of the experience:
before booting me for the hideous crime of driving a jeep in a Battlefield series game one of the admins was whining about how he barely had time to play because he had to kick so many people.
Helpful Hint:
if you'd rather game than babysit, don't make ridiculous rules that you explain very poorly.
And I found these nuggets of brilliance in their recruitment form (yeah, they're that kind of clan, they have 'junior members' and everything- the really l337 ones get to have a + in their tag, loser recruits wear the R of shame and 'junior members' have a -):
We are looking for players who demonstrate the following:
* Broadband Connection
* Mature personality (Ie. We do not want people who opening abuse people on public servers or chats)
* Enforce our rules in the server !
* No Cheats !!!!
The bar is real high when they have to specify No Cheats with a handful of exclamation points. =D
(And how would you demonstrate a broadband connection? Turn your head and cough?)
Anyway, everyone is advised to avoid the {tcb} Ranked server, unless you want bad CS flashbacks to those unhappy times when South was down and you had to play on random pubs with the unwashed.
Oh, the irony...just checked out their Server Rules.
Check rule #1:
1) Maintain the spirit of the TCBClan server.
This includes quality teamplay, good sportsmanship, even teams, and a newbie-friendly environment.
HAH.
What dictionary do you figure they're getting their definitions from?
/edit
In the interst of fairness, maybe I just ran across a couple of bad apples. It's possible that the main CS branch of the clan actually does adhere to their stated principals of fair play and open arms to new gamers. But I'd still suggest steering well clear of their 2142 server, because it's run by infants.
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Gaming Hangovers
As I sit at the keyboard today with an actual hangover (thanks to an early Halloween party) I am put in mind of the rarer (for some) but equally disorienting virtual hangover.
The earliest one I remember was the result of an afternoon-long Asteroids binge. I couldn't close my eyes without seeing vector-drawn rocks hurtling through the skies for the rest of the night.
The worst one was probably the result of a day-long Robotron 2084 duel with my pal Cole.
When we left the arcade I didn't even have to close my eyes to hallucinate the game...everything I saw was transformed in real time. My hands twitched on phantom sticks, wanting to save the last human family from being subsumed by the machine horde (tangential thought- the Borg are a TOTAL Robotron ripoff!)
A related phenomenon struck me at odd times during my long addiction to Counterstrike.
I'd catch myself analyzing the environment in terms of CS strategy: marking likely sniper nests, picking out routes, finding the best spots for a Mac 10 ambush. All that separated me from a gibbering streetcorner wino was the self control to keep my trap shut as my brain skittered along the highway of madness, and marginally better hygiene.
I mention all of this because yesterday, after spending entirely too long playing 2142, I went outside to forage some last-minute bits for my costume...and everyone I saw had a red or blue team identifier floating over their heads.
=/
The earliest one I remember was the result of an afternoon-long Asteroids binge. I couldn't close my eyes without seeing vector-drawn rocks hurtling through the skies for the rest of the night.
The worst one was probably the result of a day-long Robotron 2084 duel with my pal Cole.
When we left the arcade I didn't even have to close my eyes to hallucinate the game...everything I saw was transformed in real time. My hands twitched on phantom sticks, wanting to save the last human family from being subsumed by the machine horde (tangential thought- the Borg are a TOTAL Robotron ripoff!)
A related phenomenon struck me at odd times during my long addiction to Counterstrike.
I'd catch myself analyzing the environment in terms of CS strategy: marking likely sniper nests, picking out routes, finding the best spots for a Mac 10 ambush. All that separated me from a gibbering streetcorner wino was the self control to keep my trap shut as my brain skittered along the highway of madness, and marginally better hygiene.
I mention all of this because yesterday, after spending entirely too long playing 2142, I went outside to forage some last-minute bits for my costume...and everyone I saw had a red or blue team identifier floating over their heads.
=/
Friday, October 27, 2006
2142 Roll Call
Community folk who are retail enabled:
Macattack
Snowfarmer
Vinnie
Gordo
Ivan
VonDemon
the de rigeur couple of peeps who I always forget to mention when making these sorts of lists,
and of course, Moi.
If you're hesitating for fear of a mass exodus once the new car smell wears off, let me assure you it'll be many thousands of miles before I trade this one back in to the dealer. Haven't liked an FPS this much since SoFII, and the goal-oriented gameplay here is light years better. These devs have already shown their willingness for post-release support with other games in the series, so it won't be left to rot on the vine like Raven left SoFII
Macattack
Snowfarmer
Vinnie
Gordo
Ivan
VonDemon
the de rigeur couple of peeps who I always forget to mention when making these sorts of lists,
and of course, Moi.
If you're hesitating for fear of a mass exodus once the new car smell wears off, let me assure you it'll be many thousands of miles before I trade this one back in to the dealer. Haven't liked an FPS this much since SoFII, and the goal-oriented gameplay here is light years better. These devs have already shown their willingness for post-release support with other games in the series, so it won't be left to rot on the vine like Raven left SoFII
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
call for info
I want to put together a little history of some of the clans who hung out on South and other Hauze servers over the years and I need some help, my memory not being what it once was.
I'm looking for member lists and some brief history of clans MIF, DEL, iMPC, {bfd}, @o@, c0a and any other clans that were 'regulars' on ORD servers over the years.
drop me a line at
oldretardeddog at gmail dot com
or, post in the thread I started on the forums...whatever works.
I'm looking for member lists and some brief history of clans MIF, DEL, iMPC, {bfd}, @o@, c0a and any other clans that were 'regulars' on ORD servers over the years.
drop me a line at
oldretardeddog at gmail dot com
or, post in the thread I started on the forums...whatever works.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
History of ORD membership
original LAN TardsThe Tard ranks are fairly exclusive, due more to the laziness and apathy of founding fathers than any perception of superiority; the fact is we'd rather play games than wrangle with a huge mob of members.
For most of our history, we've worked with a 'hard cap' of 20 Tards. It seemed a small enough number to manage itself without a lot of top-down directives and was also the size of a full CS server, which was aesthetically pleasing at the time.
Us being Tards and all, the 20 member limit has been more of a concept than a rigid boundary, like the border of India and Pakistan. People vanish for a while then reappear, some are LAN regulars who don't get on-line any more, some are sidelined by technical difficulty but show up when they can. And recently we've treated the cap like the 55 MPH speed limit, a silly restriction from a bygone era. As the ORD gaming diaspora expands the borders of our world, there's more room for growth. 20 people playing one game generates a lot more population density than 20 people playing ten games.Of course, our gaming community has never been defined simply by who wears the ORD tag. All our servers across the years have attracted groups of regulars who share our basic gaming philosophy. From the old CS days when LUSH, MIF and the H&K Employees were a valued presence on South to now, with The Agency and -MAC- providing a solid base for the Black Pit of Lag, our regulars are our extended family. But for the sake of the historical record, here is an all-inclusive listing of 'official' members of the Old Retarded Dogs, more or less in the order of their appearance.
