04 January, 2009

Keepalive: Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal, LAN Party

I zipped through Ratchet & Clank 3 again. Still wonderful. Still beautiful. Flaming vampire ducks and black holes and lots of electricity and stuff blowing up really never gets old.

The New Year's LAN party went fairly well. Playing versus Left 4 Dead with complete newbies was painful. There's too much to know in that game to play it well with no prep, and one lousy player can wreck your team. Of course, the random tank spawns make it so the game could never actually be played competitively in the first place. I wish there was a way to turn off scoring in versus completely.

We also played the Nations @ War mod for Battlefield 2. Outside of being built on the the BF2 engine (occasional crashes), it was wonderful. This time next year, the Crysis based version should be available. Hopefully that will be better. The way we play Nations @ War is somewhat analogous to Left 4 Dead. Except the regular zombies are played by piles of dumb bots, and the boss zombies are played by dumb bots in tanks and planes and stuff.

There was one game of Rise of Nations which had to be played competitively, as there were too many people to team up against the AI. It was okay. Our team won, but only because a member of the opposition had to leave. Meh. It's an RTS. Why look over a battle when you can be in it?

We also played through all the maps in Quake Wars. It's too bad that game isn't easier to mod / more popular. Playing through the same campaigns forever is pretty dull.

We also tried some Call of Duty: World at War co-op when the numbers thinned out a bit. I actually liked the scoring in that, because I didn't have to guess when I killed a guy. But getting kicked back to the menu after every single map got pretty tedious. Plus it wasn't entirely stable.

We played a little Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. It mostly sucked, as it always does. Map knowledge is key, and I don't have it. Plus we have a lot of cowboys who run off on their lonesomes then cry medic when they get shot. :P

Overall it was fun. And the idea to have everyone bring whatever leftover holiday snacks they had definitely worked out. There wasn't enough room on the snack table to hold it all.

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