Theme From Jaws (photo heavy, JO)

duh-nuh

duh-nuh

*click*





duh-nuh

duh-nuh

dundun-duhnuh

dundun-duhnuh

DUHNUHNA!

DUHNUHNA!

*click*


All three of them had different screams . We laughed for days.


duh-nuh

duh-nuh

dundun-duhnuh

dundun-duhnuh

DUHNUHNA!

*click*

Peace Protest (JO)

Some servers don't let you choose what team you want to be on. Sometimes it takes a really long time, joining and rejoining, for Mike and I to get on the same team. One night, we just gave up. But instead of fighting, we started a peace protest. We would find an objective point to rendevous at and start shouting "Cease Fire" at the top of our lungs. Depending on who was trying to take said objective point, one or both of us would usually end up dead. So we started laying down smoke and "yelling for peace". :)


Here's a bold picture of Mike, "yelling for peace" in the midst of our smokescreen. I, less bold, am hiding in the grass (but still yelling).

Pimpin' Majesty and NPCs (JO)

I'm not really a System of a Down fan, but "Pimpin' Majesty" is a great phrase. :)

It's also an apt description of the feeling you get when you fly by a giant enemy transport chopper and turn it into dozens of beautiful pieces of debris.

The way that it instantly turns from giant engine of menace into twirly bits of flittering confetti can only be described as magical.


I think this was a custom user created map where NPCs had been added. It was slightly bizarre to see normal people just standing around in this environment.


Or rather lying around. I didn't kill these people. Mike and I were so taken with the novelty of the novelty of the situation that we just wanted to see what we could do with them.


Here's Mike driving one around on a six wheeler.


She eventually fell off. The fact that the NPCs actually have a slow dog paddling animation was disturbing.


Here's Mike, posing with our new friend. :P

The Airborne Assclown Experience (JO)

After being taught that it was possible to stand on the gun pods of attack choppers, we started doing it on a pretty regular basis. I must say, the views are spectacular.


And though I'll never do the experience justice with mere words, there was one occasion where a group of lads joined us on the wings of the eagles.


There is no way of describing the joy of riding on the back of a gun chopper, minigun and missles blasing away, with four mental defectives screaming their war cries and throwing all the flashbangs, grenades, bullets they can muster at the scattering ants of the opposing team. If you read that sentence over three times, pausing to soak in every detail, it still wouldn't be half as cool as the actual experience.

Etiquette (JO)

When waiting with six other people for the helicopter to spawn, it is polite to cover the landing pad in smoke grenades.


When tidying up enemy encampments...


Be willing to go the distance in removing stubborn bridge stains.


Similarly, if some human stain refuses to get out of your copilot seat...


Do what must be done.

It should be noted that it was very polite of the copilot to catch 30 feet of air off the explosion. :D (Click the picture to see his politeness in all its gangly glory.)

More Of The Backlog (JO)

Let it never be said that we haven't been willing to learn new methods of assclownery from other players.


Here's a brilliant fellow named Boehsar Orkel. He is standing on the gun pod of an attack helicopter. Since there's only one passenger seat in an attack chopper, being able to ride the gun pods effectively doubles the capacity of the vehicle.


Of course, it's always more fun if you're properly equipped with a grenade launcher.


Here's Mike, back clearly broken, waving his knife skyward and cursing the cruel fate that made him. Screaming at the sky while waving your knife or shooting your gun is very liberating. Just don't try throwing grenades at the sky.


It's also very liberating to drive up to big strong tank on a pissant little motorbike...


and watch it go poof. Mmmmm. Poof.

More Pics (JO)

I don't remember if I posted enough pics of this particular stunt before, but I still get a kick out of our unorthodox ordinance delivery methods.


Here's Mike driving a six wheel out the back of a transport chopper. You can see by the altimeter in the bottom left that we are half a kilometer up. You can see by the radar in the bottom right hand corner that we are over an enemy base. Mike lands on the ground, blows his satchels, killing anyone nearby, then runs into the base and starts knifing people. It's a beautiful combination of all the things that make no sense about Joint Ops.