Glock, Gordo, Ivan, Gumbyman, Goatfoot, Badger 242, Tungsten, Sokkmonkey, JedTheRed, Pork Chop, Patric, Gimp
---------------
This is the group of 'real world' friends who formed the core of ORD at LAN parties back dating back to 1999. All live or have lived here at Tard Central, and all have spent a lot of time together IRL in various combinations.
The First
Howdy
---------------
Howdy was the first non-ORD to game on the Hauze the day it went up, and he was still there when it went down for the count. He also gets a special commendation for directing future Tards Von Demon, Deth & Bennett to the Hauze.
Early Adopters
Raven Hawke, Quitchabitch'n, Morphix, Woof, Wolverine, Never Trust a Monkey,
---------------
Folk who showed up after Howdy but before everyone else. This group features our only two teen members, Quicha and Morph. Of this group, only Woof was active in a clan before joining ORD, and originally showed up on the server as [LUSH]Drunkard. We all thought Quitcha was 25 or so, but he was 17. Morph had burned out on D2 and was looking for a change. Never showed up on the Pit with a group of friends who banded together as MonkeyPoop, then stuck around and joined the collective. Rave was another very early regular, and one of the most persistently determined applicants. We signed him up to get some peace and quiet. :b Wolv was Rave's pal, and a fine (if utterly silent) addition to the miox.
South Era
Von Demon, Deth, Bennett, CyberWolf, Dango, Paco, Wicked, Sacrelicious
---------------
Von, Deth and Bennett were Howdy's former pals from the @o@ clan. CW was well known to Glock and Ivan from one of their other favorite CS servers, 420 CounterStrike, and the CS scripting forum. Dango and Paco both joined the ranks from the H&K Employees. Sacrelicious is Tungsten's older brother and missed LAN Tard-dom by moving to SF before the advent of the LAN era. Wicked is the Howard Hughes of ORD- he lives in a secluded Vegas penthouse, emerging occasionally to issue cryptic technological pronouncements and ride around on his Ducati.
Modern Era
BravoTwoZero, Turtle, Leon, Snowfarmer, Alien Luv Chyld, Security, Vinnie Jones, Wolf, Stuff
---------------
Tards who joined up after our break with CounterStrike. An odd time, while we found our footing after moving on from the game that brought us all together. All of our 'postmodern' additions to the clan are interested in gaming for it's own sake and aren't glued to any single platform. Security, Bravo & Vinnie were all veterans of the H&K Employees, ALC migrated over from MIF and Snowy joined from {bfd}, after finding Ivan and Gordo on the Urban Terror server. We found Leon after he linked our CS strategy guide on his homepage- we exchanged emails and he ended up being a regular on South, eventually joining up after the CS fall. Wolf wandered in from the snowy woods of c0a and Stuff joined up after the final demise of clan DEL.
The History of the Old Retarded Dogs
A Brief History of ORD
The urge for collective gaming flows strongly in the blood of the founding Tards.
More than twenty years ago Gordo, Goatfoot & Glock would gather for weekly pen-and-paper RPG fun. Chainmail, D&D, AD&D, C&S, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls, Call of Cthulhu, and many lesser known titles (Stalking the Night Fantastic, anyone?) were played and enjoyed.
Additions to the gaming collective in later years included Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Badger242 & Tungsten. We started painting miniatures and supplementing our pen-and-paper gaming with Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battle miniatures wargaming. Group electronic gaming reared its head as Gordo's old Nintendo allowed us to gang-tackle Super Mario Brothers powered by 7-11 Mochas (1/2 hot chocolate, 1/2 coffee), Hostess Snowballs and an unquenchable lust for coins. Time passed. Ivan joined the army and vanished for several years, then returned. Jed got old enough to drink. Gordo went off to university after eight years of savage battle with Junior College. Sokks made a career move from waiting tables at Italian restaurant here for a job waiting tables at Italian restaurant in Santa Cruz.
Miniatures gaming slowly faded, while RPG gaming made a return to prominence with quality titles like Deadlands and Hell on Earth.
We also started getting together at Ivan's place out by the prison every so often to hook up a bunch of PlayStations so we could butt heads in Thrill Kill and that cool robot game, with the mechs you could customize.
The Distant Past
PC gaming got its hooks in Gordo's soul while he was away at university. As the first adopter of Wintel computing (Ivan, Corto, Glock, Badger, Tungsten and Goatfoot were all confirmed Mac users at this point), Gordo was the first to feel the power of Doom.
Faced with the choice of writing a 75 page term paper or spending all night battling the minions of Hell, the choice was obvious. To this day Gordo remains a spiritual slave to Doom- his refusal to strafe stands out on-line in much the same way his ears do in real life. The Doom infection was spread to the rest of us at annual Thanksgiving feasts, which ended up being equal parts gorging and gaming. Even confirmed Marathon enthusiasts could see the potential of any game featuring a chainsaw.
The seeds that eventually blossomed into the drooling flower of ORD were planted at regular LAN parties starting sometime in 1999. The slow migration from Mac to Windows was relatively complete (except for Badger, who clung to his Mac with religious tenacity until it expired of congestive hard drive failure- since buying a whole new PC cost about the same as a new drive for his Mac, he finally made the move).
Glock's first Wintel PC was a hand-me-down collection of bits box hardware put together by Gordo and christened The Pity Box. A P2 133 with 64 megs of RAM, an old Diamond Monster video card with a 2d daughter board and pass-through cable, it just BARELY ran Quake 2. Ivan had gone Windows because he needed a machine that could run 3D Studio Max to pursue his dream job as a video game designer. Ivan and Glock started hooking up for modem-to-modem Starcraft battles, and getting together for one-on-one Quake 2 and Halflife deathmatch action. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to our first *real* LAN, which was held at Glock's house (believe it or not, for those who have seen it).
Folk in attendance for an afternoon and evening of Q2, Shogo and HL deathmatch were Gordo, Sokkmonkey, Ivan, Jed and Shasta. Glock's wife suffered a culture shock she will probably never recover from, and everyone else caught a FEVA for multiplayer ak-shown that only more LAN fury could satiate.
The LAN Age
This period saw us gathering at Ivan's virtually every weekend for good times and VERY late nights. The initial regulars were Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Pork Chop and myself. After a couple of weeks, we were joined by Tungsten and his pal Wyld Wolf. Eventually Corto was lured into the mix, while Gordo joined in during his summer visits from the East Coast and Goatfoot made appearances from his home base in Northern California.
