written on Monday, June 15, 2009
After playing Action Half-Life 2, I decided to go back to an old favorite, The Specialists for Half-Life. The Action mods are grittier. You can get injured, which means you move slowly and bleed to death unless you make yourself completely vulnerable by bandaging. And diving is pretty much the only stunt. The Specialists was more flamboyant, with wall jumping, back flipping, and lots of glass an other destructible stuff. The Specialists also has a big role-playing community for some reason, and I'll you about a strange sociology experiment I ran on them later. But today I just checked out the DeathMatch servers.
For the most part, I got killed. The couple dozen people still playing the game are crazy good at it. Plus they have key binds that automatically pull off complicated moves. And at least one of them appeared to be outright cheating to move around the map faster than anyone else.
More importantly, they're not actually fun to play with. They use the most powerful moves (back kicks) and weapons, so everyone dies in seconds. No one evinces any sense of humor. Nobody uses voice. The closest thing to camaraderie is the occasional "nice shot" in text chat. It's basically playing with bots.
Part of me wants to bring this mod to a LAN party so that I can share the simple joys of leaping through a window and sliding across a floor while shooting dual Colt semi-automatic pistols at people.
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