Zombies and Coca-Cola Health Potions

I’m older and jaded than I used to be, but I still love the holidays; and since I’m a fat kid, nothing puts me in the holiday spirit like food.  Turkey, stuffing, cranberry chutney, coffee, tea, hot cocoa, pumpkin pie, and Coca-Cola.  Yes, Coca-Cola puts in the mood for the holidays.  Ever since I was a kid and I saw those polar bear commercials and the commericals with the trucks and the little kids chanting “Santa packs are coming,” I associated Coca-Cola with the holidays.  The fact that Coca-Cola puts out the best Christmas-themed bottles helps; a recent design is the ornament-shaped bottles.  I love these bottles because they get me in the holiday spirit (well, they help) and they remind me of health potions from every RPG ever.  Seriously: skinny neck, short and fat body–if you’ve played any RPG on any console or rig and used a health potion, you know of what I speak.

Of course, RPGs will have to take a break for a moment: Left 4 Dead dropped today, and after playing the demo, there was no way I could wait until next year to play it.  I just finished “No Mercy” with a great group of guys (one whom I swear was stoned), and it was some of the best fun I’ve had rolling multiplayer ever.  If Horde mode is incredibly awesome, then Left 4 Dead–in any shape, form or fashion–is incredibly awesome cooked in a spoon.  Definitely multiplayer game of the year.

Braaaainssss…….

Saturday night I fell ill.  Terribly ill.  Violently ill.  So ill, that I had already decided that, should I find myself craving human flesh and losing the ability to construct complex abstract thoughts, I would spare my family the horror of my turning and take the noble way out before I succumbed to the Solanum virus.

Now I am well again, and I tried out Gears of War 2 Horde mode.  It is, without a doubt, one of the coolest ways to play a game I have ever seen.  One could even base an entire release off of it.  It’s so good, I no longer even have interest in campaign mode (though I’m sure I’ll finish it eventually).  Speaking of campaign mode, co-op is the way to go.  Whether online or off, this game is so full of chest-thumping bravado and hyper-masculine Hell-yeahness that one person can’t handle it all.  You need a friend to which to shout “Did you see that?  DID YOU SEE THAT?”.  You need a friend to which to scream “I’m down!  I need a revive!”.  You need a friend that will help you set up crossfires, provide cover while you roadie run behind barriers for chainsaw kills, and toss grenades at E-holes while you mow down wave after wave of ass-ugly Locust drones.  If you don’t have a friend to play this game with–or you don’t have an X-Box Live Gold account–I can honestly say “screw it.”  This game was meant to played with others.

Speaking of zombies, I am so psyched for Left 4 Dead.  I have played the demo twice and had more fun with it than I had with the full build of some games.  It’s inherently simple in its set-up, but the possibilities for game play are endless with some of the best random generation I’ve ever seen; plus, different gamers with different styles will change the flow of each game–and force you to learn some lessons as well.  A hot-dogging lone gun will learn quickly to keep his head down and his eyes up, while slow-and-steady sniper types will have to adapt to sudden spikes in intensity, but there is still plenty of room for both native styles.  What I like most is that it really feels like I’m playing a game, with rules and limitations and mechanics, as opposed to a simulation, where everything is trying to look and feel and sound real.

Lich King drops tomorrow, and I have to sit out the midnight launch because I will not only be playing Gears 2 but I really don’t want to get sick again–hence I don’t want to be on my feet around a bunch of people tonight.  Tomorrow night, though, I will be hopping on to…do what I’ve been doing the past damn year.  My rogue is about to ding 40 though, so hopefully by the time WoW 2 drops I can roll a Death Knight!  Woot!  I’m getting the expansion now so that I can have a seamless experience into the new content, once I’m able to access it (like I did for Burning Crusade).  Now, I just need to make a commitment and get there.

Everybody on X-Box 360 Live is a Dirty, Cheating Dingleberry

At least that’s the way it feels.  I did a few rounds of Call of Duty: World at War (the multiplayer beta is on XBL Marketplace, if you’re interested) this morning, and I did not enjoy it.  Not because it wasn’t a good game.  It really does have much in common with Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (which was a great game, but hampered by a few broken game play segments) as far as interface and presentation go, and I for one will never tire of the war-torn Europe setting of World War II games, but I really felt like I was just there to serve as fodder for the more experienced, better-skilled players–and it felt like thye had to be using some kind of secret-hidden video game equivalent of steroids to make me die.

Seriously: I would pump a guy full of lead and he wouldn’t drop, but he would pop off one round and I’m down on the ground.  I would see a guy up ahead, his back to me, and I would raise my gun up for the killing shot–and out of freakin’ nowhere some guy would ninja-strike me dead.  I mean, like, materialize out of nowhere.  From the shadows.

