24 April, 2011

Keepalive: Mostly Multiplayer

written by Blain Newport on Sunday, 24 April, 2011

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

While most of the people on my Steam friends list were playing Portal 2, I kept playing Bad Company 2. I'm sure Portal 2 is an amazing experience, but I was just too cheap to spend that kind of money on a puzzle game which I will probably only play through once.

Bad Company 2 I bought for $6.78 and am still enjoying pretty well. There are still lag deaths. And my Comcast internet seems to hitch up for a few seconds every so often, booting me from the game. But I'm still learning the tools and doing better, so it's still got my interest.

My latest favorite toy is the humble motion mine. I never used it at first because it said it was a mine, but didn't explode, which is stupid. But what it does do is send out small pulses that show the positions and facings of enemies near the mine. If you're playing hide and go seek with shotguns, this is life saving information. And when any enemy is killed near your motion sensor, you get free points.

There are a fair amount of cheaters playing Bad Company 2. I suppose that's part of any popular, competitive game. In a single night I've seen over half a dozen people automatically kicked for using various hacks. And I've been on at least one server, where people were hacking and the computer was unable to tell. It's sad how proud they are of it, too. Dude, everyone knows you're cheating. The only ones dumb enough to think you're a winner are some inert silicon and you.

The cheap price of the game may work against BC2 here, as getting banned for life just means dropping $10 to buy another copy. Who knows, maybe someone will use / has used that as a business plan. Sell the hacks through a different company, then ban players for using them, but not until they've had enough fun dominating matches that they'll happily buy the game again.



Killing Floor

I only bothered to reinstall Killing Floor after my recent reformat because my brother has it, and I try to have a nice selection of co-op games ready to go. But when the Portal 2 pre-game silliness started, a bunch of PA people started playing, so now I'm back leveling my pretend skills. I still say that Killing Floor skills take way too long to level. But sometimes I'm tired of fighting against people, so stale co-op wins. Bad Company 2 actually does have co-op, but DICE didn't port it to the PC. >:P

Since I hadn't played it in so long, I found I had a lot to learn about Killing Floor, as well. Monsters behave differently than they used to. They take different amounts of damage from different types of weapons, I hear. And there are a couple new guns. It's fresh enough that I'll probably stick with it for a bit.



System Shock

I forgot what a pain the maintenance level on System Shock was. There are invisible, fireball throwing mutants that spawn in infinitely. Very few shooters put in areas you're just supposed to blow by. Most games are either about shooting or avoiding. Actually having to use my brain to choose for myself is disorienting. It's like I'm choosing what genre the game is as I'm playing it.



Other Stuff

I'm working on some game programming stuff. It's really basic, but if anything results from it, I'll post.

I would still like to post Big Baby's War Journal at some point. I've already reformatted all the images. I just haven't had any inspiration to do the writing. I may have to forgo the inspiration and just post it as a scrap book to have it done.

I would still like to post a video of Chris and me discussing our old Doom levels. To me they represent an important part of our lives, and I want to preserve that.

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