For Science! (JO)

Hi Mike! Here's more stuff blowing up.

I was playing on an interesting server the other night. Friendly fire was on, and there were no bullet traces, so you had to use your ears (or the killcam postumously) to figure out where enemy fire was coming from. So when I saw a sniper setting up shop outside our main base, I had to land and introduce him to Mr. Knifey. Imagine my surprise when I turned around and realized where I had landed my chopper. :D


Ever the scientist, I decided to get in his chopper and take off.

As you can see, the chopper on the blade fell off. It subsequently exploded. The interests of science were served.


Here I am driving around in a rigged jeep. It's better when you have a partner to do the mad bombing, but whatcha gonna do?


Research in lightweight materials for APC construction must be progressing nicely. He got at least four feet of air.


Here I am as the top scorer on the winning team. But I was a medic and didn't blow too much stuff up, so I don't really even know why I included this photo. :

For another change of pace, here I am running over a guy with a nice powerslide maneuver. There were a couple really good tank hit and runs yesterday, but I failed to capture them on film. Luckily, that gives me a reason to blow more stuff up. For science!

For Mike (JO)

In honor of Mike's trip across the sea. I attempted to blow some stuff up.


This one was a heartbreaker. Here I am planting my satchel in a chopper.


Here I am flying it to the objective.


And here I am shot in the head. I was amazed I even landed in the middle of the compound. Another second, and I would have gotten at least three kills. I may have to reconfigure my controls to make the clicker easier to get to. Who really ever bothers to lean left and right anyway?


Here I am in the middle of an enemy villiage. I've jumped out of my jeep and am preparing to blow it up.


The enemy jeep pushed my jeep back to the bridge, which rendered me perfectly safe when I blew the satchel.


In the midst of all the shooting and chaos, I somehow managed to commandeer another jeep and head for the enemy base. My heart was pounding. Visions of satchel mayhem danced in my head.


Then, in traditional Joint Ops style, my jeep glitched on a tree and somebody shot me. But this last attempt made it all worthwhile.


While driving across the bridge, I ran into an enemy jeep. I jumped out onto the hood of my jeep. I can only wonder what the enemy was thinking as his jeep, my jeep, and me were all pushed along the bridge.


Whatever it was, he didn't have long to think it. w00t!

Bugs (JO)

Starship Troopers Demo
Reaction seems to be heavily divided on the Blues News forums regarding the quality of this demos. I fall on the "it's crap" side. The guns are pea shooters. This in itself is not a bad thing, if it forces some kind of strategy. In this game, it just forces a lot of backpedaling. Only Serious Sam forces as much backpedaling, and that was my least favorite aspect of that game as well. The pathetically underpowered grenades didn't help at all. The controls are totally unresponsive on higher detail levels. That's just bad coding. The inability to use turrets at the base was frustrating. Even with the difficulty on easy, surviving the wave of bugs that swarm over you when you pick up the mine layer is very difficult. I tried three times. By that time the lack of quality of the demo and fact that you can't save and so have to work your way to the overly difficult encounter (Easy means easy.) all over again had burned up all of its fun potential, and I uninstalled it. Sometimes games don't really come together until the final polishing stages. This game would have to get pretty spectacular reviews for me to bother finding out if that was its problem

Joint Ops
Mike has been conducting more experiments with high explosives. I swear, if we could just strap our satchel charges to our chests and become suicide bombers we would. In the meantime we settle for escapades like last night where we took out two apcs with nothing more than our satchels and a raft. We were doing the same to boats, but boats are much better equipped to handle rafts and much more aware of rafts as a legitimate threat since any monkey with a pistol can shoot the unprotected crew of a boat. Here we are doing the Charlie Chaplin heel kick at getting wasted by an enemy boat.



So we landed helicopters on them.


Here, Mike lands on the docs next to an enemy in a boat.


Here, everything goes boom.

Sure, our kill to death ratio isn't that great, but we laugh our asses off. I figured out how to use the line in plugin for WinAmp to record our games in progress. My windows startup noise is now from a little maneuver I executed. A tango had stolen an APC and was killing people in our base. I threw a flashbang in the front, blinding him. I ran around the back and threw a satchel in. I yelled a battlecry, clicked my clicker, and enjoyed the boom. So satisfying. In the future I may find a place to post those sound files so that you can enjoy them. I'm recording low fidelity MP3s, about 7 megs an hour, but I'll make sure to slice out just the highlights if I post them. I would be sorely tempted to post last nights, but for some reason only the microphone was recording, not the game noise and Mike's silly comments.

BWAAAAAhahahaha (JO)

It's been a while. I took a break from gaming for a while. Now that I'm back, here's what I've been up to.

Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War

I probably should have kicked up the difficulty on this one. As it was, I could always follow a two step process. Secure resource point. Take next resource point. I never had to restart a map. Heck, I had a hard time losing troops, and with the tiny unit caps in the game, that means I would have had to deliberately throw men to the wolves to build more cool units. Mind you terminators would have been worth it, but I'm not that ruthless when I don't feel any serious pressure.

Sid Meier's Pirates!

I haven't finished this one, and I'm not sure I'll bother. I wanted to have fun being an explorer, but the crew on the ships doesn't like exploring, so there's frequent desertions and mutinies. Actually, the mutinies are great. Your men take a ship, then you attack them and take it back, somehow magically ending up with more guns and food then when you started. Still, it takes way too long to get to the point where you're ready to look for lost cities. And the dancing mini game that you have to do over and over to get to that point is pretty lame, too. No, the most fun I had with the game was modding it. I did it as a birthday present for a friend of mine, adding lots of Monty Python quotes and songs and a few other choice blurbs. I also made sails for his ship that more express his personality. The flag says DIE! and the sail has a picture of the cyberdemon from DOOM with the words "Mister Fancy Pants" on it. :) Also, when you're doing well in a sword fight, Matrix music kicks in. Heheh.

Joint Ops

This is where today's update gets its title. I have seen sillier things in Joint Ops than I dared imagine. I even caused some of them. We'll start at the non-silly and work up.

Here I am watching a helicopter leave the enemy main base.


This is on the Sulawa Spaceport map where you have to constantly ferry tanks from your main base to the island where all the objectives are. I swam over to the hovercrafts there and placed satchel charges on them. Someone drove a tank onto one of them and headed out.


So I did the obvious thing.


Next we have a new tactic that I invented. Only and idiot like me could have come up with this. First, you dump satchel charges on a vehicle.


Then you drive up next to an enemy vehicle.



Then you blow yourself up.


As you may notice, the person driving (in this case me) is totally fine. That's because you can't hurt players on your team with your explosives, just yourself. But it gets better. Sometimes, through a bug in the game I don't fully understand yet, you don't even hurt yourself. On one occasion there were three APCs attacking one of our bases. We drove by one, detonating our charges, and blew it up. Both of us survived. Then we restocked the hood, drove by again, and blew up a second APC. Then we got killed, but the point is that as soon as I can figure out what we did that made it so that both of us lived through the explosions, we'll be taking out tanks and APCs left and right. Fear the lowly amphibious jeep. Lowly no more. In fact, you can even attach the charge to a motorcycle, exploding it as you zip between enemy vehicles. You could also jump off the motorcycle as it rolls into the enemy base and detonate the charge from a safe distance. I'll just sum it up by saying that I expect to be enjoying experiments with satchel charges for a while.

But that isn't the topper for the evening. Oh no. Check this out!

Yep. That's a hovercraft parked in the treetops.



Then it fell onto our resupply truck.


I could not stop laughing. I'm also still not sure how His Shadow got the thing up there in the first place, but I give him kudos for a job well done.