Our original games were Quake 2 and Half Life deathmatch, with some Shogo thrown in for spice. We also started experimenting with a new thing, Half Life 'mods'. Ivan got us to try out Sven Co-Op, I was an advocate for Deathmatch Plus (which we could never get running) and Sokks kept pushing the first Action Half Life beta, which was an unplayable mess. Of course, Sokks eventually redeemed himself by championing a little mod that showed a lot of promise- CounterStrike, which we started playing regularly just as Beta 3 segued into Beta 4.
Regular attendance swelled from a dependable three or four players to a dependable ten. Our gaming population had outstripped Ivan's spare room and the overwhelming stench of close-packed gamers forced us to seek a new home. Rumors that the real motivation was Ivan's wife snapping and menacing us with his Claymore after one too many raucous 3am shouting matches are totally unfounded.
The Compound
Fortunately, Sokks and Jed's folks had recently bought a swanky house in town. A house which happened to feature a giant, empty garage. We may be Tarded, but we're not stupid. No time was wasted in constructing a huge LAN table out of 3/4 inch plywood and some sawhorses. The parts box was borne across town on a palanquin of oiled Teak wood by a procession of us wearing velvet robes and hoods. We christened our new gaming palace The Compound, and proceeded to consecrate its ground with an ocean of virtual blood.
The Compound was mostly a CounterStrike venue. We honed our skillz against each other and became highly adept at hardware and software troubleshooting, as well as building up our networking muscles. We learned valuable life lessons that continue to serve us well, such as DON'T FUCK WITH SHIT ON GAME DAY! and THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS 'TOO MANY' CABLES!
During this time Ivan was the king of the hill, his killin' fury unchallenged by lesser mortals, the T. Rex of the Compound.
A hardware arms race erupted as the masses embraced technology in an effort to close the Ivan Gap. From two button mice, to three button mice, to wheel mice, to optical wheel mice, special mouse pads, cutting edge video cards, CPU upgrades, extra RAM, the Compound was a technological Galapagos where unfit hardware was exiled to the parts box to rot alongside the broken headphones, sticky keyboards and kinked network cables of yesteryear.
Alas, no cybernetic enhancement replaces raw skill, despite the glittering promises of manufacturers. Ivan's reign continued apace, untroubled by the seething of the proletariat throng at the foot of his throne.
The Name
During the Compound days we toyed with the idea of a tag we would all wear, showing our allegiance and solidarity. We fiddled with different ideas, searching for the strangest tag we could find. The first name that stuck for any length of time was {Fg&h@S}, the Free, Gay and Happy All Stars. Inspired by one of Sokkmonkey's dance music MP3's, we identified with the theme of carefree outcasts gyrating the night away, untroubled by the social expectations of The Man.
But when we started thinking about maybe putting together a web page the name became problematic. None of us were actually gay, and the vision of confused, search-engine savvy homosexuals pondering the arcana of CounterStrike gaming tormented us in the dark of night. We decided to scrap the name and start over, in the interest of peaceful slumber (The Free, Gay and Happy All Stars live on as an official TARD HAUZE Anthem, played at LANs and other ORD events to get the party started).
The next name to flirt with immortality was [Gl337].
Gleet was discovered by Gordo during esoteric academic research, and its foulness is best left to the imagination. Regardless, it was nutty enough to attract a following, so we all ran around as [Gl337] for a while. But once again real world considerations intervened. We discovered 'l337' had a pre-existing meaning in the on-line gaming world. The thought that our silly name might be misinterpreted as some sort of bragging about our (modest to nonexistent) gaming skillz prompted another change.
And so we come to [ORD], our final port of call.
Ivan started the stone rolling down the hill. At one LAN we were playing Assault, and Sokkmonkey and myself kept trying the same losing tactic every round. Eventually Ivan said "you two are like a pair of old dogs, doing the same damn thing every round and drooling all over yourselves". Over the course of several subsequent evenings it evolved and caught on, and we have entered the arena of gaming combat as the Old Retarded Dogs ever since.
Welcome to the Future: The Online Era
Of course, everything changes. If you're lucky, one Golden Age eases into another. Which is what happened with us.
People started moving around, disrupting our LAN get-togethers. Wyld Wolf joined the army. Sokkmonkey got a real job and stopped coming down every weekend. Jed was accepted to the CHP academy and took off for Sacramento.
This could have spelled disaster for our gaming group, but the forces of Karmic balance were at work behind the scenes. As some were moving away, Gordo graduated from Princeton and moved *back* to California, about the same time Ivan was exhorting everyone to forget about LANs ("ancient history!") and embrace the FUTURE; high-bandwidth on-line gaming. While much of this messianic urge can be attributed to his misanthropic nature and intense hatred of physical labor (like packing up a computer and moving it across town), skeptics soon discovered an element of visionary prophecy in his ravings.
The first ever ORD game server was hosted by Corto on his spare cable modem. It was a modest CS server that maxed out at six players, but it was the spark that ignited the fire. It demonstrated that a bunch of us could get together regardless of where we were physically, hang out together and chat and socialize- and incidentally play a game. What a revelation!
When Gordo landed a year internship at a major Southland college, he found himself with an office, a computer...and access to a really, really, really phat pype. It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to set up an improved ORD server for our gaming needs. In short order he had a stable CS server with a 20 player limit running.
Gordo christened this prodigy 'The Tard Dog Hauze ---woof!'
THE TARD DOG HAUZE
Our original full-time online home, the Tard Dog Hauze (aka South) is where ORD evolved from a bunch of friends who gamed together into a 'real' clan. The connection was a huge improvement over Corto's cable modem, but by any objective measure it was terrible.
Network administration at the school was an endangered species, verging on extinct. While this was good in the sense that our server hummed away without fear of regulatory interruption, it also meant that unwashed masses of students were foolishly allowed to do whatever they liked with their own connections. Combine lax enforcement with the insatiable student hunger for pr0n and mp3s and you have a recipe for LAG.
Of course, calling the Hauze 'laggy' is like calling The Sultan of Dubai 'well off', or saying Hannibal Lecter is 'mildly eccentric'.
Lag at the Hauze came in many flavors and gradations; Baskin Robbin's 31 flavors wouldn't begin describe its range. Lag was to us like as snow was to the Eskimos- we had a hundred different words for it, and were constantly discovering new ones. Lag that drove newcomers to gibber, weep and hurl their mice across the room in frustration would barely raise an eyebrow among the Hauze veterans. We were experiencing Bullet Time long before The Matrix & Max Payne introduced it to the masses.
At the time we didn't see any benefit to the lag: we endured it with the stoic acceptance of Russian peasants trapped in the hell of Stalingrad: sure it was a bombed-out ruin, but it was OUR bombed out ruin, dammit.
