26 November, 2009

Keepalive: Mercenaries 2, Nations @ War, Mass Effect

written by Blain Newport on Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Gaming's happening. We had to cut Mercs 2 short on co-op Tuesday because my router went kerflooie. It's okay now. What fixed it? Turning it on its side.

Yeah. Technology.



So I spent the late part of Tuesday night playing Nations @ War online with the LAN group. I prefer messing around in that game to playing it straight. Well, occasionally it's fun to "have Canada make its presence felt". Instead of character classes, N@W has countries. And Canadian soldiers carry the Javelin, a crazy effective anti-vehicle weapon. One shot will end a tank. The problem is it doesn't work if the vehicle is parked under something or if the vehicle is within 200 meters. Since the draw distance of the game is only 250 meters, this makes it so that I often am firing at enemies I can't see. I just fire the missile, swap weapons to force a fast reload, then wait for the obituary to come up. It feels like cheating.

So most of last night I flew jets and choppers. Poorly. It's a funny PC game that includes vehicles that were obviously never meant to be controlled with mouse and keyboard. Whatever.



The Jayne Shepard playthrough of Mass Effect is underway. The game has a lot of mediocre content, so much that I can do almost entirely different side quests the second time through, which is mildly interesting. Unfortunately the game doesn't allow me to do a very good approximation of Adam Baldwin's mug, and I frequently don't have a dialog option that effectively answers the question, "What would Jayne do?" I must admit, though, it's nice forego all the delicate negotiations and just shoot everyone who disagrees with me.



And of course I'm still playing Batman and Republic Commando for the walkthroughs. So there's plenty of gaming going on.

And with the big sales, there may be more coming up. Direct 2 Drive is selling GTA 4 for $20. It's tempting.

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