Here's what it looks like if you're in the car.


And here's what it looks like if your car gets caught upside down on some telephone lines. I fell to my death on exiting the car. Good times. :D

JO Pics

Ah. Joint Ops. Joint Ops and Mike are my most reliable gaming experience. Even when I get frustrated, I always know there's going to be a peak experience just around the corner. :)


In this case, giving a forty mile an hour chiropractic adjustment.


In this case, administering rough satchel justice. I hope I remembered to honk my jeep horn before I blew him up. The contrast between the anemic horn and thundering satchel explosion is my kind of comedy. :)


Here we have Mike, posing with a trohpy kill. I don't think the kill itself was anything special, but the absurdity of taking trophy photos like this gave us a good laugh.


Respect the hat! You will never have a hat this cool.


Hahaha. This was great. I was trying to plant a satchel on this bridge to kill passing APCs when this guy in an amphibious jeep comes roaring up to run me over. I try to run backwards and kill him with the satchel. The satchel sends him and his six wheel sky high. The only problem turned out to be...


where he landed. Doh!

Okay, I don't want to have too many photos per blog, so I'll continue this on the next entry.

WoW Ennui and More JO Madness (JO)

Well, that didn't go anywhere. I've been playing plenty of Joint Ops. I will post pictures tonight. It's not like I have anything else to do. My roommate is always playing WoW when I get home. The fact that I came home to see him and my other WoW friend running Gnomer without me (and my spending more than a day trying to run it with pick up groups to no avail) have begun to turn me to actively hating seeing that game up when I get home. It's just a reminder to me of how little I mean to my "best" friends. Meh.

At least my Joint Ops buddy is keeping things hopping. He mostly pilots while I satchel and grenade launcher the poor shmucks below. The frightening thing is we do really well that way most games. Once in a while you'll have competent opposition that prioritize you as a target and can actually do something about it, but mostly we just mop up. We had some fun the other night because the other team full of assclowns put a dozen people on a chopper and flew it into our base. I guess they thought if one guy with a grenade launcher was cool, twelve guys with grenade launchers and rockets would be spectactular. They weren't entirely wrong. They did some good stuff. But that was until we prioritized them as targets. My friend was piloting and refused to get close enough for me to use my satchels. So instead we had a whirling firefight, heli against heli, until we shot enough losers off of their skids and roof to make them head for the hills. It was like a knife fight from west side story. Classic. Still, the most kills I've ever gotten with one satchel was ten. I would love to beat the record.

After that map (Bumbu Channel) comes Karo Highlands. It was there that the legend was born: The Legend Of Daniel B. Hahaha. Daniel B was some guy who thought he could snipe our main base just by parking a heli behind a hill and crawling over. We repeatedly lobbed grenades on his head. We got so fond of killing him that we started typing messages into the general chat about the legend of Daniel B. It was sort of a Davy Crockett thing. I was even working on a song. Needless to say we were disappointed when he gave up the strategy. As such, we started base raiding the other team. There is nothing quite as satisfying as dropping one satchel on the middle of the joint ops roof full of helis, detonating it while your back is turned, and coming about to see a completely clean building, as though no helis were ever there. It's cleansing.

We've developed a small following online as well. There are some players that will switch teams to join our "Nade Bird" of destruction. We are a loyal group, going out to pick up other members. We've actually gotten pretty good at jumping into the helicopter as it flies by us at full speed while we are in the water. Hilarious. And a few times we've even managed to switch choppers in midair. That shuts up the people who think we're just assclowns real quick. Of course, we are just assclowns, but we're badass assclowns. :)

Speaking of which, let me describe a technique my partner in crime has perfected which still amazes me. The helicopters in joint ops can actually fly partly underwater, sometimes largely underwater. Who cares, right? Well, imagine this scenario. We're chasing an enemy boat when the driver (maybe coming under fire from one of our APCs or just panicked because we're yelling and shooting at him from our chopper) dives overboard. He thinks he'll swim safely to shore (or into a friendly APC or whatever). I immediately jump off the skid, knife in hand, to go and carve up his giblets. My friend flies around like crazy to get the guy in the water to take a shot at him so I can catch up and slice him. But my friend realized that since the chopper can dip it's beak in the water, maybe there was more he could do.