In hindsight, intransigent lag on the Hauze was an important factor in the creation of the community.
Even then, CS had more than its fair share of l337 d00dz who thought their superior gaming skillz entitled them to harass and denigrate 'lesser' gamers. The lag was our ally in keeping these sorts of people away- after a few rounds of riding the bucking bronco that was the Hauze, most of these sorts were thrown from the saddle and wandered out of the corral for good.
The folks who stuck around did it for the company, not the silky smooth connection. They weren't looking for a solid platform to show off their CS skills, they just wanted a friendly game in congenial surroundings. And there were plenty of people who did stick around. From day one, the Hauze attracted persistent strangers who showed up night after night and eventually stopped being strangers. We were faced with a historic crossroads when some of these 'regulars' started asking if they could join ORD.
Expansion and Empire
Strangers asking to join ORD triggered a minor identity crisis.
What did they wanted to join, exactly? WE weren't sure what we were, and we'd started the whole thing. What we were NOT was a clan in the traditional sense; we had (and have) zero interest in any sort of organized competition, the driving force behind most other clans.
The whole 'clan' thing was a joke anyway- I mean come on, 'Old Retarded Dogs'? We were making fun of all the 'Shadow' and 'Execution' and 'Force' and 'Ninja' type clans, overwrought adolescent sorts who took their gaming waaaay to seriously in a "Daredevil could kick Batman's ass!" sort of way. Eventually, we decided "what the hell!" (which remains a popular battle cry at the Hauze). With a name like Old Retarded Dogs, how serious could we get about 'recruiting' anyway? A short while later someone who had been hanging around the server literally from the day it went up, @o@.Capt_Howdy, became the first non-LAN member of ORD.
ORD MEMBERSHIP
The process of choosing members was every bit as slapdash as the rest of our organizational policies, and our record keeping is no better. Since we're not smart enough to remember exactly who joined when, here's the best we can do: a rough membership timeline of the Tard legion, divided by geologic era.
Post CounterStrike
The end of our official clan involvement with the game that we'd followed since our earliest days was marked by the September 11th terrorist attacks. An assortment of internal and external pressures convinced us it was time to move on and find fresh gaming pastures. Forward thinking Tards Gordo and Ivan had already made this move, and they set the stage for another ORD transition, from the Tard Hauze South to
The Black Pit of Lag
After his departure from the notable school that unwittingly hosted South for us, Gordo's talent, ability and glistening Ivy League credentials landed him a tenure track position at an even grander California university, where the server ground was fertile and relatively unplowed. These network police were numerous and aggressive, but also concerned entirely with lowlife students running FTP servers out of their dorm rooms, not respectable Ph.D's using their office connections for legitimate educational purposes.
In short order Gordo set up a legitimate, educational game server for his pals. It ran Urban Terror, a modern combat mod built on the Q3 engine (think 'pretty CS minus missions'). While running the UrT server we made more friends, the quality individuals who make up the clans Agency and -MAC-.
ORD has become a postmodern clan, divorced from the standard underpinnings of game clans (competition, love of a single game). The ties that hold us together are the same ones we were founded on- friendship and camaraderie.
In Conclusion
It's been a strange journey. What began as a couple of friends in a spare bedroom became a group of friends in a garage, then even more friends and a bunch of total strangers on a server, and eventually into quite a number of friends, strangers and strangers who became friends on several mailing lists, forums, multiple servers, different games and computer platforms.
Looking to the future, we remain dedicated to creating a gaming oasis for folks who like their fragging without the usual side order of juvenile machismo, regardless of the game.
Change is the only reliable constant in life, and the best you can hope for is that one golden age overlaps the next like shingles on a roof. The quality people we've met and befriended across the years ensure no leaky gaps overhead at the Hauze.
You can measure our success by the company we keep.
The urge for collective gaming flows strongly in the blood of the founding Tards.
More than twenty years ago Gordo, Goatfoot & Glock would gather for weekly pen-and-paper RPG fun. Chainmail, D&D, AD&D, C&S, Runequest, Tunnels & Trolls, Call of Cthulhu, and many lesser known titles (Stalking the Night Fantastic, anyone?) were played and enjoyed.
Additions to the gaming collective in later years included Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Badger242 & Tungsten. We started painting miniatures and supplementing our pen-and-paper gaming with Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battle miniatures wargaming. Group electronic gaming reared its head as Gordo's old Nintendo allowed us to gang-tackle Super Mario Brothers powered by 7-11 Mochas (1/2 hot chocolate, 1/2 coffee), Hostess Snowballs and an unquenchable lust for coins. Time passed. Ivan joined the army and vanished for several years, then returned. Jed got old enough to drink. Gordo went off to university after eight years of savage battle with Junior College. Sokks made a career move from waiting tables at Italian restaurant here for a job waiting tables at Italian restaurant in Santa Cruz.
Miniatures gaming slowly faded, while RPG gaming made a return to prominence with quality titles like Deadlands and Hell on Earth.
We also started getting together at Ivan's place out by the prison every so often to hook up a bunch of PlayStations so we could butt heads in Thrill Kill and that cool robot game, with the mechs you could customize.
The Distant Past
PC gaming got its hooks in Gordo's soul while he was away at university. As the first adopter of Wintel computing (Ivan, Corto, Glock, Badger, Tungsten and Goatfoot were all confirmed Mac users at this point), Gordo was the first to feel the power of Doom.
Faced with the choice of writing a 75 page term paper or spending all night battling the minions of Hell, the choice was obvious. To this day Gordo remains a spiritual slave to Doom- his refusal to strafe stands out on-line in much the same way his ears do in real life. The Doom infection was spread to the rest of us at annual Thanksgiving feasts, which ended up being equal parts gorging and gaming. Even confirmed Marathon enthusiasts could see the potential of any game featuring a chainsaw.
The seeds that eventually blossomed into the drooling flower of ORD were planted at regular LAN parties starting sometime in 1999. The slow migration from Mac to Windows was relatively complete (except for Badger, who clung to his Mac with religious tenacity until it expired of congestive hard drive failure- since buying a whole new PC cost about the same as a new drive for his Mac, he finally made the move).
Glock's first Wintel PC was a hand-me-down collection of bits box hardware put together by Gordo and christened The Pity Box. A P2 133 with 64 megs of RAM, an old Diamond Monster video card with a 2d daughter board and pass-through cable, it just BARELY ran Quake 2. Ivan had gone Windows because he needed a machine that could run 3D Studio Max to pursue his dream job as a video game designer. Ivan and Glock started hooking up for modem-to-modem Starcraft battles, and getting together for one-on-one Quake 2 and Halflife deathmatch action. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to our first *real* LAN, which was held at Glock's house (believe it or not, for those who have seen it).