I blame, in part, the XP system of Call of Duty.  For those unfamiliar with it, it works just like an RPG.  You get XP for a kill, and get bonus XP depending on your performance in battle.  When you earn enough XP, you can make new character classes, tricking them out with better weapons, upgrades, and special abilities.  Of course, this means that gamers who spend hours playing multiplayer will have a distinct advantage, because–win or lose–if you grind away enough time you’ll get access to the high-level perks (this might explain those wonder-kills that my opponents could pull off).

It also means that, if you’re late to the party, you will be dog food until you do reach those high levels.  You won’t get to actually play and improve your skills mind you; you’re just there to learn level layouts and generate easy points for the hardcore competitors.  Every once in a while, you’ll luck up on a kill and earn a measly 5 XP, chipping away at your leveling while you get bitch-pwnd left and right.

Of course, skill goes a long, long way in rectifying this unfairness.  If you can lay down some hurt, then you can stand on equal ground with a player carrying the most advanced weapons and power-ups; and this would all be well and good if the matchmaking wasn’t so very bad.

I’ll admit: I’m not that great at multiplayer FPS games.  I’m not bad, but I play in the “Recreation” zone for a reason.  I got addicted to multiplayer FPS with Goldeneye (which I was actually pretty good at; I once boasted an undefeated streak of..well, I don’t know the numbers, but it was known amongst my friends that I didn’t lose at Goldeneye).  I went a long time without playing against others (in fact, Halo 2 was the next time I played multiplayer FPS with any sizable number of people, and Halo 3 the first time I played online since Jedi Knight for the PC) and I’m not as good as I used to be–and it shows.  It seems, however, that I always end up being thrown in a match with a bunch of uber-elite-inhumanly-fast-BOOM!-HEADSHOT-gaming jocks when I play Halo 3 or Call of Duty 4.  I never got any better because I never could get enough play time to get any better.  It’s the reason I traded Call of Duty 4 and the reason I don’t play Halo 3 much anymore (I won’t trade it in because it was the last game I played with my Uncle Tim before his passing).

I’m not saying I want to be let to win, and I’m not saying that I think the really good gamers should purposely go easy on the newbs.  I’m not saying that there should be auto-handicapping or some kind of other behind-the-scenes game twiddling going on to make it where everybody gets to win.  I’m saying I want more tracking of in-game performance to rate my skill level and I want to play against people of comparable ability until I get so good I’ll be griefing every match.  I want to be able to say “I don’t want to play with him.  He’s too good and I’ll just spent the next five minutes dying.”

I’m saying to the programmers in charge of matchmaking for multiplayer FPS titles: I suck and I want to play with other players that suck so that I’ll have a chance for my skills to improve so that, one day, I can start playing with gamers that don’t suck.

With that being said, I’m off of work this Friday, so I plan on doing some multiplayer on Gears of War 2 (Horde mode has me excited, plus the co-op campaign, and the duck-and-cover system might make for better competitive play; I never played the first one online).  I’m level250geek, so feel free to look me up.

Hello Stormwind! Sure is good to see you again.

I have started playing World of Warcraft again after about six months of absence.  I didn’t stop playing, mind you, because I grew tired of the game; I stopped playing because of financial and personal reasons (you know, video games can be a huge money and time sink, in case you haven’t noticed).  Once I made the decision to buy a nice gaming PC, I was either going to jump back into Azeroth or start up an account with The Lord of the Rings Online once I had secured my rig.  However, because I missed my great guildmates (and one of the best guildmasters you could hope for) and the supreme satisfaction that comes with leveling and looting (Too Human is great for that experience, but it doesn’t have that sense of discovery that WoW does), I re-installed the game on to my Macbook, downloaded the 10,548 updates and patches I had missed, and now I’m right back where I belong.

I was going to re-roll, but I decided to go back into the character I had always loved the most: my human rogue (Yes, yes, I know, true hardcore gamers roll Horde, but I never once claimed to be a “true hardcore gamer;” I’m just a dude who loves games.).  So if you’re on the Kilrogg realm and run across a guy named Morgulis, then you have found me.

He’s only level 31 now.  You see, it took me a while to find a character that I felt had real personality, and I only played this guy for the last few weeks of stint in the game.  I don’t actually role-play mind you, but I like for my in-game characters to have a sense of self, and I could just imagine Morgulis being that kind of shifty, drunken, witty bastard who loves a good fight and lives for the next big score.  He was the first such character that I had rolled, so I stuck with him.  Hopefully, I’ll ding 55 soon so that I can make a Death Knight by the time Wrath of the Lich King comes out (though I’m waiting to get that until I do score that PC, so I can experience it in all of its glory from the get-go).

Of course, since I believe in experiencing as much of a game as it has to offer, I also have rolled a dwarf hunter named Craizen (who I can also see having a lot of personality).  I never played as a dwarf, but I also liked them; drunken, ill-tempered good ol’ boys that they are.

What I want to know, however, is how sad is it that playing this game again feels like, as Peter Cullen said of reprising his role as Optimus Prime for last year’s awesome Transformers movie, “slipping into an old pair of very comfortable shoes that you haven’t worn for a while?”