I'm swimming up behind a guy who's trying to sneak onto a friendly nade boat and kill our guys bombarding the enemy base. I'm right behind him, but can't close the distance. We're ten feet away from the friendly boat. He's gonna make it.

WHAM!

What the hell was that!? There is no way in @#*& I just saw what I just saw. That did not happen. Oh crap. It totally did!

Flying right next to the boat, my friend had dipped the heli's nose into the water right in front of where I was swimming while flying at full speed. HE RAN THE GUY OVER WITH THE HELI UNDERWATER!!!

I mean, it was ridiculous and hilarious enough that he had gotten to the point where he could smush unmoving enemy snipers and stupid enemy troops under his skids, but underwater hit and run!? He does it all the time now and still I can't believe it. It's like watching a quick wipe in a movie where one second a guy's alive, the next second he's doing the dead man's float, but an underwater helicopter is doing the wipe. Inconievable!

Some days, Joint Ops is all I live for.

Out Of Hibernation (And Mana)

Warning: This is mostly stream of conciousness with plenty of gamer jargon. It's mostly just me mentally catching up with the gaming I've done.

I have played a lot of games. But for pictures, I haven't had much to post except Joint Ops, and I figured you'd be tired of that. Then I realized that there's no more than two people who even read this thing, and you'd love some more Joint Ops. :) I'm not posting this from a place where I've got access to my Joint Ops photos, but you can expect further updates in the not too distant future. In the meantime, I'll blather about WoW.

World of Warcraft is a decent game. But like most MMOs, it's largely about fighting monsters to get bigger weapons to fight bigger monsters to get even bigger weapons to fight even bigger monsters. Size is the 3D game equivalent of palette shifting. I'd explain, but the gamers know what I mean. And it's not that everything in WoW is size adjusted. There's palette shifting too. :P Seriously, though, it's the same treadmill. But I don't care anymore.

I'm all played out.

Seriously.

I spent six months playing games and played everything there is to play.

That's not strictly true of course. There's always more to play, but I've played the best in every genre I care about. I even got to the point where I could be playing a well made game and be bored with it. Sly 3: Band of Thieves is the game I'm thinking of. I enjoyed Sly and Sly 2. Sly 3 was still good, but didn't feel much different from Sly 2. I'd had enough gaming goodness. And don't think I hadn't done a good deal of looking around.

I played every game I cared about on Yahoo's subscription service. Out of all of them, I only bought Thief: Deadly Shadows to keep after my account expired. I think that game made the best use of bump mapping of any game I've seen. Medieval environs are just perfect for the type of rough stone and brick textures bump mapping brings out. Sure, DOOM 3 had it, but Thief 3 really used it.

And that asylum level was fantastically creepy and way more fun than Silent Hill 3 in its entirety. The problem I have with most horror games is that they aren't really horror games, but rather action games with really bad controls. Even Resident Evil 4, the best of the lot, fits that description. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed RE4, but lost interest on my second playthrough. The thing I like about games is that they give you the tools to perform amazing feats. Most horror games just don't do that. If you want to make me play a clutzy writer who's fallen into a horrible conspiracy, that's fine, but do what a novelist would do and give me the kinds of puzzles and situations that would make it somewhat feasible for my character to perservere, not just a nerf version of an action game protagonist fighting cumbersome nerf monsters. That's incredibly lazy design.

Meh. I have no room to talk. It's not like I'm writing a game. I was at one point, but I'm just too damn lazy. Spending time with family and friends is as much as I want out of life. So that's what my gaming life has become. I play WoW because my friends do, even avoiding advancing too quickly so no one gets level envy and we all get the same XP. I play Joint Ops because Baby Einstein does. I could still play with 69 Rocket GC, yoshahorror and some of the others, but without the voice chat and accompanying silliness (the ballad of DanielB), it wouldn't be worth it.

Hanging out with friends and family. That's my gaming life.

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!