Folk in attendance for an afternoon and evening of Q2, Shogo and HL deathmatch were Gordo, Sokkmonkey, Ivan, Jed and Shasta. Glock's wife suffered a culture shock she will probably never recover from, and everyone else caught a FEVA for multiplayer ak-shown that only more LAN fury could satiate.
The LAN Age
This period saw us gathering at Ivan's virtually every weekend for good times and VERY late nights. The initial regulars were Ivan, Sokkmonkey, Jed, Pork Chop and myself. After a couple of weeks, we were joined by Tungsten and his pal Wyld Wolf. Eventually Corto was lured into the mix, while Gordo joined in during his summer visits from the East Coast and Goatfoot made appearances from his home base in Northern California.
Our original games were Quake 2 and Half Life deathmatch, with some Shogo thrown in for spice. We also started experimenting with a new thing, Half Life 'mods'. Ivan got us to try out Sven Co-Op, I was an advocate for Deathmatch Plus (which we could never get running) and Sokks kept pushing the first Action Half Life beta, which was an unplayable mess. Of course, Sokks eventually redeemed himself by championing a little mod that showed a lot of promise- CounterStrike, which we started playing regularly just as Beta 3 segued into Beta 4.
Regular attendance swelled from a dependable three or four players to a dependable ten. Our gaming population had outstripped Ivan's spare room and the overwhelming stench of close-packed gamers forced us to seek a new home. Rumors that the real motivation was Ivan's wife snapping and menacing us with his Claymore after one too many raucous 3am shouting matches are totally unfounded.
The Compound
Fortunately, Sokks and Jed's folks had recently bought a swanky house in town. A house which happened to feature a giant, empty garage. We may be Tarded, but we're not stupid. No time was wasted in constructing a huge LAN table out of 3/4 inch plywood and some sawhorses. The parts box was borne across town on a palanquin of oiled Teak wood by a procession of us wearing velvet robes and hoods. We christened our new gaming palace The Compound, and proceeded to consecrate its ground with an ocean of virtual blood.
The Compound was mostly a CounterStrike venue. We honed our skillz against each other and became highly adept at hardware and software troubleshooting, as well as building up our networking muscles. We learned valuable life lessons that continue to serve us well, such as DON'T FUCK WITH SHIT ON GAME DAY! and THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS 'TOO MANY' CABLES!
During this time Ivan was the king of the hill, his killin' fury unchallenged by lesser mortals, the T. Rex of the Compound.
A hardware arms race erupted as the masses embraced technology in an effort to close the Ivan Gap. From two button mice, to three button mice, to wheel mice, to optical wheel mice, special mouse pads, cutting edge video cards, CPU upgrades, extra RAM, the Compound was a technological Galapagos where unfit hardware was exiled to the parts box to rot alongside the broken headphones, sticky keyboards and kinked network cables of yesteryear.
Alas, no cybernetic enhancement replaces raw skill, despite the glittering promises of manufacturers. Ivan's reign continued apace, untroubled by the seething of the proletariat throng at the foot of his throne.
The Name
During the Compound days we toyed with the idea of a tag we would all wear, showing our allegiance and solidarity. We fiddled with different ideas, searching for the strangest tag we could find. The first name that stuck for any length of time was {Fg&h@S}, the Free, Gay and Happy All Stars. Inspired by one of Sokkmonkey's dance music MP3's, we identified with the theme of carefree outcasts gyrating the night away, untroubled by the social expectations of The Man.
But when we started thinking about maybe putting together a web page the name became problematic. None of us were actually gay, and the vision of confused, search-engine savvy homosexuals pondering the arcana of CounterStrike gaming tormented us in the dark of night. We decided to scrap the name and start over, in the interest of peaceful slumber (The Free, Gay and Happy All Stars live on as an official TARD HAUZE Anthem, played at LANs and other ORD events to get the party started).
The next name to flirt with immortality was [Gl337].
Gleet was discovered by Gordo during esoteric academic research, and its foulness is best left to the imagination. Regardless, it was nutty enough to attract a following, so we all ran around as [Gl337] for a while. But once again real world considerations intervened. We discovered 'l337' had a pre-existing meaning in the on-line gaming world. The thought that our silly name might be misinterpreted as some sort of bragging about our (modest to nonexistent) gaming skillz prompted another change.
And so we come to [ORD], our final port of call.
Ivan started the stone rolling down the hill. At one LAN we were playing Assault, and Sokkmonkey and myself kept trying the same losing tactic every round. Eventually Ivan said "you two are like a pair of old dogs, doing the same damn thing every round and drooling all over yourselves". Over the course of several subsequent evenings it evolved and caught on, and we have entered the arena of gaming combat as the Old Retarded Dogs ever since.
Welcome to the Future: The Online Era
Of course, everything changes. If you're lucky, one Golden Age eases into another. Which is what happened with us.
People started moving around, disrupting our LAN get-togethers. Wyld Wolf joined the army. Sokkmonkey got a real job and stopped coming down every weekend. Jed was accepted to the CHP academy and took off for Sacramento.
This could have spelled disaster for our gaming group, but the forces of Karmic balance were at work behind the scenes. As some were moving away, Gordo graduated from Princeton and moved *back* to California, about the same time Ivan was exhorting everyone to forget about LANs ("ancient history!") and embrace the FUTURE; high-bandwidth on-line gaming. While much of this messianic urge can be attributed to his misanthropic nature and intense hatred of physical labor (like packing up a computer and moving it across town), skeptics soon discovered an element of visionary prophecy in his ravings.
The first ever ORD game server was hosted by Corto on his spare cable modem. It was a modest CS server that maxed out at six players, but it was the spark that ignited the fire. It demonstrated that a bunch of us could get together regardless of where we were physically, hang out together and chat and socialize- and incidentally play a game. What a revelation!
When Gordo landed a year internship at a major Southland college, he found himself with an office, a computer...and access to a really, really, really phat pype. It seemed like the most obvious thing in the world to set up an improved ORD server for our gaming needs. In short order he had a stable CS server with a 20 player limit running.
Gordo christened this prodigy 'The Tard Dog Hauze ---woof!'
THE TARD DOG HAUZE
Our original full-time online home, the Tard Dog Hauze (aka South) is where ORD evolved from a bunch of friends who gamed together into a 'real' clan. The connection was a huge improvement over Corto's cable modem, but by any objective measure it was terrible.
Network administration at the school was an endangered species, verging on extinct. While this was good in the sense that our server hummed away without fear of regulatory interruption, it also meant that unwashed masses of students were foolishly allowed to do whatever they liked with their own connections. Combine lax enforcement with the insatiable student hunger for pr0n and mp3s and you have a recipe for LAG.
