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.