Of course, calling the Hauze 'laggy' is like calling The Sultan of Dubai 'well off', or saying Hannibal Lecter is 'mildly eccentric'.
Lag at the Hauze came in many flavors and gradations; Baskin Robbin's 31 flavors wouldn't begin describe its range. Lag was to us like as snow was to the Eskimos- we had a hundred different words for it, and were constantly discovering new ones. Lag that drove newcomers to gibber, weep and hurl their mice across the room in frustration would barely raise an eyebrow among the Hauze veterans. We were experiencing Bullet Time long before The Matrix & Max Payne introduced it to the masses.
At the time we didn't see any benefit to the lag: we endured it with the stoic acceptance of Russian peasants trapped in the hell of Stalingrad: sure it was a bombed-out ruin, but it was OUR bombed out ruin, dammit.
In hindsight, intransigent lag on the Hauze was an important factor in the creation of the community.
Even then, CS had more than its fair share of l337 d00dz who thought their superior gaming skillz entitled them to harass and denigrate 'lesser' gamers. The lag was our ally in keeping these sorts of people away- after a few rounds of riding the bucking bronco that was the Hauze, most of these sorts were thrown from the saddle and wandered out of the corral for good.
The folks who stuck around did it for the company, not the silky smooth connection. They weren't looking for a solid platform to show off their CS skills, they just wanted a friendly game in congenial surroundings. And there were plenty of people who did stick around. From day one, the Hauze attracted persistent strangers who showed up night after night and eventually stopped being strangers. We were faced with a historic crossroads when some of these 'regulars' started asking if they could join ORD.
Expansion and Empire
Strangers asking to join ORD triggered a minor identity crisis.
What did they wanted to join, exactly? WE weren't sure what we were, and we'd started the whole thing. What we were NOT was a clan in the traditional sense; we had (and have) zero interest in any sort of organized competition, the driving force behind most other clans.
The whole 'clan' thing was a joke anyway- I mean come on, 'Old Retarded Dogs'? We were making fun of all the 'Shadow' and 'Execution' and 'Force' and 'Ninja' type clans, overwrought adolescent sorts who took their gaming waaaay to seriously in a "Daredevil could kick Batman's ass!" sort of way. Eventually, we decided "what the hell!" (which remains a popular battle cry at the Hauze). With a name like Old Retarded Dogs, how serious could we get about 'recruiting' anyway? A short while later someone who had been hanging around the server literally from the day it went up, @o@.Capt_Howdy, became the first non-LAN member of ORD.
ORD MEMBERSHIP
The process of choosing members was every bit as slapdash as the rest of our organizational policies, and our record keeping is no better. Since we're not smart enough to remember exactly who joined when, here's the best we can do: a rough membership timeline of the Tard legion, divided by geologic era.
Post CounterStrike
The end of our official clan involvement with the game that we'd followed since our earliest days was marked by the September 11th terrorist attacks. An assortment of internal and external pressures convinced us it was time to move on and find fresh gaming pastures. Forward thinking Tards Gordo and Ivan had already made this move, and they set the stage for another ORD transition, from the Tard Hauze South to
The Black Pit of Lag
After his departure from the notable school that unwittingly hosted South for us, Gordo's talent, ability and glistening Ivy League credentials landed him a tenure track position at an even grander California university, where the server ground was fertile and relatively unplowed. These network police were numerous and aggressive, but also concerned entirely with lowlife students running FTP servers out of their dorm rooms, not respectable Ph.D's using their office connections for legitimate educational purposes.
In short order Gordo set up a legitimate, educational game server for his pals. It ran Urban Terror, a modern combat mod built on the Q3 engine (think 'pretty CS minus missions'). While running the UrT server we made more friends, the quality individuals who make up the clans Agency and -MAC-.
ORD has become a postmodern clan, divorced from the standard underpinnings of game clans (competition, love of a single game). The ties that hold us together are the same ones we were founded on- friendship and camaraderie.
In Conclusion
It's been a strange journey. What began as a couple of friends in a spare bedroom became a group of friends in a garage, then even more friends and a bunch of total strangers on a server, and eventually into quite a number of friends, strangers and strangers who became friends on several mailing lists, forums, multiple servers, different games and computer platforms.
Looking to the future, we remain dedicated to creating a gaming oasis for folks who like their fragging without the usual side order of juvenile machismo, regardless of the game.
Change is the only reliable constant in life, and the best you can hope for is that one golden age overlaps the next like shingles on a roof. The quality people we've met and befriended across the years ensure no leaky gaps overhead at the Hauze.
You can measure our success by the company we keep.
Battlefield 2142 further impressions
I'm getting a better grip on things- I've entered that phase of development where I know what I should do but flounder on the execution.
Either I hit the wrong key, or miss the target, or trip and fall.
Still, it's better than wandering through the battlefield like an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember where they parked the car. Progress is progress.
I have discovered one odd skill- I can maneuver the hover tank like a pro.
I've got some intuitive understanding of the weird way it moves. Not surprisingly, it's the only vehicle I'm any good with...I'm hopeless with the mech and worse than that with anything airborn.
I can navigate a dune buggy from point A to point B...as long as nothing gets in my way and nobody shoots at me. =P
So far I'm enjoying the smaller maps with more of an infantry focus the best- no surprise there. And I prefer the Conquest gametype over the Titan, which seems too busy for me.
Capping flags I understand and enjoy.
Controlling missile silos to knock down shields so you can board the Titan (via APC-mounted circus cannon or helicopter) and blow up multiple control panels so you can eventually destroy the reactor core....not so much.
I'm a simple creature with simple pleasures.
Titan missions reek of the sophisticated decadence of 1920's Berlin, igniting in my breast the unreasoning fury of the proletariat.
Of course, in the parlance of the day Game Experience May Change During Online Play. A few months and a mountain of flags down the road and I may start singing the praises of the fussy, complicated Titan missions.
We'll see.
Either I hit the wrong key, or miss the target, or trip and fall.
Still, it's better than wandering through the battlefield like an Alzheimer's patient who can't remember where they parked the car. Progress is progress.
I have discovered one odd skill- I can maneuver the hover tank like a pro.
I've got some intuitive understanding of the weird way it moves. Not surprisingly, it's the only vehicle I'm any good with...I'm hopeless with the mech and worse than that with anything airborn.
I can navigate a dune buggy from point A to point B...as long as nothing gets in my way and nobody shoots at me. =P
So far I'm enjoying the smaller maps with more of an infantry focus the best- no surprise there. And I prefer the Conquest gametype over the Titan, which seems too busy for me.
Capping flags I understand and enjoy.
Controlling missile silos to knock down shields so you can board the Titan (via APC-mounted circus cannon or helicopter) and blow up multiple control panels so you can eventually destroy the reactor core....not so much.
I'm a simple creature with simple pleasures.
Titan missions reek of the sophisticated decadence of 1920's Berlin, igniting in my breast the unreasoning fury of the proletariat.
Of course, in the parlance of the day Game Experience May Change During Online Play. A few months and a mountain of flags down the road and I may start singing the praises of the fussy, complicated Titan missions.
We'll see.
Monday, October 23, 2006
Sunday, October 22, 2006
battlefield 2141: early review
Played a few hours over the past couple of days, enough to get a solid first impression.
So far I'm a big fan of the game itself, independent of EA's amoral corporate behavior.
The objective-based gameplay is well polished, the maps I've played so far are balanced and provide for heated action, a bit more infantry-centric than the demo (which is a good thing- my main gripe with the demo was feeling about as dangerous as a newborn kitten if you got caught outside of your heavily armored ride). Which I guess is to be expected, since 2141 is the fourth iteration of the basic Battlefield formula.
I mostly played lone wolf, for some reason I couldn't connect to Macattack's Vent server and teaming with strangers is an iffy proposition.
Fortunately, the game works fine playing as a One Man Army Corps.
You can do all the stuff you would anyway, help your side win the battle, and build up points for 'unlocks' to improve your effectiveness.
Of course, all that stuff is much easier as a member of a squad. The option to run wild n' free is always there, but working as part of a team is incentivized by awarding point bonuses for achieving goals set by the squad leader and for helping out your squadmates, on top of whatever Rambo points you rack up on your own.
Forced teaming is the reason I gave up on WoW...once I hit 30th level I couldn't wipe my own ass without first putting together a team, killing the world's supply of Gritjaw Basilisks until one finally dropped the desired Thick Scale Toilet Paper...then praying nobody else in the party had a dirty bottom.
I find the system of encouraged teaming in 2141 more to my liking.
There's a Fun Night scheduled this evening, so I should have some more squad-centric impressions tomorrow.
So far I'm a big fan of the game itself, independent of EA's amoral corporate behavior.
The objective-based gameplay is well polished, the maps I've played so far are balanced and provide for heated action, a bit more infantry-centric than the demo (which is a good thing- my main gripe with the demo was feeling about as dangerous as a newborn kitten if you got caught outside of your heavily armored ride). Which I guess is to be expected, since 2141 is the fourth iteration of the basic Battlefield formula.
I mostly played lone wolf, for some reason I couldn't connect to Macattack's Vent server and teaming with strangers is an iffy proposition.
Fortunately, the game works fine playing as a One Man Army Corps.
You can do all the stuff you would anyway, help your side win the battle, and build up points for 'unlocks' to improve your effectiveness.
Of course, all that stuff is much easier as a member of a squad. The option to run wild n' free is always there, but working as part of a team is incentivized by awarding point bonuses for achieving goals set by the squad leader and for helping out your squadmates, on top of whatever Rambo points you rack up on your own.
Forced teaming is the reason I gave up on WoW...once I hit 30th level I couldn't wipe my own ass without first putting together a team, killing the world's supply of Gritjaw Basilisks until one finally dropped the desired Thick Scale Toilet Paper...then praying nobody else in the party had a dirty bottom.
I find the system of encouraged teaming in 2141 more to my liking.
There's a Fun Night scheduled this evening, so I should have some more squad-centric impressions tomorrow.
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Logitech Gaming Keyboard
It looks pretty sweet to these eyes.
Of course, I'm a recovering gadget-whore who used to be a sucker for any techno-treat making dulcet promises to make up for my lack of killin' fury in various games, so take it with a grain of salt.
But this part tickles me:
Little could I have imagined in the dusty, distant past when playing Doom required editing batch files and operating systems came on floppy discs that even the lowly keyboard would eventually proffer a laundry list of pre-installation demands.
Also...does anyone else get the feeling manufacturers slap the Gamer tag on a product as an excuse to price gouge?
How many times have you seen someone take a standard beige accessory, spray paint it black, tart it up with a couple of LED's, paste on an edgy logo and bump the price ten bucks?
and...what do you figure the over/under is for Gordo picking one of these up on the expense account?
Of course, I'm a recovering gadget-whore who used to be a sucker for any techno-treat making dulcet promises to make up for my lack of killin' fury in various games, so take it with a grain of salt.
But this part tickles me:
System Requirements
* PC with Pentium® processor or compatible
* 256 MB RAM
* 20 MB of available hard disk space
* CD-ROM drive
* USB port
* Windows® XP or Windows Vista™
Little could I have imagined in the dusty, distant past when playing Doom required editing batch files and operating systems came on floppy discs that even the lowly keyboard would eventually proffer a laundry list of pre-installation demands.
Also...does anyone else get the feeling manufacturers slap the Gamer tag on a product as an excuse to price gouge?
How many times have you seen someone take a standard beige accessory, spray paint it black, tart it up with a couple of LED's, paste on an edgy logo and bump the price ten bucks?
and...what do you figure the over/under is for Gordo picking one of these up on the expense account?
FPS: Battlefield 2142 Retail
So it turns out the spyware scare was something of a tempest in a teapot.
Yeah, the retail game calls home with details of your behavior.
But it restrains the window-peering and keyhole-peeping to in-game activities.
Which is like having a neighborhood peeping tom next door who restricts his viewing to your living room & kitchen. Still odious, but not completely beyond the pale.
I'd likely still have passed except for good old fashioned peer pressure- there's already a healthy squadron of Tards in the hover transport, waving me aboard through open and inviting doors. It seems positively churlish to scowl and kick the dirt over something as insignificant as privacy.
I got in some solo trigger time last night and held my own despite FPS skills as rust-caked and frozen as the pre-lube job Tin Man. I'm hoping a few weeks of practice will serve as my personal Dorothy and grease up the joints a bit.
Yeah, the retail game calls home with details of your behavior.
But it restrains the window-peering and keyhole-peeping to in-game activities.
Which is like having a neighborhood peeping tom next door who restricts his viewing to your living room & kitchen. Still odious, but not completely beyond the pale.
I'd likely still have passed except for good old fashioned peer pressure- there's already a healthy squadron of Tards in the hover transport, waving me aboard through open and inviting doors. It seems positively churlish to scowl and kick the dirt over something as insignificant as privacy.
I got in some solo trigger time last night and held my own despite FPS skills as rust-caked and frozen as the pre-lube job Tin Man. I'm hoping a few weeks of practice will serve as my personal Dorothy and grease up the joints a bit.
Wednesday, October 18, 2006
FPS: Battlefield 2142
This is the latest potential rallying point in the ceaseless quest to reunite the Tard Nation under the banner of a single FPS shooter.
One of the problems with maintaining the existence of a 'clan' over any substantial period of time is that its members came together under the umbrella of a certain game (Counterstrike, in our case). Surviving the inevitable fall from grace of the alpha game is a challenge, because nothing else the group tries will possess that same magnetic universal appeal.
Of course that's a whole other post, one I'll save for a future rainy day.
On with BF 2142.
It's the latest incarnation of a series I've never particularly enjoyed comprised of Battlefield 1942 (WWII puts me in a coma) and Battlefield 2 (fundamentally more of the same, only with automatic weapons). 2142 is set in the future, and as Ivan will tell you the future is simply better than everything else.
I don't generally cotton to vehicles in games, neither am I a huge fan of the sheer scale of the battlefields (I cut my teeth on 20 player CS servers, playing maps you could run across in 90 seconds), but once I overcame my antipathy to hover tanks, VTOL jets and mechs the size of the maps and the sheer number of players (generally 48 or 64) made sense.
My mistake had been approaching it as an infantryman. If you're on foot, the distances are ridiculous and your combat effectiveness is practically nil. You have to embrace the vehicles before the game makes sense...and once I did that, everything else fell into place.
The 'big picture' is overwhelming, but it's easy to shrink the game down to scale. Make a squad with some friends, pick one of the objectives (a variation on CTF- the flags are in fixed locations, you make them change hands by standing next to them for a certain amount of time) hop in one of the vehicles on offer and head out to stake your claim. The aggregation of these individual firefights determines which side is "winning" the battle.
So, here's a game I like (almost in spite of itself), a direct extension of a series that's attracted substantial Tard interest over the years, a game that promises to bring together a sizable fraction of the scattered tribe....and yet, I remain uneasy.
EA is a notoriously crummy, money-grubbing game publisher (their marketing motto it's in the game is often appended ...you bought last year by cynical players) and there's a rumor floating around that 2142 will ship with spyware that sniffs around your computer and generates targeted in-game ads.
However much I'm enjoying the gameplay and regardless of the games potential to gather up the scattered tribes I'll never pay a dime for spyware....let alone 'targeted ads'.
Because let's face it, nothing says grim future of perilous military adventure like billboard ads for Pimp Juice and Family Guy box sets (or, in the case of targeted ads, Rogaine & Depends).
Here's hoping this kerfuffle is just typical Internet overreaction and EA clarifies their position soon-ish, or provides some sort of 'opt out' loophole for those of us who prefer our games ala carte, without the side order of Big Brother.
One of the problems with maintaining the existence of a 'clan' over any substantial period of time is that its members came together under the umbrella of a certain game (Counterstrike, in our case). Surviving the inevitable fall from grace of the alpha game is a challenge, because nothing else the group tries will possess that same magnetic universal appeal.
Of course that's a whole other post, one I'll save for a future rainy day.
On with BF 2142.
It's the latest incarnation of a series I've never particularly enjoyed comprised of Battlefield 1942 (WWII puts me in a coma) and Battlefield 2 (fundamentally more of the same, only with automatic weapons). 2142 is set in the future, and as Ivan will tell you the future is simply better than everything else.
I don't generally cotton to vehicles in games, neither am I a huge fan of the sheer scale of the battlefields (I cut my teeth on 20 player CS servers, playing maps you could run across in 90 seconds), but once I overcame my antipathy to hover tanks, VTOL jets and mechs the size of the maps and the sheer number of players (generally 48 or 64) made sense.
My mistake had been approaching it as an infantryman. If you're on foot, the distances are ridiculous and your combat effectiveness is practically nil. You have to embrace the vehicles before the game makes sense...and once I did that, everything else fell into place.
The 'big picture' is overwhelming, but it's easy to shrink the game down to scale. Make a squad with some friends, pick one of the objectives (a variation on CTF- the flags are in fixed locations, you make them change hands by standing next to them for a certain amount of time) hop in one of the vehicles on offer and head out to stake your claim. The aggregation of these individual firefights determines which side is "winning" the battle.
So, here's a game I like (almost in spite of itself), a direct extension of a series that's attracted substantial Tard interest over the years, a game that promises to bring together a sizable fraction of the scattered tribe....and yet, I remain uneasy.
EA is a notoriously crummy, money-grubbing game publisher (their marketing motto it's in the game is often appended ...you bought last year by cynical players) and there's a rumor floating around that 2142 will ship with spyware that sniffs around your computer and generates targeted in-game ads.
However much I'm enjoying the gameplay and regardless of the games potential to gather up the scattered tribes I'll never pay a dime for spyware....let alone 'targeted ads'.
Because let's face it, nothing says grim future of perilous military adventure like billboard ads for Pimp Juice and Family Guy box sets (or, in the case of targeted ads, Rogaine & Depends).
Here's hoping this kerfuffle is just typical Internet overreaction and EA clarifies their position soon-ish, or provides some sort of 'opt out' loophole for those of us who prefer our games ala carte, without the side order of Big Brother.
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
Welcome
How was I to know, in those halcyon days when wrangling daily Tardhauze updates meant riding my dinosaur to the HTTP factory and carving posts out of raw html with stone axes and fire-hardened sticks, that one day the entire process would be automated by a sexy GUI and a corporate behemoth would happily pick up the hosting tab in return for 'content'?
A bleak history Generation Myspace remains blissfully unaware of.
Happily, I survived to reap the benefits of turn-key web publishing alongside young hellions like omfg420LOLZ and lilh0peep.
So, welcome to the new Tardhauze, same as the old Tardhauze....except for the stone axes and dinosaur commuting.
We'll be covering gaming from the perspective of the older, mellower and somewhat less proficient gamer (with occasionally glaring exceptions, like woof and snowfarmer), and if we get around to hosting game servers again this will be the place to get your news & whatnot.
Also, comments are disabled because I don't want to wrassle Haloscan & have no desire to delete the inevitable raft of Russian spam-bot postings.
However The Tardhauze Forums are eager to fulfill your feedback requirements.
A bleak history Generation Myspace remains blissfully unaware of.
Happily, I survived to reap the benefits of turn-key web publishing alongside young hellions like omfg420LOLZ and lilh0peep.
So, welcome to the new Tardhauze, same as the old Tardhauze....except for the stone axes and dinosaur commuting.
We'll be covering gaming from the perspective of the older, mellower and somewhat less proficient gamer (with occasionally glaring exceptions, like woof and snowfarmer), and if we get around to hosting game servers again this will be the place to get your news & whatnot.
Also, comments are disabled because I don't want to wrassle Haloscan & have no desire to delete the inevitable raft of Russian spam-bot postings.
However The Tardhauze Forums are eager to fulfill your feedback requirements.
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